Lecture 18: The Center of the Twelve: Micah, Nahum, and Habakkuk

The lecture, section by section

1. Preaching Jonah

   Nineveh's destruction came roughly a century and a half after Jonah's ministry: the generation that repented was spared, and a later generation that forgot was not. Within the book Jonah remains the unfaithful prophet, angry even to death, used by Yahweh in spite of himself, and in that he pictures Israel: wanting God's compassion for themselves and not for the Gentiles, an ineffective servant through whom the sovereign Lord nonetheless brought salvation to repentant Gentiles. The application lands close: believers who have forgotten how great a sinner they were, looking at the rip-roaring sinner next door and wanting judgment rather than grace, praying imprecation instead of repentance for whoever they count an enemy. Jonah preaches to the church.

2. Micah: the sins of Jacob

   Micah of Moresheth, in the Shephelah of Judah, ministered under Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, within the years 739 to 686 BC, concentrated in the era of the Assyrian invasions down to 701; like his contemporary Isaiah, a southern prophet addressing both kingdoms. His opening names his subject: Samaria and Jerusalem, and 1:5 calls their sin the rebellion of Jacob, the pointed name: not Israel, the one who strives with God, but Jacob, the heel-grabber, the deceiver. Samaria's wound is incurable and has come to the very gate of Jerusalem (1:9): the invader who takes the north will reach the south.

3. How bad it was

   Micah's catalog is unsparing. Chapter 2: woe to those who scheme iniquity on their beds, lying awake planning tomorrow's evil and executing it at morning light, coveting fields and seizing them, while protesting, is the Spirit of Yahweh impatient? Chapter 3: the rulers hate good and love evil, tearing skin and eating the flesh of the people, spiritual cannibals rather than shepherds; the prophets cry peace for those who feed them and declare holy war against those who do not; judges judge for a bribe, priests instruct for a price, prophets divine for money, and all lean on the Lord: is not Yahweh in our midst? Calamity will not come. Chapter 6 adds the wicked scales and deceptive weights; chapter 7 the collapse of all trust: the godly has perished from the land, do not trust a neighbor or a friend, guard your lips from her who lies in your bosom, for a man's enemies are the men of his own household.

4. Three calls to hear, three endings in hope

   The structure follows the summons: hear at 1:2 (O peoples, all of you), at 3:1 (heads of Jacob), and at 6:1 (what the Lord is saying), three divisions of judgment, and each ends with restoration through a coming ruler. The first closes at 2:12 and 13: I will surely assemble all of you, Jacob, gather the remnant like noisy sheep in a fold, and the breaker goes up before them, their king passes on before them, Yahweh at their head. Strikingly, Micah opens by calling all the peoples of the earth to witness the judgment of God's own nation, just after Jonah has carried the word to a Gentile city.

5. The last days envelope: Micah 4 and 5

   The second division's hope (chapters 4 and 5) is enveloped by the end: it opens in the last days, with the mountain of the house of the Lord established and the nations streaming to it, and it closes (5:10 to 15) with the great purging: horses and chariots cut off, no more fortifications, sorceries and fortune-tellers gone, carved images destroyed, and vengeance on the nations who have not obeyed. Between the bookends stands the judgment: daughter Zion will go to Babylon (4:10), yet the model invader is the Assyrian (5:5 and 6), whose historical breaking pictures what the coming King will do to every besieging enemy, until the remnant of Jacob is dew and showers among the peoples, a blessing to the nations instead of a byword.

6. Micah 5:1: whose cheek is smitten?

   With a rod they will smite the judge of Israel on the cheek. Jewish and Christian tradition, hearing Isaiah's suffering servant, has read the smitten judge as Messiah; not a single commentator recommended for the course does, because the context does not fit: chapter 3 has just indicted the leaders, and 4:9's is there no king among you? mocks not the absence of a king but the absence of the right kind. The debate is between an unnamed Davidic king smitten in the siege (Allen, Waltke, the EBC) and Zedekiah, struck and blinded at Jerusalem's fall, called judge rather than king because Nebuchadnezzar had installed him as a vassal to judge the people for Babylon. Jesus was indeed smitten on the cheek; Micah 5:1 is not that prophecy.

