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Dr. Manny Arango
Hey, Bible nerds. This is Dr. Manny Arango and I'm your host for the Bible department podcast. Powered by Arma. This podcast follows a Bible reading plan we created to help you read the entire Bible in a year. You can head to the show notes or thebibledepartment.com to download our reading plan and join the journey. Let's be honest, a lot of us are still treating digital ministry like it's a backup plan from 2020. But discipleship isn't just happening on Sundays anymore. People need gospel centered connection every day of the week. And if you're stuck juggling five different platforms, one for giving, another for sermons, something else for events, it's no wonder engagement feels off. That's not ministry. That's a mess. Subsplash changes that one platform. Everything you need, media, giving, events, messaging, your app, your website, built specifically for churches. No hacks, no workarounds, just clarity and simplicity. Because every day you wait, families scroll past your sermons, new guests click away from clunky sites, and real people miss real moments with Jesus. Don't waste another summer stuck in digital survival mode. Use it to get ahead, simplify, upgrade, get back to what matters. Head to subsplash.combible-dept and schedule a free no pressure demo. And let this be the summer your church gets focused and fully equipped family. Welcome to day 191. We are in Micah chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7 today. Four chapters of the Bible. And to be completely honest, as I was doing the reading, I got a little emotional. Like, this is a beautiful, just some beautiful writing. More restoration in these chapters of Micah than judgment. I would say chapters one, two and three had restoration sprinkled in, but a lot of. Just like, man, God's pissed, okay? And there's a lot of judgment. God's angry. Today's reading, the tone, it's just so hopeful, so restorative. Obviously, there is still a lot of justice, like God, God, God makes it really clear. Babylon is coming, destruction is guaranteed, but that there's hope, that there's. That he plans on bringing restoration. So if you've done the reading, then you've got context for everything I'm gonna say. And my job is to add even more context. And then I'm gonna give you some nerdy nuggets. And like always, we're gonna leave off with a timeless truth. So let's dive in. As soon as we get into Micah chapter four, verse one, you immediately notice a shift, okay, from, from the tone of what we've been reading. And here's this in the last days. Now we're going to get a prepositional phrase like that a couple of times. Okay, Chapter four, verse one is going to start out with in the last days. And then chapter four, verse six, it's going to say in that day. And then chapter five, verse 10, I think that's the next page for me. Is gonna say in that day. So this is not looking at the day of judgment, when Babylon is going to come and Jerusalem is gonna become a rubble and the temple's gonna get destroyed. No, Micah's now prophesying of a day that's further than the day of destruction. So, which means judgment's not the final word, that there's a word of restoration that follows the word even of judgment. So. So what's going to happen in the last days? Well, the mountain of the Lord's temple will be established. So we get a prophecy that the temple is going to get rebuilt, restored as chief among the mountains. It will be raised above the hills and peoples will stream to it. Many nations will come and say, come, let us go to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways so that we may walk in his paths. The law will go out from Zion, the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He will judge between many peoples and will settle disputes for strong nations far and wide. They will beat their swords into plowshares so their weapons will become farm tools for them. They will beat. Martin Luther King, by the way, loved to quote this verse. Okay. They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears and their pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation, nor will they train for war anymore. Every man will sit under his own vine, under his own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid, for the Lord Almighty has spoken. All the nations may walk not the name of their gods. We will walk in the name of the Lord, our God, forever and ever. So chapter four, verses one through five, it's prophesying that the temple will be rebuilt. Then chapter four, verses six through eight are prophesying that the people will return to Zion in that day. It starts off with, in that day, declares the Lord. I will gather the lane. I will assemble Who? The exiles. Okay, so you're not going to be in exile forever. Exile is guaranteed. But