Micah 4

In vain should we search the history of Israel for the fulfilment of this blessed and glowing promise. Centuries of calamity, civil war, invasion, captivity, subjugation by foreign powers, terminating at last in the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, and the dispersion of the Jews among all nations, have blighted whatever hope this prediction may have inspired in the ancient people of God. Indeed, the prophet had already foretold that Zion should be ploughed as a field, and Jerusalem become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places of the forest. Neither has any period of human history furnished the picture of peace, safety, plenty, and righteousness, that is here described. It was of the final triumph of the Messiah’s kingdom that the prophet spake. The “last days” denote “the point which lies on the outermost limits of the horizon.” History is filling up the intermediate spaces, and we are moving toward the glorious consummation. Christianity has already done much to humanize war, and to mitigate its horrors. It is yet to abolish it altogether. For it is through the prevalence of this spiritual, peaceful, and loving religion, the exaltation of the word and the worship of God, that the nations shall be subdued to peace. When its principles shall prevail, the very weapons of war shall be turned into implements of husbandry; production shall take the place of destruction; armies shall be disbanded; private rights shall be respected; and every home shall be the abode of peace, love and devotion. J. P. T.

Blessed are the eyes which shall see this great gathering of the nations, and the ears which shall hear the sound thereof. Blessed above those born of women, especially, the devoted men, who, after laboring in the field of the world, shall be rewarded, and at the same time astonished, by finding its harvest-home hastened, and the work which they had been pursuing, with strong crying and tears, done to their hands, done completely, and done from heaven. In this belief lies the hope and the help of the world. Gilfillan.

God has no set time to favor Zion but when her servants favor her stones and take pleasure in the dust thereof. From the beginning the cause of God on earth has been maintained and carried forward only by the most heroic exertion. Christianity, even in the age of miracles, was not propagated but by stupendous efforts. And it is only by a revival of primitive zeal and enterprise that the glorious things spoken of the city of our God can be accomplished. Nor need we be disheartened. We possess a thousandfold the advantage of apostles and primitive Christians for the spread of the Gospel. And shall the whole Church on earth—shall the thousand thousands who now profess the purd religion, be dismayed and paralyzed at an enterprise which had once been well-nigh accomplished by the energies of twelve men? L. Beecher.

The task to which we are summoned is one of unparalleled boldness, requiring the loftiest faith, the most unwearied patience, the most untiring and generous enthusiasm. Neither Alexander, nor Caesar, nor Napoleon dreamed of such an empire as that to whose establishment Jesus Christ calls us. Is there energy adequate to the aim? Yea, verily. For He who commands us to this service is He who bore our infirmities, who died to save the race, and who rose again, fathoming our misery and guilt, leaping from the cross and the tomb to the throne of universal and eternal dominion. And by that sign we conquer! Behrends.

2. Come, and let us go up. This expresses the desire of all nations, which was gradually to be awakened, for instruction in the truths of the Messiah’s kingdom. For out of Zion shall go forth a law. The Hebrew word for law literally signifies instruction. The old law is not what is here meant, but the fulfilment of it (Matt. 5:17, 18), the teaching of Christ. The word of the Lord from Jerusalem. The Gospel was to be preached, in Christ’s name, “among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem” (Luke 24:47).

3. Isaiah and Micah foretell the operation of the spirit of peace, which was to mark the Redeemer’s kingdom, and which was declared at its commencement (Luke 2:14). It was to be a leaven, surely working from age to age, but, for the present, bearing imperfect results. In proportion to the prevalence of this spirit in men, the Lord is accepted as the umpire between the nations. Disputes are decided by the law of right, not by force. The Lord is at hand so as to reprove and correct them (cf. John 16:8), so as to avert war. B. C.

4. Over against the scenes of war lie the pursuits of peace and the quiet enjoyment of God’s good gifts of nature and providence, and of the fruits of human labor. Each man sits under his own vine and fig-tree; none shall make them afraid. These are the usual Oriental symbols of a state of paradise on earth. H. C.

