Trinity 3
Micah
7:18-20
6/17/18
People have many different
hobbies. As you know, my hobby is model
railroading. Some people collect items
like coins. Some like to fish or hunt.
For many, their yard or garden is a hobby. Certainly, following your favorite
sports teams can be considered a hobby.
Paul Allen, the billionaire
co-founder of Microsoft has a hobby as well.
It’s just on a larger scale than most of us. His hobby is finding sunken warships. In the
last few years he has found in the Pacific Ocean the USS Indianapolis that was sunk
by a Japanese submarine after delivering components for the atom bomb, as well
as the Japanese battleship Musashi which along with her sister ship the Yamato
were the largest battleships ever built.
Just recently, Allen’s hobby
produced some amazing images as he found the U.S.S. Lexington, the U.S.
aircraft carrier that was sunk at the Battle of the Coral Sea in May 1942. The Lexington went down with planes on the
flight deck. Two miles down below of
surface of the ocean, Allen discovered that some of them had settled on the sea
floor upright near the Lexington. They
were preserved in remarkable condition. Among
the images produced by Allen, there was a F4F Wildcat fighter and you could clearly
see the Japanese flags on the side of the cockpit indicating aerial kills along
with the squadron insignia.
When the Lexington and her planes
sank into the ocean, no one expected to see them again. That’s because when things go down into
depths of the ocean, they are gone. You can’t see them. There is no sign of where
they went down. Even if there were,
under normal circumstances you could never get to the bottom to see them.
In the Old Testament lesson today,
the prophet Micah ends his book by saying that our God is a God who forgives. He shows love and compassion toward
sinners. In order to emphasize this
fact, Micah uses the metaphor of God casting all of our sins into the depths of
the sea where they are gone forever, never to be seen again.
The prophet Micah served God in the
eighth century B.C. He is unusual in
that he spoke to both the northern and southern kingdoms. Micah’s book has some really amazing stuff. Yet you probably aren’t very familiar with
him. In large part, that is because he
was a contemporary of the prophet Isaiah.
Isaiah overshadows all of the writing prophets because of the size of
his book and what he wrote. Micah is
kind of like all of those star NBA players during the 1990’s who had great
careers but never won a championship because they had the misfortune to play at
the same time as Michael Jordan.
Like Isaiah, Micah announced that
Yahweh iwaz bringing judgment against his people. He was going to do this because they were
worshipping idols – the false gods of the surrounding nations. They were not walking in faith. They were not living according to the Torah
that God had given to his covenant people – the instruction that described how
they were to live because Yahweh had taken them as his own. They were coveting the possessions of others,
and acting in order to get them. They
cheated their neighbor by using deceitful weights. They lied, in order to get
what they wanted.
It’s not hard to see how these same
accusations apply to us. We too have
false gods; we covet; we don’t always do what is right at work; we lie in order
stay out of trouble and to get what we want.
Yet the thing we really need to pay
attention to is that God’s people didn’t want to hear about their sin. They said everything was going to be
fine. Micah complains, “‘Do not preach’--thus they
preach—‘one should not preach of such things; disgrace will not overtake
us.’” The prophet lamented, “If a man
should go about and utter wind and lies, saying, ‘I will preach to you of wine
and strong drink,’ he would be the preacher for this people!”
Micah’s
words raise the question regarding whether you are willing to be confronted
about your sins. The world won’t do
this. Instead, it will often affirm your actions. In fact it will provide a sinful example to
follow. Are you using the Gospel to
give yourself a false sense of security thinking that you can do what you want
and everything will be ok? As Micah said
of Jerusalem in his own time, “Its
heads give judgment for a bribe; its priests teach for a price; its prophets
practice divination for money; yet they lean on the LORD and say, ‘Is not the
LORD in the midst of us? No disaster shall come upon us."’”
They were wrong. Yahweh did send judgment in the form of the
Assyrians, and then finally, the Babylonians.
