When it comes to conflict or tension in a relationship, I like to be right. More specifically, I don’t just like being right (because I’m already prone to believe that anyway), I want the other person to realize that I’m right. Not that I would be snotty about it if that happened, strutting about in superiority. But Lord help me, there’s just something gratifying about that kind of vindication.

And I’m not the only one who feels that way (I know I’m right about this!).

It’s part of our broken human condition. There’s nothing wrong with being right (obviously). The problem is in the satisfaction of being right over against someone else who is therefore wrong. It feeds our pride, our self-righteousness.

It is in that spirit that people may have heard Micah’s opening words. Yes, God is coming down from heaven as judge; he is coming with such incomprehensible power that the very mountains will melt like wax at the touch of his feet. But given the sorry state of affairs in both the northern and southern kingdoms, it’s easy to imagine that people would have listened to these words and filtered them through their pride and arrogance.

Think, for example, of Jesus reading from the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4:16-30). At first, the people are amazed and gratified at what they take to be such gracious and encouraging words. But when he responds by reminding them how prophets are routinely rejected and that Isaiah’s words are not to be read nationalistically, the mood flips: the people are so incensed by his words that they try to throw him off a cliff.

Apparently, they miss the irony of attempting to kill him in response to his declaring that prophets aren’t honored in their hometown.

Imagine, then, people hearing Micah’s opening words and thinking, “Yes, yes, of course! God will come to judge the nations, and all those godless people will get the punishment they deserve!” Then Micah says this:

All this is because of Jacob’s transgression,
    because of the sins of the people of Israel.
What is Jacob’s transgression?
    Is it not Samaria?
What is Judah’s high place?
    Is it not Jerusalem? (Mic 1:5, NIV)

The people may want to point fingers at other nations. Aren’t we God’s people? Aren’t the other nations the ones persecuting us, keeping us from our divine destiny? But the prophet will have none of it. No, he says. God is coming in judgment because of you.

Moreover, Micah points the prophetic finger not just at the people, but at Samaria and Jerusalem, the capitals of the northern and southern kingdoms respectively. Kings bear responsibility not just for the political direction of their nations but the spiritual as well — the king lays the path that the people will follow. That, in essence, was the sin of Solomon. He didn’t introduce idolatry to God’s people; they had struggled with that ever since they entered Canaan. But through his political intermarriages with other nations, he gave state sanction to idolatry.

This, from the wisest man in history.

Thus, by the time of Micah, idolatry was rampant in the north and south. Judah’s “high place,” an elevated place of worship, was supposed to be Jerusalem on Mount Zion, the site of Solomon’s temple. But Micah is making the ultimate accusation of spiritual corruption: even Zion, even the holy city that was at the heart of Israelite worship and piety had become a place of idolatry.

Such idolatry, again, is nothing new. But Micah stands in a long line of prophets, people sent by God to warn the people of the consequences of their sin. Micah has the sad task of telling the people, after generations of their disobedience, that God is not going to put up with it anymore. Doom is coming, first to Samaria and then to Jerusalem.

Micah will live to see the first.

A century later, the prophet Jeremiah will see the second. And as we’ll see later in an upcoming post, the story of Jeremiah tells us that Micah’s prophecy against Jerusalem will still be remembered even then.