Pastor Tim continues our series, “the Weary World Rejoices,” turning to the promise of a king who cares for us in Micah 5:1-4.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The pastor emphasizes that Micah’s messianic promise comes within a context of judgment against corrupt leadership. How does understanding God’s judgment alongside His promises change the way we receive comfort during difficult seasons like the one we may be experiencing now?
The sermon uses the metaphor of unwrapping a gift with unexpected packaging. In what ways might we create our own “boxes” or expectations for who Jesus should be or what He should do—and how can recognizing those expectations help us better receive the unexpected gift of the Messiah?
The pastor contrasts two ways of misunderstanding the Messiah: believing we are unworthy of His care, and expecting Him to fix everything according to our timeline. Which error do you struggle with more, and how does the image of Jesus as a shepherd-king—rather than a distant or self-serving ruler—address that struggle?
How does understanding the Messiah as both a descendant of David and the one “from ancient of days” deepen our appreciation of who Jesus is, and how does the promise that His kingdom extends to “the entirety of the earth” affect our sense of His relevance to our own lives today?
The sermon suggests that the validity of God’s promises does not depend on our emotional response to them. What practical steps can we take this Advent season to cultivate trust in those promises and experience the real peace Jesus offers, even when circumstances feel far from joyful?
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
Well, good evening and welcome to Steadfast. I’m so glad to be with you again tonight as we continue our series, The Weary World Rejoices. Last week we began this series looking at some of the promises in Scripture and building up to the celebration of Jesus’ birth.
Tonight we’re going to turn to a very familiar passage of Scripture, one we hear every year, but I’m not sure we really spend very much time thinking about the meaning of, and that’s Micah chapter 5. So let’s go ahead and come before our God, ask Him to guide us as we dig into this passage, and then we’ll dig in. Let’s pray.
Father, thank You for this evening. Thank You for Your Word. Thank You for giving us the promises of Scripture, the ones that we see fulfilled in the first coming of Jesus, that God with us has dwelt on this earth. And thank You for the promises we know are still to come, that our Savior will return to this earth and restore all things. And thank You for the gift of Your love. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
So let’s go ahead and start with the most familiar part of Micah chapter 5, and that’s verse 2. If you take a look at Micah chapter 5, verse 2, it’s this very familiar Christmas passage.
Whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient of days.
Tim actually read this passage for us last night for our Advent candle lighting, and we’re used to hearing it in those sorts of contexts, or perhaps in a Christmas Eve service. And there’s all kinds of implications of this verse. However, this verse is in a much longer idea that’s being expressed by the prophet Micah. And I think we miss some of the impact of it if we don’t take that into account.
You see, Micah isn’t just giving a little prophecy so we know that when the Messiah comes, that Jesus is the Messiah. It does that. But he’s giving it in the context of a series of judgments against the people of God. You see, the people of God have become corrupt. They’re in a period of time under kings that aren’t those who want to follow the Lord, but who have done a fairly good job of running the country. People are becoming wealthy. They have some power. Things seem to be going pretty well. And so the people haven’t necessarily completely abandoned God, but they certainly have abandoned following him in the way he’s called them to. They favored what makes themselves happy. They favored what makes themselves rich or powerful over caring for each other and following God’s call to be humble and to seek after the Lord first amongst all things. They’ve lost the sense of what God truly desires.
That’s the context that Micah gives this prophecy. It’s not just a random promise. It’s a promise given in the midst of judgment. Because Micah wants them to know, yes, judgment is coming. The Lord is going to take them out of the land of Israel. They’re going to be hauled off to Babylon. That’s quite a judgment. But it isn’t the end of the story. They need to know that there is more to come. And so he offers this promise in the midst of the judgment.
Take a look at verse 3.
Micah goes on, They’re going to be given up for a time. They’re going to be taken away for a time. In chapter 4, Micah actually even explicitly says where they will be taken to. They’re going to be taken to Babylon. That seems unlikely at the time. Babylon isn’t even fully a power yet to be reckoned with. And yet he says that day will come and you will be taken there. But even before you’re taken, even before you face the full brunt of the Lord’s judgment for how you’ve abandoned him and you favored your own perceived happiness over following God’s call for you to do what he made you to do, even before all that happens, you need to know that there will be restoration. There will be hope.
