When I was a kid, our family didn’t live close enough to the elementary school to walk there. So my sister and I took the bus every morning and afternoon. It wasn’t the typical yellow school bus you still see in so many communities today. It was the regular passenger bus for everybody, kids and adults alike, and we had to pay a fare just like everyone else. So we climbed into the bus, said “Good morning” to George, our regular driver, and dropped our dime into the fare box and listened to it clink-clink-clink its way to the bottom before finding a seat.

When I had my own kids, though, we lived right around the corner — literally — from their elementary school. So we walked. And now that our kids are grown and long gone, we see other people’s kids across the street, bouncing along with their backpacks on the way to or from school. When we need to go somewhere in the car, we try to remember that at certain times of the day, our neighborhood streets will be clogged with cars full of parents driving their kids instead.

Over the course of my life, I’ve spent a fair amount of time waiting for some vehicle to take me somewhere I couldn’t walk. Buses, trains, and planes; taxis and Lyft drivers. There’s a whole, diverse, global transportation industry based on getting people from point A to point B.

But sometimes, you have to walk. You can’t wait for someone else to take you where you need to go.

That’s how it is in the spiritual life.

Previously, we’ve seen how the beginning of Micah 4 echoes a vision given to Isaiah. The destruction of Jerusalem will not be the last word. There will come a day in which the nations of the world will come to Zion to seek justice and learn God’s ways. With God as judge, the world will be at peace, and war will be a thing of the past. Micah then adds to Isaiah’s prophecy, painting a picture of people living in contentment and without fear.

Just not yet. It’s a beautiful, hopeful image of peace. It’s a future worth waiting for. But what do God’s people do in the meantime?

There will, of course, be people who completely ignore Micah’s prophecy. They don’t want hope; they don’t think they need it. After all, they’re not the victims of injustice; they’re the perpetrators. For them, everything is just fine. They have their comfort, and prophets who allow them to remain comfortable. Who needs to listen to that depressing little crank, Micah?

But there are also those who will take the prophecies to heart, including Micah and Isaiah themselves. They’re not sitting around waiting for either disaster or peace to happen; they’re actively engaged in God’s work. And through prophecy, Micah invites others to do the same:

All the nations may walk
    in the name of their gods,
but we will walk in the name of the Lord
    our God for ever and ever. (Mic 4:5, NIV)

Earlier in the oracle, it may have been surprising, even distasteful, for the people to hear that other nations would stream to Zion. But all right — I guess — maybe they’ll all become converts? I think here of the so-called “Judaizers” of the New Testament. These were Jewish believers who followed Jesus as their Messiah but still got a case of the heebie-jeebies thinking of Gentiles as full participants in God’s family. At the very least, they insisted, shouldn’t these converts be circumcised?

Given what they had always been taught about Gentiles, their reluctance was understandable. But the apostle Paul, the foremost Jewish evangelist of the Gentiles, already understood something that his compatriots were still working out: to require circumcision of these converts would be a betrayal of the gospel itself.

What do we do, then, with Micah’s statement that “all the nations may walk in the name of their gods”? Does that mean that they can come to Jerusalem and bring their gods with them?

No. Remember that the earlier part of the oracle says that the nations will come to learn God’s ways, so that they may “walk in his paths” (Mic 4:2). But they will not for that reason cease to be a diverse people with diverse histories. We’re not talking about a world in which the people of any particular nation decide for themselves individually and privately which gods they want to worship. Government, culture, and religion tended to be much more closely intertwined than that. There were particular gods associated with particular cultures. Even coming to worship the God of Jacob from another land didn’t mean leaving your culture behind; one didn’t swap gods as easily as buying a new pair of shoes (or sandals, as the case may be).

But no matter. The people who had always been called by God’s name would walk in that name. In the face of such a prophecy of hope, they would commit to living the way they were meant to live. Instead of waiting for peace to happen, they would walk in the way of shalom.

The faithful don’t wait around for a Magic School Bus to take them where they want to go. They start walking. And in so doing, they embody the truth that the people had somehow forgotten: God had always blessed his people to be a blessing to the nations.

Micah doesn’t say, but it may be part of the vision; the reason the nations stream to the God of Jacob is because of what they see in the lives of Jacob’s descendants.

So let’s catch the vision for where we’re going, and start walking.