Micah 2:7 O you that are named the house of Jacob, is the spirit of the LORD straitened? are these his doings?… Micah says, You are trying to do the right thing in a wrong way: you are wasting the bread of the kingdom of heaven: you have mistaken the right beginning and the right continuance of all this ministry of revelation. My sun will never do good to a dead creed; every beam of that sun is a sword striking at that poor outcast dead thing. "Do not My words do good?" To whom? To the man who wants them, longs for them, represents their purpose, walks uprightly. Literally, Do not My words do good to him that is upright? You must not only have right food, you must have the right appetite and the right digestion. God's revelation is lost upon the man who cares nothing for it. It is within the power of the eyelid to shut out the midday. The Bible has nothing to say to the froward soul. The revelation of God never talks to the critic. Intellect, unless a servant, has no business with things spiritual, supernatural, ineffable. Let every man then test himself by this one standard. The Word of the Lord is meant to be good to the upright. Not necessarily to the personally perfect. There are no such people, except in their own estimation, and therefore there are none perfect at all. What is it to be upright then? To be sincere: to mean to be right. There is a middle line in every man's thought and life and purpose. Do not judge him by the higher line, or by the lower level; you will find the average thought, and tendency, and pressure — judge by that. When a man says, 1 want to be right, though I am failing seven times a day, — he is right...To walk uprightly is not to walk pedantically, ostentatiously, and perfectly in the estimation of the world; but to walk uprightly is to have the stress of the soul in the right direction. (Joseph Parker, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: O thou that art named the house of Jacob, is the spirit of the LORD straitened? are these his doings? do not my words do good to him that walketh uprightly? |
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