The man with a question for a name

There was a prophet with a question for a name. He came from Moresheth, a hamlet in the hills where farmland gives way to plain, and not from Jerusalem. Up close he saw what the great ones, far away, did not want to see: how the rich seized the fields of the poor, how justice was for sale in the city gate, how his small villages were trampled underfoot by armies that thought only in numbers. Micah, he was called, a fragment, a broken-off sentence. In full it was Micaiah: who is like YHWH? His whole life he carried that question as a name. Every time his mother called him in from the yard, it rang out over the hills, and every time someone hailed him in the gate, that person confessed, without noticing, the incomparability of his God.

At the close of his book, after seven chapters in which everything he had announced collapses, he pauses and speaks aloud the question he had always been: mi-El kamocha, who is a God like You? It is as if a man who all his life had been named Question Mark, on his final page, finally speaks the mark itself. Then an answer comes, and no one had expected that answer.

For that question sounds through the whole of Scripture, every time a person is overwhelmed by God (at the sea, in the temple, in distress), and everywhere it is answered with power. He is incomparable in holiness, in wonders, in strength. Except here. In Micah it is answered with forgiveness: who is a God like You, who carries the guilt and delights in it? The matchlessness of God lies not deepest in what He breaks, but in what He carries. That is the thread I try to hold on to in this book.

Still, this book is about a Person, not about an idea. So before anything else, one question, to you. Do you know Him? I am not asking whether you know things about Him; most of us know all kinds of things about Him. Do you know Him the way you know a father, a beloved, someone you have lived with? Every person carries an image of God with them, and that image is rarely pure. It is colored by the fathers we had, by the years in which He mostly felt like someone who watched and shook His head. With such a damaged image, it is nearly impossible to love Him.

Adjusting is not enough; this book wants to replace that image. It wants to introduce you to the real God, and that is something other than telling you still more about Him. It follows one question (who is like You?) from the first time it sounds, in Egypt, before a king, over frogs, to the last time, by a sea of glass, from the mouth of a crowd no one can count anymore. If all goes well, you will not end this book with the thought "now I know more." You will close it with the only sentence left when you have truly seen Him: You, no one is like You.

The man who bore the question as his name asks it at the close. We begin at the beginning, in the land of 1,000 gods. There the answer already sounded, "there is none like YHWH," before the question was sung at the sea.