Micah: Canonically to Christ

I’ve been wanting to put the “Preaching Christ from the OT” from a previous post to the test and have the opportunity to do so this Sunday. I am going to attempt preaching Micah 6:1-8 in a canonical way to arrive at Jesus.

The passage itself is pretty straightforward. God calls Israel into His courtroom and asks, “How have I wearied you?” Israel responds, “What do you want? How can we get you off our backs? You want sacrifices—fine. You want the best of our flocks—fine. You want thousands of sacrifices and rivers of oil—fine. Hey, even if you want us to sacrifice our firstborn for you—fine. Just get off our backs.” Then God famously replies, “I’ve told you what I require of you—do justly, love lovingkindness, and walk humbly with Me.”

I’ve actually preached this sermon before. My message was: Silly Israelites, God didn’t want their sacrifices—God wanted their heart. So my application for today would have been something like: Change your heart attitude towards God because that’s what He really wants, not your extravagant gifts. Yes you guessed it–that’s not gospel, that’s law.

So how do you preach an OT Text canonically and bring it to Christ? Just take it back to the heart of OT theology—Deuteronomy. In Deuteronomy, Moses sets before Israel life and death. Obey God and you live and are blessed. Disobey Him and you are cursed and die. Pretty simple. Except that Moses also tells the people, after he tells them to choose live, that they will in fact NOT choose life. They will fail. All the curses will come to pass. He even composes a song (ch. 32) that is basically an “I-told-you-so.” When they are in captivity, after they have failed to choose life, they are to remember the words of this song.

 Micah 6 is actually pretty easy to bring back to Deuteronomy because 6:8 is a clear adaptation of Deuteronomy 10:12 “And now, Israel, what does the LORD your God ask of you except to fear the LORD your God by walking in all His ways, to love Him, and to worship the LORD your God with all your heart and all your soul?” Interestingly, Moses tells them how they will be able to fulfill this requirement a few verses later. They are to “circumcise their hearts” (v. 15).  The only way Israel could “choose life” is to receive a heart-circumcision. In Deuteronomy 10 this act was given as a command—Do it! This change of heart is necessary if Israel wants to live. But they don’t choose life—precisely because they do not have this necessary heart circumcision. The good news of Deuteronomy is in 30:5. Here God promises that after He restores Israel, He Himself will circumcise their hearts—then they will love Him. What was before an imperative that could not be obeyed is now a future promise. This is the gospel—God Himself doing for His people what He requires of them to do but what cannot do for themselves.  

Back in Micah, the requirement of 6:8 is, therefore, not a reprieve for Israel. It is not that God “only” wants a good attitude. The point is that they COULD have given Him tens of thousands of sacrifice. They COULD have sacrificed their firstborn to make God happy. But God demanded more—acts and attitudes that are the results of heart circumcision. He is not letting them off the hook—he is asking the impossible. In this light, all of the monergistic promises of Micah make a lot of sense—I will destroy your idols, I will tear down your poles, I will gather, I will assemble.  

This future hope was fulfilled, of course, in the “Consolation of Israel” (Luke 1:25). Jesus Himself brought grace and truth. He did justly. He loved mercy. He walked humbly with His Father. Thus, the only way the cursed that were promised in Deuteronomy and re-affirmed in Micah will not fall upon a person is if that person is in union with Christ (the essence of the Gospel).  

Colossians 2:11-14   In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ,  ¹² having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead.  ¹³ And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses,  ¹⁴ by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.

Manly Men Doing Poetry

At what point did manly men surrender the art of poetry to tofu-eaters? Sure, there are exceptions of respectable men writing and reading poetry. For the most part, though, poetry is thought of as something for the artsy-fartsy, effeminate, badminton players. Manly men drive trucks, eat steak, play football, use power-tools, and kill their own venison. They don’t read poetry. Seriously, can you picture Rodney Harrison penning a quick sonnet during half-time? Or Jim from According to Jim? Or Tim the “Tool Man” Taylor?

 

This apparent disconnect between manliness and poetry has not always existed. Consider David, for instance. Here’s a guy who attacks lions, bears, and giants with sticks and stones. His future father-in-law who just threw a javelin at him asks for 100 Philistine foreskins as a dowry. So what’s David do—he brings him 200. No question—this guy is a manly man. If we’re picking teams in gym class, David goes first every time. But check out what David wrote in his down time (Ps. 29):

 Ascribe to the LORD, O heavenly beings,

ascribe to the LORD glory and strength. 

² Ascribe to the LORD the glory due his name;

worship the LORD in the splendor of holiness.

 ³ The voice of the LORD is over the waters;

the God of glory thunders, the LORD, over many waters. 

⁴ The voice of the LORD is powerful;

the voice of the LORD is full of majesty. 

⁵ The voice of the LORD breaks the cedars;

the LORD breaks the cedars of Lebanon. 

⁶ He makes Lebanon to skip like a calf,

and Sirion like a young wild ox.

⁷ The voice of the LORD flashes forth flames of fire. 

⁸ The voice of the LORD shakes the wilderness;

the LORD shakes the wilderness of Kadesh. 

⁹ The voice of the LORD makes the deer give birth and strips the forests bare,

and in his temple all cry, “Glory!” 

¹⁰ The LORD sits enthroned over the flood;

the LORD sits enthroned ^bas king forever. 

