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Introduction
to Micah
This summary of the book of Micah provides information about the title,
author(s), date of writing, chronology, theme, theology, outline, a brief
overview, and the chapters of the Book of Micah.
Little is known about the prophet Micah beyond what can be learned
from the book itself and from Jer 26:18. Micah was from the town of Moresheth
(1:1), probably Moresheth Gath (1:14)
in southern Judah. The prophecy attests to Micah's deep sensitivity to the
social ills of his day, especially as they affected the small towns and
villages of his homeland.
Micah prophesied sometime between 750 and 686 b.c. during the
reigns of Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah (1:1;
Jer 26:18). He was therefore a contemporary of
Isaiah (see Isa 1:1) and Hosea (see Hos
1:1). Micah predicted the fall of Samaria (1:6),
which took place in 722-721. This would place his early ministry in the reigns
of Jotham (750-732) and Ahaz (735-715). (The reigns of Jotham and Ahaz
overlapped.) Micah's message reflects social conditions prior to the religious
reforms under Hezekiah (715-686). Micah's ministry most likely fell within the
period 735-700.
If Micah himself wrote out his messages, the date for the earliest
written form of his work would be c. 700. If one of his disciples arranged his
messages in their present form, the date would be the early seventh century
b.c. If a later editor collected and arranged his messages, the date would
still need to be early enough in the seventh century to allow time for his
prophecy of Jerusalem's fall (3:12)
to become familiar enough to be quoted in Jer 26:18 c. 608.
The background of the book is the same as that found in the
earlier portions of Isaiah, though Micah does not exhibit the same knowledge of
Jerusalem's political life as Isaiah does. Perhaps this is because he, like
Amos, was from a village in Judah. The relevant Biblical texts covering this
period (see Date above) are 2Ki 15:32 -- 20:21; 2Ch 27-32; Isa
7; 20; 36-39.
Israel was in an apostate condition. Micah predicted the fall of
her capital, Samaria (1:5-7), and also foretold the inevitable
desolation of Judah (1:9-16).
Several significant historical events occurred during this period:
As the Outline shows, Micah's message alternates between oracles
of doom and oracles of hope -- in terms of Ro 11:22, between God's "sternness" and his
"kindness." The theme is divine judgment and deliverance. Micah also
stresses that God hates idolatry, injustice, rebellion and empty ritualism (see
3:8 and note), but delights in pardoning the penitent (7:18-19;s).
Finally, the prophet declares that Zion will have greater glory in the future
than ever before (see, e.g., 4:1-2 and note on 4:1-5). The Davidic kingdom, though it will seem
to come to an end, will reach greater heights through the coming Messianic
deliverer (5:1-4). Key passages include 1:2;
3:8-12; 5:1-4; 6:2,6-8; 7:18-20.
I.
Title (1:1)
A.
Judgment on Israel and Judah (1:2;2:11)
B.
Restoration of a Remnant (2:12-13)
III.
Second Cycle: Indictment of Judah's Leaders, but Future Hope for
God's People (chs. 3-5)
IV.
Third Cycle: God's Charges against His People and the Ultimate
Triumph of His Kingdom (chs. 6-7)
──《New
International Version》
Introduction to Micah
Micah was raised up to support Isaiah, and to
confirm his predictions, while he invited to repentance, both by threatened
judgments and promised mercies. A very remarkable passage, Mic 5 contains a
summary of prophecies concerning the Messiah.
── Matthew Henry《Concise Commentary on Micah》
00 Overview
MICAH
INTRODUCTION
“None of us liveth unto himself,” the apostle Paul says in his
Epistle to the Romans. Very careful this should make us about our thoughts and
our behaviour, lest we do harm by our example. But very cheering, too, when we
are striving to walk as children of the light and of the day, the knowledge
ought to be that we are wielding over others a “power which makes for
righteousness.” The lives of good men--of all who have been in the main, with
however many faults, saints and servants of God--have an incalculable value.