We saw that last week as we saw that God gave a promise even to Adam and Eve right after they first sinned and sin came into the world. And we see that again here. God offers promises. He offers his assurance of his love even in the midst of our failures. That’s the context of this promise.
I think that’s relevant for us because I’d imagine many of us are approaching this Christmas season not necessarily feeling entirely celebratory. Tim, as he was lighting the candles last night, as he prayed for us, shared some of that uncertainty and that oddness that we feel as we go into a season where we’re being told to stay away from our loved ones. A season where we look back on a year where maybe you’ve been sick, maybe you’ve lost loved ones, maybe you’ve lost a job, or you have a small business and it’s uncertain what’s going to happen to it. There’s all kinds of different forms of uncertainty and we go into the Christmas season and we’re supposed to be celebrating and joyous. We may not actually feel that way.
Well, I think the first people that heard this promise that’s always part of that celebration weren’t feeling exactly joyous either if they actually were listening to what Micah said. We’re told elsewhere in Micah that people want him to quit preaching, to quit prophesying because they didn’t like what they were hearing. They weren’t necessarily feeling joyous. But even in the midst of that lack of joy, and certainly as they were carried off to Babylon and they really didn’t feel joy, they could look to the promise. And the fact that they didn’t feel an emotional excitement in that moment didn’t take away from the validity of it. In their darkest moments, they could look to that promise and know that God was promising to continue to work. That’s what he promises for us today too.
If that’s where you are right now, if you’re feeling like you’re in one of those dark seasons, if 2020 has not been at all what you expected and you’re not sure what 2021 holds, there’s that promise that the fact that things aren’t necessarily always going how we want, they aren’t going how we want right now, in no way at all invalidates that God is still working. God is still working.
This is then an opportunity in this season. Advent, this season before Christmas, is meant to be a season of preparation to set our hearts right before God. And I think more than ever we have that opportunity this year as we reflect on how things aren’t how we would necessarily have dreamt or hoped. We can stop and we can reset and we can think about what God is doing.
I learned early on in life that in my family you couldn’t necessarily judge a gift by its wrapping. You see, my family delights in trying to make gifts hard to figure out. I remember my grandpa, when he would have a present, he often liked to tie a string and have you follow the string. You had no idea where you were going or what was going to be at the other end of that string. My mom loves to take little notes and put them inside the package. And so you can have this giant package and you keep opening up layers and you finally get to a little bitty note that leads you to something. And the package was completely deceptive. You had no idea what was in it. And you could shake it and there were probably things in it that would throw you off the scent, as it were.
We love doing that to each other. It’s part of the fun that not only do we get to give gifts to each other, we get to make them confusing.
In a sense, we tend to judge gifts by what we think they are, what we’re expecting. But if you come to realize that sometimes the packaging and the bows and everything else don’t necessarily give away what the gift is, it allows us to look more deeply into what we’re actually receiving.
The problem with the Messiah in the time that Jesus came is that people were so sure of what that package was going to look like, or in the time of Micah they were so sure of what they wanted God to give them that they saw the box and it wasn’t the shape they thought would contain the gift they wanted. And they completely missed the Messiah. Not everyone. Plenty of people believed. And when Jesus came and walked on the earth, there were people all over that heard the message of the gospel and believed. The fact that we’re here is a testimony of that. But so many didn’t because they had that box and they forgot to keep opening up the layers and find the little note inside that God said, here’s a gift that’s more amazing than you can imagine.
God rejects the trimmings that we expect and he gives us something truly incredible. We see that as we turn back to that familiar verse 2.
Take a look at it once again.
But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, who are too little to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel, whose coming forth is from old, from ancient days.
The ignored little town of Bethlehem was going to be where the Messiah would come from. Now, Bethlehem had a very important past. King David, the king whose line was promised to go on for eternity, who anyone who was studying the promises of God knew would be the ancestor of the Messiah, had come from Bethlehem. So it wasn’t as if Bethlehem weren’t important at all. And yet in the years that followed as the king operated out of Jerusalem and the descendants of the king were born time after time in Jerusalem, people had their focus on the power and the authority and the wealth of Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the whole state and there was good reason for that. Not only was the king there, the temple was there. There was plenty of reason to pay attention to Jerusalem.
