Micah 2:1-4

And they covet fields, and take them by violence

Avarice

Greed is the spring and spirit of all oppression.

Here rapacious avarice is presented in three aspects.

I. Scheming in the night. When avarice takes possession of a man, it works the brain by night as well as by day. What schemes to swindle, defraud, and plunder men are fabricated every night upon the pillow!

II. Working in the day. The idea esteemed most is the worldly gain of avaricious labour. So it ever is; gain is the God of the greedy man. He sacrifices all his time and labour on its altar. Shakespeare compares such a man to a whale which plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful.

III. Suffering in the judgment. For judgment comes at last, and in the judgment these words give us to understand the punishment will correspond with the sin. “Because they reflect upon evil,” says Delitzsch, “to deprive their fellow men of their possessions, Jehovah will bring evil upon this generation, lay a heavy yoke upon their necks, under which they will not be able to walk loftily or with extended neck.” Ay, the time will come when the avaricious millionaire will exclaim, “We be utterly spoiled.” “Go to, now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you,” etc. (Homilist.)

The wrong which Micah attacks

Micah scourges the avarice of the landowner, and the injustice which oppresses the peasant. Social wrongs are always felt most acutely, not in the town, but in the country. It was so in the days of Rome, whose earliest social revolts were agrarian. It was so in the Middle Ages; the fourteenth century saw both the Jacquerie in France and the Peasants’ rising in England; Langland, who was equally familiar with town and country, expends nearly all his sympathy upon the poverty of the latter, “the poure folk in cotes.” It was so after the Reformation, under the new spirit of which the first social revolt was the Peasants’ war in Germany. It was so at the French Revolution, which began with the march of the starving peasants into Paris. And it is so still, for our new era of social legislation has been forced upon us, not by the poor of London and the large cities, but by the peasantry of Ireland and the crofters of the Scottish Highlands. Political discontent and religious heresy take their start among industrial and manufacturing centres, but the first springs of the social revolt are nearly always found among rural populations. Why the country should begin to feel the acuteness of social wrong before the town is sufficiently obvious. In the town there are mitigations, and there are escapes. If the conditions of one trade become oppressive, it is easier to pass to another. The workers are better educated and better organised; there is a middle class, and the tyrant dare not bring matters to so high a crisis. The might of the wealthy, too, is divided; the poor man’s employer is seldom at the same time his landlord. But in the country power easily gathers into the hands of the few. The labourer’s opportunities and means of work, his house, his very standing ground are often all the property of one man. In the country the rich have a real power of life and death, and are less hampered by competition with each other, and by the force of public opinion. One man cannot hold a city in fee, but one man can affect for evil or for good almost as large a population as a city’s, when it is scattered across a country side. This is precisely the state of wrong which Micah attacks. This is the evil, the ease with which wrong is done in the country. “It lies to the power of their hands; they covet and seize.” Micah feels that by themselves the economic wrongs explain and justify the doom impending on the nation. (G. A. Smith, D. D.)