And by the way, congratulations
are in order. David and Celeste just welcomed
their thirteenth grandchild into the world. Ben and his wife just
had their first one. Turn with me please to the book
of Micah. I'll give you a second to find
it. It's one of those little short books near the end of the
New Testament. When you find Micah, we'll read
chapter 7, the last chapter of the book. Micah chapter 7. Woe is me, for I am as, when
they have gathered the summer fruits, as a grape gleanings
of the vintage, There is no cluster to eat, my soul desired the first
ripe fruit. The good man is perished out
of the earth, and there is none upright among men. They all lie
in wait for blood, they hunt every man his brother with a
net, that they may do evil with both hands earnestly. The prince
asketh, the judge asketh for a reward, and the great man,
he uttereth his mischievous desire, so they wrap it up. The best
of them is as a briar. The most upright is sharper than
a thorn hedge. The day of thy watchman and thy
visitation cometh. Now shall be their perplexity. Trust ye not in a friend. Put
ye not confidence in a guide. Keep the doors of thy mouth from
her that lieth in thy bosom. For the son dishonoureth the
father, the daughter riseth up against her mother, the daughter-in-law
against her mother-in-law, a man's enemies are the men of his own
house. Therefore, I will look unto the
Lord, I will wait for the God of my salvation. My God will
hear me. Rejoice not against me, O mine
enemies, when I fall. I shall rise. When I sit in darkness,
the Lord shall be a light unto me. I will bear the indignation
of the Lord, because I have sinned against him, until he plead my
cause and execute judgment for me. He will bring me forth into
the light, and I shall behold his righteousness. Then she that
is mine enemy shall see it, and shame shall cover her which said
unto me, Where is the Lord thy God? Mine eyes shall behold her. Now shall she be trodden down
as a mire of the streets. In the day that thy walls are
to be built, in that day shall the decree be far removed. In
that day also he shall come even to thee from Assyria, and from
the fortified cities, and from the fortress, even to the river,
and from sea to sea, and from mountain to mountain. Notwithstanding,
the land shall be desolate because of them that dwell therein, for
the fruits of their doings. Feed thy people with thy rod,
the flock of thine heritage, which dwell solitarily in the
wood, in the midst of Carmel, Let them feed in Bashan and Gilead
as in the days of old. According to the days of thy
coming out of the land of Egypt will I show unto him marvelous
things. The nation shall see and be confounded
in all their might. They shall lay their hands upon
their mouths. Their ears shall be deaf. They
shall lick the dust like a serpent. They shall move out of their
holes like worms of the earth. They shall be afraid of the Lord
our God. and shall fear because of thee. Who is a God like unto
thee, that pardoneth iniquity, and passeth by the transgression
of the remnant of his heritage? He retaineth not his anger for
ever, because he delighteth in mercy. He will turn again. He will have compassion upon
us. He will subdue our iniquities, and I will cast all their sins
into the depths of the sea. Thou will perform the truth to
Jacob and the mercy to Abraham, which I was sworn unto our fathers
from the day of old. Now, verses 1-6 give us a description
of natural man. There's nothing in that description
that would even hint at the fact that there's a little good in
everyone. People say, you just have to see the good in people.
And this description of natural man is very similar to what we
read in Romans 3, where it says, There is none righteous, no,
not one. There is none that understandeth. There is none that seeketh after
God. They are all gone out of the
way. They are together become unprofitable. There is none that
doeth good. No, not one. Their throat is
an open sepulcher. With their tongues they have
used deceit. The poison of asps is under their lips, whose mouth
is full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed
blood. Destruction and misery are in their ways. And the way
of peace have they not known. There is no fear of God before
their eyes. So Micah writes that because
he's been shown that there's no help in himself, he turns
to the only one in whom there is any hope to be found. When
we read in verse 7, therefore, I will look unto the Lord. He will seek out the only one
who can change him from a vile wretch to a redeemed sinner. In the next sentence it says,
I will wait for the God of my salvation. My God will hear me,
which is what the Lord promised in 2 Chronicles. He said, if
my people which are called by my name shall humble themselves
and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways,
then will I hear from heaven and forgive their sins and will
heal their land. Our God has a sense of hearing.
that surpasses anything that we can imagine, that he, sitting
in heaven, can hear the cry of a sinner here on the earth. And then Micah speaks of the
confidence that he has and the ability and power of our God
to do him good when we read in the next verse, Rejoice not against
me, O mine enemy. When I fall, I shall arise. When I sit in darkness, the Lord
shall be a light unto me. David wrote, of a similar feeling
which we find in Psalm 3 when He said, Lord, how are they increased
that trouble Me? Many are they that rise up against
Me, many there be that say of My soul, there is no help for
him and God. But Thou, O Lord, art a shield
for Me, My glory, and the lifter up of Mine head. Our foes look
at us and say, yep, he's down for the counters, no coming back
from this. But our God has other ideas.
