Thin Places (Part II)
Bethlehem, a thin place
The prophet Micah called the people of Judah to focus hard on finding a thin place in the midst of the thick and foreboding threat of foreign invasion. Like a raging storm, the Assyrian invaders were bearing down on them to sweep them away as God’s instrument of judgment against his people. They would dodge that particular fate at the hands of Assyria, but they would not escape the later Babylonian invasion. Like so many of us, the people of Judah made the mistake of thinking that God was far away and put up a thick wall of apostasy as a way of holding God at a distance. God would break through, however, and their walls, both literally and figuratively, would eventually come tumbling down.
And yet, even in the midst of all this impending doom, God offers a word of hope through the prophet with a promise to create a new thin place for his people — a remote, out of the way place that, like Iona, was populated with only a few shepherd families and a lot of sheep. In Bethlehem, in a place few expected, God was going to bring the life of heaven to Earth in a very personal way.
Bethlehem was, of course, King David’s hometown, and it was there that he was chosen as the unlikely successor to the reign of King Saul, who was Israel’s idea of what a king should look like. God, of course, had a very different idea. The shepherd-boy David was anointed and would rule Israel successfully until his own moral downfall, but even then God would continue to honor the promise he made to David that one of the king’s descendants would sit on the throne of Israel forever (2 Samuel 7:16). Despite all that was about to happen to the remnants of David’s kingdom in Micah’s day, the prophet assures the people that God was not going to abandon the promise that a king was coming from David’s hometown to rule Israel, one “whose origin is from of old, from ancient days” (Micah 5:2). This king, in other words, would represent God himself.
In the meantime, God would give up his people to exile until that king would be born and his people brought back from distant lands. Then that shepherd-king will “stand and feed his flock in the strength of the LORD, in the majesty of the name of the LORD his God” (w. 3-4). All of that would happen because God was going to create a thin place there in Bethlehem.
Interestingly, most people in Micah’s day thought that the ultimate thin place in the world was the temple in Jerusalem, which was the place where it was thought that God dwelled with his people. But Israel’s salvation wasn’t coming from the temple, the future of which was already in jeopardy. Security wasn’t to be found in relying on the temple, but in God’s true king who would bring security and peace through his righteous reign (w. 4-5). Instead of a temple, the place where heaven and earth came together, the place where God would dwell with his people, was going to be the feeding trough in a back alley of the tiniest and most insignificant of places.
~Mark Roberts, “Thin Places,” a 2012 blog entry on patheos.com, retrieved in Homiletics, November/December 2012, Volume 24, Number 6
