Micah 6:8,9 - He has shown you, O man, what is good

6:8

We then get to the heart of the matter. What God requires is a change of heart, matched with actions in accordance with a godly heart. We will always try and change everything except ourselves. Change the government, change the system, but never ourselves. Churches can do this as well. We will think changing a structure is the key. Now it might be helpful, but it is never the heart of the matter.

Now look at this verse. Do justly and love mercy. We will so often go to one of these, and if we do that we are not being godly. A harsh justice without mercy is not biblical. Equally, mercy without any justice is equally unbiblical. True righteousness has the two in the right balance. “And to walk humbly with your God”. Even if we seek to balance justice and mercy in the right way there will be times when we do not know, perhaps even cannot know, how best to deal with a situation. The truth is that we are not capable of all things, we do not know all things, we are not all wise. So we have to walk humbly with our God, aware of our own limitations, and aware of God’s faithfulness. And we need to live in the light of our own weakness and God’s faithfulness.

6:9

In prophets we repeatedly find the interplay of judgement and salvation, for the two are inextricably linked. Too often today we speak of salvation in terms that ignore judgement. This is deeply unbiblical. If we read the gospels we find that Jesus speaks again and again of judgement, if we read Acts we find that the granting of repentance was central to the spread of the gospel, and the gospel message. “It is sound wisdom to fear your name”, and then “hear of the rod and of him who appointed it”. It is a wise man who knows that God is a God of judgement, and that it is God who executes judgement. This is also crucial to understanding the cross. It is God who subjected Jesus to judgement in our place, this is central to a true understanding of the cross.