The influence of a holy example carries weight long after the man himself has
gone from the world. Such thoughts as these are awakened in us by the very name
of the prophet Micah. It was not the first time in the history of the chosen
people that the name had been borne by a minister of the Lord. More than a
century and a half before the days when this preacher of judgment and mercy
stood up to deliver his message to his nation there had been another Micah, who
had testified faithfully for God. We know little regarding him; only one
dramatic and thrilling incident in his career has been recorded (1 Kings 22:1-53). So Micaiah, the
son of Imlah--and Micaiah is simply a fuller and more original form of
Micah--was summoned; and his single voice was heard, solemn and brave in that
turbulent crowd, warning Ahab that he must die, and that his people must be
scattered like sheep upon the hills. The bold witness bearer was smitten and
imprisoned, and we hear no more of him. But his words were vindicated. Micaiah
means “Who is like the Lord?” There was a trumpet call in the very title which
the man bore. It was in itself an inspiring watchword. It was a challenge to
those four hundred blind leaders who stood round him; an assurance given them
that Jehovah was about to prove Himself superior to every false god. But the
prophet who had been so loyal to God had a further reward. Many years after his
time there was need for the unfurling again of the old standard, the uttering
afresh of the old watchword. It is sad to think that it was in the Kingdom of
Judah, which had been more faithful to the truth than its Northern neighbour,
that the need had arisen. Those evil influences had indeed begun to work within
its borders which were to lead at last to the destruction of Jerusalem and to
the weary captivity that ensued. The people were anxious to walk after the
desires of their own hearts, without any disturbing voice to tell them that the
wages of their sin must be death; they longed for men who should speak only
smooth things to them; and they had their wish. There were many religious
teachers in the land who were prepared, for the pay of the hireling, to give
those careless and unrighteous souls all that they craved. They condoned their
sins; they minimised their unjust practices; they concealed the demands and the
penalties of God’s law. Then it was that a new Micah arose, possessed of the
dauntless spirit of the old. The name which he had received from his parents,
in memory, perhaps, of the brave preacher who had gone before him, was full of
meaning to him. He determined to walk in the footsteps of his predecessor. He
would ring out again the solemn challenge, “Who is like the Lord?” He, too,
would show himself an Abdiel, “among innumerable false unmoved.” He would
summon the world to behold the conflict, undertaken afresh which God had
formerly brought to a triumphant issue. “Hear, all ye people; hearken, O earth,
and all that therein is; and let the Lord God be witness against you, the Lord
from His holy temple,”--these were his fearless words. Micah had no higher
ambition than to reproduce the good soldier of an earlier time, who had been
very jealous for the Lord God of hosts. There is a twofold lesson here which we
shall do well to lay to heart. There is the comforting truth that the dead are
blessed who die in the Lord, because their works do follow them--their example
lives on when they are themselves away, to stimulate other souls to think of
those things which are true and honourable and just and pure and lovely and of
good report. The first Micah is repeated in the second, who is even greater,
and who wields a wider influence than himself. So it is very often. Our success
as husbandmen in God’s vineyard may seem to us meagre indeed, and we may not
feel ourselves qualified to render Him any large service. But if we speak as He
gives us language, and enter willingly the doors which He sets open, and pray
without ceasing, He may employ us to kindle into vitality and enthusiasm a life
which He is to use for the noblest ends. And the other lesson is similar. It is
this, that God will take care to perpetuate His work, and to provide Himself
age after age with true-hearted servants and witness bearers. When one Micah
dies, his place will be filled, if need be, by another, who will utter anew the
ancient watchword, whether men will hear or whether they will forbear.
