The Prophet & What God Requires

What happens in Jonah & Micah

Jonah and Micah present two contrasting faces of prophetic ministry: one prophet who runs from God's compassion for the nations, and another who embraces God's heart for justice, mercy, and humility.

JONAH: The book of Jonah is unlike any other prophetic book, it is not a collection of oracles but a narrative about a prophet who does everything wrong. God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, Israel's most brutal enemy, and preach against it. Jonah does the opposite: he boards a ship heading to Tarshish, as far west as he can go. He is literally running from the presence of the LORD.

God sends a violent storm. While the pagan sailors pray desperately to their gods, Jonah is asleep below deck. When lots reveal Jonah as the cause of the storm, even the sailors are more compassionate than the prophet, they try everything before reluctantly throwing him overboard. God appoints a great fish to swallow Jonah, and he spends three days and three nights in its belly, praying a psalm of thanksgiving from the depths.

The fish vomits Jonah onto dry land, and God repeats His command. This time Jonah goes to Nineveh and delivers the shortest sermon in biblical history: 'Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.' Astonishingly, the entire city repents, from the king to the lowest person, even putting sackcloth on their animals. God sees their repentance and relents from the disaster.

But here is the shocking twist: Jonah is furious. He wanted Nineveh destroyed. He reveals his real reason for running: 'I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.' Jonah's problem is not that he doubts God, it is that he knows God too well. He knew God would show mercy to Israel's enemies, and he could not stomach it.

God makes a final point with a vine that grows to shade Jonah, then withers. Jonah is angry about the vine. God's response closes the book as an open question: 'You are concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. Should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and also many animals?' The book ends without Jonah answering. The question is directed at every reader.

MICAH: While Jonah struggles with God's mercy toward outsiders, Micah confronts insiders, the corrupt leaders of Judah and Israel. A contemporary of Isaiah, Micah comes from Moresheth, a small rural town, and speaks with the voice of the countryside against the powerful elites of Jerusalem and Samaria.

Micah's indictments are devastating. Leaders who should protect the people instead 'tear the skin from my people and the flesh from their bones.' Prophets preach prosperity for those who pay them and declare war on those who do not. Judges take bribes. Priests teach for a price. Yet they lean on God and say, 'Is not the LORD among us? No disaster will come upon us.' Micah warns that because of them, 'Zion will be plowed like a field, Jerusalem will become a heap of rubble, and the temple hill a mound overgrown with thickets.'

But Micah also delivers some of the most beautiful promises in Scripture. He prophesies that a ruler will come from Bethlehem, 'small among the clans of Judah', whose origins are 'from of old, from ancient times.' This prophecy is so specific that when the Magi ask Herod where the Messiah will be born, the religious leaders quote Micah 5:2 without hesitation. The promised ruler will 'shepherd his flock in the strength of the LORD' and 'will be their peace.'

Micah 6:8 is considered one of the greatest single-verse summaries of biblical faith: 'He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.' This verse holds together what religion often tears apart: justice (doing right), mercy (compassion and forgiveness), and humility (living in dependent relationship with God). All three are required. Justice without mercy becomes harsh legalism. Mercy without justice enables evil. And both without humility before God become human achievement rather than divine obedience.

The book closes with one of the most moving declarations of hope in the prophets: 'Who is a God like you, who pardons sin and forgives the transgression of the remnant of his inheritance? You do not stay angry forever but delight to show mercy. You will again have compassion on us; you will tread our sins underfoot and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea.' Micah's very name means 'Who is like the LORD?', and his book answers: no one.