He picks us up every time we fall and sets our feet on that
solid rock of Christ the Lord. He brings us out of darkness
and causes us to walk in His marvelous light. Then in verse
9, Micah says, I will bear the indignation of the Lord because
I have sinned against Him. This word indignation is an interesting
word. It means anger. excited by that
which is unjust, ungrateful, or base. Anger mingled with contempt,
scornful displeasure. Micah knew that he deserved whatever
indignation that the Lord felt toward him because he had done
that which displeases a righteous God. He had sinned against Him. Sin is not committed against
other people. David knew this. David knew that
sin is always committed against God. He said, "...and against
thee and thee only have I sinned." Though David had sinned against
Uriah by taking his wife and then placing him on the front
lines of battle to be killed, and though he had sinned against
Bathsheba by committing adultery with her, yet he knew that in
the end, all sin is sin committed against a holy God. But Michael
also knew this, that he would not bear the indignation of the
Lord for long, but only as he states in verse 9, until he plead
my cause and execute judgment for me. We're promised that the
anger of the Lord toward his elect people is short-lived.
He says, for a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with great
mercies will I gather thee. In little wrath I hid my face
from thee for a moment, but with everlasting kindness will I have
mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer." Micah says, until
he pleads my cause. Our great advocate pleads for
us to the Father, presenting evidence that all the demands
of the law, the law that says the soul that sinneth it shall
die, that those demands have been met. We are not to be punished
for sins which we've committed because that punishment has already
been rendered for God's people when Christ hung on that cross
and endured what was ours. Now let's skip down to verse
18 of Micah 7. Micah asked, Who is a God like
unto thee? And in Isaiah 46.9, God Himself
answers this question. Micah says, Who is a God like
unto thee? And God replies, Remember the
former things of old? For I am God, there is none else. I am God, and there is none like
me. Micah asks this question because
he already knew the answer. He simply wants to extol and
uplift the name of his God. by asking the question, but then
also answering it. Micah asked this question because
every other so-called God that men have worshipped throughout
time, without fail, require the offender to personally pay the
price for wrongs committed. Throughout the history of the
world, we can read of various deities worshipped by different
cultures, and without exception, they required a personal sacrifice
from the offending party. These range from beating yourself
with whips until your back was a bleeding mess of shredded flesh,
to cutting off a part of the human body that was perceived
to have committed the offense, such as a hand from a thief,
or sacrificing your own children, such as a young virgin daughter,
all in the name of appeasing or placating the angered deity,
but not so with the God that we worship. The God that we worship
and hold in reverence does not extract payment for sin from
the offending party, but rather He supplies the sacrifice necessary
to pay for those offenses. He told Abraham, or as Abraham
told Isaac, my son, God will provide Himself for a burnt offering. There is not a God like unto
our God who provides Himself to be the sacrifice for the transgressions
which we have committed. Many cultures require that you
give your Son as a sacrifice for sins. We have a God who gave
us His Son. 1 John 4.10 says, Herein is love,
not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son
to be the propitiation for our sins. The blood of His Son is
a thing that propitiates, which satisfies the requirements that
the soul that sinneth it shall die. But the blood of Christ
does not just remove the anger of God and placate His anger. It further enables us to be fit
to be called the children of God, heirs of God, joint heirs
with Christ. And few, if any, deities worshipped
throughout the ages of time ever loved their worshippers. Rather, they demanded fear and
dread from the persons who worshipped them. And the reason for that
is simple, because the men who invented them were convinced
that the only way to rule people was to rule them by fear. Who is a god like unto thee that
pardoneth iniquity and passeth by the transgression of the remnant
of his heritage, Micah asks. The word pardoneth is only found
one time in all of Scriptures. This time here in Micah. And
as our pastor told us many times, when you see this ETH at the
end of a word in the King James Version, it means it's an ongoing
process. Our God doesn't just forgive
sin, one time like perhaps a president might issue a pardon when he
is leaving office. No, our God ever pardoneth, constantly
pardoneth our iniquities, all past iniquities, all future iniquities. And there is only one reason
that the God who we worship pardons iniquity, and that reason is
stated in the last five words of verse 18. Because He delighteth
in mercy. I make a conscious effort every
time I speak to men and women who are redeemed by Christ's