Micah--the Micah who wrote this book--was a native of the country and not of
the town. He was born in Moresheth Gath, a village on the Philistine frontier,
which could still be identified when, long centuries later, the Christian
father Jerome lived in Palestine. It was from the thrifty and industrious
peasantry of Judah that the prophet sprang. He was essentially a man of the
people. As we read his words we can see how all along his sympathies continued
to go out towards the humbler classes, the toilers of the land, those who bound
the sheaf and built the house and dug the grave. There is a burning indignation
in his tone when he speaks against the tyranny of the rich and noble. It is a
vivid picture which he paints from his own observation of the sufferings of the
commonalty at the hands of their lords. Those proud and wealthy men seemed to
imagine that all who were beneath them in social station existed but for their
benefit. “They coveted fields, and seized them; and houses, and took them
away.” The poorer agriculturists were robbed daily of their holdings by
violence or by false judgment. And so to Micah the worst enemies of Judah were
not the Assyrians; they were the men of her own household--the haughty grandees
who were hostile to God, because they oppressed those who were under God’s most
immediate care, the needy and the helpless and the destitute. Micah was a
social reformer as well as a prophet. It appears strange that the sins which he
denounces in such burning words should have prevailed in what to outward
seeming was a period not only of great prosperity, but even of great attention
to the observances of religion. The word of the Lord came to him, the heading
of the book informs us, “in the days of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of
Judah.” £ It may be, as recent expositors incline to believe, that the larger
part of the prophetic utterances which follow must be assigned to the last of
these reigns; but the life of the prophet himself extended over them all. Now,
two of the kings who are named were anxious to know and do God s will, and
sought to induce their subjects to act wisely and uprightly. Ahaz, it is true,
was anything but a God-fearing prince, and we need not be surprised that in his
time truth should stand on the scaffold, and wrong be seated on the throne. But
it is grieving to learn that, under the rule of Jotham and Hezekiah, evils
should abound like those which Micah exposes and condemns. The sympathies of
the sovereigns were with what was good; they were careful to see that God was
outwardly honoured and obeyed; but they could not change the hearts and
characters of their people. Under their government, injustice and corruption
were rampant still, and the prophet had to utter severe and awful words
concerning the crimes of the land. It was at a national crisis that he began to
speak. Ruin was impending over the Northern Kingdom of Israel. There the storm,
which had been gathering for long, was about to burst at last. Ere many months
had gone Samaria would be a heap of the field; the stones of her bulwarks were
to be rolled down into the valley, and her graven images dashed to pieces by
the soldiers of Sargon, the Assyrian king. Amid such clouds and darkness, such
wars and rumours of wars, Micah lifted up his voice. But it was not to the
Kingdom of the ten tribes that he was eager to bear God’s message. It was to
his own land of Judah. It, too, had shared the transgression of Samaria, and
the same judgments menaced it. Outwardly it looked strong and noble; never
since the time of David and Solomon had its wealth and power been greater; it
seemed to be religious, too; but there was a canker eating at its heart.
Beneath the fair covering, what unrighteousness dwelt, and what neglect of the
Divine law! And now, when the Lord’s punishments were abroad and Israel was tottering
to its fall, would Judah not learn righteousness? Would it not be roused into
concern? The task given Micah to accomplish--the revealing to the Jewish people
of their evil and of the grievous judgments which awaited them--was not a light
or an easy task. It was one under the burden of which he would often be ready
to sink. But at those moments when heart and flesh are like to fail it must
have encouraged him to know that he was not alone in doing God’s strange and
heavy work. He had a great coadjutor and friend. Isaiah, the noblest of all the
prophets, had begun his ministry before Micah, in the reign of Jotham’s father
Uzziah; and when Micah laid down his armour he left Isaiah still labouring and
battling on. And we may regard it certain that the two were not contemporaries
merely, but helpers one of another. In what fashion, then, did Micah finish the
work given him to do? We have only to read the book in which he collected the
substance of what God had taught by him, to feel assured that, if it had been
possible to stir within the proud hearts of the Jews that godly sorrow which
needeth not to be repented of, this was the man to break and bend and melt
them. I like that old division of the prophecy, though some of the critics
reject it, which finds in it three distinct parts, each of them introduced by
the call, “Hear ye!” (See Micah 1:2; Micah 3:1; Micah 6:1.) If we look at the separate
sections we shall discover that in all there is first an unveiling of the
national sins, and then a solemn prediction of the woes with which God must visit
such transgressions; and finally--as if the heart of the prophet, and the heart
of the Lord whose spokesman he was, relented and shrank back from the strange
work of judgment--a multitude of exceeding great and precious promises. The
sins against which the preacher inveighs are sins both against God and man--a
religion full of idolatry, and a false confidence in Jehovah fostered and
encouraged by lying oracles; these on the one hand, and, on the other, the
unjust dealing which abounded, and the oppression of the poor by the rich.
