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It is written:
Micah 7:15-As in the days when you came out of the land of Egypt, I will show them wonders.”
Tucked away in the Book of Micah is a prophecy about the ending of the miraculous gifts. While the Apostle Paul much later deals with this especially (1 Corinthians 13:8-13), what the Prophet declares should be given consideration. The Prophet deals several times throughout his Book with themes relating to the First and the Second Coming of Christ, as well as events that would take place during the Christian Age. He writes extensively about the First Coming of Jesus. For example, the Messiah is referred to as the One Who would tear down walls and barriers:
Micah 2:12-13-I will surely assemble all of you, O Jacob, I will surely gather the remnant of Israel; I will put them together like sheep of the fold, Like a flock in the midst of their pasture; They shall make a loud noise because of so many people. 13 The one who breaks open will come up before them; They will break out, Pass through the gate, And go out by it; Their king will pass before them, With the LORD at their head.”
Look at how this is rendered in the ERV:
Micah 2:12-13 (ERV)-Yes, people of Jacob, I will bring all of you together. I will bring together all those in Israel who are still living. I will put them together like sheep in the sheep pen, like a flock in its pasture. Then the place will be filled with the noise of many people. 13 The “One Who Breaks Through Walls” will push through and walk to the front of his people. They will break through the gates and leave that city. They will leave with their king marching before them— with the LORD at the front of his people.
Christ is the One Who tears down the walls. He is the One Who tears down our wall of separation between us and God: the wall of sin (Isaiah 59:1-2). By the blood of His cross, He is able to bring us back to God (Colossians 1:16-20). He is also able to tear down the walls between human beings: whether the walls of gender (Joel 2:28-32), of race (Acts 10:34-35), or of personal offense (Romans 12:17-21). Notice also that this passage identifies the messiah as being Divine: “the LORD at their head.”
Later, Christis called the great Lawgiver:
Micah 4:1-3-Now it shall come to pass in the latter days That the mountain of the LORD’s house Shall be established on the top of the mountains, And shall be exalted above the hills; And peoples shall flow to it. 2 Many nations shall come and say, “Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, To the house of the God of Jacob; He will teach us His ways, And we shall walk in His paths.” For out of Zion the law shall go forth, And the word of the LORD from Jerusalem. 3 He shall judge between many peoples, And rebuke strong nations afar off; They shall beat their swords into plowshares, And their spears into pruning hooks; Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, Neither shall they learn war anymore.
This echoes what the Lord had promised through Isaiah the Prophet (Isaiah 2:1-4), and is a prophecy of the establishment of the house of the Lord, which is the church of Christ (cf. 1 Timothy 3:14-15). This was established in Jerusalem as God (cf. Acts 2:1-4), and from there the Word of the Lord went forth to the Jews and then to all of the nations (Acts 1:8). After this, we read of the Lord’s birth in Bethlehem:
Micah 5:1-3-But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, Though you are little among the thousands of Judah, Yet out of you shall come forth to Me The One to be Ruler in Israel, Whose goings forth are from of old, From everlasting.” 3 Therefore He shall give them up, Until the time that she who is in labor has given birth; Then the remnant of His brethren Shall return to the children of Israel.
In the Old Testament, two cities are identified as Bethlehem. One is Bethlehem in the region of Zebulun:
Joshua 19:15-Included were Kattath, Nahallal, Shimron, Idalah, and Bethlehem: twelve cities with their villages.
The other is Bethlehem Ephrathah, which was located south of Jerusalem. Notice that here we are told the Messiah would be born, and again we see hints of His Divinity: Hs goings forth are “from of old, from everlasting.” This is a clear declaration of His Deity (cf. Psalm 90:1-2). He is then identified as the Shepherd :
Micah 5:4-And He shall stand and feed His flock In the strength of the LORD, In the majesty of the name of the LORD His God; And they shall abide, For now He shall be great To the ends of the earth;
Here, the Bible looks to the fame of Christ, even discussing how He would become known “to the ends of the Earth.” Here is a clear reference to the Christian Age, as is the following statement:
Micah 5:5-And this One shall be peace. When the Assyrian comes into our land, And when he treads in our palaces, Then we will raise against him Seven shepherds and eight princely men.
The Bible here tells us about the fame of the Messiah, when “the Assyrian” comes into the land. Several ancient sources identity “the Assyrian” as the person Christians know as “antichrist.” Others believe it is a reference to all of the enemies of God during the Christian Age. Regardless, it is clearly after the birth of the Messiah, and at a time when the Jewish people would be in captivity (cf. Micah 5:7-8). This would seem to be indicate a timeframe after 70 A.D. since that is when the Jewish people went into captivity to the Gentile nations, until they became a nation again on May 14, 1948.