blood to remind them of the incredible, astounding, abundant, everlasting
mercy of our God toward us, and to encourage them to hope in
that mercy for those of their family or their loved ones who
do not yet know Christ. Now let me read a couple of verses
which speak of God's mercy and how it's directly tied to His
pardoning of sin, how that He will pardon all of our iniquities. Numbers 14, 19 says, Pardon I
beseech thee the iniquity of this people according unto the
greatness of thy mercy, as thou hast forgiven this people from
Egypt even until now. Nehemiah tells us, Thou art a
God ready to pardon, gracious and merciful, slow to anger,
and of great kindness. Isaiah tells us, let the wicked
forsake his ways, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and let him
return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him, and
to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. Our God preserves those
who He forgives. David tells us, the Lord shall
preserve thee from all evil, He shall preserve thy soul, The
Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this
time forth and even forevermore. Then in verse 19 of Micah 7,
we read, He will turn again. He will have compassion upon
us. Another blessed promise. This
is a picture of one who is angry and turns his back on the one
that he's angry with. But his anger, our God's anger,
does not last long toward his people. A similar promise is
found in Deuteronomy, where it says, Then thy God will turn
thy captivity and have compassion on thee, and will return and
gather thee from all nations, whether the Lord thy God has
scattered thee. David pleads with the Lord to
turn back and help his people. O God, Thou hast cast us off,
Thou hast scattered us, Thou hast been displeased, O turn
Thyself unto us again. Now the 19th verse of Micah tells
us that our God will turn again and have compassion on His chosen
elect people. But He makes no such promise
to those who continue to rebel against Him. Once our God pronounces
judgment on a people or a nation, their damnation is sure. But
our God does promise to turn and do His people good, as stated
in Jeremiah 29, 14. And I will be found of you, saith
the Lord, and I will turn away your captivity, and I will gather
you from all nations, and from the places whither I have driven
you, saith the Lord. I will bring you again into the
place which I caused you to be carried away captive. This verse
contains four blessed I wills, promises of God that cannot fail. I will be found of you, he says.
I will turn away your captivity, that captivity which bound us
in sin. I will gather you, as a good
shepherd gathers his sheep, and I will bring you again back into
the fold. But our God further promises
not to turn away from us. And I will make an everlasting
covenant with them, and I will not turn away from them to do
them good, but I will put my fear in their hearts, and that
fear shall not, and they shall not depart from Me." Also here
in Micah 19, or verse 19, we're told that God will have compassion
upon us. Compassion is a deep awareness
of the sufferings of another, accompanied by the desire to
relieve that suffering. Now, many times we may feel compassion
toward a friend who's suffering through a trial, through a sickness,
but all too often we don't have the ability to do that friend
any good. Not so with our God. He not only
has compassion, He has the full capability to relieve that suffering
and to help us endure. His grace is sufficient, He tells
us. And for those who are suffering under a load of guilt for sin,
He makes a promise in verse 19 to subdue our iniquities, to
conquer. bring into subjection our iniquities,
to bring under control, to overpower by force, to overcome our iniquities. He did that when he bore those
iniquities, as we read in Isaiah 53, and endured the punishment
that was ours when he hung on that tree. And the last promise
that we find in verse 19 is this, that He will cast all their sins
into the depth of the sea. Now this is an illustration that
anyone, even a child, can understand. The deepest part of the ocean,
I read, was 36,000 feet, nearly 7 miles. And you can be sure
that if you dump something overboard at that point of the ocean, it
will never be found again. It will never be brought up again. So it is with our sins. They've
been cast into the deep, deep sea of God's forgiveness. And
they will never be brought up again. Next, in verse 20 of our
text, Micah says, Thou will perform the truth to Jacob. Perform the truth. Fulfill the
truth. Carry out the truth to completion. Psalm 33 verse 4
assures us, for where the Lord is right and all His works are
done in truth. Our God is bound by His truth. He cannot lie. But what does
this verse mean when it says that God will perform the truth
to Jacob? Turn with me over to Genesis
46. We'll have a little insight into
what this means. Genesis 46. And Israel took his journey with
all that he had and came to Beersheba and offered sacrifices unto the
God of his father, Isaac. And God spake unto Israel in
the vision of the night and said, Jacob, Jacob. And he said, Here
am I. And he said, I am God, the God
of thy father. Fear not to go down into Egypt,
for I will there make of thee a great nation. And I will go
