Micah 4:2
2 Many nations will come and say,
‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the temple of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us his ways,
so that we may walk in his paths.’
The law will go out from Zion,
the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
We’ve seen already in Micah just what a mess the people have got themselves into, when they’ve misunderstood what it means to be ‘God’s people’. Instead of recognising it as the gracious blessing that it is, they’ve treated it like a ‘get out of jail free’ card that means they can live how they like, treating God with contempt, and not have to face the consequences. So perhaps it’s not surprising that, down the ages, people have struggled to make sense of the idea of God choosing one nation to be particularly his. Isn’t he meant to be the God of all people, everywhere? Surely it’s not fair to favour one particular group, in one particular place. What about those who are left out? After all, they didn’t choose where to be born!
But if we think like that, we’re missing something very important - God’s intention was never that his ‘chosen people’ would be the only ones who would know him and worship him. The whole point of him choosing a nation to belong to him was so that they could show the rest of the world just how good it was to live with him as their God, so that others would come and join them. From the very beginning, when God made promises to Abraham - who would become the founding father of the Jewish people - the plan was that ‘all peoples on earth’ would be blessed as those promises were fulfilled.
So it shouldn’t surprise us that in today’s verse, these ‘last days’ will be a time of blessing for many nations, not just for one. Many nations will come to the God of Jacob. Many nations will worship in his temple. Many nations will learn his ways and walk in them. His words will not be hidden away in a small middle-eastern city where only those born in the right place can hear them. Instead, those words will flow out into all the earth, so that people of every language can hear and believe them. Those of us who weren’t born Jewish are only able to call this God our father because he has chosen to adopt into his family children from every nation, country and culture. Let’s thank him for that today.