And yet Jerusalem would now become weak. We see that in verse 1.
The Lord says, “Now muster your troops, O daughter of troops; siege is laid against us. With a rod they strike the judge of Israel on the cheek.”
The king of Israel, the king of Judah, was going to be struck down. That’s what it means when it says the judge of the people is going to be struck. And there’s nothing more insulting in a culture such as Israelite culture of the time than to slap someone on the cheek. We see that in many cultures still today. So the king was going to be utterly humiliated. The power of Jerusalem was going to be completely shut down.
Micah says that’s going to happen. That’s coming. That judgment is coming. Because those kings from Jerusalem no longer follow the Lord faithfully. They look after themselves. They look after the things of the world. They seek alliances with countries that are clearly displeasing to God rather than trusting in the Lord to provide for them. They do all these things. And so Jerusalem no longer, in this sense, represents the promise. We’re going to reset.
In modern terminology, we often talk about, for example, in a television show with a reboot that takes the show, the story, back to the beginning. In some sense, God was going to reboot the monarchy. He wasn’t going to get rid of the line of David. But he was going to take a descendant of David, one who wasn’t anything like the failed kings. That one was going to be born in Bethlehem just like King David.
When that one came, he would represent a totally different kind of king, one that could genuinely restore. The one that didn’t fit that nice gift box. But if they’d just keep digging through the layers and find the note that would lead them to this true king, they’d find that the gift they were getting was far better than they could imagine.
It’s really interesting, though. And this is the part that they couldn’t have understood fully at the time. Not only was this king going to be born in David’s city where he was born, not only was this king going to be a descendant of David, but this king was also going to predate David.
If you look at this passage, the promise is not only that the king is going to be part of that promise, that long-ago covenant with David, but from the ancient times. And many commentators believe that’s actually referring to all eternity. That the promise isn’t just for one who continues that line of David. The promise is for one who was always meant to fulfill the salvation of God’s people.
You see, the promise of the Messiah doesn’t just go back to David. It goes back to that initial rescue from sin that God gave to Adam and Eve when they first sinned. That one would come who would crush the head of Satan.
The mystery is how one can be both a descendant of David and also the one that goes back to ancient times, back to prehistory. Of course, we have the advantage of hindsight. We can look back and say, well, the way that that happens is that Jesus is both the human descendant of David and also the one whose father is God. That Jesus is actually God. God the Son. The mystery of the Trinity.
But for the moment, Micah just leaves that sitting there to say, you can’t fully understand this. You haven’t completely unwrapped the package yet. But when you do, you’re going to unwrap something amazing. After judgment will come the fulfillment of what the world has been waiting for.
And yet so many people would miss that. They’d read that promise. They’d hear that God had promised a Messiah. And yet, even as they read that, even as they knew that this was a promise of the Messiah, they still were looking for the wrong kind of package.
Don’t we do that still? We see a celebrity and we look up to this celebrity. We do that in the church. We have celebrity pastors. We look up to them and then that person falls. And it’s been striking to me the last few weeks. There was a recent news story of a scandal with a celebrity pastor. And a lot of the people that weren’t followers of that pastor have been saying, there we go again. We’re following celebrity pastors. Isn’t that horrible?
What struck me, though, is that so many of the voices condemning that pastor and condemning the people that followed him have their own celebrity pastors. They might not think of them that way. They might not have the flashiness of that pastor, but we still have people that we set aside as somehow special. And as long as those people fit our mold of how we think things should be, we go ahead and elevate them as what really leadership should look like or what the church should look like or what we should look like.
And we start to build a box that doesn’t look very much like Jesus. We all have our different boxes. And I think that’s the thing. We all have those boxes. And scripture challenges us to peer inside and look at how we’re expecting the gift that God gives us to look and to ask, is that really what scripture promises? Because when we have an expectation and we’re so focused on that, we can miss something so much better, something that we need so much more.
