When God confronts the nation Israel about its gross ingratitude in Micah 6, the people suggest making amends by coming “before him with burnt offerings, with calves of a year old.”

They say, “Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers of oil? shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”

Jordan explains, “They’re trying to figure out, ‘What do you want from us, Lord?!’ and He says, ‘You know, you come up with all the wrong answers. What have I ever asked of you?!’

“They say, ‘Well, what if we give you the calves of the first year for a sacrifice? And just so you know we mean it, we’ll give you are first-born! We’ll give you the ultimate gift of life; the fruit of our own body!’

“Now, certainly it’s good to give the best to the Lord—the sentiment isn’t bad; the problem is it’s sort of a Let’s Make a Deal religion.

“They thought God’s forgiveness could be bought, just like their leaders could be bought and they could be bought. They thought God had a price, and so they’re willing to make a deal with Him.

“The problem is that what they’re offering is outward things. When God talks to Israel, what does He say to give? ‘Son, give me thy heart,’ the verse in Proverbs says.

“You see, God doesn’t want your things. He doesn’t want what your hands produce; He wants what’s inside that motivates the production.

“In Ezekiel 13, He says, ‘With their lips they draw near to me but their heart is far from me.’ So when you come to verse 8, Micah says, ‘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?’

“If I could crystallize for you . . . if there was one verse you could learn and memorize that would say for you what the divine ethic of God’s word to Israel was, that’s it. If you want to see the standard of life that God had for them . . .

“If you go to the Sermon on the Mount, for example, and look at the Messiah giving His standards of life for His kingdom, it’s simply the expression of that spontaneous lifestyle that lives spontaneously for one another.

“To do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with thy God. Those three statements encapsulate the ethic of Scripture. They sum up God’s requirement of man. Think about what they say. ‘To do justly . . .’

“Justice is simply to be absolutely fair and right in dealing with others. God is just. God’s justice makes up His integrity. The integrity and holiness of God is made up of two of His attributes—one is His righteousness. This is the standard of perfection—always being right.

“Now, that’s not, you know, like your wife or husband always thinking their right when you know good and well they aren’t. That’s God who is, in Himself, ALWAYS right!

“And then the justice of God goes out and deals with people on the basis of the standard of His righteousness. God’s integrity is that standard of righteousness and it’s His ability and desire to deal with people in an absolutely righteous, fair manner.

“When we think of justice, we think, ‘Uh-oh, we’re in trouble,’ because what do we do? We come short of that righteous standard. To do justly is to act like God acts. It’s to deal with others and treat other people righteously because you know the Lord, and you know how He deals with you and others, and you reflect His life.

*****

For the nation Israel, justice was a great social issue. Doing justly meant caring for the poor, for the widow, for the orphan. It meant not reaping the edges of the field at harvest time so the poor could glean the rest.

A number of instructional passages in the Old Testament deal strictly with paying fair wages and having honest scales and not cheating or extorting; refusing to take advantage of the less fortunate. Masters were to give their servants that which was just and equal, knowing that they have a Master in heaven.

Jordan says, “Micah 6:8 says not just to be merciful, but love it; have a passionate pursuit of mercy. Now, that term mercy relates to the way we treat people. ‘His mercy endures forever,’ the psalmist said. Mercy is the ability to love the unlovely when they don’t love back.

“It’s one thing to love someone when they respond lovingly, but that isn’t mercy. Mercy is to love them in spite of the fact that they DON’T respond back. It’s to care for people who don’t care for you just because you know the Lord.”

*****

Jordan continues, “I was struck by a story the other day. A man and his wife were going toward Midway Airport down Cicero Avenue at the freeway entrance and a guy was standing in traffic panhandling, holding up the sign, ‘HOMELESS. NEED HELP. PLEASE HELP.’

“He and his wife had driven separately because they were picking up family and the husband said he’d been keeping an eye on his wife following him. He admitted, ‘When the homeless man went by me I tried to ignore him and look the other way.’

“He said, ‘I don’t like to give to people panhandling like that because it just makes more of them come along, and you never know how much they deserve it or need it. I don’t have any real solution for them anyway, and a dollar isn’t going to do much.’

“The guy walked on by and the husband looked in his rear-view mirror, thinking, ‘Uh-oh, my wife’s going to have to deal with him next,’ and in another second he saw her window go down and she put money in the guy’s bucket.