down with thee unto Egypt, and I will also surely bring thee
up again, as Joseph shall put his hands upon thine eyes." Now
here Jacob is a type of Christ. God tells Jacob not to fear to
go down to Egypt, because God promised that he would go with
him. He would not go alone. Christ said, I and the Father
are one. He is always with me. In his
prayer to the Father in John 17, he's speaking of his disciples,
and it says, "...that they may be one, as our Father art in
me, and I in thee, that they may also be one in us, Christ
in the Father, the Father in Christ, always with Him. And as Jacob went down to Egypt,
so our Lord came into this world, is, of course, a type of the
world in which a people of God find no rest from the bondage
of sin. And as God promised Jacob that
He would make of him a great nation, a nation that would one
day be free from the bondage of Egypt, so our God promised
His Son that He would give him a number which no man can number,
a greater nation than the physical Israel ever was. And it would
be freed from bondage, from the fear of death spoken of in Hebrews
2.15, which caused him a lifetime of bondage. We read in Genesis
49 how Jacob died in Egypt, but we also read that he was not
left there forever. When the children of Israel left
Egypt, they took the bones of Jacob with them. So it was with
our Lord Jesus Christ. He died in Egypt. the Egypt of
this world, but he was not left in that borrowed tomb. Peter,
in Acts chapter 2, on the day of Pentecost, when he was preaching,
spoke of this. He quoted the Psalms and said,
Because I will not leave my soul in hell, neither wilt thou suffer
thine Holy One to see corruption. Therefore, being a prophet, and
knowing that God had shown with an oath unto him, that of the
fruit of his loins, according to the flesh, he would raise
up Christ to sit on his throne. He, seeing this before, spake
of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in
hell, neither his flesh did see corruption. So God did indeed
perform the truth to Jacob, which he had promised, and to our great
Jacob, the Lord Jesus Christ, which he had before sworn. Then
in verse 20 of Micah 7, It tells us that God will also perform
mercy to Abraham. Among the mercies which God showed
to Abraham, first of all, was calling him out of a life of
idolatry where he dwelt in the land of Ur of the Chaldees, the
story of which we find in Genesis 12. And one of the promises which
God made to Abram at that time, he said, I will make of thee
a great nation. And later he promised Abraham,
I will make thy seed to multiply as the stars of heaven, and will
give unto thy seed all these countries. And in thy seed shall
all nations of the earth be blessed. That mercy that he showed to
Abraham carries on to this day, because all nations of this world
are still being blessed in the person of Christ. Paul spoke
of this in his writings in Galatians 3. He said, Now to Abraham and
his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as
of many, but as of one, and to thy seed, which is Christ. God later promised Abraham in
Genesis 13, 16, And I will make thy seed as a dust of the earth,
so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall
thy seed also be numbered. as Christ was promised that one
day He will be praised by a number which no man can number. Then
lastly, in Micah 20, we read of that truth which our God will
perform to Jacob, and that mercy that was performed unto Abraham.
And it happened, and it's still happening to this day, because
thou hast sworn to our fathers from the day of old. His promise
which began with Adam, Now, there's a multitude of places where we
find in Scripture where God swore a promise to one or more of the
patriarchs or the prophets. After Abraham was willing to
sacrifice Isaac, we read of God speaking to him, and he said,
By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, for because I have
done this thing, it has not withheld thy son, thine only son Jacob,
that in blessing I will bless thee, And in multiplying I will
multiply thy seed as the stars of heaven, and as the sand which
is upon the seashore. And thy seed shall possess the
gate of his enemies. And in thy seed shall all nations
of the earth be blessed, because thou hast obeyed my voice. And
God also promised Moses, that keep therefore the words of this
covenant, and do them, that ye may prosper in all that ye do.
that thou shouldest enter into covenant with the Lord thy God,
and into His oath, which the Lord thy God maketh with thee
this day, that He may establish thee today for a people unto
Himself, and that He may be unto thee a God, as He has sworn unto
thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob." And he promises in Ezekiel, he
says, I am the Lord, I have spoken it, I will also do it." Now,
we serve a God unlike any other God of man's imagination, a God
whose promises are sure. And because of the fact that
He holds all power, there's no force in this universe that can
overrule His will. So when He says, I will, it's
as sure as if it's already done. Because in the mind of our God,
it already is. He cannot lie. He cannot fail. Which is why we proclaim, not
as a question as Micah did, but as a declaration with an exclamation
mark at the end, who is a God like unto thee. Jimmy, come lead
us in a song.