Will Vaus

Today in our journey through the 66 books of the Bible we come to the minor prophet, Micah.   Author   Micah 1:1 tells us that the prophet Micah was from Moresheth, a town in Judah. Jeremiah 26:18 confirms this designation. There we read… Micah   of Moresheth prophesied in the days of Hezekiah king of Judah. He told all the people of Judah, ‘This is what the   Lord   Almighty says: “‘Zion   will be plowed like a field,      Jerusalem will become a heap of rubble,      the temple hill   a mound overgrown with thickets.’   Everything the Bible tells us about Micah attests to his deep sensitivity to the social ills of his day, especially as they affected the small towns and villages of his homeland.   Date   Micah 1:1 also gives us the historical setting of the book: in the days of Kings Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah of Judah. These kings lived in the latter half of the 8 th  century and the early years of the 7 th  century BCE. This is around the same time that Isaiah of Jerusalem was proph

Here is the last telling of the Christmas story in the Bible. It comes to us in Revelation 12:1-6. I believe we find a secret message encoded there. It is a message of Christ’s love…. A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on his heads. His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that he might devour her child the moment it was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. The woman fled into the desert to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days

I thought I would offer something different for my commentary on today’s reading. I know it is a little bit early for some of us to be thinking about Christmas. However, here is an excerpt from my book, Open Before Christmas , that touches upon a passage in our reading for today…. An article appeared in the Associated Press one December day a number of years ago: Israel might declare Bethlehem a closed military area on Christmas Eve, preventing worshippers from arriving there…. Bethlehem’s mayor has already canceled Christmas Eve celebrations in the town because of more than two months of violence between Israelis and Palestinians. The violence has driven away most tourists, hitting Bethlehem’s economy hard. The daily Maariv said Prime Minister Ehud Barak was considering imposing the restrictions if Palestinians do not stop firing on the Jewish neighborhood of Gilo, not far from Bethlehem. Israel television broadcast a similar report. “O little

Here is Boadt’s introduction to Micah…. If Isaiah seemed to be totally concerned with the behavior and life of Jerusalem the capital city, and with the presence of the holy God that dwelled in its midst, Micah seems nearly the opposite. Except for the long poem on Zion that fills chapter 4 of his book and which many scholars doubt is original to Micah, hardly a mention of Jerusalem or the temple occurs anywhere. Instead, he talks of the villages and small towns, the tribal territories and the border cities of the Philistines to the west. The label that heads the book in Micah 1:1 tells us that he preached his message at the same time as did Isaiah, but the two prophets must have been very different types of people. Micah’s town of Moresheth-gath was probably quite small and more concerned with the agricultural year and the weather than with the affairs of state. Where Isaiah might cry out against injustice in urban vocabulary, “How the faithful city has become