Bible Commentaries

Hypocritical Eagerness

Micah 6:6-8.

"Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high God?" What a delightful state of mind! Here is a man asking himself the greatest of all possible questions. "Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old?" The only question which I have to put Micah 6:9-15.

Hear ye the rod, and who hath appointed it." Do not be atheistical in the time of affliction. The "rod" means judgment. Sometimes judgment takes the form of chastening We are not always to suppose that the rod means mere punishment—an action of the strong upon the weak, or the righteous upon the wicked; the rod may be an instrument of education as well as of vengeance and of penalty. Do not suppose that the devil holds the rod. The devil is the weakest of all creatures: his is only the strength of boisterousness; there is nothing in it of abiding pith, stability, real power. The devil is a chained enemy. Afflictions do not spring out of the dust. When the rod is lacerating your back, ask, What wilt thou have me to do? When all things are dull and distressing and disappointing, say, This is the ministry of God: he is taking out of me some elements of vanity, which are always elements of weakness, and he is conducting me to the altar by a subterranean passage. We do not always go to the altar along pathways of flowers; not always does God beckon us through a garden to follow him to some chosen place of real communion. Sometimes we are driven to the altar; often we do not want to pray: the soul will take no rest, and give none, until a great, sweet, holy, burdened prayer has gone up to heaven by way of the Cross. Is the rod lying heavily upon your house now? Know ye the rod, and him who hath appointed it; examine yourselves carefully and searchingly, and see if there be any wicked way in you, and drag it out, it will rot in the sunlight. If, on the other hand, you can hold by your integrity like the Psalmist of old, if you can wrestle with God as did Jacob, saying, I cannot tell why this has come upon me, the answer will be more abundant than your petition. Magnify the Cross at midnight.

In this instance, however, there is a good deal of immorality behind everything, and explaining the whole action of divine visitation and penalty. The questions that follow are thunder bolts:—

"Are there yet the treasures of wickedness in the house of the wicked, and the scant measure that is abominable?" ( Micah 6:10).

The reason why the rod is lifted up is that the ephah is made lean; that is to say, the measure is cut down a little, even if it be by so much as the rim, so that the poor are paying for goods they do not receive. God will not have this economy. We may even call it political economy, but he calls it robbery. God is very frank; there is no circumlocution in the divine speech. When the thief has shaken down the ephah, so that he can save almost half an ephah in every thousand measures he sells, he says, It is so very small that no one particular customer or client can possibly miss it, and yet when you come to thousands the profit in return to myself is very considerable. I am not injuring any one in particular; I am simply gathering up littles. The Lord says, Liar! thief! They are not polite words, but sin has never entitled itself to be spoken to politely. "Scant measure": that is a minor morality, is it not? As men become metaphysical they become self-deceived; in proportion as men become very clever they become too clever. So we have distributed morality into major and minor; it is an awful thing to steal so that you can be found out, but to make the ephah short, to make the measure scant, and do it so skilfully that nobody will be able to charge you with it, is a minor offence. We are the victims of our own acuteness, even upon the bench of judgment, as well as in the sanctuary of righteousness. Hence we speak of minor offences, first offences, venial offences. Is there any such classification in the Bible? Not to be an inspired book, according to the theory of some, it is wonderfully fierce with wrongdoing: verily it might have been inspired; it is so just, it stands by and says, Put another handful in there. If we reply there is no room for it, the Bible says, Press down what is already in the ephah, and you will find room for it. That is a very curious theology. It is the only theology worth maintaining, unless it be followed to its natural consequence, which means the true worship, devout homage, rendered to God, and a spiritual acceptance of all the mysteries of the Cross of Christ. The Lord will not be content with a fine spiritual, doctrinal orthodoxy. There are men who suppose that if they believe in the supernatural they may plunder anybody. There are those who turn purple in the face when they encounter a denial of the supernatural; yet they have not an honestly gotten sovereign in their bank! Will the Lord be pleased with this defence of the supernatural? It is an aggravation of the original blasphemy. If men would say nothing about religion, and be sheer, pure, simple, out-and-out devils, one might have some hope of them. It is this church-going coupled with church-murder that makes the case hopeless. What a searching religion! Suppose it, dream it,—the religion takes up the ephah, the measure, and says, Is this right? And the man says, What have you to do with the ephah? Cross-examine me in the catechism; ask me questions out of the Old Testament; inquire into my acquisitions in the New Testament; interrogate me about the Epistles of Paul: and the Spirit of God says, Not until you have made this ephah right; you have nothing to do with Paul or his epistles, or theological profession, or Christian nomenclature, until you have made the measure right. What wonder that many men should find in correct doctrinal orthodoxy all they want? One of two things is clear: either they are right and the Bible is wrong, or the Bible is right and they are wrong; they cannot both be right.

The prophet goes into detail, saying,—

"Shall I [that Micah 6:11).

