In this final episode, I want to add one important qualification to what's been said in this podcast about God's covenant faithfulness. The teaching of the New Testament is that God initiated a new covenant in Jesus. Knowing the role of covenant faithfulness in books like Micah helps deepen our understanding and appreciation of this important fact!

Our memories of the past shape how we see the present and the future. Because of this, we are all in a sense "time-travelers." This kind of imagination is crucial to hope, and it's the note on which the book ends: the prophet's hope for the future is grounded in his memory of God's past faithfulness.

No one knows for certain the origin of the phrase "to put the kibosh on" something. But my own theory is that it comes to us from Yiddish, and is related to a Hebrew word that Micah uses to describe what a gracious God does to the guilt we incur from our sin.

The book of Micah ends with a beautiful and worshipful prayer from the prophet, one in which the people hopefully joined. The prayer seems to echo words spoken by God to Moses long ago; even if God punishes sin, he also abounds in mercy and forgiveness.

Much of what Micah says presupposes that in their greed and wickedness, the people of Judah and Jerusalem have ceased to fear God as they should. By contrast, in chapter 7, the prophet envisions other nations coming to fear God, and by extension, his people. But we have to be careful here: the assumption is that the people have repented, and have returned to a proper fear of God themselves.

We've seen Micah use the metaphor of shepherd and sheep to describe God's relationship as king to his people. This is renewed in chapter 7, in a beautiful and hopeful picture of God's people returning to the lush pasturelands of their past...

Back in chapter 4, we heard Micah's prediction of a blessed future for Jerusalem. Something similar is said in chapter 7. Destruction will not be the end of the story...

What is hope? In one well-known description, a researcher describes it as "the will and the ways": a hopeful person is motivated to make something happen and can see a way to do it. Christian psychologist Everett Worthington calls these "willpower" and "waypower," and adds a third element: waitpower. Even if we possess the other two, can we truly have hope if we can't wait patiently for change to happen?

We tend to think of tragedies and comedies as sad and funny respectively. And they often are. But in a classical sense, what makes a story a comedy is that there is a reversal of fortune, where a bad situation turns around. And in the final chapter of Micah, even with all the doom and gloom, the prophet still looks for an ultimate reversal of fortune for God's people.

Is hope possible when the situation is so dire, when the entire nation of Judah has collapsed morally? Despite the dreary portrait Micah paints, he still watches and waits for vindication from God.