He has showed you, O man, what is good.
And what does the LORD require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God.
                                                —Micah 6:8

 It amazes me how little attention this verse gets…here it is, written out, the answer to all our questions: what does the Lord require?

To act justly
To love mercy
To walk humbly with your God

To best understand this text, I suggest working in reverse. Whereas our minds – trained in the Western scientific method – tend to work from cause to effect, the prophets often “[depicted] a scene in such a way that their listeners were led to inquire, ‘Why did this happen?’ This question led them back to the cause.”[1]

So let us start with the cause of all things – that which we find at the end of this text: GOD.

What does it mean to walk with God? It seems a simple and insignificant thing, but things happen when people walk with God…Adam and Eve walked with God in the cool of the day. Now this is clearly more than simply a physical activity…notice the personal pronoun in today’s text: “walk humbly with YOUR” God…this time our first parents spent with God was the time during which intimate relationship was built between God and His creation.

So intimate was Enoch’s relationship that we’re told he walked with God 300 years and then was no more, for God simply took him to heaven so they could keep walking throughout eternity.

Let’s take a moment here, lest we think “walking with God” should put us away in some monastery or something with no contact with the world. We are told that Enoch had children…did the normal things of life, but he did them with God.

Walking with God is not about the destination. Abraham walked all over the land God promised him with nothing to show for it but altars set up everywhere he pitched his tents.

Do we worship along the way or are we waiting for what God promised us? Even worse, are we waiting on our idea of what He promised us?

There may be many milestones along the way. The Red Sea was not the only body of water that parted for the Israelites on their way to Canaan. The Jordan River allowed them to pass through on dry land as well, and God instructed them to set up a pile of stones – one for each of the tribes – that when their children asked about it, they would remember and recount the time God delivered them.

As with Abraham, we may walk our whole lives without reaching an apparent destination, but when we are in danger of becoming discouraged, we should have markers along the way that remind us of how God has led us and delivered us in the past. And let this be said, even if God never did another good thing, He is still worthy to be praised, for He is the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords!

Now, in contrast to wandering, walking has a purpose. We must be careful here, as we often think the destination is the purpose, when for God, it’s the walking itself that’s important. After walking through the Red Sea on dry land, the Israelites were scared of the inhabitants of Canaan, so instead of walking with God, they spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness.

It’s important to note here, that even when we don’t walk with God, it doesn’t mean He is not walking with us.

(Exodus 33:15-17) 15 Then Moses said to him, “If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. 16 How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?” 17 And the LORD said to Moses, “I will do the very thing you have asked, because I am pleased with you and I know you by name.”

So it is walking with God that distinguishes His people from the rest of the world.

I never like to be too hard on the Israelites, for their story – faults and all – was recorded for our instruction. The lesson here is in how we walk with God. The text from Micah says to “walk humbly” with your God. That means letting Him lead.

This is my challenge. I want to skip to the part about “doing justice,” but this is impossible without walking humbly with God and learning to love mercy as He does, that His restorative justice might take hold. This humility is in relation to God and God alone – not “self-abnegation before other men” nor “men’s efforts to accommodate themselves to their own and others’ superiority-feelings…not keeping place in a scale of being, but absolute dependence on God and trust in Him.” (Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, pp 26-7)

Following God’s lead oftentimes will not seem logical to us. I doubt that the Hebrew boys would have chosen the setting of the fiery furnace as a place in which to walk with God, but that was where God led.

In devising battle plans against Jericho, it’s unlikely the military leaders thought, “let’s walk around the city once each day for six days, and then seven times on the seventh day.” Thank God it was Him that was in control instead of the military leaders…

And so we come to Jesus, who seemed to be in perpetual motion for the 3 ½ years of His public ministry. He walked all over the Judean countryside, from as far south as Jerusalem to Tyre and Caesarea Philippi in the north – that’s over 100 miles as the crow flies, but as we’ve seen, God rarely works “as the crow flies,” so we see Jesus traveling around the Sea of Galilee and going back and forth to Jerusalem. In all of his travels, Jesus encountered many people, some of whom walked with Him, and some whom were unable to make that life commitment.

We will walk with someone, there is no doubt about that…indeed, the book of Psalms opens with this surety:

1 Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked     or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. 2 But his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night. 3 He is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers.

Is it your desire today to walk with the Lord?

 (1 John 2:5-6) But if anyone obeys his word, God’s love is truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are in him: {6} Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did.

And it is in walking as Jesus did that we come to love mercy and act justly, which we will look at next. Discipleship is a lifelong process…not only must we take that first step, but we must continue to walk humbly with our God, allowing Him to lead in our lives day by day. We must commit to that constant movement and growth, to walking away from dead tradition and toward life and all that entails.

[1] Shea, William H. Daniel 7-12. The Abundant Life Bible Amplifier series, p. 21.