With the passing of all political danger to the fatherland, Micah retired permanently to his farms in Moresheth. There he devoted the remainder of his peaceful, happy years to teaching the common people, "my people," as he fondly refers to them, the religious, moral and ethical life that God demanded of them.
Micah employed the same vivid, picturesque language in his speeches of peace as he did in his addresses of war. There is extant a remarkable oration in which he pictures a religious controversy between God and his people, and in which he makes a declaration of what true religion is that has not been better phrased in all the thousands of books that have been written on religious subjects since that day.
The address is in the form of a dialogue between God and Israel, and reads as follows:
"Hear ye now what the Lord is saying:
'Arise, contend thou before the mountains,
And let the hills hear thy voice.
Hear, O ye mountains, the Lord's controversty,
And ye enduring rocks, the foundations of the earth:
For the Lord hath a controversy with His people,
And He will plead with Israel."
Then God is pictured pleading with the people:
"O my people, what harm have I done unto thee?
And wherein have I wearied thee?
Testify against me.
Is it because I brought thee out of the land of Egypt,
And redeemed thee out of the house of bondage,
And sent before thee Moses, Aaron and Miriam?
O my people, remember now what Balak, king of Moab, devised,
And what Balaam, the son of Beor, answered him;
(Remember what took place) from Shittim unto Gilgal,
That ye may know the righteous acts of the Lord."
As with the purely religious teachings of the older prophets, the people could not quite understand Micah. They believed that religion consisted in offering the prescribed sacrifices regularly, and that, in having fulfilled this obligation they had performed their religious duties.
The average Judean's idea of religion, of the relationship between man and God, was that of a bargain between man and God; so many sacrifices brought to God, so many favors from God, in return; the more precious and numerous the sacrificial oils and burnt offerings, even to one's children, offered to God, the more precious and numerous would be the blessings from God.
To this false idea Micah replies, with irony that stings, in these words:
"Wherewith shall I come before the Lord,
And bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings,
With calves of a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
Or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my first-born for my transgression,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?"