_THE REASONABLENESS OF TRUE RELIGION_
MICAH vi. 1-8.
We have now reached a passage from which all obscurities of date
and authorship[898] disappear before the transparence and splendour
of its contents. "These few verses," says a great critic, "in
which Micah sets forth the true essence of religion, may raise
a well-founded title to be counted as the most important in the
prophetic literature. Like almost no others, they afford us an
insight into the innermost nature of the religion of Israel, as
delivered by the prophets."
Usually it is only the last of the verses upon which the admiration of
the reader is bestowed: _What doth the Lord require of thee, O man,
but to do justice and love mercy and walk humbly with thy God?_ But in
truth the rest of the passage differeth not in glory; the wonder of it
lies no more in its peroration than in its argument as a whole.
The passage is cast in the same form as the opening chapter of the
book--that of an Argument or Debate between the God of Israel and His
people, upon the great theatre of Nature. The heart must be dull that
does not leap to the Presences before which the trial is enacted.
The prophet speaks:--
_Hear ye now that which Jehovah is saying;_
_Arise, contend before the mountains,_
_And let the hills hear thy voice!_
_Hear, O mountains, the Lord's Argument,_
_And ye, the everlasting! foundations of earth!_
This is not mere scenery. In all the moral questions between God and
man, the prophets feel that Nature is involved. Either she is called
as a witness to the long history of their relations to each other, or
as sharing God's feeling of the intolerableness of the evil which men
have heaped upon her, or by her droughts and floods and earthquakes
as the executioner of their doom. It is in the first of these
capacities that the prophet in this passage appeals to the mountains
and eternal foundations of earth. They are called, not because they
are the biggest of existences, but because they are the most full of
memories and associations with both parties to the Trial.
The main idea of the passage, however, is the Trial itself. We have
seen more than once that the forms of religion which the prophets had
to combat were those which expressed it mechanically in the form of
ritual and sacrifice, and those which expressed it in mere enthusiasm
and ecstasy. Between such extremes the prophets insisted that
religion was knowledge and that it was conduct--rational intercourse
and loving duty between God and man. This is what they figure in
their favourite scene of a Debate which is now before us.
_Jehovah hath a Quarrel with His People,_
_And with Israel He cometh to argue._
To us, accustomed to communion with the Godhead, as with a Father,
this may seem formal and legal. But if we so regard it we do it
an injustice. The form sprang by revolt against mechanical and
sensational ideas of religion. It emphasised religion as rational
and moral, and at once preserved the reasonableness of God and the
freedom of man. God spoke with the people whom He had educated: He
pled with them, listened to their statements and questions, and
produced His own evidences and reasons. Religion, such a passage as
this asserts--religion is not a thing of authority nor of ceremonial
nor of mere feeling, but of argument, reasonable presentation and
debate. Reason is not put out of court: man's freedom is respected;
and he is not taken by surprise through his fears or his feelings.
This sublime and generous conception of religion, which we owe
first of all to the prophets in their contest with superstitious
and slothful theories of religion that unhappily survive among us,
was carried to its climax in the Old Testament by another class of
writers. We find it elaborated with great power and beauty in the
Books of Wisdom. In these the Divine Reason has emerged from the
legal forms now before us, and has become the Associate and Friend of
Man. The Prologue to the Book of Proverbs tells how Wisdom, fellow of
God from the foundation of the world, descends to dwell among men.
She comes forth into their streets and markets, she argues and pleads
there with an urgency which is equal to the urgency of temptation
itself. But it is not till the earthly ministry of the Son of God,
His arguments with the doctors, His parables to the common people,
His gentle and prolonged education of His disciples, that we see the
reasonableness of religion in all its strength and beauty.
In that free court of reason in which the prophets saw God and man
plead together, the subjects were such as became them both. For God
unfolds no mysteries, and pleads no power, but the debate proceeds
upon the facts and evidences of life: the appearance of Character
in history; whether the past be not full of the efforts of Love;
whether God had not, as human wilfulness permitted Him, achieved the
liberation and progress of His people.