Evils like these God could not leave unpunished. If Micah spoke of the terrors
of the Lord--if he felt that he must put the trumpet to his lips and blow what
Milton calls “a dolorous blast,” in order that the careless in Zion might be
aroused--he could not refrain from telling out, too, God’s mercy and grace. He
was compelled by stern necessity to show himself a Boanerges, a son of thunder;
but we cannot help seeing how much rather he would have been a Barnabas, a son
of consolation. And had he no reward given him for all his faithfulness? Yes, a
rich and enviable reward. God’s approval rested upon him; the Master whom he
served was well pleased with him. But, more than that, he was honoured to work
a great reformation in the guilty land. The Divine judgment, he saw, must come
sooner or later; the nation had sinned too deeply to escape the infliction of
punishment; but he delayed the evil day--he rendered it possible for God to
spare the erring people yet a while. His message stirred within some who
listened to it a deep and saving repentance. It is the prophet Jeremiah who
narrates the story (Jeremiah 26:10-19). When his own life was
endangered by his uncompromising words, and the priests and false prophets were
crying out for his blood, he tells us that certain of the elders of the land
took his part and secured his safety. And this was how they argued, “Micah the
Morasthite prophesied in the days of Hezekiah king of Judah; and he spake to
all the people of Judah, saying, Zion shall be ploughed as a field, and
Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places
of a forest. Did Hezekiah king of Judah and all Judah put him at all to death?
Did he not fear the Lord, and entreat the favour of the Lord, and the Lord
repented Him of the evil which He had pronounced against them?” Here, then, is
the completion of Micah’s history. His proclamation of lamentation and mourning
and woe--his sharp and piercing words--penetrated the hearts of Hezekiah and of
numbers of his subjects. To this prophet the conversion of the king may be
traced, and all those noble reforms which the king inaugurated. For a time the
sword of Jehovah was put away into its scabbard, and His fierce anger tarried.
He saw the nation awake to sorrow and to righteousness under the rebukes of His
servant; and He heard it ask the way to Zion, setting its face thitherward. Was
not Micah blessed indeed? If many went on still in their wickedness, there were
some whom he plucked as brands from the burning, and whom he led into the ways
of wisdom which are ways of pleasantness and peace. Probably his office on
earth closed shortly afterwards. (Original Secession Magazine.)
MICAH
INTRODUCTION
“None of us liveth unto himself,” the apostle Paul says in his
Epistle to the Romans. Very careful this should make us about our thoughts and
our behaviour, lest we do harm by our example. But very cheering, too, when we
are striving to walk as children of the light and of the day, the knowledge
ought to be that we are wielding over others a “power which makes for
righteousness.” The lives of good men--of all who have been in the main, with
however many faults, saints and servants of God--have an incalculable value.
The influence of a holy example carries weight long after the man himself has
gone from the world. Such thoughts as these are awakened in us by the very name
of the prophet Micah. It was not the first time in the history of the chosen
people that the name had been borne by a minister of the Lord. More than a
century and a half before the days when this preacher of judgment and mercy
stood up to deliver his message to his nation there had been another Micah, who
had testified faithfully for God. We know little regarding him; only one
dramatic and thrilling incident in his career has been recorded (1 Kings 22:1-53). So Micaiah, the
son of Imlah--and Micaiah is simply a fuller and more original form of
Micah--was summoned; and his single voice was heard, solemn and brave in that
turbulent crowd, warning Ahab that he must die, and that his people must be
scattered like sheep upon the hills. The bold witness bearer was smitten and
imprisoned, and we hear no more of him. But his words were vindicated. Micaiah
means “Who is like the Lord?” There was a trumpet call in the very title which
the man bore. It was in itself an inspiring watchword. It was a challenge to
those four hundred blind leaders who stood round him; an assurance given them
that Jehovah was about to prove Himself superior to every false god. But the
prophet who had been so loyal to God had a further reward. Many years after his
time there was need for the unfurling again of the old standard, the uttering
afresh of the old watchword. It is sad to think that it was in the Kingdom of
Judah, which had been more faithful to the truth than its Northern neighbour,
that the need had arisen. Those evil influences had indeed begun to work within
its borders which were to lead at last to the destruction of Jerusalem and to
the weary captivity that ensued. The people were anxious to walk after the
desires of their own hearts, without any disturbing voice to tell them that the
wages of their sin must be death; they longed for men who should speak only
smooth things to them; and they had their wish. There were many religious
teachers in the land who were prepared, for the pay of the hireling, to give
those careless and unrighteous souls all that they craved. They condoned their
sins; they minimised their unjust practices; they concealed the demands and the
penalties of God’s law. Then it was that a new Micah arose, possessed of the
dauntless spirit of the old. The name which he had received from his parents,
