Keep Quiet
No wonder they told Micah to shut up. Keeping things quiet is a familiar tool for people in power — how else to maintain control? Without a Freedom of Information Act (perhaps even with one) it is not difficult to ensure that anything awkward is carefully swept under the carpet and all societies engage in it to some extent. Politicians and business people lining their own pockets at the expenses of their neighbours. Creative accounting is not unknown in many commercial enterprises and most families have skeletons in the cupboard. What Micah is doing is whistleblowing, but it is seen by some as treachery. Scaremongering perhaps. Even helping the enemy.
The fall-out and the damage to the community is evident everywhere yet people like Micah are condemned as troublemakers and warmongers though they have ‘no thought of war’ (v 8). Family life is being destroyed (v 9). Those in authority seem not to hear and the rest only hear what they want to hear, which for Micah spells disaster for everybody.
Realist that he is, Micah avoids the issues head-on and tries instead to re-set the agenda with a different question. Shattered by a lack of response to all his previous utterances and the moral insensitivity of those in positions of responsibility and their beneficiaries, who can sleep in their beds when women and children and all the weaker members of society are allowed to go to the wall, he asks them bluntly, ‘Do you really think that what is going on is the will of God? And if it isn’t, ought not somebody to say so?
But what does it say to a world destroying itself by war and whose commitment is to building armaments? To a world suffering from unnecessary gas emissions, and global warming yet hell-bent on building bigger and better cruise ships, planes and airports, and an ever-expanding tourist industry where the limitations of renewable sources of energy are widely accepted? To all of us who close our eyes and hope it will never happen, but especially to those who if it does have safeguarded themselves and their immediate family and are keeping quiet about it? Where are we going to find a Micah?