Micah 7:18 Who is a God like unto thee, that pardoneth inquity, and passeth by the transgression of the remnant of his heritage? He retaineth not his anger for ever, because he delighteth in mercy.
Have you ever known a bad apple? Years ago, my grandma bit into a bad apple. When she opened her mouth, she found half a worm in that apple. But when we talk about bad apples, we are not talking about fruit so much as we are talking about people. A bad apple spoils the whole bunch. Well, in Israel, they may not have had apples, but they certainly had grapes. Micah begins chapter 7 by saying, “Woe is me! For I am as when they have gathered the summer fruits… there is no cluster to eat: my soul desireth the first-ripe fruit. The good man is perished out of the earth.” This is to say that the nation was full of bad apples or rotten grapes. He looked for primo grapes at the peak of the season but he could find none.
The entire nation of God’s own people was treacherous. They were not trustworthy. They were on the take. Judges were taking money. Priests were taking money. The great men were taking money. Verse 3 says, “That they may do evil with both hands earnestly.” They weren’t just kind of doing wrong. They were in it up to their eyeballs, doing evil with gusto. “The best of them is as a briar,” Micah goes on to say. So, they weren’t just bad fruit. They were choking the fruit. They were briars in God’s garden.
Now, this is a problem because our expectations of God are often informed by what we see of others, our own experience. So, what do you think the priests, prophets, and judges that were on the take thought about God based on their experience and on the other people around them? Maybe they thought that God had exonerated them. Maybe they thought God didn’t care. Maybe they thought that they were fine. Indeed, their attitude was that God was not going to go after Jerusalem because Israel was God’s own special people. They felt entitled. But if they had made that estimation of God based on the people around them and how vulnerable they were, they were sorely mistaken.
What do you think nations looking from the outside in thought about God based on His people? Verse 10 says, “Then she that is mine enemy shall see it, and shame shall cover her which said unto me, Where is the LORD thy God?” The Gentiles were saying, “Where is God?” Later, the Bible says, “The nations shall see and be confounded at all their might.” They looked at Israel and thought, “So, God is this way, huh. God is treacherous, huh. God is on the take, huh.” But they were wrong.
Verse 4 tells us that the best of them in the nations were like briars, and that is why verse 5 says, “Trust ye not in a friend.” The essence here is, “Don’t even trust your own wife. You know that the father dishonors the son, the son dishonors the father, and the daughter doesn’t even trust her mother-in-law. A man’s enemies are the members of his own house.”
In other words, an entire society was corrupt and many came to their estimation of God based upon what they saw from God’s people. There is a very important takeaway here: let God speak for Himself. If you had a Christian school principal who turned out to be a clod, don’t project that onto God. Can bad people pretend to speak for God? Yes! Can good people make bad mistakes? Yes! But, let God speak for Himself.
God did speak for Himself through Micah, yet we don’t just hear the prophet one time, we have it written down in Scripture, and we have all the prophets and the New Testament, everything we need. Let God speak for Himself. “Who is a God like unto thee” Verse 18 says, “that pardoneth iniquity?…he delighteth in mercy… he will turn again, he will have compassion upon us; he will subdue our iniquities.”
Let God speak for Himself. The more of God’s Word you know and the more of God’s Spirit that you respond to, the more authority and peace you are going to have in life.