5. “The Name” means the whole Christ as we know Him, or as we may know Him, from the Book, in the dignity of His Messiahship, in the mystery of His Divinity, in the sweetness of His life, in the depth of His words, in the gentleness of His heart, in the patience and propitiation of His sacrifice, in the might of His resurrection, in the glory of His ascension, in the energy of His present life and reigning work for us at the right hand of God. All these, the central facts of the Gospel, are gathered together into that expression, the Name, which is the summing up in one mighty word, so to speak, which it is not possible for a man to utter except in fragments, of all that Jesus Christ is in Himself, and of all that He is and does for us. There is one Name, and one alone, because in the depths of that wondrous nature, in the circumference of that mighty work, there is all that a human heart, or that all human hearts, can need for peace, for nobleness, for holiness, for the satisfaction of all desires, for the direction of efforts, for the stability of its being. The Name stands alone, and it will be the only Name that, at last, shall blaze upon the page of the world’s history when the ages are ended; and the chronicles of earth, with the brief “immortality” which they gave to other names of illustrious men, are mouldered into dust. “The Name is above every name,” and will outlast them all, for it is the all-sufficient embodiment of everything that a single heart or the whole race can require, desire, conceive or attain. And the uniqueness and solitariness of the Name demands an equal and corresponding exclusiveness of devotion and trust in us. The impulse for a life—the only one that will last, and the only one that will lift—lies in the recognition of the Name. And so our consequent simple duty is honestly, earnestly, prayerfully, always to try to keep ourselves under the influence of that sweet compulsion and mighty encouragement which lie in the Name of Jesus Christ. Our whole life ought to be filled with His Name. You can write it anywhere. All life, the trivialities as well as the crises, may be flashing and bright with the sacred syllables. There is no such decoration for a life as that Christ’s Name should be stamped thereon. A. M.

8. We need to distinguish the clothing of ideas from the ideas themselves. That the great truths of Gospel times and of Christ’s millennial reign should be clothed in Jewish imagery and costume ought not to surprise or stumble us. The human mind being what it is, this mode of writing for Jews and among Jews is unavoidable, is natural, is indeed the only language that could have been at that time understood.

9. With verse 9 commences a remarkably regular series of prophecies, forecasting great events that were specially to affect the welfare of the Jews down to the coming of Christ, and of the Church of God thenceforward. It is very noticeable that the beginning of each is indicated in our English Bible by the word “now,” which has its corresponding Hebrew word. It stands at the head of verses 9, 11, and 5:1. Consequently, the distinct predictions are verses 9, 10; verses 11-13; chap. 5:1, and onward substantially through the chapter. Verses 9, 10 speak of the Captivity to Babylon, and the restoration from it; verses 11-13, of the gathering of the great Syrian armies, together with those of some other adjacent powers, against the Jews in the times of the Maccabees, with their heroic defence and final victory; chap. 5, of the siege and fall of Jerusalem, when the sceptre finally departed from Judah; of the Messiah’s birth at Bethlehem, and then of His peaceful, triumphant reign, its policy and results. With this summary of the points before us to the end of chap. 5, we may the better understand each separate prophecy.

In the first prediction of this series (verses 9 10) the people are seen in extreme agony; the prophet hears their sharp outcry of anguish, and asks the cause of it. “And where are thy reliances for help? Hast thou no king? no counsellor?” The trouble is, that the city is falling before the fierce Chaldean, and their honored temple and loved homes are in ruins. How much they rested on their king is indicated (Lam. 4:20), where they say of him: “The breath of our nostrils, the anointed of the Lord, was taken in their pits, of whom we had said, Under his shadow we shall live among the heathen.” Zedekiah was both weak and wicked, yet he was the Lord’s anointed king, and the people, long accustomed to reverence royalty, bemoaned his fall. The twice-repeated “there”—“there shalt thou be delivered,” “there shall the Lord redeem thee,” etc., was equivalent to saying, Do not dread this going to Babylon, as if it must be the tomb of all your hopes, for there your God will meet you for your deliverance. So in fact it came to pass. Precisely there God raised up Cyrus;

precisely at Babylon He gave him those victories which paved the way for the restoration of His people. So true is it that the people of God never need fear to pass under any cloud which the Lord their God may bring up over them. H. C.