¹¹ May the LORD give strength to his people!

May the LORD bless¹ his people with peace!

Not bad for a manly man.

Getting to Christ Through a Canonical Approach

I finished Sailhamer’s Intro last week and have been digesting it for several days. I’ll do a full review later but for right now want to focus in on what I was hoping to find in reading this book: a way to preach Christ legitimately from the OT. I’m pretty happy with where Sailhamer took me, even though I feel like he pulled a Moses on me and took me all the way to the brink of the Promised Land and then stopped short of it. More on that below. The Canonical Approach, in a nut-shell, attempts to demonstrate that the final form of the OT Text in and of itself self-consciously lacks fulfillment and finds that fulfillment in Christ. I will attempt to unpack this definition below.

The first step is to state unequivocally and unapologetically that the Text of the OT as we have it today and reflects the original is fully inspired and inerrant. While this may seem superfluous to state, this will be our lifeline as we proceed into discussions about the Canon. If you feel queasy below and think you are smelling the stench of liberalism on me…look up to this paragraph. The Text of the OT is the very Word of God. It carries the full weight of His authority and purpose. What God wanted to communicate to His people He sovereignly accomplished in various ways to produce a Text that bears His stamp of approval.

Step two may make some of you uncomfortable. The fact that the final form of the OT Canon is inspired does not necessitate that it did not have several editors over decades or even centuries. Consider the Psalter. Psalm 90 was written by Moses so it would date around 1400 BC. Psalm 23 was penned by David about 400 years later. Psalm 137 is a lament of the exiles in Babylon which would take its compositional date into the 500s BC. What that means is that individual psalms were written over a period of 800 years. If we argue (and I do) that the Psalter in its present canonical state has a theological message that is more profound than its individual psalms, we have to argue that this theological message was not complete until the post-exilic period. This final, edited form of the Psalter bears the Pauline stamp “God-breathed” (2 Tim 3:16). What that means for our reading of the Psalms is significant. I certainly want to ask what David was trying to communicate with Psalm 23. However, I want to do much more than that. The theological message that got the “God-breathed” stamp of approval was the one that was created when an editor gathered a bunch of the psalms together and created the Psalter consisting of these 150 psalms. So rather than just asking what David is doing in Psalm 23, what I really want to know is what the post-exilic editor is doing in putting Psalm 23 in the Psalter at that place (number 23).

That shouldn’t have made very many people queasy—but if I move the discussion from the Psalter to the Pentateuch I may be getting into trouble. While most everybody would be comfortable saying that Moses did not personally compose the part in the Pentateuch where he dies, what if he did not personally compose the last two chapters of Deuteronomy? That is actually exactly what Sailhamer argues. While the events described in chapters 33 and 34 really did happen and Moses did say the things attributed to him in them, they were not part of the “original” Pentateuch. A post-exilic scribe added them to further his post-exilic theological goals. Let me re-emphasize what I mean with this. The historical events described actually did take place. Moses did pronounce the blessing attributed to him in these chapters. However, it was not recorded in the way we have it today until the post-exilic period. If you are interested in why Sailhamer thinks this way, feel free to read up on it in his Introduction to OT Theology or his Pentateuch as Narrative.  This scribal addition was done under the supervision and prompting of the Spirit of God and the product was a God-breathed Text.

 

Step three is where it starts getting really interesting. Step one argued that the final canonical form of the Text of the OT as we have it today is inspired Word of God. Step two argued that much of Scripture, including the Pentateuch, was not completed in its final canonical form until the post-exilic period. Now in step three we can finally examine the Pentateuch to see why all of this matters.

In Deuteronomy 18:15 Moses promises that in the future God will raise up a “prophet like me,” and when He does, Israel is to listen to him. In Deuteronomy 34:10 the post-exilic editor of the Pentateuch makes this comment: “No prophet has arisen again in Israel like Moses whom the LORD knew face to face.” Think about all the prophets since Moses—Samuel, Nathan, Elijah, Elisha, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel—and the post-exilic editor knew every single one of them. Yet he still affirms that the future hope for Israel—the promise of Deuteronomy 18:15—is yet unfulfilled. What is even more significant is that at the time that this editor wrote, the office of prophet had died out. The prudent Israelite was no longer one who went to the prophet to receive instructions from the LORD first hand, but the exegete—one who meditates on the written Word day and night” (Ps 1). The wise man has replaced the prophet as the virtuous Israelite. Thus, there is no fulfillment of Deut 18:15 in sight at the point in time when the editor is writing. The OT Canon ends with a self-conscious awareness that there must be more to come.

 

Unfortunately Sailhamer stops at step three and does not take his readers into the Promised Land of step four. If you read the OT as a canonical composition that self-consciously realizes that it lacks fulfillment in and of itself, you can preach Christ as the fulfillment of the eschatological expectation of the OT Canon. Both Peter and Stephen identify Jesus as the fulfillment of Deuteronomy 18. He is the prophet like Moses. While the final editors of the OT Canon knew that something was missing, they were confident that there would be “grace in the end” (as Dr. Kai, my former OT Prof would say). Thus, they shaped the OT canon—from Genesis to Chronicles in their Hebrew Bible—with the eschatological theme of “grace in the end” in mind. Enter Jesus—the fulfillment of the eschatological expectations of the OT canon.