1 I said, “Listen, you leaders of Israel, you are supposed to know right from wrong, 2 but you are the very ones who hate good and love evil. You skin my people alive and tear the flesh from their bones. 3 Yes, you eat my people’s flesh, strip off their skin,  and break their bones. You chop them up like meat for the cooking pot. 4 Then you beg the Lord for help in times of trouble!  Do you really expect him to answer? After all the evil you have done, he won’t even look at you!”

5 This is what the Lord says: “You false prophets are leading my people astray. You promise peace for those who give you food, but you declare war on those who refuse to feed you. 6 Now the night will close around you, cutting off all your visions. Darkness will cover you, putting an end to your predictions. The sun will set for you prophets, and your day will come to an end. 7 Then you seers will be put to shame,  and you fortune-tellers will be disgraced. And you will cover your faces because there is no answer from God.” Micah 3 vs 1-7 New Living Translation.

If there was anyone who ought to have ‘heard God speaking’ to their hearts, it was surely those who were priests and prophets of old who people looked to for leadership and guidance. But what does Micah say in verses 4, 6 & 7 was going to happen to those people in his day?

God was not going to let them hear from Him at all. Why was that? Well, verses 1-3 describe in figurative words how all the leaders were behaving. They were like cannibals! (Remember, Micah is using graphic pictures here to try and make them see how God saw their actions.) Worse still, those who were prophets were totally corrupt. See verse 5 again. They spoke ‘good words from God’ to anyone who paid them well to hear good news. But if you could not pay much then they would give you a bad message from God! There are surely some lessons for our generation as well.

While we don’t hear God speaking in an audible way, Christians believe God ‘speaks’ to us through His word, through messages we hear at a faithful Church, and even through Christian friends. But we mustn’t expect God to speak to us if we’re not living the way He calls us to live. Look at verse 4 again.

But there is a ray of hope. In Isaiah 30 we discover that if people truly repent of their sinning and turn from wrong, then God will make His voice known again. In vs 21 he says: “Your own ears will hear him; right behind you a voice will say, ‘This is the way you should go, whether to the right or to the left.’”

The other lesson is that we must be careful which ‘ministers’ or ‘preachers’ we listen to. Is their message faithful to God’s word (even if makes us uncomfortable) or do they preach and say what they know we would rather hear so we feel good about ourselves? May we be quick to put aside anything that would keep God from being on speaking terms with us.