Just as our sins can have very real consequences that we are unable to
avoid, so it was for God’s people. They experienced destruction and exile.
Yet in our text, Micah offers hope
that this will not be the final word. In
fact it cannot be, and the reason for
this is to be found in the nature and character of God himself. The prophet says in our text, “Who is a God like you, pardoning
iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance? He
does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love.”
God is the
One who pardons and overlooks our sin.
He does not remain angry. Why?
Because instead, he delights in steadfast love. People like to contrast the Old and New
Testaments. We are told that in the Old Testament God is angry, wrathful and
full of judgment, but in the New Testament he is loving, merciful and
forgiving. Yet in our text we hear a
portion of what can be called a creedal statement of the Old Testament as it
says again and again that God is “gracious
and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.”
Because
this is so, Micah describes the future of God’s people … including you. He says in chapter four, “It shall come to
pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be
established as the highest of the mountains, and it shall be lifted up above
the hills; and peoples shall flow to it, and many nations shall come, and say:
‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of
Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.’”
Micah and
Isaiah provide this same description of God’s salvation and peace. We are told that God “shall judge between
many peoples, and shall decide for strong nations far away; and they shall beat
their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall
not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”
How can
this happen? How can this forgiveness
and peace become ours? Micah tells us in
words that you will certainly recognize when he writes in chapter five, “But
you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah,
from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming
forth is from of old, from ancient days.”
Yahweh sent
Jesus the Christ, the descendant of King David, to be born in Bethlehem. He was born as a baby and laid in a manger,
but he was more than just a baby. He was
God in the flesh, the One in whom all the fullness of the Deity dwelt bodily. He is the One about whom Micah went on to
say, “And he shall stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the LORD, in
the majesty of the name of the LORD his God. And they shall dwell secure, for
now he shall be great to the ends of the earth. And he shall be their peace.”
Jesus
Christ is our peace. He is because God
delights in steadfast love. He has acted
in Jesus so that his anger against our sinfulness is not retained. He had compassion on us, and that is why he
sent his own Son to die on the cross. In
our text Micah says, “He will again have compassion on us; he will tread
our iniquities underfoot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the
sea.” God had compassion on us when he
cast our sins on Jesus. At his baptism in the water of the Jordan River Jesus
was anointed with the Holy Spirit as he took on the role of the suffering
Servant described by Isaiah. God’s anger against our sin; his wrath and
judgment were exhausted as Jesus suffered and died in our place.
Yet God’s
steadfast love could not be stopped by death.
Instead, on the third day God raised Jesus from the dead through the
work of the Holy Spirit. In his
resurrection he began the new creation.
He has begun the peace that will encompass all of humanity and creation
when he returns in glory on the Last Day.
The same
life giving Spirit who raised Jesus is now at work in you. He has made you a new creation in
Christ. He is working in you the mind of
Christ so that now, like God, you are not to retain anger. Instead you are to delight in steadfast love
and have compassion on others, just has God has had compassion on you. Because of Jesus we seek to live Micah’s
words when he wrote: “He has told you, O man, what
is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love
kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”
When through the power and work of
the Spirit we are able to do this, we rejoice.
We give thanks to God. And when
instead, we stumble in sin, we repent.
We confess our sin. We return in
faith to the words of our text: “He
will again have compassion on us; he will tread our iniquities underfoot. You
will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.”
God has
given us this forgiveness in Holy Baptism, to which we return daily. We now know that even ships sunk two miles
down in the depths of the sea can be found and seen again. Yet in the font we possess a water in which
those sins are gone forever. This is so
because in that water we have shared in the saving death of Jesus Christ. By his death he has destroyed sin. It is nowhere to be found because God has
pardoned our iniquity and passed over our transgression. And in that water we have the promise that we
will share in the resurrection of Jesus Christ on the Last Day, when sin will
be no more and the peace of Christ will reign forever.
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