Kaleidoscope

Micah
Assyria has

Babylon is swelling but no where near the next power

Reveal Answer

has fallen

Return from Exile
Babylon coming
Birth of the King
Restoration of Zion

Micah reports it all at the

time

Train our eyes to see the world with

Trust that the

Reveal Answer

given is the

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enacted

Lame return home and form a great nation
Women that the world wants to overtake and defile gives birth to a King
Bethlehem, a small village in an inconsequential town becomes the epicenter of God’s reign
He will be your

Twist the Kalediscope together to see two things:

1). God will rescue the broken-down, rejected, lame

Upside down - Power, prestige
Small country, minor town
Child, not an established reality

BUT:

He will be their Shalom
The nations will rage, they’ll push
Chaos will flail about
But the King will restore and subdue
Until Shalom is established on the whole earth

Along the way, God chooses the

; not the have-it-together ones
Do you believe that?
Are you coming to God trying to hide your wobbly gait?
Or do you see God’s love for you?
Do

Reveal Answer

him and him alone to make you stable? To give you a home?

2). Pain as in Childbirth

Advent demands that we see the world

Default setting is power, violence, self over others
The world we create when we live like that brings suffering, oppression, and desolation

In the West, our answer is to separate the world into Victim and Villan
Oppressor and oppressed
Some say, take the power from the oppressor and give it to the oppressed
They say, whatever the victim does is vindicated, because they deserve to topple those who harmed them

But this frame is foolish - only because it negates human

Throughout world history, yesterday’s oppressed are today’s oppressor

Micah’s prophecy comes back into the biblical story with the wise men
They see the star, go to Judea
Visit Herod
Herod’s position is facinating
200 years before Herod
Jews were oppressed; they revolted and won
Hanakah!
Over time, the leaders had to compromise
It was the great-great granddaughter that Herod married that allowed him to take the title of king
Romans were actually in charge; he wasn’t even really king

When the wise men visit, he inquires about the location of this new king
The wise men quote this passage - Micah’s prophecy - and they say Bethlehem
he doesn’t rejoice - he turns to

This is terrible and unsurprising
This is how humans act
If you and I think otherwise, we are fools.
Without God’s intervention, you and I would do the

Micah proclaims another way
Lame people are formed into a remnant
Out of hardship, God will give birth to something new

destroyed
Remember Nebby’s dream
Succession of nations
Tiny rock cut not by human hands
Statue destroyed by the smallest of stones

This is God’s way

Not hardship for hardship’s sake
Delight in our suffering
Not revenge

God is giving birth to something new
Child - King
Restoration

Seerveld:

Because Bethlehem is God’s humiliation, it is the historical earnest of our glorification, we who believe in Jesus as the Christ, who scandalously say kurios to the male child born in the labour pain of Mary. This is the prophecy of Micah: Bethlehem is the turning point, the beginning of the captive church’s being ransomed; we shall soon no longer be bullied and raped by the cut-throat world, but we shall be raised up to frighten the world like a huge animal. Christ’s birth in little Bethlehem is the small stone that gave Nebuchadnezzar a nightmare, the little stone uncut by human hand that rolled down into the huge gold-silver-brass-iron-and-clay image of the nations and broke it to bits, and which then itself grew into a huge mountain filling up the whole earth (Daniel 2). That is the biblical Christmas message: a little living stone against a huge metal image. —Calvin Seerveld, Take Hold of God and Pull

Today, let’s live in light of Micah’s vision
Hope in Christ’s coming again

Love

in the midst of our hardship
Us lame and wobbly ones are the very people God is gathering
Laugh and rejoice
Hardship is actually birthpains - God is doing something new

Jesus is our shalom, our peace
Let us move out into the world founded only upon this truth
Not our performance, our resume, our so-called virtue

Instead, let us look again to Bethlehem
Christ has arrived, the world is being renewed
He will come again in glory and he will be our peace.