Micah 3:12

"Therefore shall Zion for your sake be plowed as a field, and Jerusalem shall become heaps, and the mountain of the house as the high places of a forest."

Here the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple is unequivocally prophesied. Let those who will not believe in predictive prophecy explain this. They would, of course, remove the prophecy to some period after the event if they could; but that is impossible. A hundred years after Micah said this, Jeremiah quoted him by name, like God's writers always do when they are quoting another sacred author, and appealed to his (Jeremiah's) own tormentors for the same kind of leniency that Hezekiah had shown to Micah. These prophetic lines were most circumstantially fulfilled when Nebuchadnezzar and his generals demolished the city in 586 B.C. Micah lived and wrote in the eighth century B.C.

Since, therefore, it must be allowed as a genuine prophecy, literally fulfilled more than a century afterward, what can the critics do? The answer, of course, is nothing! However, we shall note a few of the things they have tried to do:

(1) They have tried to limit the prophecy to a "surprisingly accurate" discernment of political conditions by Micah, not allowing, at all, that God had anything to do with it. However, as Allen pointed out, although Micah uttered this prophecy as his own words, using the first person and speaking from himself, he had already ascribed the whole prophecy to the Spirit of Jehovah, and to God's message, which "he saw." Furthermore, a century after Micah, and at a time yet significantly prior to the fulfillment of it, Jeremiah proclaimed the very words of this Micah 3:12 as the word of God. "Thus saith Jehovah" (Jeremiah 26:18). Thus, what the prophet said, all of it, whether he so designated a certain line of it or not, was from Jehovah, God's Word, a "thus saith Jehovah," not the simple word of Micah.

(2) Others insinuate that Micah really expected Jerusalem to be overthrown during his lifetime, but that "it did not occur till a century afterward!" Such a view is false, not appearing anywhere in the passage, and merely seeking to get a contradiction between what Micah allegedly thought and what actually happened. As a matter of fact, Jerusalem probably would have fallen much sooner than it did, except for Micah's warnings and the reform under Hezekiah which led to intervention of God upon behalf of the city in the days of the siege by Sennacherib.

(3) The most incredible of all the critical objections is the complaint that, "Jerusalem has never become a deserted ruin to this day."[18] Well, well. That is the best that anybody can come up with; but that is no contradiction, and such a statement has no place in the exegesis of this text. Micah nowhere said that Jerusalem would become a deserted ruin. He said that it "would become heaps." Did it occur? Yes.

"The Babylonian king overthrew the city to the very foundations and removed all of the people.[19] Jeremiah testified to the desolation of the city, stating that, `foxes walked in it.'"[20]

Jerusalem has been rebuilt, of course; but that Jerusalem against which Micah prophesied was never rebuilt. As MacLeod wrote, "The original city extended considerably south of the present southeast wall of Jerusalem."[21] "Fields now cover that ancient site of Zion. Porter, Thompson, and other writers have spoken of seeing "the plow at work on the whole of the hill which is now under cultivation."[22]

That hill which is today called Mount Zion is the southwest hill in Jerusalem and definitely is not the southeast hill where the ancient temple was built. Christians should not be deceived by old dictionaries and last-century opinions on this. As MacLeod said, the ancient Jewish historians as well as many of the present century scholars were deceived and inaccurate on this point. The ancient Jerusalem is a plowed field to this day. This has been determined by excavations, as MacLeod said, by excavations which have fully established that:

The original city, the "Jebus" captured by David, and afterward called "The City of David" was the southeast hill, not the southwest hill.[23]

What a commentary on Micah's prophecy is this! For millenniums the human race did not even know where that Jerusalem had been located!

"For your sake ..." This is the most pitiful phrase in the whole prophecy. "The bitterest words of all for Judah's rulers were these, for they mean because of you (for your sake, on your account)."[24]

Micah was the first prophet of the Lord to prophesy the destruction of Jerusalem and of the temple; but his prophecy was embellished with additional details and repeated again by Jeremiah over a century later.

The impact of this prophecy upon the Judah of Micah's day must have been profound indeed. It was the most unheard-of, impossible thing that could have been imagined in Jewish thought. That the God Jehovah who had brought them up out of slavery in Egypt and shepherded them through their wilderness wanderings, driving out the whole land, that that God would countenance the utter destruction of their capital, even the "City of David," and that he would allow the sacred temple dedicated to God's name to be destroyed, NONSENSE! But it was not nonsense. God's covenant blessings, then, as now, were predicated upon the keeping of the covenant by his people; and failure to keep the covenant meant the inevitable forfeiture of every blessing. How blind are those who think they have found some "short-cut" to God's favor, lifting from them any blame whatever for the violation of his sacred Word.