Hosea 5:6-15

Divine Withdrawal

Hosea 5:6-15 .

"They shall go with their flocks and with their herds to seek the Lord; but they shall not find him; he hath withdrawn himself from them" ( Hos 5:6 ).

"Withdrawn" is a word that may well chill our heart. It would be enough to express intolerable displeasure if it stood just as it stands in this verse; but a larger meaning belongs to the word, "Withdrawn" is in some senses a negative relation, but it was a distinctly positive and may we add repelling action which the Lord meant to convey by the use of this term. All words were originally pictures, and the real dictionary when it appears will be pictorial. The Lord in this instance frees himself from them. That is the literal and broader meaning of the prophecy. He releases himself, he detaches himself, he shakes off an encumbrance, a nuisance, a claim that is without righteousness. This may be taken again in two senses. The people are going with flocks and herds as if bent on sacrificial purpose; they will give the Lord any quantity of blood hot, reeking blood; but the Lord says, I will have no more of your sacrifices; they are an abomination to me; I hate all the programme of ritual and ceremony and attitude, if it fail to express a hunger and a reverence of the heart and mind. So the Lord is seen here in the act of taking up all these flocks and herds, and all these unwilling priests, and freeing himself from them, throwing them away, as men pass out from their custody things that are offensive, worthless, and corrupting. Or it may mean that the Lord shakes himself clear of the clutch of hands that hath no heart in them; he will walk alone. He will not give up his shepherdliness, though he have no flock to follow him. Every woman is mother, every man is father, and a man is not the less father that all his children are twice dead, and are as plants plucked up by the roots, and cast out to the burning. The shepherdliness is not determined by the number of sheep following or going before; shepherdliness is a quality, a disposition, an inspiration, an eternal solicitude. If need be God will continue his shepherdliness though every sheep go astray, and every lamb should die. Mark the disastrous possibility! Men may be left without God; the Almighty and All-merciful may have retired, gone away, away into the shade, the darkness of night; he may have enshrouded himself in a pavilion of thick darkness, where our poor prayers are lost on the outside. To this dreadful issue may things come. Variously hath the Lord punished the Church, and punished the lands where his altars ought to have been higher than the forest trees. "Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread [the meanest of all famines], nor a thirst for water [a mere lip fire], but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord," a thirst that cannot be quenched by all the springs and fountains of the world. And in this chapter the same process of punishment is continued, and is most remarkable for the variety of its application.

There is a touch of satire in the suggestion that follows. After all this want of fealty and love on the part of the people, the Lord says, "Now shall a month devour them with their portions." The Lord will show, as it were, a visible diminution of the time of the wicked man; that time shall be a month long; the moon shall proclaim this gospel of dissolution. See how the moon waxes, wanes; it is the little month coming up with a kind of buoyancy as if it would last a year, and then suddenly falling back and quietly dying among the clouds. The Lord says, Watch the moon; O thou proud, bloated, blustering Church, watch the moon, that is thy picture: a time of waxing to be followed by a time of waning; a month shall eat thee, a handful of days shall devour thee in forgetfulness. The satire of God is keen, subtle, penetrating; if ever it appeared to be other, it is because the Lord must adopt language which the people whom he seeks to chastise can understand. Wonderful is the visible ministry of God if we had eyes to see it. "Day unto day" speaks of brevity. Whoever imagined that the sunny dawn would die? The dawn is an assured triumph: see how it comes! It comes with the quietness of strength. Weakness may be impetuous, violent, demonstrative, but omnipotence is, by the very necessity of its qualities, calm. The earth stands still because it flies so fast. So strength, because of its completeness, is easy, composed, tranquil. The dawn makes no noise as it rolls back the darkness. The dawn can never die: see how it fills the heavens, how it almost speaks in trumpet tones of triumph that cannot be baffled, enthusiasm that seems to mean benediction, everlasting and immeasurable. This proceeds up to midday; then afterwards there is a westering process, and the dawn, caught at the other end of heaven, dies. "And night unto night showeth knowledge"; and even the year, days and nights put together, has its youth, blustering, audacious, defiant; quite a little series of explosions of wind, and deluges of rain, and storms of snow; and then it is summer, and then it is quiet autumn, and autumn, like all the others, lies down and dies. Why not open our eyes to behold the wondrous lessons that God is writing visibly for us? There are a thousand lessons without voice or sound or sign, which only the soul can read and understand in absolute silence and secrecy. There are also lessons broad as heaven, and bright as the sun, which men might read, and out of which they might make an introductory Bible.

