Imagine that you loan money to a friend. He agrees to pay you back in six months, and you both shake hands on the deal. But six months come and go, and you haven’t heard from him. You suspect that he’s avoiding you. You try calling him, emailing him. You text him several times, but he’s ghosting you. What do you do?

If there’s not a lot of money at stake, you might just let it go. If it’s a substantial amount of money instead, you might end up letting your friend go as well. But are those your only options?

No. In some jurisdictions (as in my home state of California), it’s legally possible to sue for breach of contract, even if nothing was put in writing. What matters is that you both freely made an agreement, understood what you were doing, and your friend’s failure to keep his promise is causing you harm. That’s not to say, of course, that you’ll automatically win the case. But you do have the right to take your friend — or your former friend? — to court. And it would help, of course, if you had some solid witnesses.

Recently, I’ve spoken of the covenant that God “cut” with Abraham. God is the one who took the initiative in the relationship, promising to bless Abraham, just as he had blessed Noah in the past, just as he would bless Moses and David in the future. This kind of covenant is not like a modern contract, because a contract is broken when one party fails to live up to their side of the agreement. By contrast, God is faithful even when his people aren’t. Over and over, he demonstrates both patience with and mercy toward their disobedience, staying true to his promise from one generation to the next.

But as we’ve seen, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t stipulations; God wants the people to demonstrate their loyalty in return. And there can be consequences for violating those stipulations.

Think back to the opening verses of the book of Micah. There, the prophet imagined God coming down to the earth as judge, with the mountains melting at the touch of his feet. A similar image forms the backdrop of the beginning of chapter 6. It’s a courtroom scene, and God comes to bring what some have called a covenant lawsuit against the people. This idea comes out most clearly in the Common English Bible’s translation of the first two verses of the chapter:

Hear what the Lord is saying:
“Arise, lay out the lawsuit before the mountains;
        let the hills hear your voice!
Hear, mountains, the lawsuit of the Lord!
        Hear, eternal foundations of the earth!
The Lord has a lawsuit against his people;
        with Israel he will argue.” (Mic 6:1-2, CEB)

Micah is God’s prophet turned covenant attorney, and as the trial begins, God instructs Micah to call the very mountains and hills as witnesses for the prosecution. They are described as the “eternal foundations of the earth” — as if to say there can be no witnesses more stable, more reliable than these.

Imagine Mount Sinai looking out upon Aaron and the people making and then worshiping a golden calf. Imagine the wilderness itself listening to and remembering the people’s complaints of hunger and thirst, their fickle longing to return to the land of slavery from which they had just been freed. Imagine the hills of Canaan, watching as God’s people erect pagan shrines and plant Asherah poles in the ground.

I’m a person who lives part of my life in the public eye. There are many people who know my name and face even if I don’t know them. Many times, I’ve been approached and greeted in public spaces by people who were total strangers to me. They knew me because of something I had written, or a sermon or speaking engagement, or because they had been students where I teach, even if I had never actually had them in class.

On the one hand, it’s usually a pleasant surprise. On the other hand, it creates a vague background sense of being watched. I once rented a truck from my local Home Depot, and needed a piece of identification that I had left in the car. As I moved to run out to the parking lot to get it, the clerk stopped me. “That’s OK,” he said. “I know who you are.”

What if the whole world — the mountains and valleys, the hills and plains — watched and remembered everything we do? And if God were to call them to witness to what they had seen of our faithfulness to the covenant, what would they say?