What Does God Actually Require? Just Three Things (And We're Failing at All of Them)

Here's something that should make every religious person uncomfortable: After centuries of revelation, after the Law of Moses with its 613 commandments, after endless debates about ritual purity and proper sacrifice, the prophet Micah reduces God's requirements to exactly three things.

"He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?"
— Micah 6:8

That's it. Three things. Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with God.

No mention of correct liturgy. No discussion of what you wear to church. No checklist of devotional practices. No political litmus test. Just three profoundly simple requirements that somehow manage to be both easier to remember and infinitely harder to live than any rulebook.

And if that doesn't strike you as radically countercultural—both to ancient religious systems and to modern Christianity—you're not paying attention.

The Context: When Religion Becomes Performance

Micah 6:8 doesn't appear in a vacuum. It's God's response to a question posed in verses 6-7:

"With what shall I come before the Lord,
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?"

Notice the escalation. The question starts with standard offerings—burnt offerings, year-old calves. Then it spirals into absurdity: thousands of rams, rivers of oil, even child sacrifice. It's the ancient equivalent of asking, "How many Hail Marys do I need to pray? How many hours of adoration? Should I give up everything and become a monk?"

And God's response is essentially: You're missing the point entirely.

This is where Catholicism gets weird in the best possible way. We take ritual seriously—really seriously. We have elaborate liturgies, vestments, incense, bells. We care about rubrics and proper form. And yet, at the heart of Catholic social teaching is this same prophetic challenge: None of it means anything without justice, mercy, and humility.

Requirement #1: Do Justice

Let's start with the one that makes everyone uncomfortable.

"Do justice" in Hebrew is asot mishpat. It's not "feel bad about injustice" or "pray about injustice" or "acknowledge injustice exists." It's do justice. Active. Present tense. Ongoing.

This is where Catholic social teaching becomes unavoidably radical. The Catechism is clear:

"Respect for the human person proceeds by way of respect for the principle that 'everyone should look upon his neighbor (without any exception) as "another self," above all bearing in mind his life and the means necessary for living it with dignity.'" — CCC 1931

Pope Francis, quoting Pope John Paul II, puts it even more bluntly in Evangelii Gaudium:

"We have to state, without mincing words, that there is an inseparable bond between our faith and the poor. May we never abandon them."

Doing justice means creating systems and structures that protect human dignity. It means advocating for the poor, the immigrant, the unborn, the elderly, the sick, the imprisoned. It means examining economic systems that treat people as disposable. It means asking whether our policies serve the common good or just our own comfort.

And here's where it gets uncomfortable: Doing justice will make someone mad at you. If you defend the unborn, progressives will call you regressive. If you defend immigrants and refugees, conservatives will call you naive. If you challenge economic systems that exploit workers, capitalists will call you a socialist. If you insist on the dignity of all human life from conception to natural death, everyone will find something to hate.

Good. That's the prophetic tradition. The prophets weren't popular. Micah wasn't popular. Jesus wasn't popular. If your commitment to justice never makes anyone uncomfortable, you're probably not doing it right.

Requirement #2: Love Kindness

The second requirement is to "love kindness"—or depending on your translation, "love mercy" or "love steadfast love." The Hebrew word is chesed, which is one of those rich biblical terms that doesn't translate cleanly into English.

Chesed means loyal love, covenant faithfulness, steadfast mercy. It's the kind of love that doesn't quit when things get hard. It's mercy that flows from relationship, not from obligation.

Notice that Micah doesn't say "be kind." He says love kindness. It's not enough to perform acts of mercy out of duty. God wants us to love mercy—to delight in it, to seek it out, to make it central to who we are.

This is where the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy come in. Catholic tradition has distilled this requirement into concrete actions:

But here's the challenge: It's easy to do mercy as a transaction. Give to the homeless guy, feel good about yourself, move on. That's not loving kindness—that's checking a box.

Loving kindness means actually seeing people. It means learning the name of the homeless guy. It means visiting your sick relative even when it's inconvenient. It means forgiving the person who hurt you even when they don't deserve it. It means bearing with difficult people patiently instead of writing them off.

It means mercy becomes not something you do but something you are.

Requirement #3: Walk Humbly with Your God

And here's the one that keeps the first two from turning into self-righteousness.

"Walk humbly with your God." Not "achieve perfect holiness." Not "master all the doctrines." Not "win all the arguments about theology." Just walk humbly with God.

Humility is the foundation of the spiritual life. It's the recognition that everything we have is gift, that we are radically dependent on God, that we don't have all the answers, that we are—in the grand scheme of things—really small.

St. Thomas Aquinas, after a mystical experience near the end of his life, called all his theological writing "straw." Straw. This is the guy who wrote the Summa Theologiae, one of the most comprehensive theological works in history. And he saw it all as straw compared to encountering God.

That's humility.

Walking humbly with God means prayer. It means admitting when you're wrong. It means being willing to learn. It means recognizing that even your commitment to justice and mercy can become tainted with pride.

It means you can fight for justice without becoming self-righteous. You can practice mercy without becoming condescending. You can stand firm in truth without becoming arrogant.

Because you're walking with God, not as God.

Why We Fail at All Three

Here's the uncomfortable truth: These three requirements are both incredibly simple and impossibly hard.

We fail at justice because it's costly. It requires us to examine our complicity in unjust systems. It demands that we give up comfort, security, and privilege. It asks us to side with people who can't repay us.

We fail at kindness because it's exhausting. Mercy requires patience with people who are annoying. It demands forgiveness when we want revenge. It asks us to see Christ in people who don't look like Christ.

We fail at humility because we want to be God. We want to be right. We want to be in control. We want our theology to be complete, our politics to be perfect, our spiritual practice to be impressive.

And so we do what religious people have always done: We add complexity. We create elaborate systems of rules and rituals and doctrines and political alignments that let us feel righteous while avoiding the actual requirements.

We argue about liturgy while ignoring the poor.

We debate theology while refusing to forgive.

We perform piety while nursing pride.

Micah saw it in the 8th century BC. Jesus saw it in the 1st century AD. The Catholic Church has been wrestling with it for 2,000 years. And we're still getting it wrong.

The Weird, Beautiful Challenge

But here's what's weird and beautiful about Micah 6:8: It keeps calling us back.

Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with your God.

It's simple enough to remember. It's challenging enough to spend a lifetime learning. It cuts through all our religious performance and political posturing and gets to the heart of what God actually wants.

And it's deeply, profoundly Catholic. Because the Catholic Church—at its best—holds these three together:

• Justice in Catholic social teaching and the consistent life ethic
• Mercy in the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy
• Humility in the sacramental life and contemplative prayer

The Church knows that justice without mercy becomes self-righteous cruelty. Mercy without justice becomes cheap sentimentality. And both without humility become weapons we use to feel superior.

We need all three. Together. All the time.

So ask yourself:

Are you doing justice? Not just feeling bad about injustice, but actually working to change systems and structures that harm people?

Are you loving kindness? Not just performing acts of mercy, but actually delighting in mercy, seeking it out, making it who you are?

Are you walking humbly with God? Not just going through religious motions, but actually living in dependent relationship with the God who made you?

Because if we're honest—and humility requires honesty—most of us are failing at all three.

The good news? God knew that. That's why He sent Jesus. That's why He gave us the Church. That's why He offers us grace, mercy, and forgiveness.

But grace doesn't mean we stop trying. It means we keep walking—humbly, mercifully, justly—knowing that we're going to stumble, and that God will pick us up, and that the journey itself is the point.

That's weird. That's hard. That's costly.

And that's what God requires.

"He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?"
— Micah 6:8