Now the Lord will proceed to tell the offending people what to do: "Blow ye the cornet in Gibeah." The cornet was always used to give the signal of alarm. It was an instrument of horn; when the strong blower blew his blast through that horn, it meant that the enemy was at the gate; men were called upon to arise, put on their armour, stand erect, watch. "And the trumpet in Ramah." The trumpet was used as a signal for calling to worship; in the midst of the alarm there shall still be a place left for the adoration of God, for the exercise of those religious impulses and aspirations which make us men. Gibeah and Ramah were the weak points; through them the enemy would appear. The enemy already held Israel in savage grip, and through Gibeah and Ramah the enemy would seek the neck of Judah. What is to be done? Sound the cornet, blow the trumpet; be alarmed, and yet not irreligiously; be awakened, roused, but not so as to forget that God reigns and rules, and that the mightiest weapon is not formed of steel. Who can run his impious fingers over the sword of God's lightning? Alarm should never disable the religious faculty; panic should never be greater than the power of prayer; yea, rather when there is panic that can be vindicated by reason, there should be religiousness that can be justified by all that makes us what we are in the sight of God rational, intelligent, responsible, immortal. We must go to the prophets if we would find what God can do in the way of punishment; there would seem to be no tongue equal to the explanation of chastisement and penalty equal to the Hebrew tongue. It was a tongue that could round a prayer into noblest majesty better than any other, and when it came to deal with penalty, chastisement, the vindication of the divine righteousness, it became an instrument of tremendous power.

"Ephraim shall be desolate in the day of rebuke" ( Hos 5:9 ). "Desolate" may be ranked with energetic adjectives; it was another form of the word that the prophet used; it was a substantive, colder than ice, hollower than the wind: Ephraim shall be a desolation. We have seen already how the prophet used nouns of action in describing the moral condition of the people in the fourth verse. Here we come from the descriptive word into the concrete term a desolation; a word which carries its own limitations and qualifications. You cannot amend the word, you cannot enlarge it, you can add nothing to its cheerless-ness; desolation admits of no companion term; it must be felt to be understood. There have been times when the house was a desolation; there was no light in the windows; though they stood squarely south, and looked right at the sun at midday, yet they caught no light; there was silence in the house; no sound; the fire crackled, and spluttered, and spent itself in vain explosions, but there was no poetry in all the way of the flame, there was no picture of home in all the blank shining of the hollow tongues of fire that licked the grate, but said nothing, yet only hinted that the place was empty; bed and cot and favourite fireside, all vacant, and the very grandeur of the house an aggravation of its vacancy. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

Why is God so wrathful? Is this an arbitrary vengeance? Doth he delight to show his omnipotence, and to chastise the insects of a day because he is Almighty? Never. There is always a moral reason: "The princes of Judah were like them that remove the bound." God has always been jealous of the landmark. God is honest; would his Church were also honest! God will not live in the house until the false weights and scales be taken out of it; God will not tabernacle with men whilst they are pinching the poor of one little inch of the yard length; he will trouble the house with a great moan of wind, until the balances be right; then he will say, You may now pray. And every sentence will be an answer. From the beginning we have seen that God would have the landmark respected. Here are the princes of Judah, thieves. It must be an awful thing to rob the poor as they were robbed by the great in all ages. It must be an infinitely difficult thing for a prince to be honest; it is an almost impossible thing for a rich man to be really honest. He wants the next field. You have a thousand acres. He says, I know it, but I want a thousand and one, to round the corner, to complete the estate. Your landmark ends here; he replies, I am not quite sure of that. I think it ought to be moved a little to the north. Why will much have more? Why covet the vineyard on the other side of the hedge? Why not let the poor have something? The Lord is the defender of the poor; he will never see the poor man stripped naked without interposing in some way. We cannot understand how, but there is in history, taking it in great breadths, a spirit that reclaims what has been taken unrighteously, that punishes the men who trifle with landmarks and boundaries and old family fences. God rebukes the rich; God never blesses human greediness. It seems to flourish, and the rich man appears to have simply to reach out his hand to put another estate in his pocket. Judge not by appearances, or by narrow instances; take in cycles of time, great spans of history, and see how the slow-moving, but sure-moving, spirit of Providence readjusts and reclaims, and finally establishes according to the law of honesty and righteousness.

How will God proceed in his punishment of Ephraim and of Judah? He will proceed variously: "Therefore will I be unto Ephraim as a moth." The figure is not too humble to be adopted by the divine action for purposes of illustration. The moth works secretly, silently; you never hear its motions in the fabric which it is slowly consuming. God works thus amongst the children of men. We say from the human side: He is not the man he was; once he would not have made that mistake. How different he is now from what he was ten years ago; now he forgets, he mislays things, he mixes the succession of affairs; he is not marked now by the sharp punctuality, the honest punctuality which characterised him aforetime; he tells the same story twice over. What has taken place? Thus we remark from the outside; the Lord is as a moth within his brain. "And to the house of Judah as rottenness": a gradual process of decomposition; not coming to maturity all at once. Some men are, as to their intellect, and their spiritual qualities, and their moral attributes, visibly rotting before our eyes. You note the lowering of the moral tone; you observe how the bloom is removed from the fair peach. Where are the commandments now; where the lofty conception of human right and divine rule now? Is there any spectacle more revolting than that of a putrefying character? Hence the pestilence that fills the very air with death.

