Micah 7
The prophet looks at a society in which a man's enemies are the men of his own house — and then turns and finds the one question his own name has always been asking.
Summary
The seventh chapter is the book's concluding movement and its most personal. Micah opens in the first person — Woe is me — and surveys the social landscape with the eye of someone who has been watching the same corruption since chapter 1 and has seen it complete its work. The language is not merely political; it is intimate. The corruption has reached the supper table, the marriage bed, the parent-child relation. The list of failed social bonds — neighbour, friend, wife, son, daughter, daughter-in-law — is the prophetic literature's way of saying that the breakdown is not confined to the gates and the market; it has entered the household where trust is supposed to be native. The verse a man's enemies are the men of his own house is quoted in Matthew 10:36 and Luke 12:53 in a different context, but its weight in Micah is the weight of a society that has run out of internal social resources.
The turn from lament to confidence is abrupt and personal: But as for me, I will look to the LORD. The first-person voice is unusual for the prophetic literature, which typically speaks as the LORD's mouthpiece; here Micah speaks as himself, waiting in the dark, telling his enemy not to rejoice over his fall because when he falls he will rise. The confidence is not triumphalism; it is the patient waiting of a person who has no other resource left. The closing doxology — Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity, passing over transgression, delighting in steadfast love, casting sins into the depths of the sea — is the theological centre of the book's hope. The Hebrew mi-el kamokha (who is a God like you) is the answer to the prophet's own name, Mikhayahu: who is like the LORD? Micah answers his own name in the last verses of his book. After seven chapters of precise indictment, the final word is that the LORD's steadfast love — his hesed, the word already used in chapter 6's do justice, love mercy — is the answer to the question the prophet has been named to ask.
- Micah 1Chapter 1 opens the book with a theophanic vision: the LORD comes down from his holy temple, treads on the high places of the earth, and the mountains melt under him like wax before fire.
- Micah 2Chapter 2 opens with one of the sharpest economic indictments in the prophetic literature.
- Micah 3Chapter 3 is the climax of the book's first movement of judgment and one of the most precise indictments of a governing class in the prophetic literature.
- Micah 4Chapter 4 opens with an abrupt reversal after the judgment of chapter 3.
- Micah 5Chapter 5 opens at the siege — daughter of troops, the siege is laid against us — and then shifts to the long future.
- Micah 6Chapter 6 is the great courtroom scene of the book.
- Micah 7Chapter 7 closes the book on a note that is simultaneously its darkest and its most intimate.