7. Micah 5:2: Bethlehem and the days of old

   But as for you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you One will go forth for me to be ruler in Israel. The NASB's primary reading ends: his goings forth are from long ago, from days of eternity, the classic Christian statement of the King's eternal nature. Essex affirms the eternality of the Messiah from John 1 without hesitation, but argues Micah is not asserting it here: the Hebrew phrase looks at historical antecedents, days of old, antiquity, and the point is Davidic ancestry. Who else's origins were anchored in little Bethlehem? David's. The coming ruler's appearance was determined long ago, from days of old, because of his relationship to David and the Davidic covenant, which is why Matthew 2 finds the verse fulfilled when Jesus is born in Bethlehem. He will arise and shepherd in the strength of Yahweh, and this One will be our peace. Essex takes the marginal reading: from days of old, the true scion of David.

8. Micah at the center, and an Advent series

   Micah anchors the hope of the entire Twelve: the deliverance both Israel and the nations await is a Deliverer, the King who breaks the besieging nations, roots out idolatry, restores covenant loyalty, and fulfills the Abrahamic covenant (chapter 7) and the Davidic covenant (chapter 5) together. The closing chapter models the righteous remnant meanwhile: as for me, I will watch expectantly for Yahweh (7:7); though I fall, I will rise; I will bear the indignation of the Lord because I have sinned against him, until he pleads my case (7:8 and 9); shepherd your people with your scepter (7:14); and the anchor of it all, he will tread our iniquities underfoot and cast all their sins into the depths of the sea, giving truth to Jacob and unchanging love to Abraham, sworn to our fathers from days of old (7:18 to 20). Essex's homiletical tip: Micah, almost never preached, makes a superb Advent series on the coming King, who he is, why he must come, what he will do, once a congregation knows some Old Testament.

9. Nahum: the avenging God, then Nineveh

   Nahum opens not with Nineveh but with Yahweh: a jealous and avenging God is Yahweh; Yahweh takes vengeance on his adversaries and reserves wrath for his enemies (1:2 to 8), the general principle of who God is toward those who oppose him. Only at 2:8 does the oracle turn specifically to Nineveh, announced in the title; and 2:2 grounds the sequence in Israel's story: Yahweh will restore the splendor of Jacob, for the devastators have devastated them, so the judgment of the devastator serves the restoration of the devastated. Chapter 3 is the lament, woe to the bloody city, completely full of lies and pillage, and 3:8 to 10 removes any illusion of exemption: are you better than No-amon, Thebes on the Nile, who went into exile with her infants dashed to pieces? What God did to her, he will do to Nineveh. The purpose: Yahweh, the avenging God, would judge Nineveh for her cruel acts and immoral deeds, the generation after Jonah's Nineveh having forgotten its repentance.

10. Why is Nahum in the canon?

    Liberal commentators, uncomfortable with a God of wrath, have pressed five charges: Nahum ignores Judah's sin; he gloats with malicious joy; he paints Judah righteous and disdains the Gentiles; he contradicts the prophets, since God confronted Jonah's anger but never Nahum's; therefore he was a nationalistic false prophet of the kind Jeremiah and Ezekiel opposed. Walter Maier's classic work answers cogently, and Essex commends it: Judah's sin is implied in 1:12, though I have afflicted you, I will afflict you no longer, the same judging principles other prophets applied to Israel; the book parallels the oracles against the nations in Isaiah 13 to 23 and Jeremiah 46 to 51, which no one excises; Nahum shows a wider viewpoint (3:4, 3:8 to 10); and by Deuteronomy 18's test, the true prophet is the one whose word comes to pass, and Nahum's did, the criterion being fulfillment, not whether one likes the message. And be ready pastorally: the same shock comes not from scoffers but from the earnest church member whose reading plan lands on Nahum, or who cannot bear the violence even of the passion narratives; the answer is that God is also a judging God, and this truth too must be learned.

11. Elkosh, and preaching Nahum

    Where was Nahum from? The book says only: Nahum the Elkoshite, and Elkosh is unknown; four sites have been proposed, one in Assyria, two in Galilee, one in Judah, and most commentators end at we do not know, though Judah fits best for a prophet of Yahweh ministering after the fall of Thebes, which the book cites as accomplished, and before Nineveh's fall in 612 BC. Feinberg says it best: I don't know where he came from, but I do know what he said when he came from there. Essex has preached one message on Nahum, in three parts: the character of Yahweh as judging God, the coming judgment on Nineveh, the lament over it, aimed at an age that wants God to be compassion only. Jonah and Nahum belong together: the generation that repented knew God in deliverance; the generation that did not knew him in judgment. If you will not know God in deliverance, you will know him in judgment. And Nineveh itself, unlike Assyria's people who share in Isaiah 19's future blessing, has no promised restoration.