one day, I'm going to assemble the exiles and those I have brought to grief. I will make the lame a remnant. Again we get the theme of remnant. Those driven away, a strong nation, the Lord will rule over them in Mount Zion, and from that day and forever. As for you, O watchtower of the flock, O stronghold of the daughter of Zion, the former dominion will be restored to you. Kingship will come to the daughter of Jerusalem. Okay, all right, then chapters four to four, verse nine to chapters five, verse one. The people go to Babylon. Okay? So this is guaranteed. I mean, literally, you can just read verse 10 of chapter 4. Maybe 10B is. Is the technical, you know, address of this verse 10b. You will go to Babylon. There you will be rescued. There the Lord will redeem you out of the hand of your enemies. So you are going to Babylon, okay? The worst thing that could ever happen is going to happen. Babylon is going to take you into captivity. You're going to Babylon. But I will use it, okay? I will redeem you out of the hand of your enemies. I will rescue you. Just because I'm punishing you does not mean that my. That punishment is the final word. There's a word of restoration after the word of punishment. Yahweh's plan is to save them from destruction, and a remnant will return from exile. This idea of remnant is all pervasive, okay? Huge. All right, let me give you some nerdy nuggets. We're gonna get a huge prophecy about Jesus, about the Messiah. Chapter five. We'll start reading in verse two. But you, Bethlehem. Sorry. Oh, no. But you, Bethlehem. Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me, one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are of old, from ancient times. I always wonder, like, how men like Micah felt about prophesying about things that probably seemed ridiculous, right? You get a word from the Lord, man, out of Bethlehem is going to come one who will be ruler over Israel. Man, I wonder at the time if he thought to himself, I wonder what this means. Well, I guess I'm just gonna say it, you know, and then we get to look at this and go, man, the town in which Jesus was born is predicted right here, hundreds of years before the event ever happened. And I'll give you an extra nerdy nugget that you didn't even ask for is that Bethlehem is the home of what we would call Levitical shepherds. Okay? So remember, when the angel comes and announces to a group of shepherds that there will be a sign for them, that the sign will be that the star is going to rest on a place they're going to find a baby with swaddling clothes. Okay? So Bethlehem is about Six miles from Jerusalem. So Jerusalem is where the temple is. It's where you have to make sacrifices of unblemished animals, lambs and lambs, sheep. In order to keep a lamb unblemished, that means its bones can't break. No scars, no, no, no. No outer imperfections. In order to get a lamb that's unblemished, typically you'd have to have a whole group of shepherds who just did that. Okay, so you have shepherds who are, are shepherding sheep for the general population, right? For, for wool and for food. And then you got a special subset of shepherds who are Levitical shepherds. And their only job is to make sure that these sheep have no blemishes so they can get sold to worshipers at the temple, so they can offer sacrifices. You understand that, right? Normal shepherds with normal sheep. And then Levitical shepherds who are making sure that these sheep have no blemishes, no scars, no broken bones, no problems. Well, the angel in Bethlehem is not appearing to normal shepherds because all the shepherds of Bethlehem were Levitical shepherds because of the proximity that they had to Jerusalem, just six miles. So the temple's right here. Let's raise sheep over here that could be used for slaughter over here. So these Levitical shepherds are only interacting with sheep who are born to die. That's it. The only sheep that they are interacting with are sheep that are born for the purpose of sacrifice. So the angel says to these shepherds who only interact with sheep born for sacrifice, you are going to walk into a manger and you are going to see something about this messiah that nobody else is going to be able to appreciate. Well, in order for a sheep to, to live up to that purpose of being sacrificed in the temple, you can't have a blemish. No broken bones, no issues. So they would take swaddling clothes and wrap the lambs in swaddling clothes. So when they go into the manger and they find that a baby is wrapped in the same exact cloths that they wrap lambs in, they immediately make the connection that, like these sheep, this baby has been born to die and that he must remain blemish free. No scars, no broken bones. And so his parents, because they're poor, they're actually doing something that only Levitical shepherds