The Heart of the Matter Text: Micah 6:6-8
Introduction: Religion on Steroids
We live in an age that is simultaneously religious and godless. Men are inveterately religious creatures; you cannot stamp it out of them. If they will not worship the true God, they will worship a false one, whether that idol is the state, the self, the environment, or some therapeutic notion of "wellness." And with this worship always comes a liturgy, a set of rituals, a system of sacrifices designed to appease the chosen deity and signal one's virtue to the watching world.
Our text in Micah addresses a people who had become experts in this kind of externalized religion. They were willing to consider the most extravagant and grotesque sacrifices to get God off their backs, to satisfy the divine requirement so they could get back to their lives of injustice and covenant-breaking. Their question is a form of spiritual negotiation, an attempt to bribe the judge of all the earth. "What's the price? Name it. Thousands of rams? Rivers of oil? My firstborn child?" This is not the language of a broken and contrite heart; it is the desperate haggling of a spiritual materialist who believes God can be bought.
This is the essence of all false religion. It seeks to manage God through external performance. It reduces righteousness to a checklist of rituals. It is an attempt to keep God at arm's length through a flurry of religious activity. Modern evangelicals are not immune to this. We can substitute our quiet times, our church attendance, our small group participation, and our financial giving for the weightier matters of the law. We can have all the outward trappings of conservative Christianity and still have hearts that are a cage of unclean birds. Micah's prophecy cuts through all such pretense. It is a divine exposé of the difference between religion that is skin deep and righteousness that is bone deep.
God is not interested in our religious pyrotechnics. He is not impressed by the scale of our sacrifices if the heart is not right. He sweeps aside the entire bargaining table and tells us plainly what He has always required. And what He requires is not a transaction, but a transformation. It is not a ritual, but a relationship. It is not a performance, but a posture of the entire life.
The Text
With what shall I come before Yahweh
And bow myself before the God on high?
Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings,
With yearling calves?
Is Yahweh pleased with thousands of rams,
With ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has told you, O man, what is good;
And what does Yahweh require of you
But to do justice, to love lovingkindness,
And to walk humbly with your God?
(Micah 6:6-8 LSB)
The Folly of Externalism (vv. 6-7)
The prophet begins with a series of rhetorical questions, voiced from the perspective of a corrupt but religiously-minded Israelite.
"With what shall I come before Yahweh And bow myself before the God on high? Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, With yearling calves? Is Yahweh pleased with thousands of rams, With ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?" (Micah 6:6-7)
This is the voice of a man who understands the concept of substitutionary atonement in a purely mechanical way. He knows a price must be paid for sin, but he thinks the value is in the stuff, not the heart. He starts with the prescribed sacrifices, burnt offerings, yearling calves, but quickly escalates into absurdity. Thousands of rams. Ten thousand rivers of oil. This is hyperbole meant to show his willingness to do anything, to pay any price. He is trying to impress God with the sheer volume of his piety.
This is the logic of every works-based religion. It is always a matter of quantity. How many prayers? How many pilgrimages? How much money in the plate? The assumption is that you can reach a tipping point where God is obligated to bless you. You can overwhelm the divine scales with the weight of your religious activity.
But then the logic takes a dark and pagan turn: "Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression?" This was not some wild, abstract hypothetical. This was the practice of the surrounding Canaanite nations, the worship of Molech. This was the very abomination that God had explicitly and repeatedly forbidden (Lev. 18:21; Deut. 12:31). The fact that the Israelite would even consider this shows how far his heart has drifted. He is willing to offer the most precious thing he has, not out of love, but as the ultimate bribe to settle his account with God. He is thinking like a pagan, treating Yahweh like a bloodthirsty tribal deity whose wrath can be bought off. He is willing to commit the most heinous sin in order to atone for his sin. This is the insanity of a seared conscience.
This reveals the fundamental error of all external religion. It believes that sacrifice is something we give to God to get something from Him. But the biblical sacrificial system was never about that. The sacrifices were types and shadows pointing to the one great sacrifice that God would provide for us. They were not a payment we made, but a picture of the payment He would make. To obey is better than sacrifice, Samuel told Saul (1 Sam. 15:22). Why? Because obedience is the proper response of the heart to God's grace, while sacrifice without obedience is just a dead ritual, a stinking carcass on an altar.
