Micah 4:9-10
9 Why do you now cry aloud –
have you no king?
Has your ruler perished,
that pain seizes you like that of a woman in labour?
10 Writhe in agony, Daughter Zion,
like a woman in labour,
for now you must leave the city
to camp in the open field.
You will go to Babylon;
there you will be rescued.
There the Lord will redeem you
out of the hand of your enemies.
In verses 1-8 of this chapter we saw the wonderful future that lies ahead for God’s people. But that isn’t their present experience. The hope that is to come doesn’t cancel out the judgement that this book warns of. Yes, God will rescue them. But he will rescue them ‘out of Babylon’. They have to lose their city, their country, their home, and be taken into exile before God brings them back. Yes, God will redeem them out of the hand of their enemies. But he’s still going to hand them over to those enemies first. There will be blessing in the last days. But those blessings will be enjoyed by a people who have been brought through suffering and out the other side, not by a people who have been wrapped in cotton wool and airlifted directly to glory without having to live through anything difficult.
This pattern is not unusual, purely for the people of Micah’s day. It’s characteristic of the whole Bible story. The nation of Israel had its beginnings when God rescued his people out of slavery in Egypt. Presumably, God could have blessed them by not allowing them to be made slaves in the first place, but he didn’t. He blessed them by being with them through their sufferings and then rescuing them from their sufferings. That’s our experience too. As Christians, we don’t get automatically shielded from the pain that comes from life in a broken world. And even though Christ’s death in our place means that we won’t face the judgement from God that our sin deserves, we do often have to live with the consequences of our own sin, and the sin of the people around us, in the here and now.
So let’s not make the mistake of thinking that when life is hard, that must mean that God’s given up on us. It’s the normal pattern for God’s people to experience hard things on the way to glory. That’s how it was in the Old Testament. That’s how it was for Jesus and that’s how it will be for us. God has redeemed us already, in Jesus. And he is with us now, while we wait to experience the wonderful future which he has promised us. So let’s pray today that he would keep us trusting him, while we wait, however hard that seems.
