When our kids were small, we would occasionally visit a zoo. Now I enjoy doing the same with my granddaughter, who already knows the names of many animals she’s never seen. Someday soon, I hope to take her to a zoo here in Southern California, where she can hold out a carrot and have a giraffe come and slurp it right out of her hand with its long, greyish tongue.

That is, if it doesn’t freak her out. You can’t really get a sense of how big that animal is until it’s right there in your face.

Animals in captivity seem harmless enough when kept in enclosures and viewed from a distance: Look at that lazy old lion just lying about in the sun! But up close and personal encounters with natural predators can be dangerous or fatal. When tourists wanting to see lions are driven through safari parks, they’re given specific instructions: Keep your windows closed! But some visitors, of course, ignore the warnings. They open their windows or even get out of the car to get that once-in-a-lifetime picture — and that’s the end of that lifetime. And in case you were wondering, it’s best to keep the door locked too. Some lions have been known to open unlocked doors with their mouths. I know: I watch YouTube.

So for my money, I’m sticking to giraffes.

As we saw in the previous verse, the prophet Micah spoke of the remnant of God’s people who would return from exile, likening them to the morning dew or rain showers. It was a symbolic way of saying that the returning exiles would be a blessing to their neighbors. But then abruptly, Micah switches metaphors. Now the people are portrayed as an unstoppable, marauding lion:

The remnant of Jacob will be among the nations,
    in the midst of many peoples,
like a lion among the beasts of the forest,
    like a young lion among flocks of sheep,
which mauls and mangles as it goes,
    and no one can rescue.
Your hand will be lifted up in triumph over your enemies,
    and all your foes will be destroyed. (Mic 5:8-9, NIV)

Micah introduces the new metaphor using almost exactly the same language in verse 8 as we saw in verse 7. Before, he said that “the remnant of Jacob will be in the midst of many peoples”; here, he says that “The remnant of Jacob will be among the nations, in the midst of many peoples.” That poetic variation doesn’t change the meaning of the phrase at all, but the portrayal of the remnant that follows couldn’t be more different.

The lions of the ancient world, of course, weren’t confined to zoos or animal parks. They were free-roaming predators and symbols of frightening power and ferocity. Micah pictures the people as a lion decimating whole flocks of sheep, to the horror of the shepherds who are powerless to rescue them.

This may be meant to echo the blessing Jacob pronounced from his deathbed upon his son Judah:

You are a lion’s cub, Judah;
    you return from the prey, my son.
Like a lion he crouches and lies down,
    like a lioness—who dares to rouse him? (Gen 29:9)

But the morning dew and a raging lion: how do we reconcile two such different images of the remnant? It might be worth noting that Jacob’s blessing upon Judah continues in a royal vein: “The scepter will not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet, until he to whom it belongs shall come and the obedience of the nations shall be his” (Gen 29:10). And interestingly, in the book of Proverbs, the metaphors of the dew and a lion are both used in one pithy verse to describe the different faces of the king: “A king’s rage is like the roar of a lion, but his favor is like dew on the grass” (Prov 19:12).

It’s possible, of course, that the metaphors were common enough that this is just a coincidence, and no royal association is intended in Micah. But the context of the oracle, as we’ve seen, is the prophesied ruler who is to come from Bethlehem, the one portrayed as mighty enough to defeat Assyria. And here, when Micah prophesies that the remnant will triumph over its enemies and destroy its foes, the image is clearly one of war.

It might be nice to think that if one always did their best to live at peace with their neighbors, always strove to be a blessing to them, that they would reciprocate in kind and all would be well. But we live in a broken world. Right from the beginning, when God gave birth to a people through the calling of Abraham, the language of blessing and curse went hand in hand.

The reality is this: if we claim that there is only one true God, if we truly devote ourselves to following that God, our presence in the world will be divisive, just as the presence of Jesus was divisive. Unlike the ancient Israelites, we are not physically called to holy war; in the New Testament, the battle is not against flesh and blood, but a spiritual one instead.

Our vocation is to be a blessing to others, even if some curse us in return. But in the end, the victory will go to the Lion of the tribe of Judah (Rev 5:5), the one who arose from Bethlehem.