Welcome to the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast.

Right now we're going through the entire Bible to understand it is one big cohesive story.

We're covering one book each day, and this one is about Micah.

In the first few chapters of the book of Micah, we meet a guy who's from a small town,

a long ways away from Jerusalem, a guy who clearly is going to be talking to the normal people of Judah,

and one of his chief gripes that apparently God told him to call out amongst his own people

was this practice of the government getting in bed with business and then cornering the market on

everything and then engaging in these predatory business practices by which they'd wait for somebody

to have a couple of bad harvests in a row and then snatch their ancestral family land out from

under them. You're not supposed to do that according to the Bible, but again, that ship had sailed.

This starts happening left and right, and now what you have is such a weird imbalance in an

agricultural society where if you don't have land, you're effectively a surf, a serving class.

You got a situation where through all entirely technically legal means the paperwork you'll see

is entirely in order. Through entirely those kind of shenanigans, what happened is you created

this elite ownership class and everybody else became a subject class and that wasn't God's design

for what his holy people set apart for him and set apart to model the values of his character

in his kingdom was supposed to look like. In fact, these land grabs and all these other exploitative

practices made it impossible for God's chosen people to live out life in community the way he said

they were supposed to, which was supposed to be a beacon to and a blessing to all the nations.

So what we get in Micah is because they were unable to pull this off instead of the nations

being drawn to them by the beauty of their system and their relationship with God and coming to

the temple to learn from them about God and about truth instead they're going to come to the temple

...