“And he said, ‘You know, that’s the difference between me and her.’ He said he realized the homeless guy didn’t care how much money his wife had or how much he had. He only cared about one thing—that she gave him some of what she had.

“Now, I make the application to you like this. You go through life every day and there are people you rub shoulders with who have a sign up, ‘GODLESS. IN NEED OF HIS LOVE AND FORGIVENESS.’ They really don’t care how much you know about the love and forgiveness of God; what matters is how much you share with them.

“You can ignore the hurting neighbor; you can try not to see the sign from your Muslim acquaintance or whatever. You can rationalize it and say, ‘Well, I don’t have . . .’ but all that really matters to the guy with the sign isn’t how much you know, or how much you’ve got, but how much you share with him.

“To love mercy is to love that sharing heart of God with others. It’s always seemed strange to me that people get so engrossed in putting a dollar in a homeless man’s bucket and doing all the social things which, by the way, everywhere the gospel goes that’s what happens, you ever notice that?

“One of the ways you get to be a mega-church is you have a humongous social network where members are reaching out to people hurting and in need; people who have what they call ‘felt needs.’

“Everywhere the gospel goes—even when it goes out in a weak, emaciated form—

love and mercy and doing good for people is a natural outwork.

“If you take a map and dot the places on the planet where Christianity has gone, you’ll dot the places on the planet where humanitarian efforts to feed the poor and help the sick have followed, naturally and instinctively. And, in fact, in such tandem that you can hardly decide which preceded the other. Now, you and I know which preceded the other—it’s the love of mercy that did it. But that’s what God says He wants to come out of your heart.

“Folks, that’s why the government can’t do it! That’s where, in Israel, the welfare system was not the government going out and doing it just out of an economic, political interest to get votes and make a controllable society. It came out of a heart!

“That’s what God’s telling these people: ‘Look you’re going out with all of your programs and what does it wind up being? It winds up being a failure because it doesn’t come out of a heart that expresses my life.’

“ ‘And to walk humbly with thy God.’ Humility is the opposite attitude of pride. Do you know that? Humility is not saying, ‘I’m nothing, I’m worthless, I’m a worm.’ Humility is not being chopped liver, folks. That sense of, ‘I’m nothing, I’m a worm,’ that’s really—listen to me—that’s really self-pity and that’s just another form of pride. You hear that?

“Humility is simply to have the proper view of yourself and the proper view of God. Pride is to have too big a view of your own importance and too little a view of God.

“Paul writes in Romans 12:3, ‘For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.’

“When he says over there in Acts 20, ‘Serving the Lord with all humility of mind,’ that’s Paul’s expression of what he writes in Ephesians 4 about walking in ‘lowliness and meekness.’ It’s understanding there’s a great God. He’s big; I’m not the issue. It’s understanding who I am in Him.

“I Corinthians 4:7 is a verse of scripture that always strikes me when I think of humility: ‘For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive? now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?’

“If you’ve got some God-given natural abilities or talent to do this or that or the next thing, where’d you get that? Well, you got it because of who God made you.

“When you read the part, ‘Now if thou didst receive it, why does thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?’ do you understand what that’s saying? That doesn’t take a fifth-year student in Greek to exegete that.

“ ‘God made me and I belong to Him, and every good thing I have is a gift from the Almighty, so I just need to do the best with what God gave me and I’m not going to act like He didn’t give it to me and I did it myself.’

“That verse says, ‘You know, you shouldn’t get all puffed about something you’re good at it because who is it that made you good at it? That’s humility of mind, and I’m not just talking about believing, I’m talking about life in general.

“When you realize who God is and who you are in relationship to Him, you walk in that light. That’s what the verse says God required. That’s the good He’s seeking.

“Now, you know the problem with that, right? We fall short, don’t we? But those three words—justice, mercy and humility—describe the heart God wants because God wants the real you.

“Did you ever learn the poem, ‘What shall I give Him poor as I am. If I were a shepherd I’d give Him a lamb. If I were a wise man, I’d do my part. But what shall I give Him? I’ll give Him my heart.’ That’s what God desires.

“You say, ‘How do I give Him my heart?’ Paul says, ‘With a heart man believes unto righteousness.’ Do you live that way on a daily basis, or does living for the Lord just become, ‘Well, that’s what we do.’ You ever tell your kids that? You know, the kids are growing up and they ask, ‘Uh, why we got to go to church?’ and you answer, ‘That’s what we do—that’s who we are.’

