For Micah and Against Keller in Response to Redemer
Earlier this week, Colin Redemer argued in these pages that Generation Z should find a new life verse. Redemer—a Millennial like me—knows well how our generation obsessed over Micah 6:8: “Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your God.” No doubt we both heard numerous sermons on the text during the first two decades of this century; listened as dozens of friends quoted it during Bible studies, prayer requests, and heartful talks about discerning their “vocation”; and watched as those same friends cited the verse to exalt progressive social justice into Christian duty.
Find a better life verse, Redemer tells Gen Z—perhaps, Psalm 1:1-2 or Jeremiah 29:7. Something less abstract, more courageous, and more attuned to the signs of the time. “Micah 6:8 had its moment” but that “moment is over.” For “the work ahead calls more for steel than slogans.” It calls for “justice that flows from strength . . . and is anchored in the fear of the Lord.”
Amen! And that is exactly why I advise Gen Z to adopt Micah 6:8 as its life verse, just as my generation did. Except this time (unlike us), interpret the verse correctly. Micah’s prophecy, after all, was far from abstract or culturally accommodating in its original meaning. The verse appears at the end of a passage in which God condemns Israel for its sins. A human voice—the voice, we later find out, of “man” (’adam), the first father of humanity—asks what it can do to reconcile itself with God. Would the offering of a bull, or a libation of oil, or even the slaughter of a first-born son suffice? Micah himself answers the inquiring voice: “He hath shewed thee, O man (’adam), what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly (mishpat), and to love mercy, and to walk (leket) humbly with thy God?”
Micah tells the questioner that God has already revealed elsewhere what the nature of goodness is. And, as many commentators have noted, Micah clearly had a specific intertext: Deuteronomy 10:12-13. There, Moses relates words that the Lord spoke to him when he received the stone tablets at Sinai. “And now, Israel, what doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all his ways, and to love him, and to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, To keep the commandments of the Lord, and his statutes, which I command thee this day for thy good?”
The Micah passage adopts its basic features from Deuteronomy: the apostrophe to a corporate speaker (man/Israel), the “what … but to” syntax, a list of divinely revealed moral requirements, terms like “love,” “walk,” and “good.” But Micah also makes at least two major changes. First, the command is to “man,” not to Israel. The most particularistic event in the special history of Israel–the giving of the Mosaic law to God’s chosen people—has been replaced with a general command to all humanity, all descendants of Adam.
Second, Micah has replaced Deuteronomy’s repeated references to the laws of Moses in the plural (the “commandments” and “statutes” that God gave on that “day” to Moses) with a universalizing requirement to “do mishpat.” It was this alteration that confused the Millennials. Traditionally, Micah’s phrase has been rendered rather inelegantly into English as “do justly/justice.” Hence, for instance, Tim Keller’s bizarre claim in Generous Justice (p. 14) that the common Hebrew hendiadys mishpat wa-tsedaqah (“judgment and righteousness”) should be translated “social justice.” There is perhaps no purer example of evangelicalism’s early 2000s attempt to baptize social justice progressivism than Keller’s mistranslation. Yet even Keller admitted on the very next page of his book (p. 15) that mishpat “strictly” meant “the punishment of wrongdoing,” not social justice at all.
Etymologically, mishpat simply means a “judgment” or a “judicial ordinance” and derives from the standard Hebrew word for a judge (shaphat), as in the name of the seventh book of scripture. The Bible regularly uses mishpat, especially in the plural, as a rough synonym for torah. It was the Lord’s mishpatim that Moses set before Israel in the Covenant Code (Ex. 21:1), that Moses received on the plains of Moab (Num. 36:13), that are true, more desirous than gold, and righteous altogether (Ps. 19:9). Because many sections of the Mosaic Law seem to preserve legal decisions from actual or hypothetic cases, “the precedents” is a logical way to say “law.” Indeed, today, mishpat serves as the modern Hebrew word for “law,” with a beit mishpat (house of judgment) as a court and mishpat ivri (“Hebrew judgment”) as the standard phrase for the rabbinic legal system.
When Micah tells humanity to “do mishpat,” it is perverse to imagine that he is advising humans to get a job at some NGO dedicated to recycling or third-world microcredit. Doing mishpat fills the same role in Micah that serving the Lord and keeping his commandments did in Deuteronomy. God demands obedience. Moral rectitude, not only charitable deeds. If Israel must submit to the commandments handed down at Sinai, then likewise all humans must obey the natural law written on our hearts. The close connection between mishpat and humbling oneself to “walk” with God in Micah 6:8 also has a legal connotation, for halakha (literally “the walking”) is a normal term for Jewish law. As a life verse, Micah 6:8 shares much in common with Psalm 1:1-2 (one of Redemer’s recommendations). Both passages implicitly contrast the path of wickedness with walking with God by following his law.
Adopt Micah 6:8, then, Generation Z. But embrace it correctly, as a command that all humans—Christian and non-Christian alike—follow the moral law revealed in nature. Freed of its Kellerite gloss, the verse perfectly instructs this generation for this moment.
Since the creation of the world, the nature of divine goodness has been clearly seen, so men are without excuse. God has already revealed, O humanity, what is good and what the Lord demands from you—that you keep his law, that you love his covenant mercy, and that you humiliate yourself in order to walk with God.
Image: View of Mount Sinai, Edward Lear (1812-1888). Wikimedia Commons.