12. Habakkuk: the ways of God

    Habakkuk stands between Nahum and Zephaniah announcing God's judgment first on Judah and then on Judah's judge, Babylon. The book is about the ways of God: look among the nations, observe, be astonished, for I am doing something in your days (1:5); and Lord, I have heard the report about you and I fear; revive your work in the midst of the years; in wrath remember mercy (3:2). Since Yahweh says he is raising up the Chaldeans and Habakkuk shows no awareness of their arrival, the book falls between about 626 BC and the first Babylonian entry into Judah. The situation is precise: a righteous man speaking to a righteous God about why he is not acting against unrighteousness, and the answer, threaded through 1:5, 2:4, and 3:16 to 19, is the same the course met at the end of Micah: the righteous man waits and trusts in Yahweh for his deliverance.

13. Two complaints and one answer

    The structure has universal agreement. Complaint one (1:2 to 4): how long, O Lord, will I call for help? Violence and injustice flourish in Judah; do something. Yahweh's response (1:5 to 11): I am; the Babylonians are coming. Complaint two (1:12 to 17): your eyes are too pure to approve evil; how can you use a nation worse than we are to judge us? Essex's classroom illustration: pray for God to judge the sin of Los Angeles and hear that he will do it by sending San Francisco. Habakkuk then stations himself on the rampart to await the answer he is sure God cannot give (2:1), and God answers (2:2 to 20): the vision is for the appointed time; though it tarries, wait for it, for it will certainly come; the proud one's soul is not right within him, but the righteous will live by his faith, followed by the five woes assuring Babylon's own judgment. Habakkuk's response is the prayer of chapter 3: recounting God's past acts of judgment and deliverance as the ground for asking him to do that work again, and ending in trust: though the fig tree does not blossom, yet I will exult in the Lord.

14. Habakkuk 2:4: whose faith, and what faith?

    The book's key verse raises two questions. Whose faith? Some read by his faithfulness as Yahweh's, God faithful to his promise, true in itself, but the subject is the righteous man, so it is his. Then what is faith here? Three senses of the Hebrew term are all attested: trust itself, clinging and depending on Yahweh; faithfulness, the steadfast reliability that results from such trust; or, Bailey's double-duty reading, the steadfastness together with the faithful actions flowing from it. The steadfastness reading has become predominant, but Essex leans to the foundational sense in this context: cling to me, trust me, depend on me in the midst of the coming judgments. Habakkuk preaches today because the perplexity has not aged: why does God allow evil to go on? Trust Yahweh; he will act; the righteous live by faith while they wait.

15. The commentaries

    For Micah: Allen; the new Anderson and Freedman Anchor Bible volume, everything on Micah in one place and, as with their Hosea, surprisingly conservative in conclusions for the series; and Barker's NAC, the best beginning commentary. For Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah: Bailey's half of the same NAC volume, warmly reviewed by Dr. Barrick and much advanced over the briefer Tyndale volume by Baker, whose nuggets Bailey largely quotes; Patterson's work is a good place to begin study; and for Nahum specifically, Walter Maier's great commentary, worth finding in reprint, takes on the liberal objections head-on. Prior remains a serviceable exposition of Micah.

1. Essex says whoever you count an enemy is likely someone you pray against rather than for. Name the person or group that test applies to, and what praying for their repentance instead would cost you.

2. Micah's generation combined thorough corruption with confident religion: is not the Lord in our midst? Where do you see, or practice, wrongdoing cushioned by religious assurance?

3. Essex affirms the Messiah's eternality yet declines to find it in Micah 5:2, letting the verse say what it says about Davidic ancestry. What does that discipline teach about proving true doctrines from the right texts?

4. Nahum's God is jealous and avenging, and even earnest believers flinch at it. How do you hold the judging God and the compassionate God together as one God, and which side of that truth do you avoid?

5. Habakkuk brought his complaints directly to God, stationed himself, and waited for an answer. What would honest, expectant complaint look like in your prayer life, and how is it different from grumbling about God to others?