Micah 6:8 He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you, but to do justly, and to love mercy… The prophet read off rightly God's requirements, but he had not anything to say about God's gifts. So his word is a half-truth. The great glory of Christianity is not that it reiterates or alters God's requirements, but that it brings into view God's gifts. To "do justly," etc., is only possible through repentance towards God, and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. I. GOD'S REQUIREMENTS. In the text are the plain, elementary duties of morality and religion. It covers substantially the same ground, in a condensed form, as does the Decalogue, only that Moses begins with the deepest thing and works outwards, as it were: Micah begins at the other end, and starting with the lesser, the more external, the purely human, works his way inwards to that which is the centre and the source of all. II. OUR FAILURE. There is not one of us that has come up to the standard. Micah's requirements come to every man that will honestly take stock of his life and his character, as the statement of an unreached and unreachable ideal If then it is true, that all have come short of the requirement, then there should follow a universal sense of guilt, for there is a universal fact of guilt, whether there be a sense of it or not. And there follows a hopelessness as to ever accomplishing that which is demanded of us. III. GOD'S GIFTS. The gift of God is Jesus Christ, and that meets all our failures. What a difference the conception of God as giving — rather than requiring — makes to the spirit in which we work! What a difference it brings into what we have to do. We have not to begin with effort, we have to begin with faith. First go to the giving God. Then accept His gift. And then say, "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do?" (A. Maclaren, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? |
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