Judah Learns its Lesson.
King Hezekiah's preparation for rebellion against Sennacherib, in 715, shattered any optimistic hopes that Micah held for a continuation of improvement in the condition of the common people, in which he had been instrumental up to this time. The costs of war always fell heaviest on the poor, and the devastating results of war upon the farming population.
Younger and readier to act than his older contemporary, Isaiah, he was not satisfied with a negative warning, such as the older prophet gave the leaders in Jerusalem when he walked about the city barefoot and in the garb of a slave.
Micah came up to the capital to stir it up; and he did set the people to talking and to thinking when, in a memorable speech, he differed fundamentally from Isaiah in his declaration that the Temple, the very House of God, as well as the city in which it was situated, could and would be destroyed:
"Hear this, I pray you, ye heads of the house of Jacob,
And rulers of the house of Israel,
That abhor justice and pervert all equity;
That build up Zion with blood,
And Jerusalem with iniquity.
The heads thereof judge for reward,
And the priests thereof teach for hire,
And the prophets thereof divine for money;
Yet will they lean upon the Lord, and say,
'Is not the Lord in the midst of us?
No evil shall come to us.'
Therefore shall Zion, for your sake, be plowed as a field,
And Jerusalem shall become heaps,
And the mountain of the house as the high places of a forest."
Micah, naturally, received opposition from the same clique of false prophets that opposed Isaiah, and made his labors so difficult and, at first, unsuccessful; that misled king and people, "that bite with their teeth and cry, 'Peace,' to make my people to err." To these Micah gave as well as he received:
"The seers shall be put to shame,
And the diviners confounded.
Yea, they shall all cover their lips,
For there is no answer of God.
But as for me,
I am full of power by the spirit of the Lord,
And of judgment and of might,
To declare unto Jacob his transgression
And unto Israel his sin."
For years Micah kept at his task. He was indeed a tribune of the people, the champion of their rights against the vested interests, the great commoner of his day and time, fearlessly and courageously standing out against all opposition, trusting absolutely in God.
At last came the crisis of 704-1 and Hezekiah's memorable change of mind and heart. Micah played no mean part with Isaiah, in Hezekiah's reforms that followed.
Reforms were needed, however, not alone by "the heads of the house of Jacob" and "the rulers of the house of Israel," not alone in the courts of law and among the priests and prophets; they were needed as well in the religious beliefs and practices of the common people, whose cause was Micah's cause.