No More War

My daughter who lives now in Toronto in Ontario, Canada misses the mountains. Though she was born in the flatland of Nebraska, she lived from age 5 through college here in the Pacific Northwest, surrounded on the west by the Coast Range to the north by the Coburg Hills and to the east by the Cascades. Even while a Nebraska toddler she was driven to mountains all over the west and was taught to hike up them and appreciate their beauty. Now after six years in Toronto she still moans over Skype to me, “Daddy, it’s all so flat!”

Not everyone shares that desire to see and ascend the geographical heights. My wife would much rather take a trip to the coast than to the mountains. But Scripture talks about one mountain to which everyone will want to go, the “mountain of the Lord’s house,” in the first verse of Micah 4:1-5. The prophet is envisioning the day when the destruction of Jerusalem predicted at the end of the previous chapter will be repaired and the temple height will be the desire and destination not only of Israel but of all people. They will all be saying as in verse 2, “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord.”

The rest of verse 2 reveals that the point of going up God’s mountain is to be instructed by God’s Word. That Word manifests hugely in verse 3 by exercising perfect judgment between peoples and nations so that war is done away with. This verse contains the most well-known words in Micah (also appearing in Isaiah 2:2-4) which are also some of the most well-known phrases in the Bible as a whole, the promise that swords will be beaten into plowshares and that war will be learned no longer.

Like the way the sight of a high mountain captures the attention and imagination of those who see it, Micah’s (and Isaiah’s) vision of peace has captured the imagination of people longing for relief from war down through the ages. It spoke to ancient Israel beset by enemies and it spoke to African-American slaves in the 19th century. The spiritual “Down by the Riverside,” has the chorus, “Ain’t gonna study war no more, no more.” It still speaks to us as we consider all the wars in which our nation has been involved and still is involved. We long to climb a mountain and learn peace.

Micah adds to the negative image of the cessation of war shared with Isaiah a positive image of a life of peace in verse 4, “they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.” The reign of God’s peace implies a place to live for every person, a place where they find both what they need (the provision of the vines and fruit trees) and safety from enemies. It’s another way of picturing God’s provision for His flock.

Verse 5 is a source of debate for scholars, regarding its fit into the flow of Micah’s message. One school sees Micah 4 and 5 as a long dialogue between Micah and his opponents. So verse 5 is read as opposition to the “universalism” of verse 2 which has all nations coming to learn the ways of the Lord. Verse 5 then is the narrow, “nativist” reply of those would see only Judah enjoying the Lord’s instruction and blessing.

Better, I think, is to read verse 5 as a recognition that verses 1-4 are about an incomplete promise from God. That peace and welcome and inclusion of all people has begun in Christ, but is still frustrated by the fact that the peoples of the earth stubbornly cling to and walk in the ways of other gods, whether those are false spiritual entities or the idols of money and power. Read that way, verse 5 is a commitment to walk in that way of peace which God teaches and which God will bring to completion, no matter what others are doing at present.