in memory, perhaps, of the brave preacher who had gone before him, was full of
meaning to him. He determined to walk in the footsteps of his predecessor. He
would ring out again the solemn challenge, “Who is like the Lord?” He, too,
would show himself an Abdiel, “among innumerable false unmoved.” He would
summon the world to behold the conflict, undertaken afresh which God had
formerly brought to a triumphant issue. “Hear, all ye people; hearken, O earth,
and all that therein is; and let the Lord God be witness against you, the Lord
from His holy temple,”--these were his fearless words. Micah had no higher
ambition than to reproduce the good soldier of an earlier time, who had been
very jealous for the Lord God of hosts. There is a twofold lesson here which we
shall do well to lay to heart. There is the comforting truth that the dead are
blessed who die in the Lord, because their works do follow them--their example
lives on when they are themselves away, to stimulate other souls to think of
those things which are true and honourable and just and pure and lovely and of
good report. The first Micah is repeated in the second, who is even greater,
and who wields a wider influence than himself. So it is very often. Our success
as husbandmen in God’s vineyard may seem to us meagre indeed, and we may not
feel ourselves qualified to render Him any large service. But if we speak as He
gives us language, and enter willingly the doors which He sets open, and pray
without ceasing, He may employ us to kindle into vitality and enthusiasm a life
which He is to use for the noblest ends. And the other lesson is similar. It is
this, that God will take care to perpetuate His work, and to provide Himself
age after age with true-hearted servants and witness bearers. When one Micah
dies, his place will be filled, if need be, by another, who will utter anew the
ancient watchword, whether men will hear or whether they will forbear.
Micah--the Micah who wrote this book--was a native of the country and not of
the town. He was born in Moresheth Gath, a village on the Philistine frontier,
which could still be identified when, long centuries later, the Christian
father Jerome lived in Palestine. It was from the thrifty and industrious
peasantry of Judah that the prophet sprang. He was essentially a man of the
people. As we read his words we can see how all along his sympathies continued
to go out towards the humbler classes, the toilers of the land, those who bound
the sheaf and built the house and dug the grave. There is a burning indignation
in his tone when he speaks against the tyranny of the rich and noble. It is a
vivid picture which he paints from his own observation of the sufferings of the
commonalty at the hands of their lords. Those proud and wealthy men seemed to
imagine that all who were beneath them in social station existed but for their
benefit. “They coveted fields, and seized them; and houses, and took them
away.” The poorer agriculturists were robbed daily of their holdings by
violence or by false judgment. And so to Micah the worst enemies of Judah were
not the Assyrians; they were the men of her own household--the haughty grandees
who were hostile to God, because they oppressed those who were under God’s most
immediate care, the needy and the helpless and the destitute. Micah was a
social reformer as well as a prophet. It appears strange that the sins which he
denounces in such burning words should have prevailed in what to outward
seeming was a period not only of great prosperity, but even of great attention
to the observances of religion. The word of the Lord came to him, the heading
of the book informs us, “in the days of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of
Judah.” £ It may be, as recent expositors incline to believe, that the larger
part of the prophetic utterances which follow must be assigned to the last of
these reigns; but the life of the prophet himself extended over them all. Now,
two of the kings who are named were anxious to know and do God s will, and
sought to induce their subjects to act wisely and uprightly. Ahaz, it is true,
was anything but a God-fearing prince, and we need not be surprised that in his
time truth should stand on the scaffold, and wrong be seated on the throne. But
it is grieving to learn that, under the rule of Jotham and Hezekiah, evils
should abound like those which Micah exposes and condemns. The sympathies of
the sovereigns were with what was good; they were careful to see that God was
outwardly honoured and obeyed; but they could not change the hearts and
characters of their people. Under their government, injustice and corruption
were rampant still, and the prophet had to utter severe and awful words
concerning the crimes of the land. It was at a national crisis that he began to
speak. Ruin was impending over the Northern Kingdom of Israel. There the storm,
which had been gathering for long, was about to burst at last. Ere many months
had gone Samaria would be a heap of the field; the stones of her bulwarks were
to be rolled down into the valley, and her graven images dashed to pieces by
the soldiers of Sargon, the Assyrian king. Amid such clouds and darkness, such
wars and rumours of wars, Micah lifted up his voice. But it was not to the
Kingdom of the ten tribes that he was eager to bear God’s message. It was to
his own land of Judah. It, too, had shared the transgression of Samaria, and
the same judgments menaced it. Outwardly it looked strong and noble; never
since the time of David and Solomon had its wealth and power been greater; it
seemed to be religious, too; but there was a canker eating at its heart.