He was tempted to connive at this whole deception. It would have been an easier life if Micah could have said, Brethren, I am sent to assert certain great metaphysical propositions; as to what you are doing with your weights and measures I know nothing, and really I am not called upon to know anything—do you believe in the supernatural? Certainly! Can a man believe in the supernatural, and have a bag of false weights in the house? He cannot. That would indeed be a supreme genius that could be familiar with God, and able to vindicate and defend the mysteries of the Trinity, and yet be using false weights and scales all day long. That never was allowed in the Bible. And this element of morality never can be revised out of the holy Book. And you can never have any family prayer in your house until you make the measure right, and the weight right, and the scale right. You may have to cut down the returns very much—let it be so; the moment you have cut them down there will be a highway opened between your soul and heaven, and you can pray all day without feeling the tedium of the homage. No minister dare speak about false weights if he has any regard to his living. There is not a man in any congregation that would not resent a criticism upon the weight or the balance or the ephah, and leave the ministry because it was too personal. If such men are taking the most comfortable road down to darkness, the road will be short, the darkness will be everlasting. Why do not men receive a book that is so pure in its morality, so righteous in its demands; a book that speaks for the dumb, and sees for the blind, and goes before the traveller to make the way open and easy? Take out of our literature the Bible, and you have not only taken out the most mysterious book, but the most moral book, the book of conduct, the book that purifies every relation of life; it nails every bad coin to the world's counter, and calls every Micah 6:12).

Yet there are poor men who are so misled as to wonder if the Bible is inspired. Against whom is the charge made? "Rich men." Why is it laid against them with so much emphasis? Because they might have been so much better. A man who is rich can have education, intelligence, pictures, music, books in the house; he can sit in comfort, and read the finest literature of the age; his opportunities are so many, his advantages are so vast; he has a garden in which he can walk, a library in which he can read, a gallery of pictures in which he can feed the hunger of his eyes. For him to have mean thoughts and low purposes, for him to be bad, is to be bad with infinite aggravation of the original offence. It is difficult for a rich man not to be violent. We are soon swollen with pride. We begin to think that money answereth all things, and men who dare not whimper under other circumstances, yet talk blatantly under the inspiration of their wealth. Wealth will have its own way—wealth can pay for it; wealth need not consider the rights of other people; wealth can be violent when its own things are in peril. This is the natural tendency of wealth. How hardly, with what infinite strain and difficulty, shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of heaven! Riches are liars; riches are deceivers evermore. The Apostle Paul speaks of "the deceitfulness of riches." On the other hand, it is possible to have millions, and to be simple, modest, generous, true, magnanimous. There are men who stand upon their property. The Lord bless such men, for the more they have the more the poor will have, the more every good institution will have; they do not carry their property as a burden, they stand upon it in sign of sovereignty.

There is something worse than violence in the charge—"their tongue is deceitful in their mouth." There is hope of a violent Micah 6:14-15).

Mark the vexation of it—sowing, and not reaping; sowing, and somebody else reaping. Here is the uncontrollable element in life. A man says, I certainly did tread out the olives, and I have not a small vessel full of oil with which to anoint myself: working for others, the slave of slaves. We see this every day. We need not invoke the supernatural in any merely metaphysical sense in order to substantiate this as a fact; it is the common experience of life. Men put money into bags, and go for the money, and it is not there. Why is it not there? The prophet explains that there were holes in the bag, and the money went right through. You have heard of a man all day long trying to draw water out of a well with a sieve. How industrious he is! See, the sieve goes down, the wheel is turned, and the sieve is brought up, and there is no water in it. It is a mystery. Not at all. Why is there no water? Because the vessel is a sieve; the water runs out as quickly as it runs in. You have heard of one who was rolling a stone up the hill all day, and the more it was rolled up the more it rolled down, and at night it was exactly where it was before the process of rolling began. Worthless labour, useless labour, vexatious labour. Thus doth God puzzle and bewilder and perplex men. Now, they say, it is done. Where is it? Gone! Do not suppose that wrong can ever come right; do not imagine that God can ever be outwitted. Come into the harmonic relation of things. Do not start some little solar system of your own. Why should you play the fool too much? You can do nothing. All the divine government is fixed, and is moving on to its purpose, and you can do nothing to hinder it; it will just roll over your poor bones, and there shall not be one speck of powder left. It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks. It is an awful situation, indeed, to be always going against gravitation. And what a fool is he who says, I will make a little earth of my own, and I will light it by a principle which I have invented and patented, and I will set up an independent empire. The only answer to that man is, Do it. By no means reason with him. A man who can make the proposition is not below reason or above reason—he is simply not in reason at all. Tell him to do it, and when he has done it to send for you, and you will look at it. No. There is a scheme of things, a grand sphere, with a wondrous globe symbolising completeness and symbolising motion. Globes were not made to stand still; squares may try to rest on one side, but globes have nothing to rest on, they were meant to whirl and curve. A globe flies; it is a mystery of wings, and the Lord hath set all things in circles. He knows nothing about our straight lines, and our detailed and intermediate geometry, in which we please ourselves with divers figures. He knows the circuit, the sum and mystery of things, and if we will not enter into his circular motion, his wonderful scheme of sun within sun, constellation within constellation, and system within system, we shall be dropped out. And where, where shall we drop to?