God speaks:--
_My people, what have I done unto thee?_
_And how have I wearied thee--answer Me?_
_For I brought thee up from the land of Miṣraim,_
_And from the house of slavery I redeemed thee._
_I sent before thee Moses, Aharon and Miriam._
_My people, remember now what Balak king of Moab counselled,_
_And how he was answered by Bala'am, Be'or's son--_
_So that thou mayest know the righteous deeds of Jehovah._[899]
Always do the prophets go back to Egypt or the wilderness. There God
made the people, there He redeemed them. In lawbook as in prophecy,
it is the fact of redemption which forms the main ground of His
appeal. Redeemed by Him, the people are not their own, but His.
Treated with that wonderful love and patience, like patience and
love they are called to bestow upon the weak and miserable beneath
them.[900] One of the greatest interpreters of the prophets to our
own age, Frederick Denison Maurice, has said upon this passage: "We
do not know God till we recognise him as a Deliverer; we do not
understand our own work in the world till we believe we are sent into
it to carry out His designs for the deliverance of ourselves and the
race. The bondage I groan under is a bondage of the will. God is
emphatically the Redeemer of the will. It is in that character He
reveals Himself to us. We could not think of God at all as the God,
the living God, if we did not regard Him as such a Redeemer. But if
of my will, then of all wills: sooner or later I am convinced He will
be manifested as the Restorer, Regenerator--not of something else,
but of this--of the fallen spirit that is within us."
In most of the controversies which the prophets open between God and
man, the subject on the side of the latter is his sin. But that is
not so here. In the controversy which opens the Book of Micah the
argument falls upon the transgressions of the people, but here upon
their sincere though mistaken methods of approaching God. There God
deals with dull consciences, but here with darkened and imploring
hearts. In that case we had rebels forsaking the true God for idols,
but here are earnest seekers after God, who have lost their way and
are weary. Accordingly, as indignation prevailed there, here prevails
pity; and though formally this be a controversy under the same legal
form as before, the passage breathes tenderness and gentleness from
first to last. By this as well as by the recollections of the ancient
history of Israel we are reminded of the style of Hosea. But there is
no expostulation, as in his book, with the people's continued devotion
to ritual. All that is past, and a new temper prevails. Israel have at
last come to feel the vanity of the exaggerated zeal with which Amos
pictures them exceeding the legal requirements of sacrifice;[901] and
with a despair, sufficiently evident in the superlatives which they
use, they confess the futility and weariness of the whole system, even
in the most lavish and impossible forms of sacrifice. What then remains
for them to do? The prophet answers with the beautiful words, that
express an ideal of religion to which no subsequent century has ever
been able to add either grandeur or tenderness.
The people speak:--
_Wherewithal shall I come before Jehovah,_
_Shall I bow myself to God the Most High?_
_Shall I come before Him with burnt-offerings,_
_With calves of one year?_
_Will Jehovah be pleased with thousands of rams,_
_With myriads of rivers of oil?_
_Shall I give my firstborn for a guilt-offering,_[902]
_The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?_
The prophet answers:--
_He hath shown thee, O man, what is good;_
_And what is the LORD seeking from thee,_
_But to do justice and love mercy,_
_And humbly_[903] _to walk with thy God?_
This is the greatest saying of the Old Testament; and there is only
one other in the New which excels it:--
_Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give
you rest._
_Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in
heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls._
_For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light._
FOOTNOTES:
[898] See above, pp. 369 ff.
[899] Omitted from the above is the strange clause _from Shittim to
Gilgal_, which appears to be a gloss.
[900] See the passages on the subject in Professor Harper's work on
Deuteronomy in this series.
[901] See above, p. 161.
[902] See above, p. 370, on the futility of the argument which
because of this line would put the whole passage in Manasseh's reign.
[903] This word הצנע is only once used again, in Prov. xi. 2, in
another grammatical form, where also it might mean _humbly_. But the
root-meaning is evidently _in secret_, or _secretly_ (cf. the Aram.
צנע, to be hidden; צניע, one who lives noiselessly, humble, pious; in
the feminine of a bride who is modest); and it is uncertain whether
we should not take that sense here.