THE KING TO COME
Mic 4:8 - Micah 5
WHEN a people has to be purged of long injustice,
when some high aim of liberty or of order has to be won, it is
remarkable how often the drama of revolution passes through three
acts. There is first the period of criticism and of vision, in which
men feel discontent, dream of new things, and put their hopes into
systems: it seems then as if-the future were to come of itself. But
often a catastrophe, relevant or irrelevant, ensues: the visions
pale before a vast conflagration, and poet, philosopher, and prophet
disappear under the feet of a mad mob of wreckers. Yet this is often
the greatest period of all, for somewhere in the midst of it a
strong character is forming, and men, by the very anarchy, are being
taught, in preparation for him, the indispensableness of obedience
and loyalty. With their chastened minds he achieves the third act,
and fulfills all of the early vision that God’s ordeal by fire has
proved worthy to survive. Thus history, when distraught, rallies
again upon the Man.
To this law the prophets of Israel only gradually gave expression.
We find no trace of it among the earliest of them; and in the
essential faith of all there was much which predisposed them against
the conviction of its necessity. For, on the one hand, the seers
were so filled with the inherent truth and inevitableness of their
visions, that they described these as if already realised; there was
no room for a great figure to rise before the future, for with a
rush the future was upon them. On the other hand, it was ever a
principle of prophecy that God is able to dispense with human aid.
"In presence of the Divine omnipotence all secondary causes, all
interposition on the part of the creature, fall away." The more
striking is it that before long the prophets should have begun, not
only to look for a Man, but to paint him as the central figure of
their hopes. In Hosea, who has no such promise, we already see the
instinct at work. The age of revolution which he describes is cursed
by its want of men: there is no great leader of the people sent from
God; those who come to the front are the creatures of faction and
party; there is no king from God. How different it had been in the
great days of old, when God had ever worked for Israel through some
man-a Moses, a Gideon, a Samuel, but especially a David. Thus
memory, equally with the present dearth of personalities, prompted
to a great desire, and with passion Israel waited for a Man. The
hope of the mother for her firstborn, the pride of the father in his
son, the eagerness of the woman for her lover, the devotion of the
slave to his liberator, the enthusiasm of soldiers for their
captain-unite these noblest affections of the human heart, and you
shall yet fail to reach the passion and the glory with which
prophecy looked for the King to Come. Each age, of course, expected
him in the qualities of power and character needed for its own
troubles, and the ideal changed from glory unto glory. From valor
and victory in war, it became peace and good government, care for
the poor and the oppressed, sympathy with the sufferings of the
whole people, but especially of the righteous among them, with
fidelity to the truth delivered unto the fathers, and, finally, a
conscience for the people’s sin, a bearing of their punishment and a
travail, for their spiritual redemption. But all these qualities and
functions were gathered upon an individual-a Victor, a King, a
Prophet, a Martyr, a Servant of the Lord.
Micah stands among the first, if he is not the very first, who thus
focused the hopes of Israel upon a great Redeemer; and his promise
of Him shares all the characteristics just described. In his book it
lies next a number of brief oracles with which we are unable to
trace its immediate connection. They differ from it in style and
rhythm: they are in verse, while it seems to be in prose. They do
not appear to have been uttered along with it. But they reflect the
troubles out of which the Hero is expected to emerge, and the
deliverance which He shall accomplish, though at first they picture
the latter without any hint of Himself. They apparently describe an
invasion which is actually in course, rather than one which is near
and inevitable; and if so they can only date from Sennacherib’s
campaign against Judah in 701 B.C. Jerusalem is in siege, standing
alone in the land, like one of those solitary towers with folds
round them which were built here and there upon the border pastures
of Israel for defense of the flock against the raiders of the
desert. The prophet sees the possibility of Zion’s capitulation, but
the people shall leave her only for their deliverance elsewhere.
Many are gathered against her, but he sees them as sheaves upon the
floor for Zion to thresh. This oracle (Mic 4:11-13) cannot, of
course, have been uttered at the same time as the previous one, but
there is no reason why the same prophet should not have uttered both
at different periods. Isaiah had prospects of the fate of Jerusalem
which differ quite as much. Once more (Mic 5:1) the blockade is
established. Israel’s ruler is helpless, "smitten on the cheek by
the foe." It is to this last picture that the promise of the
Deliverer is attached.
