Micah chapter 4

This is a wonderful chapter about what life will be like when Jesus returns, when everyone will go to the mountain of the Lord to worship. It is full of promise, of hope, of peace, with swords being hammered into ploughshares, spears into pruning hooks, and every man able to sit outside his house under his vine (or in his garden) without any fear at all. There are places in this world now where people have to have strong gates, stout doors, they have to bar themselves in for protection, so imagine how they would feel knowing that they could safely sit outside without fear of any harm?

But the verse that really struck me was verse 12 "but they do not know the thoughts of the Lord; they do not understand his plan, he who gathers them like sheaves to the threshing floor."
God is the creator of the universe. He made the sun, moon and stars, the earth and all the planets, the land, the sea, the plants, flowers, animals and insects, even spiders and daddy long legs that I hate. He made each one of us, decided upon the colour of our hair, our eyes, our skin, the shape of our nose, forming us in the womb and watching over us. He knows each one of us intimately, and at any second of the day, he knows exactly what each and every person is doing - he is watching the babies being born, people dying, he knows what we're thinking, how we are feeling, and he is co-ordinating the weather, the wind, and he never sleeps.

And many of us carry on regardless, never giving a thought to the fact that the odds on there not being a creator, a grand designer of the world and all that is in it, are something like 1 in 10 to the power of 40000! Those are some serious numbers which make me wonder just how people can not believe in God.

We carry on with our lives, going to school, college, work, taking the children to school/work, keeping the house running, earning a living, all the everyday things we have to do, and life happens around us. And God is watching over us the whole time. Yet which one of us really knows the mind of God? Knows why things happen? Why we or our loved ones get ill, why we struggle at times, why there are floods, earthquakes, famine, disasters? Why our prayers are unanswered or answered?

I think the thing here with these verses, is that the leaders, the priests, the teachers, chose to ignore God, to live their lives without him, and just to pay lip service to Him, to the Laws of Moses, the rituals, festivals and ceremonies and so on. Well, you cannot string God along. You can't tell Him in church on Sunday (or the Temple on Saturday) that He is a great and awesome God, offer him your praises, your worship, and then the rest of the week ignore Him, ignore his laws, His calling , his guidance in your life. He is not a just God of our Sundays, He is God of our Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays as well, God of our nights and our days, our work and our leisure time.

Knowing God, or desiring to know God, is a conscious choice we make, or don't make, we have to choose to want to know him. The leaders Micah is talking about didn't want to know God, seek him, talk to Him, ask Him for help, for guidance, but instead, they wanted to go their own way, do what they wanted to do without having to count the cost, to take into account what God would have them do. And yes, it is often easier to do that than to make a stand, to do what you know God would want, but the rewards of obeying God, which may well never come in this lifetime, only after we are dead and buried, far outweigh any temporary gain from going our own way or following the crowd.