would understand. And the prophecy that Jesus would be born in Bethlehem is right here in the book of Micah. Micah, chapter five, verse two. Family, the wait is over. My brand new book, Crushing Chaos, is out now and available everywhere Books are, are sold. Literally. Today I walked into a Barnes and Noble and I signed a bunch of copies at a physical location. So you can grab this book at a physical Barnes and Noble or you can go to a Books A Million or Amazon or anywhere books are sold and grab a copy. If you enjoy reading the Bible from an ancient perspective, if you understand that the beauty of scripture is actually knowing it in context, then you'll love this book. And if there's any chaos in your personal life, I think that reading the Bible from an ancient perspective can actually help to crush the chaos in your life. I think this book is going to be a New York Times bestseller. I really do. I think we wrote a good one. I think you should get a copy today. All right, back to the episode. So, by the way, when you read, I'm pretty sure it's Luke's Gospel, where the angels come down and they tell the shepherds, this will be a sign to you, something that only you guys will understand. The thing that makes it a sign, the light bulb moment, is that the swaddling clothes. Now I get it. We in the west, in the modern world, swaddle babies, but swaddling cloths for babies was not a thing in the ancient world. You only did that for lambs to keep them from injuring themselves so that they could actually be offered in the service of. Of worship for which they were born. All right, let's keep moving. I just love that. I just love that. Jesus is prophesied, chapter five, verse two to five, for the future king born in Bethlehem, the city of David, the shepherd king who will truly shepherd his people. Okay, so not only why, why does it make sense, okay, that a shepherd would come out of Bethlehem? Well, because Bethlehem is dedicated to the occupation, to the vocation of shepherding stuff. Makes total sense. By the way, this, none of this clicked for me until I went to Israel for the first time. I learned a lot of this with just, like boots on the ground, just being in Israel. And a lot of things begin to click. The Bible goes from black and white to color. The moment you begin to go to the Holy Land and begin to make a lot of these connections, you begin to learn context. Okay, let's keep going with the nerdy Nuggets. Chapter 5, verse 5 to 15 is all about a future kingdom which will end the oppression of Assyria and Babylon and any kingdom that's like Assyria and Babylon, a kingdom that the remnant will follow and where worship will be true and cleansed. And now we're going to Move into our third oracle. So chapter six, verse one. It's gonna start with the words, listen, by the way, let's. Let's look at the end of chapter five. Because God, it's not all just hope in. In rainbows and butterflies in chapters four through seven. So let's look at the end of chapter five. Says, in that day declares the Lord, I will destroy your horses from among you and demolish your chariots. I will destroy the cities of your land and tear down your strongholds. I will destroy your witchcraft, and you will no longer cast spells. Okay, so if you were thinking, yeah, injustice is the only problem that Micah is going to address. Absolutely not. Okay? This is where the Bible is unique, that God demands justice and righteousness, that he demands moral justice or social justice, but also moral righteousness. So no witchcraft. No longer cast spells, no carved images. Verse 13. Sacred stones, okay? Will no longer bow down to the work of your hands. Verse 14. I will uproot from among you your Asherah poles and demolish your cities. And I will take vengeance in anger and wrath upon the nations that have not obeyed me. Then we get in chapter six, verse one. Listen, stand up. Plead your case before the mountains. So this is another law court scene. I brought you up out of Egypt and redeemed you from the land of slavery. Okay? I did all these things. And then again in verse nine, okay, listen, the Lord is calling to the city and to fear your name is wisdom. Heed the rod, the one who appointed it. Okay? And then we get down into the injustice. Says, her rich men are violent, her people are liars, and their tongues speak deceitfully. And then chapter seven, verse three, the judge accepts bribes. The powerful dictate what they desire. Okay, so we get right back into, I have these things against you, okay? And I am going to judge you in the third oracle, okay? Yahweh, the judge, cross examines Judah. Stand up. Plead your case before the mountains. Okay, that's how chapter six starts. It's a cross examination. He had been faithful. Yahweh had been faithful to the covenant, but Judah had, had not. In this, we see God's desire