From Monday, I've started a one-on-one study with a student leader at Bethany Bible School. As our discussion circled around the theme of the Old Testament prophets, I shared with him certain "summaries" of the Old Testament Law. Of course, we discussed the centrality of the Shema, Deuteronomy 6:4-9, the commandment Jesus chose to summarize the Law, coupled with Leviticus 19:18. Also I pointed him to Micah 6:6-8, whose triad of "do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God" has been cited as the summation of the Law within the history of Jewish biblical interpretation. Other rabbis boiled Micah 6:8 down to Habakkuk 2:4: "the just shall live by faith." Quite naturally, therefore, our discussion highlighted the interrelatedness of faith, justice, mercy, humility, and love. To put it another way, what it means to have faith is to walk humbly with God, accordingly living justly with and showing mercy to others. That all sounds very much like loving God with all one's heart, soul, and might, and one's neighbor as oneself.
Within our study, my friend testified to me of Micah 6:8 that "this was his first time to see this verse." He also had this to say of the "minor prophets", the corpus of twelve prophetic books of which Micah and Habakkuk are two:
"They are not minor in meaning. They are very direct. I sometimes go into Christian bookstores and buy books with 200, 300 pages. But they don't say anything new. These books [the minor prophets] say far more in fewer words."
-Joe
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