Micah 2:13

"The breaker is gone up before them: they have broken forth and passed on to the gate, and are gone out thereat; and their king is passed on before them, and Jehovah at the head of them."

There are two possible meanings here. As Hailey indicated, one of the interpretations is that, "The Messiah is the breaker who breaks down the wall of sin that separated them from the Lord and made them bondsmen."[32] That meaning is surely in line with what Pusey and practically all of the older interpreters thought to be correct. "This promise therefore is an encouraging revelation from God, rather than the vain optimism of some unnamed false prophet."[33] Clark and others have supposed that, "This prophecy, as regarding the northern kingdom has never been fulfilled";[34] but this impression is due to a failure to recognize the prophecy as foretelling the kingdom of Christ, in which all the prophecies for both the old fleshy kingdoms (the whole house of Israel), as well as for the hopes of the Gentiles, were all gloriously fulfilled in a single event, that of the coming of Christ to lead men out of the captivity of darkness and sin. "The fulfillment of this prophecy commenced with the gathering together of Israel to its God and King by the preaching of the gospel."[35] Keil went onward to postulate something yet future from the times of Messiah regarding the fleshly Israel; but the prohibition of such interpretations is inherent in the truth that in the present dispensation, "There is no distinction between them (Jews) and us (Gentiles) (Romans 10:12). Therefore, we do not hesitate to declare that the total fulfillment of the glorious promise here must be found in the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, which we identify, unequivocally with the church which he redeemed and purchased with his own blood.

Without, in any sense, rejecting or compromising the view expressed thus far under Micah 2:13, we believe there is something else in it.

"The breaker ..." This would appear to be another instance of a word-play so consistently prevalent throughout Micah. The term "breaker" was applied by a number of historians to Assyria, having reference to the extraordinarily cruel and inhuman treatment of the peoples they conquered, "enemies being impaled, flayed, or beheaded in great numbers."[36] Contrasted with that "breaker," Micah promised that the great "Breaker" of mankind's darkness and sin would appear in the achievement of human redemption. If this discernment is correct, it still further ties the passage to all that Micah had just written, and makes it virtually impossible accurately to understand the passage as any kind of insertion into Micah's prophecy.