If you’re from St. Louis or you’ve been to St. Louis, you can’t help but know about toasted ravioli, one of the world’s greatest inventions. Toasted ravioli is amazing. Regular ravioli can be quite good, but toasted ravioli is amazing. What makes it so good? It’s so crispy and you dip it in the marinara sauce and you have that wonderful fusion of the soft filling on the inside and the crispy outside. It’s just wonderful.
And it came out, as the story goes, unexpectedly. There’s some debate on exactly who invented toasted ravioli, but almost every story points back to a time when some chef in St. Louis on the hill accidentally dropped some ravioli into a fryer as opposed to water to boil it. And instead of just throwing away this thing and saying, “It’s not what I expected, it’s not what I wanted,” he decided to serve it and people were delighted and now we have this wonderful, delicious thing to eat.
Because that chef, thankfully, was willing to see something that was unexpected and enjoy it.
Now, it’s so much better with God’s plan because, like toasted ravioli, Jesus isn’t what we expect him to be. Jesus isn’t how we think in worldly terms. But God wasn’t surprised.
As I mentioned in verse 2, we see this promise, this amazing promise, I’ve underlined it here, “whose coming forth,” look at the end of this verse, “whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient of days.” It’s important for us to realize that this is God working intentionally. God wasn’t surprised at how he would bring the Messiah into the world.
When Jesus came to the earth, the Father didn’t look down and look at the Son and say, “Well, you’re not doing what I thought you would do.” No, God knew exactly what the Messiah would look like and what he would do and what we really needed, what salvation would really look like.
It was us who, who, when being offered toasted ravioli, we only think, that’s not what I expected. But God gives us a gift that’s so much better.
And we continue to see that as we go into the end of verse 3 and into verse 4. Take a look.
Micah says, “And he shall stand and shepherd his flock in the strength of the Lord,” and so on.
Jesus is going to be a great king, far greater than they imagined. Israel was looking for a Messiah who would come and restore what they had. Maybe go back to the grandeur of King David, where Israel was a prosperous kingdom that other kingdoms looked to and admired. But the prophecy doesn’t stop at that. They were setting their eyes too low. They were looking for something too simple.
No, God says that the Messiah is one who brings a kingdom that covers the entirety of the earth. How much more wonderful is that? There’s not going to just be a great, itty-bitty little kingdom. No, the Messiah’s reign covers the universe.
All of us sitting here, unless someone’s tuning in from Israel tonight, are sitting outside of the boundaries of David’s kingdom. So if God had merely restored what David had, we’d all be sitting outside of it. But that was not the limit of what God promised.
The people, again, were looking at that box and they were saying, it doesn’t fit the shape that I thought the Messiah would come in. And they were missing that inside was a note that said, no, the Messiah can’t fit in a box. The Messiah’s work, his mighty deeds, his greatness are far too big for the box that you’re expecting.
And on top of that, he wouldn’t be like a normal great king. Because a normal great king, even the greatest of kings, still is focused on bringing power and glory to himself, to shoring up his authority and making sure his enemies don’t get in his way.
But what will Jesus do? Jesus will shepherd his people. He will bring back, it says, his brothers, restore them, the very ones who had fallen short, who weren’t necessarily doing what God wanted them to do. I shouldn’t even say not necessarily, they weren’t doing it, period.
He was going to restore them and allow them to be in his kingdom. He was going to then care for his people, not focus on self-serving authority like a normal earthly king, but no, he was going to shepherd them as his flock. He was going to feed them and provide for their needs.
The fullness of what David says about the Lord being his shepherd, that is what we would see in the Messiah. That’s what we do see in Jesus. That restoration, that our deepest needs, the answer to our fears, would be answered in Jesus.
What does his care give us? It’s what we desperately need every single day. Take a look at verse 5 at the very beginning. It says, “And he shall be their peace.”
If you’re not feeling peace right now, and many of us probably aren’t, not fully at least, if you’re feeling unsettled, if you’re feeling fearful, what is the promise of the Messiah for you? The promise is that as you focus more and more on his promises, as I focus more and more on his promises and who he truly is, I recognize that he provides true and ultimate peace for me.
Not that everything is right in the moment. That’s trying to build that little box because I just want a Messiah that comes in and makes things right right now for everything I feel that is wrong. But he provides eternal peace. He’s an eternal shepherd for me. He’s an eternal shepherd for you.
