Sheep aren’t part of my daily life (as a matter of fact, I’m allergic to wool). And I would guess they’re not part of your life either. They’re not wandering your neighborhood, and you don’t have one as a pet. But we still use sheep as a metaphor for mindlessly following someone; when we say that people are like sheep, it’s not a compliment. Or take the expression, “like lambs to the slaughter,” a phrase that originates with Isaiah and Jeremiah; it describes the cluelessness by which an innocent and trusting lamb can be led to its death.

Modern city-dwellers and suburbanites like myself don’t have much of a point of reference for understanding the biblical metaphor of God as shepherd and the people as sheep. Our image of sheep may be of somewhat addle-brained but adorably fluffy creatures, prototypes for a child’s stuffed animal. Add to that the gentle pastoral imagery of Psalm 23, and we have everything we need to sentimentalize the idea of God as shepherd.

But I doubt Micah would have taken it that way.

In the Old Testament, the metaphor of God as shepherd cannot be neatly separated from God as king. Consider, for example, Psalm 95. You may already be familiar with the words of the psalm because of the praise song that comes from it: “Come let us worship and bow down / Let us kneel before the LORD, our God, our Maker / For he is our God / And we are the people of his pasture / And the sheep of his hand.”

But the psalmist first declares that God is the “great King above all gods” (Ps 95:3, NIV). In the psalmist’s world, people worshiped multiple gods, but typically held that the one responsible for creation was the greatest of all. The psalmist isn’t endorsing polytheism, but speaking into that ancient worldview and insisting that there is only one true God.

And that God is the Shepherd-King. To be the king isn’t just a matter of power and authority. The king is responsible for the care, guidance, and protection of the people. There’s nothing sentimental about such a role, especially in times of war and invasion.

The kingdom of Assyria was constantly, aggressively expanding. They would overrun the northern kingdom of Israel and deport most of its people. The capital city of Samaria fell in 720 BC, and about 20 years later, the Assyrian king Sennacherib threatened Jerusalem to the south, where Hezekiah resided as the king of Judah. Sennacherib had already made military incursions into Judah, capturing cities. Hezekiah tried to buy him off, basically telling Sennacherib, “I’ll pay you leave. Name your price.” The Assyrian asked for so much money that Hezekiah had to empty the treasury and strip gold from the temple (see 2 Kings 18:13-16).

But that didn’t keep Sennacherib from laying siege to Jerusalem. In his own annals, he would boast of trapping Hezekiah in Jerusalem like a “caged bird.” What he does not say, however, is why he was eventually forced to withdraw. Second Kings 19 tells of the prophet Isaiah coming to deliver God’s word to Hezekiah: God himself would defend the city. The result was devastating for the Assyrians:

That night the angel of the Lord went out and put to death a hundred and eighty-five thousand in the Assyrian camp. When the people got up the next morning—there were all the dead bodies! So Sennacherib king of Assyria broke camp and withdrew. He returned to Nineveh and stayed there. (2 Kings 19:35-36, NIV)

There’s no word of this, of course, in Sennacherib’s journals.

This, then, is probably the historical background against which we should read the rest of Micah’s oracle of hope at the end of chapter 2:

The One who breaks open the way will go up before them;
    they will break through the gate and go out.
Their King will pass through before them,
    the LORD at their head. (Mic 2:13)

The bird isn’t caged; the sheep aren’t trapped in their pen. The Shepherd-King goes before the sheep in triumph, and they are saved.

Happy ending? Well, not quite. As Isaiah later tells Hezekiah, Jerusalem will eventually still fall to Babylon; destruction and exile are still coming, though not in the king’s lifetime (see 2 Kings 20:16-18). And Hezekiah, as we’ve seen, fading and chronically ill, takes the prophecy as good news because he won’t have to deal with the tragedy personally.

It wasn’t the most kingly response. But it’s a good reminder of the nature of the hope preached by the prophets. It’s one thing to hope that God will do a specific thing for you, rescue you from your own suffering or calamity. But it’s another to hope in the character of God, whatever happens. The Shepherd-King can be counted on to lead wisely and reign righteously; he will keep his promise even if means doing so for only a remnant of those who began the journey.

Things may not always go the way we’d want them to. Things may or may not work out for us personally. But we must still put our faith and trust in the One who is both Shepherd and King.