It may be a question as to whether the text refers more especially to the place and office of Israel when planted in its own land, or when dispersed among the nations.  For, as you see, he speaks of ’the remnant of Jacob’ as if he was thinking of the survivors of some great calamity which had swept away the greater portion of the nation.  Both things are true.  When settled in its own land, Israel’s office was to teach the nations God; when dispersed among the Gentiles, its office ought to have been the same.  But be that as it may, the conception here set forth is as true to-day as ever it was.  For the prophetic teachings, rooted though they may be in the transitory circumstances of a tiny nation, are ‘not for an age, but for all time,’ and we get a great deal nearer the heart of them when we grasp the permanent truths that underlie them, than when we learnedly exhume the dead history which was their occasion.

Micah’s message comes to all Christians, and very eminently to English Christians.  The subject of Christian missions is before us to-day, and some thoughts in the line of this great text may not be inappropriate.

We have here, then,

I. The function of each Christian in his place.

’The remnant of Jacob shall be as a dew from the Lord in the midst of many nations.’  What made Israel ‘as a dew’?  One thing only; its religion, its knowledge of God, and its consequent purer morality.  It could teach Greece no philosophy, no art, no refinement, no sensitiveness to the beautiful.  It could teach Rome no lessons of policy or government.  It could bring no wisdom to Egypt, no power or wealth to Assyria.  But God lit His candle and set it on a candlestick, that it ‘might give light to all that were in the house.’  The same thing is true about Christian people.  We cannot teach the world science, we cannot teach it philosophy or art, but we can teach it God.  Now the possibility brings with it the obligation.  The personal experience of Jesus Christ in our hearts, as the dew that brings to us life and fertility, carries with it a commission as distinct and imperative as if it had been pealed into each single ear by a voice from heaven.  That which made Israel the ‘dew amidst many nations,’ parched for want of it, makes Christian men and women fit to fill the analogous office, and calls upon them to discharge the same functions.  For—­in regard to all our possessions, and therefore most eminently and imperatively in regard to the best—­that which we have, we have as stewards, and the Gospel, as the Apostle found, was not only given to him for his own individual enjoyment, elevation, ennobling, emancipation, salvation, but was ’committed to his charge,’ and he was ‘entrusted’ with it, as he says, as a sacred deposit.