Now in Micah, the Prophet is looking forward in hope to the day when the Messiah will be born into the world. He will bring salvation.
Micah 7:19-He will again have compassion on us, And will subdue our iniquities. You will cast all our sins Into the depths of the sea.
The reference here to “the depths of the sea” is a prophecy about baptism. The Jewish people practiced baptism long before the time of Christ, and one place where they practiced this was in a place called “the Sea.” One author has pointed out:
“The Sea and Baptism There was also something called the Great Sea (1 Kgs 7: 23). It was made of bronze. The Great Sea was tremendously large; some seven feet high and fifteen feet in diameter, holding about 10,000 gallons of water and weighing between 25-30 tons when empty. As Beale notes, “Priests would have had to climb a ladder to wash in it.” (Beale 2004b: 34, n. 11). There were also ten additional washing basins (1 Kgs 7: 38) added to the temple for various washings. All of the lavers were surrounded by animal figures, further illustrating the earthly theme of this part of the temple. These washings (especially in the Great Sea) were later called by the Jews “mikvehs.” A mikveh is a ritual bath in a pool of fresh water. It is necessarily an immersion.[ 78] These baths have been practiced since before the times of Christ, and they are still practiced today. Josephus refers to his master Banus (an Essene) as ritually “bathing himself in cold water frequently by night and by day.” (Josephus, Vita §2). Jews refer to the baths of the priest into temple ministry (2 Chron 4: 6) or tabernacle ministry (Ex 29: 4) as mikvehs.[ 79] The ceremonial idea comes from Lev 15: 13, “When the one with a discharge is cleansed of his discharge, then he shall count for himself seven days for his cleansing, and wash his clothes. And he shall bathe his body in fresh water and shall be clean.” Fresh water could come from an ocean, a river, rain, snow, or a place created to hold any such fresh water. Solomon had gigantic aqueducts and cisterns of water running right up to the temple so that all of the water could be fresh water, because this is what the law demanded. The Letter of Aristeas (2nd Century B.C.) apparently is an eye-witness report about this as it continued in the second temple, The whole foundation was decked with (precious) stones and had slopes leading to the appropriate places for carrying the water which is (needed) for the cleansing of the blood from the sacrifices… There is an uninterrupted supply not only of water, just as if there were a plentiful spring rising naturally from within, but also of indescribably wonderful underground reservoirs, which within a radius of five stades from the foundation of the Temple revealed innumerable channels for each of them, the streams joining together on each side. (LetAris 88-90) The origin of mikveh is primordial. Gen 1: 10 describes the gathering of the waters away from dry land. The word “gathering” is mikveh. This is salient because the previous verse also talks about a “gathering,” but it uses a different word (qavah). In Ex 7: 19 and Isa 22: 11, mikveh is used for a reservoir, which is a collection of fresh water. A curious play on mikveh occurs in Jer 17: 13 where the word is translated “hope.” “O Lord, the hope [mikveh] of Israel, all who forsake You will be put to shame. Those who turn away on earth will be written down, because they have forsaken the fountain of living water, even the Lord.” Our Mikveh is the “Fountain of Living Water.” This, of course, is fulfilled in Christ who gives us living water to drink (John 4: 10).[ 80] Jews who practice mikvahs recognize that the equivalent word in Greek and English is baptism. If true, then the immersion practice of baptism has Jewish and OT roots beginning right here in the Temple. If true, then we also have new evidence that original creation was a baptism.” (Douglas Van Dorn, Waters of Creation: A Biblical-Theological Study of Baptism, 51-52 (Kindle Edition): Erie, CO: Waters Of Creation Publishing)
Speaking of the relevance of this with the passage in Micah, another author observes:
“Often synagogues were constructed near bodies of water. Josephus (Ant. 14: 258) speaks of a custom of Hellenistic Jewish communities “who make their places of worship near the sea.” Paul refers to prayer meetings held by a river where “prayer was wont (usually) to be made” (Acts 16: 13, KJV). Perhaps the same idea motivated the institution of the Tashlikh ceremony: Tashlikh ceremony on Rosh Ha-Shanah also lay beyond this custom although the site may have been chosen to obviate the need for a mikveh. On the first day of Rosh Hashanah, Jews traditionally proceed to a body of running water, preferably one containing fish, and symbolically cast off their sins. The Tashlich ceremony includes reading the source passage for the practice, the last verses from the prophet Micah (7: 19, Tanakh), “He will take us back in love; He will cover up our iniquities. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.” 13”. (Dr. Barry Fike, Mikveh: Jewish Ritual Immersion and Christian Baptism, 16-17 (Kindle Edition): Trilogy Christian Publishers)
Micah the Prophet, acknowledging his own sin, now points to the coming Messiah who will be the ultimate Savior!