The Triad of True Religion (v. 8)
After exposing the bankruptcy of this transactional religion, God, through Micah, lays out the simple, profound, and unchanging requirement. It is a threefold cord not easily broken.
"He has told you, O man, what is good; And what does Yahweh require of you But to do justice, to love lovingkindness, And to walk humbly with your God?" (Micah 6:8 LSB)
"He has told you." This is not new information. This is not some secret, esoteric knowledge. This is the consistent message of the law and the prophets from the beginning. God is not being mysterious. The problem is not a lack of information but a lack of submission. The requirement has three parts, and they must be understood together.
First, "to do justice." The Hebrew is mishpat. This is not the squishy, Marxist-laced term "social justice" that is so fashionable today, which is little more than institutionalized envy. Biblical justice is not about equality of outcomes, but about impartiality under God's law. It means rendering to each man what he is due. It is about honest weights and measures in the marketplace. It is about judges who do not take bribes. It is about protecting the innocent and punishing the wicked. It is about treating the rich and the poor, the native and the foreigner, with the same standard because they are all made in the image of God. To do justice is to apply God's righteous standard to every sphere of life, from the family to the civil magistrate. It is a public and active righteousness.
Second, "to love lovingkindness." The Hebrew word here is hesed. This is one of the great covenant words of the Old Testament. It is often translated as mercy, steadfast love, or lovingkindness. It is not simply a feeling of compassion; it is covenant loyalty in action. It is a rugged, unbreakable, faithful love. God's hesed toward us is His refusal to abandon His covenant promises, even when we are faithless. Our hesed, in response, is to have a heart that delights in showing that same loyal love to others. It is more than just "doing" mercy; it is "loving" mercy. It is a disposition of the heart that finds joy in forgiveness, in generosity, in bearing with the faults of others. Justice gives a man what he is owed. Hesed gives a man what he is not owed. A Christian must be committed to both. Justice without mercy is tyranny. Mercy without justice is sentimentality.
Third, and foundational to the other two, is "to walk humbly with your God." This is the vertical dimension that governs the horizontal. The first two requirements deal with our conduct toward our fellow man. This one deals with our posture before God. To walk with God means to live in constant fellowship and communion with Him. It is the life of Enoch. It is a life of moment-by-moment dependence and obedience. And this walk must be humble. Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less. It is the creaturely recognition that you are utterly dependent on the Creator for everything, from your next breath to your eternal salvation. It is an glad submission to His authority, a joyful obedience to His commands, and a quiet trust in His providence. You cannot do justice or love mercy in a way that pleases God if you are not first walking humbly with Him. A proud man's justice is self-righteousness, and a proud man's mercy is condescension.
The Gospel in Micah
When we read this summary of God's requirements, our first response should not be to pull up our bootstraps and try harder. Our first response should be to despair of our own ability to ever fulfill it. Who among us has perfectly done justice? Who has truly loved mercy with all his heart? Who has walked humbly with God without stumbling into pride every other step?
This verse, like the law itself, serves as a schoolmaster to drive us to Christ (Gal. 3:24). It shows us the standard, and in doing so, it shows us our sin. It exposes our need for a Savior who has fulfilled these requirements on our behalf.
And Jesus Christ is the only man who has ever perfectly fulfilled Micah 6:8. He is the one who perfectly did justice, speaking truth to power and cleansing the temple of thieves. He is the one who loved hesed, showing covenant faithfulness to His disciples and mercy to sinners, even to the point of death. He is the one who walked humbly with His God, saying "not My will, but Yours, be done."
And in the great exchange of the gospel, His perfect record is credited to our account. He became the ultimate sacrifice, the true firstborn given for our transgression, so that we would not have to be. He offered Himself, the fruit of His body, for the sin of our souls. He did this so that we, in turn, could be transformed by His Spirit and begin to actually live this way.
The Christian life is not a frantic attempt to fulfill Micah 6:8 in order to be saved. The Christian life is the Spirit-empowered fruit of Micah 6:8, which flows from the fact that we are already saved. Because we have been justified by faith, we are now free to actually begin doing justice. Because we have received infinite hesed from God, we are now free to truly love showing hesed to others. And because we have been united to the humble Son, we can now begin to learn what it means to walk humbly with our God. The requirement of the law becomes the desire of the heart, not by our effort, but by His grace.