I don’t always see this. I get so focused on things that worry me and trouble me that the last thing I’m thinking about, unfortunately at times, is how Jesus is going to bring peace to everything that unsettles me. Because he isn’t doing it right now in my time and my way. And I’d imagine you felt the same thing. But we’re promised something more.
Let’s ask this question of ourselves tonight. Where am I missing the real Messiah? The one who has actually come and will come again?
Where am I thinking he’s a normal king who has no interest in me because I don’t measure up and I think I have to take care of things myself because if Jesus is a great king, he’s never going to want to bother with me?
Or where am I thinking that what the promise of the Messiah means is that he’s going to make everything exactly how I want it right now and that everything will go smoothly for me if I’m just faithful enough?
We hear these promises. They’re distorting scripture that if I’m just faithful enough, I’ll have everything I want right now in this moment. But he doesn’t promise that. He promises eternal fulfillment.
And in either case, where I’m reshaping the Messiah, I’m missing out on part of what Jesus has done to give me peace. If I’m thinking I’m unworthy, I’m not actually enjoying the peace he offers, the protection, the comfort of his love. And if I’m thinking that the sign of the Messiah is that everything is going to be right right now, again, I’m falling out of that peace because I’m probably either thinking, well, why isn’t God doing what I think he should do? Or I’m thinking, well, really somehow I go right back to that first one. I must not be worthy of God’s love.
The gift of Jesus is the best Christmas present we could ever receive, but it’s not because he’s everything that we thought we wanted. It’s because he wants us. He loves us. That’s the promise of the king who’s a shepherd king, that he wants his flock to be safe and cared for. And he does that care himself because he’s not too high and lofty to care about each and every one of us, including you as you sit there tonight, including me as I sit here tonight.
That’s the promise. That’s the wonder. That’s what we find when we unwrap that box and we take the time to dig through it or we start pulling that string and we go all the way to the end of it. What do we find? We find a promise that far exceeds our expectations but doesn’t fit the shape of our expectations because Jesus, we find at the end of that string, is there pulling us closer and closer to him because he loves us.
That is what we celebrate at Christmas. Would you join me in prayer?
Father, thank you for the goodness of your love, that you love us, that you sent your son to live and suffer and die and triumph over death for us because of that love, that he has offered that love to us, that your spirit calls us to yourself as that promise in Micah said, that you would restore us, that we would be those who are among our Savior’s brothers, adopted into the family of God.
What an amazing thing, Lord, that you do. So much better than what we expect and yet we get so focused and fixated on what we expect that we miss the wonder of what you’re doing.
As we go through this Christmas season, Lord, would you help us to see the real Messiah, to see the real fulfillment of your promises so that we go through this season with your real peace. I pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
We’re going to continue this series next week, thinking about how a weary world rejoices in the goodness of who our God is. And I hope you’ll join me at 7 p.m. on Monday night. It’s going to be a special time as we think about the joy that we celebrate as those who follow Jesus.
I think it’s going to be really amazing because we’re going to go and think about the shepherds. And the shepherds are a great picture of some of the things we’ve been talking about tonight. People who are outcasts of society, who get to celebrate as the angels declare what God has done.
So I hope to see you there for that. Also, we’re going to be sharing all kinds of other wonderful things this Christmas season. We have a Christmas Eve service planned. We have a devotional guide that we’ll share on Christmas Day. So please do visit littlehills.church.com and see all the wonderful things that are coming up.
I’d ask that you’d help us to share these things, to get the word out more than ever during the Christmas season. Would you please give these videos a like and a share? By helping us to spread the word and to share about the God who is so much better than what we expect, you can be giving hope and God’s peace to someone this Christmas season. And what better thing can you give somebody?
If there’s any way I can be praying for you this week, if you’re struggling and not feeling that peace, if you need to be reminded of God’s hope, if you’re confused and struggling with something, shoot me an email. I’d love to hear from you. You can use the email address on screen. Something that you’d like to share with the rest of those watching, a prayer request, feel free to leave it in the comments. It’d be wonderful to do that as well.
I hope you have a wonderful and blessed week, and I look forward to seeing you again next week and throughout the Christmas season. Have a wonderful evening.