Beneath the fair covering, what unrighteousness dwelt, and what neglect of the
Divine law! And now, when the Lord’s punishments were abroad and Israel was
tottering to its fall, would Judah not learn righteousness? Would it not be
roused into concern? The task given Micah to accomplish--the revealing to the
Jewish people of their evil and of the grievous judgments which awaited
them--was not a light or an easy task. It was one under the burden of which he
would often be ready to sink. But at those moments when heart and flesh are
like to fail it must have encouraged him to know that he was not alone in doing
God’s strange and heavy work. He had a great coadjutor and friend. Isaiah, the
noblest of all the prophets, had begun his ministry before Micah, in the reign
of Jotham’s father Uzziah; and when Micah laid down his armour he left Isaiah
still labouring and battling on. And we may regard it certain that the two were
not contemporaries merely, but helpers one of another. In what fashion, then,
did Micah finish the work given him to do? We have only to read the book in
which he collected the substance of what God had taught by him, to feel assured
that, if it had been possible to stir within the proud hearts of the Jews that
godly sorrow which needeth not to be repented of, this was the man to break and
bend and melt them. I like that old division of the prophecy, though some of
the critics reject it, which finds in it three distinct parts, each of them introduced
by the call, “Hear ye!” (See Micah 1:2; Micah 3:1; Micah 6:1.) If we look at the separate
sections we shall discover that in all there is first an unveiling of the
national sins, and then a solemn prediction of the woes with which God must
visit such transgressions; and finally--as if the heart of the prophet, and the
heart of the Lord whose spokesman he was, relented and shrank back from the
strange work of judgment--a multitude of exceeding great and precious promises.
The sins against which the preacher inveighs are sins both against God and
man--a religion full of idolatry, and a false confidence in Jehovah fostered
and encouraged by lying oracles; these on the one hand, and, on the other, the
unjust dealing which abounded, and the oppression of the poor by the rich.
Evils like these God could not leave unpunished. If Micah spoke of the terrors
of the Lord--if he felt that he must put the trumpet to his lips and blow what
Milton calls “a dolorous blast,” in order that the careless in Zion might be
aroused--he could not refrain from telling out, too, God’s mercy and grace. He
was compelled by stern necessity to show himself a Boanerges, a son of thunder;
but we cannot help seeing how much rather he would have been a Barnabas, a son
of consolation. And had he no reward given him for all his faithfulness? Yes, a
rich and enviable reward. God’s approval rested upon him; the Master whom he
served was well pleased with him. But, more than that, he was honoured to work
a great reformation in the guilty land. The Divine judgment, he saw, must come
sooner or later; the nation had sinned too deeply to escape the infliction of
punishment; but he delayed the evil day--he rendered it possible for God to
spare the erring people yet a while. His message stirred within some who
listened to it a deep and saving repentance. It is the prophet Jeremiah who
narrates the story (Jeremiah 26:10-19). When his own life was
endangered by his uncompromising words, and the priests and false prophets were
crying out for his blood, he tells us that certain of the elders of the land
took his part and secured his safety. And this was how they argued, “Micah the
Morasthite prophesied in the days of Hezekiah king of Judah; and he spake to
all the people of Judah, saying, Zion shall be ploughed as a field, and
Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places
of a forest. Did Hezekiah king of Judah and all Judah put him at all to death?
Did he not fear the Lord, and entreat the favour of the Lord, and the Lord
repented Him of the evil which He had pronounced against them?” Here, then, is
the completion of Micah’s history. His proclamation of lamentation and mourning
and woe--his sharp and piercing words--penetrated the hearts of Hezekiah and of
numbers of his subjects. To this prophet the conversion of the king may be
traced, and all those noble reforms which the king inaugurated. For a time the
sword of Jehovah was put away into its scabbard, and His fierce anger tarried.
He saw the nation awake to sorrow and to righteousness under the rebukes of His
servant; and He heard it ask the way to Zion, setting its face thitherward. Was
not Micah blessed indeed? If many went on still in their wickedness, there were
some whom he plucked as brands from the burning, and whom he led into the ways
of wisdom which are ways of pleasantness and peace. Probably his office on
earth closed shortly afterwards. (Original Secession Magazine.)
──《The Biblical Illustrator》