The prophet speaks:-
"But thou, O Tower of the Flock, Hill of the daughter of Zion, To
thee shall arrive the former rule, And the kingdom shall come to the
daughter of Zion. Now wherefore criest thou so loud? Is there no
king in thee, or is thy counselor perished, That throes have seized
thee like a woman in childbirth? Quiver and writhe, daughter of
Zion, like one in childbirth: For now must thou forth from the city,
And encamp on the field (and come unto Babel); There shalt thou be
rescued, There shall Jehovah redeem thee from the hand of thy foes"!
"And now gather against thee many nations, that say, ‘Let her be
violate, that our eyes may fasten on Zion! But they know not the
plans of Jehovah, Nor understand they His counsel, For He hath
gathered them in like sheaves to the floor. Up and thresh, O
daughter of Zion For thy horns will I turn into iron, And thy hoofs
will I turn into brass; And thou will beat down many nations, And
devote to Jehovah their spoil, And their wealth to the Lord of all
earth".
"Now press thyself together, thou daughter of pressure: The foe hath
set a wall around us, With a rod they smite on the cheek Israel’s
regent! But thou, Beth-Ephrath, smallest among the thousands of
Judah, From thee unto Me shall come forth the Ruler to be in Israel!
Yea, of old are His goings forth, from the days of long ago!
Therefore shall He suffer them till the time that one bearing shall
have born. (Then the rest of His brethren shall return with the
children of Israel.) And He shall stand and shepherd His flock in
the strength of Jehovah, In the pride of the name of His God. And
they shall abide! For now is He great to the ends of the earth. And
Such a One shall be our Peace."
Bethlehem was the birthplace of David, but when Micah says that the
Deliverer shall emerge from her he does not only mean what Isaiah
affirms by his promise of a rod from the stock of Jesse, that the
King to Come shall spring from the one great dynasty in Judah. Micah
means rather to emphasize the rustic and popular origin of the
Messiah, "too small to be among the thousands of Judah." David, the
son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, was a dearer figure than Solomon son
of David the King. He impressed the people’s imagination, because he
had sprung from themselves, and in his lifetime had been the popular
rival of an unlovable despot. Micah himself was the prophet of the
country as distinct from the capital, of the peasants as against the
rich who oppressed them. When, therefore, he fixed upon Bethlehem as
the Messiah’s birthplace, he doubtless desired, without departing
from the orthodox hope in the Davidic dynasty, to throw round its
new representative those associations which had so endeared to the
people their father-monarch. The shepherds of Judah, that strong
source of undefiled life from which the fortunes of the state and
prophecy itself had ever been recuperated, should again send forth
salvation. Had not Micah already declared that, after the overthrow
of the capital and the rulers, the glory of Israel should come to
Adullam, where of old David had gathered its soiled and scattered
fragments?
We may conceive how such a promise would affect the crushed peasants
for whom Micah wrote. A Savior, who was one of themselves, not born
up there in the capital, foster-brother of the very nobles who
oppressed them, but born among the people, sharer of their toils and
of their wrongs!-it would bring hope to every broken heart among the
disinherited poor of Israel. Yet meantime, be it observed, this was
a promise, not for the peasants only, but for the whole people. In
the present danger of the nation the class disputes are forgotten,
and the hopes of Israel gather upon their Hero for a common
deliverance from the foreign foe. "Such a One shall be our peace."
But in the peace He is "to stand and shepherd His flock,"
conspicuous and watchful. The country folk knew what such a figure
meant to themselves for security and weal on the land of their
fathers. Heretofore their rulers had not been shepherds, but thieves
and robbers.
We can imagine the contrast which such a vision must have offered to
the fancies of the false prophets. What were they beside this? Deity
descending in fire and thunder, with all the other features of the
ancient Theophanies that had now become much cant in the mouths of
mercenary traditionalists. Besides those, how sane was this how
footed upon the earth, how practical, how popular in the best sense!