Micah 7:9-I will bear the indignation of the LORD, Because I have sinned against Him, Until He pleads my case And executes justice for me. He will bring me forth to the light; I will see His righteousness.
It is within this context of the Messiah’s coming to save mankind from sin that the Prophet declares that the Lord will show wonders (miracles) to His people, as He did when He brought them out of the land of Egypt. The Lord miraculously delivered His people for forty years after He lead them out of Egypt, till the time He brought them into the land of Canaan. As such, it seems that the Prophet here declares that from the time the Messiah began His work of saving mankind in His death, there would be a period of some forty years during which the Lord would work primarily through the miraculous gifts. This makes sense also when we remember that many scholars believe that the New Testament had finished being written (perhaps with the exception of the Book of Revelation) by 70 A.D., some forty years after Jesus’ death at Calvary.
“Some readers of this book may remember the excitement in 1976 when John A.T. Robinson published his mould-breaking Redating the New Testament. Here was an arch-liberal theologian, labelled by some as the heretic Bishop of Woolwich, allegedly a proponent of the fashionable ‘God is dead’ tendency, who was suddenly stating, in a well-documented monograph, that every single New Testament text was written before the destruction of the Temple in AD 70. Overnight, he became a traitor to the ‘liberal’ cause and the new hero of the ‘conservatives’. And yet he was and remained the same John A.T. Robinson. He had merely discovered that sober textual scholarship must not be hidden under the bushel of ideological preconception. Take also the prototype of German liberal theology at the turn of the twentieth century, Adolf von Harnack. As a textual historian, he remained a classical scholar to the bone. When he realized that he and his colleagues had placed the Acts of the Apostles much too late in the first century, he corrected his error publicly and stated, in a carefully argued study, that Acts was obviously written before the deaths of James, Peter and Paul–in other words, before AD 62/ 64. This meant that Luke’s Gospel was written earlier still, perhaps as early as the late fifties, and that for those who propose the chronological sequence Mark-Matthew-Luke-Acts, Matthew’s and Mark’s Gospels must have been written in the fifties of the first century, if not earlier. This was (and is) sensational or provocative only to those who refused to envisage an early Christian community that did the obvious thing and wrote about Jesus, spreading the written message as well as preaching it by word of mouth. In fact, many professional historians have now begun to turn the tables. For many of them, dating the Gospels in the fifties or sixties of the first century is not early at all but still too late. One would have to explain why it took the first Christians twenty, thirty or even up to forty years to produce the earliest written record about Jesus. In other words, dates around the fifties of the first century are the latest conceivable ‘middle ground’. John’s Gospel, often presented as the odd one out and at best seen as a latecomer, has also been rescued from the dumping ground of second and third-generation datings. Again, it was John A.T. Robinson who set the tone when he advocated a publication date in the late sixties and argued his case persuasively in The Priority of John in 1986. Continental scholars like Klaus Berger of Heidelberg University have taken up his baton…Paul’s letters in particular are meant to correct errors and to put local communities back on the right track. In one of his letters, Paul explicitly asks for his teaching to be passed on to others and to make sure that they read what he had written elsewhere (Colossians 4: 15–16). Written records were needed, and there are scholars today who are convinced that at least one Gospel, Mark’s, existed when Paul wrote his letters, and that another one, Luke’s, may have been known to him in his later years. Indeed, it looks as though Paul assumes his readers knew the Gospel accounts, so that he did not have to refer to the life, public sermons and miracles of Jesus to any great extent. In one instance, it looks as though his preaching was even checked against written records. In Berea, the Jewish community listened to him and ‘examined the scriptures every day to see if these things were so’ (Acts 17: 11)….And if we abandon the implausibly late dates commonly suggested for the publication of the Gospels and accept the date of AD 40 suggested for Mark’s Gospel by the Jewish classical philologist Guenther Zuntz, or the mid to late forties preferred by other philologists and historians, we can see how soon this Jewish messianic document could have reached synagogal libraries throughout the Roman empire. It looks as though it even reached the library of the orthodox messianic movement of the Essenes at Qumran, where, according to a group of Jewish and non-Jewish scholars, a fragment of Mark’s Gospel was found in Cave Seven. The people who collected these writings did it for a purpose. They wanted to read, study, compare and make up their own minds about the ways of God and his Messiah with his people.” (Carsten Peter Thiede, Jesus? Man Or Myth? 85-105, 378-408 (Kindle Edition); Oxford, England; Lion Books)
We may add Micah 7:15 to the list of Scriptures which indicate that the miraculous gifts of the church was limited and has long since passed.
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with you all. Amen.