Micah 1:13-16
13 You who live in Lachish, harness fast horses to the chariot.
You are where the sin of Daughter Zion began, for the transgressions of Israel were found in you.
14 Therefore you will give parting gifts to Moresheth Gath.
The town of Akzib will prove deceptive to the kings of Israel.
15 I will bring a conqueror against you who live in Mareshah.
The nobles of Israel will flee to Adullam.
16 Shave your head in mourning for the children in whom you delight;
make yourself as bald as the vulture, for they will go from you into exile.
Verses 10-15 probably sound very strange to us. I doubt that we’ve visited, or even heard of, Lachish, Moresheth Gath, Akzib, Mareshah and Adullam. But all these place-names have a double-meaning. Not only are they actual towns and cities, threatened with destruction. But Micah picks them out particularly because their names hint at what is to come - Mareshah, for instance, sounds like the Hebrew word for ‘conqueror’. Imagine if Micah had been writing about the north of England - he might have said something like “Bury will be buried”.
This is one of those bits of the Bible that it’s easy to just skip past. Because it’s written about far away places, centuries ago, we can easily assume it doesn’t apply to us. Yet the New Testament tells us that “All scripture is God-breathed, and is useful” for Christians. So we need to resist that urge to skim over things that seem foreign or distant to us, and ask for God’s help to hear and understand what they might mean for us today. As I said in the Introduction, I’m not an expert on the book of Micah, and even if I was, 3 minutes a day is never going to be long enough to properly uncover the full riches of every verse in this book! But even if some sections of Micah leave us with more questions than answers, let’s commit to listening as carefully as we can to the things that are clear.
In this section, I think that’s probably verse 16 - “shave your head in mourning”. At first glance, even that seems a bit long-ago and far-away. But for the Israelites of Micah’s day, shaved heads were a clear sign of grief or repentance. We might not express those things in the same way today, but the underlying command still applies - ‘Grieve for your sin because it brings God’s righteous judgement’. Micah is warning them “Don’t just go on living life as normal when destruction is on the doorstep. Stop. Understand the seriousness of the situation, and respond seriously. Be willing to admit that you deserve punishment for the way that you’ve rejected God and throw yourselves on his mercy.” That’s a message that is as true today as it was when Micah first spoke it. So as we read this unfamiliar, and sometimes difficult, book let’s pray that God’s words would speak clearly to us, in our time and place, and that they would be useful in our lives, teaching, rebuking and correcting us by the power of the Holy Spirit.
