Quote:
Originally Posted by A little brother
Your effort trying to refer to the bible to find the truth is appreciated. But I am afraid until the present day the same veil remains at your reading of the old covenant.
Please answer one simple question first:
Micah 6:8 He has declared to you, O man, what is good; And what does Jehovah require of you, But that you would execute justice and love mercy And walk humbly with your God?
From the plain text, who declared this message?
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Well I hope you can appreciate now the verse's relevance to the law and its insufficiency in relation to the gospel which Paul preached about GOD's righteousness.
Let's go back to your earlier interpretation of "He has declared to you":
Micah clearly stated "He has declared to you". Unless Micah was a liar, that message was from God.
The meaning of "He has declared to you" is "God has told you enough already, in the Law of Moses ". It is not a direct word from God, but the prophet pointing them to the Law. Just as Jesus pointed the Pharisees to the law. God did not give him revelation at this point about the coming Messiah and the future righteousness in Christ. He was pointing them to what he already knew - the law of Moses, no new revelation required really.
Alternatively at this point he might have communicated God's revelation about the future Messiah and coming righteousness from God (as the verses I gave previously state). But it seems that God did not give him this revelation for this part.
We can see that Micah does not use the words "The Lord saith" or "thus saith the Lord" which Prophets normally do if they are prophesying God's direct speaking. See how Jeremiah does it:
Jer 9:13 "
And the LORD saith, Because they have forsaken my law which I set before them, and have not obeyed my voice, neither walked therein;"
Clearly vs 13 is God speaking directly through the prophet.
Jeremiah 9:12 on the other hand is not in quotation marks, indicating it is the prophets own narrative:
Who is wise enough to understand this? Who has been instructed by the LORD and can explain it? Why has the land been ruined and laid waste like a desert that no one can cross?
Prophecies are typically a combination of the prophet's own narrative (inspired as they are, but possibly containing human concepts - prophets are fallible humans too) and God's direct speaking.
So I take your possible misinterpretation of Micah 6:8 as a possible failure to rightly divide the Word and discern the difference between the prophet's own words and God's direct speaking in the prophecy. Perhaps even a failure to recognize that there is a difference? You suggested that the footnote makes Micah a liar. But if God was communicating divine revelation in this verse does that not make "God a liar"(it would contradict all the other verses I quoted previously) ?
PS. A clearer example of the difference between a prophet's human speaking and God's speaking is in the scientific matters. Take this verse for example:
Isaiah 40:22 It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in
Isaiah's cosmology matches that of a semi-spherical dome (the words circle and tent in Hebrew describe as such). This matches the cosmology of the Egyptians which they would known at the time. (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_cosmology
for biblical cosmology, it explains it all). Moses was educated by the Egyptians, the most advanced civilization at the time, so he had an ancient Egyptian scientific worldview, the best he could get. Isaiah was probably schooled in the Egyptian sciences as well, I assume. Given that the verse does not say "thus saith the Lord", I can tell that this is Isaiah explaining God in terms of his ancient scientific worldview. The spiritual truth he is conveying is divinely inspired and true but his human view about what the earth looks like is incorrect.
The book of Job is more of a puzzle given that it contains God speaking to Job using ancient cosmology terms (e.g. that snow or hail comes from vaults above a hard sky-dome firmament - Job 38:22 (God said) - "Have you entered the storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail,"). This could be because God is explaining things in a way that Job and friends can understand (to explain where snow comes from would be too hard for them to grasp), or Job is not a prophecy as such but a play where the part of God is scripted in.