Imagine a shepherd. Imagine the shepherd’s surroundings. Now imagine a king in his context. How different are those mental images? How different are the roles played by each person? To us, shepherds and kings may seem as different from each other as dog-walkers and presidents. But in biblical times, the two ideas were closely tied. Good and worthy leaders, whether kings or prophets, were supposed to be like good shepherds, guiding, protecting, and caring for the sheep.

We’ve already seen how Micah uses the metaphor to give the people of Judah and Jerusalem a bit of good news. Despite the withering condemnation of the people and their false prophets in chapter 2, the chapter ends with the promise that God will “bring together the remnant of Israel…like sheep in a pen, like a flock in its pasture” (Mic 2:12, NIV). The promise, it seems, was already fulfilled during the time of King Hezekiah, when God miraculously prevented the takeover of Jerusalem by the Assyrians.

We’ve also seen how the first five verses of chapter 4 paint a beautiful picture of peace. One day, the nations will stream to Jerusalem to learn God’s ways. They will bring their disputes to God, who will render just judgment. And with God in charge, there will no longer be any need for the weapons of war, and fighting will once more give way to farming.

The prediction of future hope then continues in verse 6 of chapter 4, and again we hear the metaphor of the people as sheep, and God as the Shepherd-King:

I will gather the lame;
    I will assemble the exiles
    and those I have brought to grief.
I will make the lame my remnant,
    those driven away a strong nation.
The Lord will rule over them in Mount Zion
    from that day and forever.
As for you, watchtower of the flock,
    stronghold of Daughter Zion,
the former dominion will be restored to you;
    kingship will come to Daughter Jerusalem. (Mic 4:6-8, NIV)

The exiled people are like scattered, injured sheep. The root meaning of “exile” can suggest not only being pushed away but led astray; both are true of God’s wayward sheep. After the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon, after the mass slaughter of its people and the deportation of survivors, only a remnant of the flock remained. But the divine Shepherd promises to gather up that remnant, seeking out the scattered, limping sheep and bringing them back to Zion, where he will rule over them as king.

The oracle portrays Jerusalem as the “watchtower of the flock,” a tower from which a shepherd could watch for enemies and predators in order to keep the sheep safe. The greed and injustice of Jerusalem’s leaders was a betrayal of their vocation. That was the reason for their exile, for the grief God brought upon them. So great was their evil that the author of Second Chronicles tells us that with them gone, the land itself “finally enjoyed its sabbath rest” (2 Chron 36:21). But dominion will be restored when the Shepherd-King reigns at last in Daughter Jerusalem.

The notion of a remnant was of great importance to the prophets. Overall, the word is used 66 times in the Old Testament. Joseph uses it, for example, when he tells his terrified brothers that although they had meant him harm, it was God’s plan that Joseph come to Egypt and rise to the rank of Pharaoh’s second-in-command so that he would be able to preserve a remnant of Israel in the midst of a great famine (Gen 45:7).

But the most dominant use of the term by far — a full 54 of the 66 occurrences — is in the Prophets. Jeremiah, the prophet who watched Jerusalem fall to the Babylonians, uses it 24 times. Micah only uses it 5 times, but because the book of Micah is so much shorter than Jeremiah, Micah, proportionally speaking, actually uses the word more often than Jeremiah does.

The promise of a remnant is important because it signifies that despite his anger at sin and disobedience, despite the exile, God has still not given up on his people. Moreover, in the New Testament, the idea of a remnant is central to Paul’s argument in Romans 11, where he speaks of a “remnant chosen by grace” (vs. 5). There was tension between the Jews and Gentiles in the Roman church; some Gentiles had apparently begun to believe that they had taken over the privileged place of the Jews in God’s plans. Not so, Paul tells them. And don’t be so arrogant. It’s only by grace that you’ve been grafted into the tree (Rom 11:17-24).

But when would the promise be fulfilled? Not in Micah’s lifetime, of course; the Babylonian exile wouldn’t happen for another century. Not in Jeremiah’s lifetime. Not even in Paul’s lifetime, nor even in ours. The promise, however, still stands — and we’ll have to take the long view to get a picture of its final fulfillment.