“I know with me, three or four times a day I have to stop and look myself in the eye of my heart and ask, ‘Ricky, what are you doing and why are you doing it?’ And if isn’t coming out of my heart, see, I need to make an adjustment. I might not need to change what I’m doing . . .

“Was it good for Israel to give the best they had? Yes. Was it good for them to give in great exuberance and quantity? Yes. Then why wasn’t that enough? Because it didn’t come out of a heart of faith. It didn’t come out of a heart that reflected His life—His justice, His mercy, His attitude.”

*****

Jordan continues, “God had an answer for Israel and I love Micah 6:5: ‘O my people, remember now what Balak king of Moab consulted, and what Balaam the son of Beor answered him from Shittim unto Gilgal; that ye may know the righteousness of the LORD.’

“When you read this, this just goes right over your head but for Israel it wouldn’t. Here’s the motivation for all of this stuff.

“From the time Balak tried to hire Balaam to curse Israel all the way to the end—all the way through those four prophecies—God showed Israel something. And if you go back and remember what God told them, you can know the righteousness of the Lord.

“If you want to see God’s righteousness in action—not in theology but in action—go back to Numbers 23 and this is one of the most comical, touching, invigorating passages in Scripture about the righteousness of God.

“Balak is trying to get Balaam to curse Israel; it ought not be a hard job. You’re at the end of the book of Numbers. They’ve been 40 years in the wilderness. What’s been happening to them? They’ve been dying like flies. Why? Well, because 38 years before that He brought them out of Egypt, redeemed them, and guided them up to Kadish-Barnea and said, ‘Go in,’ and they said, ‘We can’t!’

“They refused to go in when the spies came back and said, ‘Oh, they’re too big for us!’ And Caleb and Joshua said, ‘Well, we can get ’em!’ but they said, ‘No, we can’t!’ and the ‘no-we-can’ts’ won and God said, ‘Everybody 19 and younger can go in and all the rest of you—you buzzards are going to die and become worm food.’

“They wander out in that wilderness for 38 more years and become worm food because of their unbelief. So when Balaam is looking at Israel—getting up on this high place and looking back—all he sees is dry bones. Graves. All the way back to Egypt.

“And that’s the setting. Why does it seem so hard to think God would curse them? Looks like He has! So Balaam says, ‘All I can tell you, Balak, is what God tells me.’ As Numbers 23: 20-21 says, ‘Behold, I have received commandment to bless: and he hath blessed; and I cannot reverse it. He hath not beheld iniquity in Jacob, neither hath he seen perverseness in Israel: the LORD his God is with him, and the shout of a king is among them.”

“Think about what that verse is saying: ‘He hath not beheld iniquity . . . ’ Now that, Micah says, is the righteousness of God in action. I look at that and say, ‘Wait a minute! How can he look at Israel when they’re dying in the wilderness for 40 years and God say, ‘I haven’t seen perverseness in Israel and I haven’t seen iniquity in Jacob’?! How can He say that?!

“What that is—Balak, who worshipped Baal, hired Balaam. That’s the unholy trinity—Balak, Balaam and Baal. And what God is saying to Satan through Balaam is, ‘Israel belongs to me. They’re mine; keep your mitts off of them! They’re mine! I’ll do with them what I want to; you don’t have any say!’

“There’s a verse like that in Romans. Paul says, ‘If God be for us who can be against us. Who is he that condemneth. It’s God that justifies.’ If God said, ‘I hadn’t seen iniquity or perverseness in them,’ who is anyone to tell Him different? And what God tells Israel over there in Micah is, ‘Remember, I taught you way back in the beginning that you’re mine and when I justify you, that’s it!’

“ But they didn’t know why God could do that. But you do, don’t you? We come over to the book of Romans and God explains how He could do something they never understood. God set forth in His Son.

“Isn’t it amazing that God would look at that erring people and in His righteousness say, ‘I have not beheld iniquity in Jacob, neither seen perverseness in Israel’?!

“You’d have, wouldn’t you? But God didn’t. Romans 8 says, ‘What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us? He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?’

“That’s the answer to the full story and it’s because of that that we have this life in us and then the righteousness of the law—the justice, the mercy, the humility, that heart attitude that God desires for man to have—can live in us as we walk not after the flesh but after the Spirit.”