Hi Friend,

Biblical prophecies are so much a part of our culture we take them for granted. For example the statue in front of the United Nations building that bears the inscription “They shall beat their swords into plowshares…” comes from the book of Micah.  The prophecy continues in the next verse where he says, “Every man will sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid, for the LORD Almighty has spoken.” (Micah 4:4)

That used to seem more like a prediction of a return to an agrarian society of farming and ranching. I’ve spent a small amount of time hauling hay and meeting the cow at the corral gate for morning milking. The smell of the pasture is invigorating, but books and research are more to my taste.

So I always felt a twinge of guilt that Micah’s statement about sitting under a vine or fig tree failed to excite the kind of emotion it should.

It wasn’t until reading the words of Karl Marx that the depth of Micah’s words came home. Sometimes it’s good to quote your enemies. A man needs to know the intent of evil men who plot against him.  And I don’t mind calling Karl Marx an enemy or evil.  Any man who advocates taking my property and enslaving his fellow man is evil—and he’s my enemy.

In the “Communist Manifesto” Karl Marx wrote, “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in a single sentence: Abolition of private property.”  He believed the family was based on capital, private property, and private gain, so Marx predicted that the family “will vanish with the vanishing of capital.”

He correctly recognized that private property equals power and Marx wanted to take power out of the hands of the individual and vest it solely in the collective or state. He saw the family as a threat to collectivism advocating an end to “the bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed correlation of parent and child.”

It’s ironic that the words of an evil man like Marx can give clarity to the prophecies of Micah. God was telling Micah about the world to come in which God himself will protect the rights of the individual. Those rights include the protection of individual possessions as well as the family.

Marxism and socialism are an attack on the individual and his rights. By contrast the values of the Bible establish rights for the individual. After all, how many of the Ten Commandments are made for the protection of the state?

Maybe I’ll take Micah’s words to heart.  I could start by planting a grape arbor.  Instructions can probably be found online.

Until next time,

Jim O’Brien