We see, then, the value of Micah’s prophecy for his own day. Has it
also any value for ours-especially in that aspect of it which must
have appealed to the hearts of those for whom chiefly Micah arose?
Is it wise to paint the Messiah, to paint Christ, so much a
workingman? Is it not much more to our purpose to remember the
general fact of His humanity, by which He is able to be Priest and
Brother to all classes, high and low, rich and poor, the noble and
the peasant alike? Is not the Man of Sorrows a much wider name than
the Man of Labor? Let us answer these questions.
The value of such a prophecy of Christ lies in the correctives which
it supplies to the Christian apocalypse and theology. Both of these
have raised Christ to a throne too far above the actual circumstance
of His earthly ministry and the theatre of His eternal sympathies.
Whether enthroned in the praises of Heaven, or by scholasticism
relegated to an ideal and abstract humanity, Christ is lifted away
from touch with the common people. But His lowly origin was a fact.
He sprang from the most democratic of peoples. His ancestor was a
shepherd, and His mother a peasant girl. He Himself was a carpenter:
at home, as His parables show, in the fields and the folds and the
barns of His country; with the servants of the great houses, with
the unemployed in the market; with the woman in the hovel seeking
one piece of silver, with the shepherd on the moors seeking the lost
sheep. "The poor had the gospel preached to them; and the common
people heard Him gladly." As the peasants of Judea must have
listened to Micah’s promise of His origin among themselves with new
hope and patience, so in the Roman empire the religion of Jesus
Christ was welcomed chiefly, as the Apostles and the Fathers bear
witness, by the lowly and the laboring of every nation. In the great
persecution which bears His name, the Emperor Domitian heard that
there were two relatives alive of this Jesus whom so many
acknowledged as their King, and he sent for them that he might put
them to death. But when they came, he asked them to hold up their
hands, and seeing these brown and chapped with toil, he dismissed
the men, saying, "From such slaves we have nothing to fear." Ah but,
Emperor! it is just the horny hands of this religion that thou and
thy gods have to fear! Any cynic or satirist of thy literature, from
Celsus onwards, could have told thee that it was by men who worked
with their hands for their daily bread, by domestics, artisans, and
all manner of slaves, that the power of this King should spread,
which meant destruction to [flee and thine empire] "From little
Bethlehem came forth the Ruler," and "now He is great to the ends of
the earth."
There follows upon this prophecy of the Shepherd a curious fragment
which divides His office among a number of His order, though the
grammar returns towards the end to One. The mention of Assyria
stamps this oracle also as of the eighth century. Mark the refrain
which opens and closes it.
"When Asshur cometh into our land, And when he marcheth on our
borders, Then shall we raise against him seven shepherds And eight
princes of men. And they shall shepherd Asshur with a sword, And
Nimrod’s land with her own bare blades. And He shall deliver from
Asshur, When he cometh into our land, And marcheth upon our
borders."
There follows an oracle in which there is no evidence of Micah’s
hand or of his times; but if it carries any proof of a date, it
seems a late one.
"And the remnant of Jacob shall be among many peoples Like the dew
from Jehovah, Like showers upon grass, Which wait not for a man. Nor
tarry for the children of men. And the remnant of Jacob (among
nations,) among many peoples, Shall be like the lion among the
beasts of the jungle, Like a young lion among the sheepfolds, Who,
when he cometh by, treadeth and teareth, And none may deliver. Let
thine hand be high on thine adversaries, And all thine enemies be
cut off!"
Finally in this section we have an oracle full of the notes we had
from Micah in The first two chapters. It explains itself. Compare
Micah 2 and Isaiah 2.
"And it shall be in that day-‘tis the oracle of Jehovah-That I will
cut off thy horses from the midst of thee, And I will destroy thy
chariots; That I will cut off the cities of thy land, And tear down
all thy fortresses, And I will cut off thine enchantments from thy
hand, And thou shalt have no more soothsayers; And I will cut off
thine images and thy pillars from the midst of thee, And thou shalt
not bow down any more to the work of thy hands; And I will uproot
thine Asheras from the midst of thee, And will destroy thine idols.
So shall I do, in My wrath and Mine anger, Vengeance to the nations,
who have not known Me."
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