for true worship. Not just going through religious motions, offerings of bulls, rams, oil, et cetera, but obedience to the call of the Torah, loving Yahweh and loving your neighbor, which culminates in Micah, chapter 6, verse 8. There's this throwaway verse in chapter 6, verse 16, called the statutes of Omri. Now, outside of the Bible, Omri is very, very famous. This speaks of statutes of Israel's Little known, most famous king. I love that phrase, little known, most famous king. Omri was a general of Israel who seized power in the 9th century BC he would go on to become, in the ancient world, Israel's most famous and one of its most successful kings. The Assyrians even referred to Israel as the land of Omri. Also established a powerful dynasty in the north through his son Ahab. Omri was considered even more evil than usual because he married his son to a Phoenician princess named Jezebel. And it was she that brought BAAL worship into both Israel and Judah. So keeping the statutes of Omri is walking in his footsteps, bringing in foreign gods to supplant Yahweh. Okay, so that brings so much context to chapter six, verse 16. And then this is a nerdy nugget. I love this. The name Micah means who is like Yahweh. Okay? That's what Micah's name means. Who is like Yahweh. And I want you to see how the book ends in chapter seven, verse 18. Who is a God like you. Okay, so Micah ends the book with a poem essentially based on his name. Who is a God like you. It would be as if, you know, my name's Emmanuel, which means God is with us. Imagine, you know, let's say on the arma platform, I had a group called the God is with Us crew. You know, it's like, it's like it's. I'm, I'm. I'm naming something after me, but using what my name means instead of just my name. And so it says this. Who is a God like you, who pardons sin and forgives the transgression of the remnant of his inheritance. You do not stay angry forever, but delight to show mercy. You will again have compassion on us. You will tread our sins underfoot and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea. And you will be true to Jacob and show mercy to his, to Abraham, as you pledged on oath to our fathers in the days long ago. And so the very last words of the book leave on a very, very, very hopeful, hopeful, hopeful note. And so let's get to our timeless truth. We didn't get a chance to dig into this a ton, but when Jesus is is prophesied about in Micah chapter five, he's described as a shepherd. And so here's our Thomas truth today. True leadership is shepherd like leadership. Someone who serves, leads, and protects the flock. Someone who's gentle, caring, strong. Shepherds aren't just, uh, they didn't just have a rod. They also had a staff. They knew how to comfort and correct the sheep. Okay, um. Shepherds are this incredible picture from the ancient world of the kind of leaders that you and I should be. And when Jesus In John, chapter 10, is describing his own leadership style, he calls himself the good shepherd. He's a good shepherd. He's from Bethlehem. He's a shepherd. Same kind of shepherd that the angels visited is the same kind of shepherd that Jesus then becomes. And these are the same kinds of shepherds that you and I should try to be. Shepherding people, pastoring people, leading people. We're not CEOs, we're not bosses. We're not managers. We're shepherds. We shepherd people. We take people by the hand. And I think that's a timeless truth that the kind of leaders. And I think it's fitting because Micah has so much to say to leaders. And Micah had a lot to say to the prophets and the priests and the teachers and political leaders of his age in his day. And so I think us, as leaders, we should be striving to be shepherds. Shepherd like leaders kind of leaders, take people by the hand and move them from one pastor to the next pasture, who lovingly guide people, who graciously lead people, who patiently take people by the hand and bring people along the journey that we know God has for them. All right, love you guys. All right, tomorrow we're getting into the book of Isaiah. And Isaiah's a long book. I don't even know how many days we got for Isaiah. I know it's a lot. Okay, so gird up your loins. Let's get ready. If you're on a streak, don't break it. I'm so, so, so, so proud of you. That is the end of the book of Micah, and tomorrow we get into the book of Isaiah. I'll see you right here tomorrow as we begin our journey through the prophet Isaiah. Love y'. All. Peace. Thanks so much for joining us on the Bible Department podcast. You can find us online and learn more about the show at thebibledepartment.com and on Instagram hebibledepartment. If you enjoyed this episode and want to dive deeper into the Bible, you can get free access to our library of courses@thebibledepartment.com we'll see you back here tomorrow.