Ideals and Norms in Micah

The study in Micah 4 touches on a couple of connected issues.

First is ideals. We should have ideals, in the sense of something unreachable on this plane. Society needs something out of reach to which people aspire. People who give up because it is out of reach are wrong people; they need fixing or marginalizing so they don’t hurt the rest of us. We need a vision of what could be, in theory. The problem is we keep ginning up our own theories. Not only to do we ignore the image granted by the Creator of all things, but we see humanity fighting it tooth and nail. This is the part which makes it out of reach, makes it an aspiration.

We know humanity, granted a near perfect setting with all the proper intellectual background and cultural experience necessary to understand God’s Laws, will still turn away from it. Some nations do so more readily than others, and God’s prophets indicated Israel was probably the worst. They had the truth, exclusively granted by God Himself into their hands, and kept trying to bury it so they could ignore it. Even with all the best humanity could know and understand, forcing them to see it won’t change a thing. Truth by itself is simply not enough. It requires something mankind cannot obtain without divine help.

So we learn the prophets like Micah raised a standard literally beyond human reach in order to make it clear it has to come from God, not from us. Sure, we could approach it, and probably gain quite a bit, but we’ll never actually get there on this fallen plane. We have to obtain it on a different level. So the prophets promised this thing would surely come, but they knew better in their own hearts than to expect a literal fulfillment.

Still, the issue is not fixing problems, but building a proper norm. This is the second thing Micah raises. Man’s instinct is to wait until something comes up, then react. This is simply backwards, a perversion of what God revealed. We have to be proactive in grasping His Laws with our minds and hearts, then proactive in building a normal society as He defines it. Again, we know we will never actually arrive there on this earth, but we also know we can aim for it and keep trying. God promises to fill in the rest inasmuch as He demonstrated with Israel when they were faithful. All those grand miracles were part of His promises to any person or group who embraces His ways.

In a microcosm, we might mention something so simple as stomach flora. Only recently has Western medicine begun realizing the necessity of giving patients on antibiotics treatment at the same time a probiotics treatment. That is, instead of thinking in terms of killing germs, we should have been creating an atmosphere in our stomachs which would have resisted the invasion in the first place. A whole raft of modern health issues would disappear in three months if everyone stopped destroying their stomachs and made choices which promoted the health of stomach flora.

If you were to survey the flora content of most Western stomachs, you would have what’s typical, but we now realize that would hardly qualify as normal. That’s because normal reflects what ought to be, not what is. Our intellectual instincts don’t go that way in the West. We are all keyed to examine what is and consider that normal. We aren’t willing to accept input from a higher source; we hate it so much we invent weird terms like “holistic medicine” instead of calling it simply good medical practice. Because we cannot detect and measure a direct link between, say, stomach health and depression, we refuse to consider it possible. In contrast to this, Eastern medicine means you contract with a doctor to keep you healthy, and the need for intervention is his fault, and comes at his expense because he failed. I guarantee you those Eastern doctors knew about stomach flora a long time ago, if not directly via science, then indirectly via centuries of observation with an open mind eschewed and dismissed by Western medicine.

The same kind of Eastern approach is necessary for social health, too. If we don’t take the ancient wisdom of what makes for a stable and peaceful society, we cannot have one. If we reach for it with our broken understanding and our weak hands, that alone brings us over to God’s side, aligning us with how Creation actually works. Western intellectual assumptions are hostile to truth, so we can’t possibly figure it out because we start from the ground of dismissing the ancient truths.