SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 12/24/2015
10:27 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
PT-3 Rebuke: The Sins of the Leaders
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Micah 3:9-12
Message of
the verses: “9 Now
hear this, heads of the house of Jacob And rulers of the house of Israel, Who abhor justice And twist everything that is
straight, 10 Who build Zion with bloodshed And Jerusalem with violent
injustice. 11 Her leaders pronounce judgment for a bribe, Her priests instruct
for a price And her prophets divine for money. Yet they lean on the LORD
saying, "Is not the LORD in our midst? Calamity will not come upon
us." 12 Therefore,
on account of you Zion will be plowed as a field, Jerusalem will become a heap
of ruins, And the mountain of the temple will become high places of a forest.”
Micah now addresses the leaders of the land in this
section along with the rulers, the priests, and the prophets as he is accusing
them of numerous sins which include committing injustice, distorting the truth
and murdering innocent people, and accepting bribes and then while doing these
evil deeds they were claiming to be serving the Lord as we read in verse eleven
“Is not the LORD in our midst? Calamity will not come upon us.” Dr. Wiersbe writes that “this is hypocrisy of
the worst kind.”
We have gone over reasons as to why these people
thought like this and it has to do with them misunderstanding exactly what the
Lord wanted them to do. They did not
understand, or maybe would not understand the “religion” that they were to
follow. They had a temple where they
were to offer sacrifices which were to look forward to Messiah coming to make
the ultimate sacrifice to free them from their sins forever. Instead they were making up their own rules
thinking that just because they were Jews that God would not do anything to
them. Paul writes that believers were
the true seed of Abraham, and these people just did not get this. God wanted them to be a light to the Gentile
nations around but instead they followed the evil practices of the nations
around them, thus causing the anger of the Lord to come upon them as he tells
them in this section that He will destroy Jerusalem and the temple that they
worshiped in, and we learned from our study of Ezekiel that this worship was
the worship of demons.
Dr.
Wiersbe writes: “Any theology that makes
it easy for us to sin is not biblical theology.
Had the rulers, prophets, and priests read and pondered Leviticus 26 and
Deuteronomy 28-30, they would have discovered that the God of the covenant is a
holy God who will not countenance high-handed holy sin. They would also have learned that the
blessings of the covenant depended on their obeying the conditions of the
covenant, and that God punishes His people when they disobey.”
As mentioned earlier God would destroy Jerusalem and
their temple as noted in this section, and so Dr. Wiersbe writes “For the sins
of her prophets, and the iniquities of her priests’ (Lam. 4:13) the nation was
defeated and the city and temple were destroyed. That’s why the prophet opened his message by
rebuking the spiritual leaders of the land, not the unbelievers. If Micah were ministering among us today, he
would probably visit denominational offices, pastors’ conferences, Bible
colleges, and seminaries to warn Christian leaders that privilege brings
responsibility and responsibility brings accountability.”
Our nest SD begins a new
Main section which takes us into chapter four of Micah’s prophecy.
12/24/2015 10:47 PM
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