A God-Pleasong Life (Micah 6:6-8): He Has Told You, O Man What is Good

Micah lays out a message of judgment against Israel and Judah, but he also provides a message of hope as well. There is a great Messianic passage in chapter 5. But our focus begins in chapter six. God indicts His people in the verses 1-5.  And in verses six through eight we see a response to this indictment and a response to the response.

In verses six and seven, we see Micah presenting some questions to God, as one of his hearers may have asked. The first question: “With what shall I come to the Lord and bow myself before the God on high?”   Now, this is a good question.  It’s much like the response the people make to Peter’s sermon in Acts 2, “what shall we do?”  But here the similarity ends.

The next questions go much further: “Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings, with yearling calves? Does the Lord take delight in thousands of rams, in ten thousand rivers of oil?”  They keep upping the ante. “Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”

To these questions, Micah responds in the first part of verse eight. “He has told you, O man, what is good.”  God had already told them what He wanted from them. Indeed, He told them over and over again.

In response to these questions, let’s look at some verses.

Burnt offerings and calves:

Ps. 40:6-8 – Sacrifice and meal offering You have not desired; my ears You have not opened; burnt offering and sin offering you have not required. Then I said, “Behold, I come; in the scroll of the book it is written of me. I delight to do Your will, O my God; Your Law is within my heart.”

            Ps. 51:16, 17 – For You do not delight in sacrifice, otherwise I would give it; You are not pleased with burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; and a broken and a contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.

            God does not delight in rote and ritual. He is after the heart. As one commentator said, He wants you! Not your offerings, not your religiosity, He wants you. The sacrifice that pleases God is when we humbly come before Him, broken, realizing our complete lack, and His complete goodness. We bring ourselves before Him, and we do this when we daily choose to be obedient to His will.

Rams and oil:

Ps. 50:7-15, 23 – “Hear, O My people, and I will speak; O Israel, I will testify against you; I am God, your God. I do not reprove you for your sacrifices, and your burnt offerings are continually before Me. I shall take no young bull out of your house nor take goats out of your folds. For every beast of the forest is Mine, the cattle on a thousand hills. I know every bird of the mountains, and everything that moves in the field is Mine. If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is Mine, and all it contains. Shall I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of male goats? Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving and pay your vows to the Most High; call upon Me in the day of trouble; I shall rescue you, and you will honor Me…He who offers a sacrifice of thanksgiving honors Me; and to him who orders his ways aright I shall show the salvation of God.”

Is. 40:16-17 – Even Lebanon is not enough to burn, nor its beasts enough for a burnt offering. All the nations are as nothing before Him, they are regarded by Him as less than nothing and meaningless.

Everything already belongs to God. He does not need anything that we can give Him. Indeed, we are so far removed from God by our sin that we could never offer enough to please Him. However, God does want us to rely on Him and to thank Him, and to praise Him. Do our lives show this kind of sacrifice, or are we trying to buy off God with our good works?

Human sacrifice:

            Lev. 18:21 – You shall not give any of your offspring to offer them to Molech, nor shall you profane the name of your God; I am the Lord.

            Lev. 20:1-5 – Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “You shall also say to the sons of Israel: ‘Any man from the sons of Israel or from the aliens sojourning in Israel who gives any of his offspring to Molech, shall surely be put to death; the people of the land shall stone him with stones. I will also set My face against that man and will cut him off from among his people, because he has given some of his offspring to Molech, so as to defile My sanctuary and to profane My holy name. If the people of the land, however, should disregard that man when he gives any of his offspring to Molech, so as not to put him to death, then I Myself will set My face against that man and his family, and I will cut off from among their people both him and all those who play harlot after him, by playing harlot after Molech.’”

            2 Kings 16:2-4 – Ahaz was twenty years old when he became king, and he reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem; and he did not do what was right in the sight of the Lord his God, as his father David had done. But he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, and even made his son pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the nations whom the Lord had driven out form before the sons of Israel. He sacrificed and burned incense on the high places and on the hills and under every green tree.

            Jer. 7:30-31 – “For the sons of Judah have done that which is evil in My sight,” declares the Lord, “they have set their detestable things in the house which is called by My name, to defile it. They have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, and it did not come into My mind."

            The ultimate sacrifice, right?  Giving up your own flesh and blood that you might live, that you might please God (or the gods).  God hates this! It is evil in His sight. Human sacrifice was a form of service to the other gods; it is what those demonic entities desired. Death. God, however, is a God of life. Yet, you say, what about Jesus? Didn’t he die as a sacrifice? Yes, he did. But His sacrifice was a sacrifice for life, willingly taken up, poured out, that he might save us. His sacrifice was a penalty. Romans 3:23 states that the wages of sin is death. It is what we have earned. Jesus did not sin. He did not deserve death. Yet, he took upon himself our sins, bore them on the cross. He paid our penalty, that we might not have to. That is great news, but even greater still, is the fact that on the third day he rose from the dead. The Resurrection! Blessed Resurrection. So that now, through him, we might have eternal life. If we would only believe in him, that is take in, appropriate for ourselves, this blessed, gracious gift.

Indeed going back to the time of Moses, He told them what He wanted:

Deut. 30:15-20 – “See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, and death and adversity; in that I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in His ways and to keep His commandments and His statutes and His judgments, that you may live and multiply, and that the Lord your God may bless you in the land where you are entering to possess it. But if your heart turns away and you will not obey, but are drawn away and worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall surely perish. You will not prolong your days in the land where you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess it. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live, you and your descendants, by loving the Lord your God, by obeying His voice, and by holding fast to Him; for this is your life and the length of your days, that you may live in the land which the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give them.

God gave Israel a choice. Follow and obey and live, or go their way, rebel, and die. He too has given us a choice, the same choice. He has promised us eternal life if we but believe in his Son. “Confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, [and] you will be saved.” It really is as simple as that. Easy, right? Yes, and no. Yes it is a simple thing. It is easy in that it requires no work on our part. But it is also a very hard thing to do. It does require of us to realize our sinfulness (sometimes a hard thing to do), and not only that, realize that we cannot save ourselves, that there is nothing that we can do to effect this (doubly hard to do). It requires us to come to God, as state before, with a broken and contrite spirit, beg His forgiveness, and believe in Jesus Christ.

But we do have another option. We can go our own way. We don’t have to choose life. What that means, though, is that we instead choose death. Jesus is the only way to the Father (John 14:6).  There is no other way to be at peace with God, to be with Him forever than to take what has been freely offered, that which was bought by Jesus’ shed blood and enabled by his resurrection. It is a sad thing to think that so many today have heard the offer and turned their backs on it, and an even sadder thing is that so many have not heard the offer. What awaits these people is judgment, and an eternity separated from God in the lake of fire (Rev. 20:15). This is why we must share the good news of Jesus Christ! It’s the good news after all! Why are we keeping it to ourselves! We must go out and make disciples (Matt:28:19).

Next time, we'll look at the question of what the Lord does require of us. Looking forward to exploring it with you.