With the exception of one home that I lived in for the first six months of my life — and therefore don’t remember — I lived in the same house, in the same suburban neighborhood, until I got married at the ripe old age of 21. To this day, I still dream about that house. As I write this, I’m taking a mental walk up the front steps and through the main entry, up the stairs to the left and down the hallway to my room. I have a lot of memories in that house, and in my mind’s eye I can picture every room. I’d go back and visit it if I could.

But it burned down in 1991, in a massive firestorm that killed 25 people and destroyed nearly 3,000 homes.

I was married by then and living hundreds of miles away. My parents, thankfully, had also moved out years before. But we all gathered to visit the charred remains. There was nothing left of the split-level stucco building but the foundation. A freezer that had once been on the lower floor of the house was now in the basement, twisted like a bizarre bit of abstract art. I remember fingering a bolt whose head protruded from a cement wall. I had put that bolt there, to anchor a grape-stake fence I had built. But there was nothing left, of course, of the fence itself.

It was an eerie feeling visiting the neighborhood, which now seemed more like a moonscape. The houses were gone, except for the occasional chimney; most of the trees were gone, too. It was a ruin, a scene of desolation. I mourned the loss.

And that was nothing compared to what Micah warned would happen to Jerusalem.

Although Micah and Isaiah were prophets to the southern kingdom of Judah, Micah also prophesied the disaster that would befall Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom. Through Micah, God declared, “I will make Samaria a heap of rubble, a place for planting vineyards” (Mic 1:6, NIV). The single Hebrew word translated as “heap of rubble” is a relatively rare one, used only four times in the Old Testament. In Micah 1, it refers to the destruction of Samaria, but every other use refers to the destruction of Jerusalem. And one of those is at the end of the oracle that concludes Micah 3, where we read this:

Therefore because of you,
    Zion will be plowed like a field,
Jerusalem will become a heap of rubble,
    the temple hill a mound overgrown with thickets. (Mic 3:12, NIV)

“Because of you,” Micah says, referring to the corrupt leaders who spread injustice with their greedy, self-serving ways. Because of you, Jerusalem will be reduced to ruins. Even Zion, even the precious hill on which the temple stands, will be mowed flat and become a place where wild things grow and cover the remains of what was before.

Remember the prophecy of Jeremiah, which I cited in the previous post? “The LORD’s temple,” the people would tell themselves. “The temple, the temple!” It was a mantra that treated the temple more like a magical talisman than a place of worship, allowing the people to continue to believe that nothing bad could happen, no matter what they did.

Like Micah, Jeremiah told the people of Judah that their evil would lead to disaster. As God instructed him to do, Jeremiah preached that word of warning at the temple itself. The prophets and priests seized him, crying out that he should be put to death for speaking against Jerusalem. But Jeremiah continued to preach repentance, insisting that he was only telling them what God told him to say.

Surprisingly, the officials and the people took Jeremiah’s side. They believed that Jeremiah had spoken in God’s name, and therefore should not be killed. Then the elders came forward. They repeated verbatim the prophecy of Micah 3:12, and argued that the revered king Hezekiah didn’t kill Micah for such a prophecy. Moreover, they insisted, wasn’t it because of Hezekiah’s faithfulness that God averted the disaster that would otherwise would have befallen Jerusalem at the hands of the Assyrians? What might happen if we don’t follow suit?

The argument worked, and Jeremiah was spared.

But for the moment, notice how this story tells us that Micah’s prophecy was still on people’s minds a century later. It saved Jeremiah’s life. Unfortunately, as Jeremiah himself would witness, it didn’t save Jerusalem. The city would still be reduced to rubble. It would still become a cause for mourning.