In Micah 3:1-3, Micah speaks to the wicked leaders of Jacob and Israel: "Aren’t you supposed to know Judgment? You hate the good and love the evil."

Here, peoples' bones stand for the things they know. Their muscles represent the things they love. The flesh and skin are things about them that are more and more external. ¹

And here, Micah is saying that if any of these things, no matter how external, are still good, the evil leaders wish to destroy them.

Micah 3:4. If those destructive leaders cry out to Jehovah for help, He will not hear them.

Micah 3:5-7. These verses are pretty plain as to what they are saying to those wicked leaders: They will end up in darkness. ² They can prophesy nothing true, because they are so perverted that they know nothing about truth.

In 3:8, Micah says that he has the spirit of Jehovah and can truly prophesy.

In 3:9-11, Micah tells those "heads" and "captains" just how evil they have been, and that still they claim that God is with them. Because they have falsified all truth and good, they can’t tell the difference anymore.

Finally, in verse 12, because of all this, Zion and Jerusalem, meaning the whole of the Israelitish church, will cease to be a representative of the Lord’s ongoing church on earth. ³

Applying this, today... there are a couple of very powerful ideas in this chapter. One is that evil hates good, and wants to destroy even remnants of it. Another scary idea here is that human beings can get to the point of not being able to tell the difference between what's true, and what's false, or between what's good, and what's evil.

Poznámky pod čarou:

1047. That 'and when I cloud over the earth with cloud' means a time when, the will part of man's proprium being what it is, faith that flows from charity does not appear, is clear from what has been stated just above regarding 'the earth', that is, about the will part of man's proprium being such that it is constantly introducing obscurity, or falsity, into the understanding part. This is 'a clouding over'. All falsity originates in this way, as becomes quite clear from the fact that self-love and love of the world which belong to man's will are nothing else than hatred. For insofar as anyone loves himself he hates the neighbour. Because these loves are so contrary to heavenly love, it is inevitable that such things as are contrary to mutual love should be constantly flowing in from them. All of those things in the understanding part are falsities, and from them arises all the obscurity and darkness that is there. Falsity 'clouds over truth just as a dark cloud does to the light of the sun. And because falsity and truth cannot be present simultaneously any more than darkness and light, it follows plainly that one goes out as the other comes in. And this being an alternating occurrence reference is therefore made here to 'clouding over the earth with cloud', that is, a time when through the will part of the proprium no faith accompanying charity, or truth and derivative good, appears, still less good and derivative truth.