These are God's silent actions; but he proceeds to say, "I will be unto Ephraim as a lion, and as a young lion to the house of Judah." How he changes! How all things are possible to God! The moth is now a lion; the process of decay is now exchanged for the roaring and the fierceness of a young lion in the agony of its hunger. Thus various is the providence of God retributive, instructive, comforting, desolating. The Lord rideth forth in twenty thousand chariots, and none can tell in what chariot he will come forth at his next appearance.

This contrastive image of penalty is beautifully given in an intermediate verse: "When Ephraim saw his sickness, and Judah saw his wound." There you have precisely the parallel in each case the sickness internal, the wound an outward bruise, a gash in the flesh. Who can tell the sickness of the heart? But who can miss the gaping gash in the bleeding body? One man is punished with sickness; another is wounded, so that the poor wound opens and the red blood leaps out in torrents. Both the punishments are from God. Does the matter end at this point? Could the almighty, all-loving God so punctuate his history of the administration of the affairs of the world as to leave at this point? It is impossible. The prophet will add a line:

"I will go and return to my place, till they acknowledge their offence, and seek my face: in their affliction they will seek me early" ( Hos 5:15 ).

God cannot say farewell until he is driven to it; and who can drive? not omnipotence of the arm hateful power! but omnipotence of the heart, which, when controlling the omnipotence of the arm, makes both a merciful almightiness. "Till they acknowledge their offence." If we deny our sin God will search us and try us and punish us; but if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, we do not deceive God. "And seek my face." We have not to wait for the New Testament to find this beautiful word. We think when we come into the revelation of St. John the Divine, and read that his servants shall see his face, that we have come to some consummating promise. Rightly read, the Old Testament has been full of the face of God. He wants his children to see his face; not to hear him behind the clouds, but to see him eye to eye; and Moses conversed with the Lord, literally, mouth to mouth, and, as we have seen, God kissed Moses into heaven. "In their affliction they will seek me early." The literal rendering would be: In their affliction they will seek me in the morning; they will rise as men who have much work to do that day. In a sweet little favourite poem we hear a child say, "Wake me early, mother, dear." Why wake you early? The child knew, and told her mother; the night was too long for that child, for she had "to be Queen of the May," and she must be up with the sun, and before the lark. In their affliction they will hardly be able to sleep during the night. They will watch for the first white in the east; any hint of morning, and up they will spring, saying, The day will be all too short for us; we must begin this work early. We have a long prayer to make, a great confession to submit; is the sun rising is there any hint of his rising, is there one gleam in the far east? O watchman, what of the night? He says, The morning cometh. Then shall all contrite souls spring to their orisons, hasten up for their matins, and before the light is fully abroad the prayer will be quite in heaven.

Thus the grand old Bible rolls like a majestic river through our human history. Let us hasten to it, and drink abundantly of its waters; they refresh and purify, and quench the soul's burning. Can any man find Jesus in Hosea? Jesus is in full presence in all this Book of Hosea. Why? Because he is in the prophet himself. The prophet speaks from the Christ-point. The prophet was himself a crucified man; in our next reading we shall find that the prophet declared the resurrection. Talk of importing meanings into the Bible? It is impossible, if those meanings be moral, just, redeeming, ennobling. This is the glory of the tree of life, that it bears all manner of fruits. Make it a large Bible, a great earth-covering Bible; make it a Bible that fills infinity, eternity; for one word of God must be greater than anything God has ever made. His thought is his deity.

Prayer

Almighty God, we know thee by our love; thou dost come to us through our hearts; we feel thy presence; we know thy nearness because of the new warmth that is within us, so that when thy Word closes for a moment we say, Our hearts burned within us. We did not know the Speaker personally, but we knew him sympathetically. There is no voice like thine; as for thy Word, it abideth for ever in winter and in summer; the night cannot frighten it away by its loads of darkness, and it stands in the sun like the angel of thy presence. Thy Word is a light, a lamp, a song, a fortress; if now and again it be as a sharp sword amongst our bones, behold this judgment is intended for our purification and our progress; but thy Word is full of gospel, good news, glad tidings, music from the heart of God: may we understand it as such, and receive it, and give it the hospitality of our whole heart Herein is love; herein is health; herein is immortality. All this we know in Christ Jesus thy Son; but for him we should be in darkness, but having Christ we see the light, we are children of the day, and we behold the inviting destiny of heaven; and because it lures us by all its light and joy, we would accept the discipline of the present toil, and act faithfully and lovingly towards our fellow men. May our Christianity be vindicated by our morality; may all that is noble in our thought embody itself in all that is generous in action. Then shall we be the children of Christ, redeemed ones, bearing the blood-mark, carrying the signature eternal; then we shall love the light and the truth and the ways of righteousness, and as for our latter end, it shall be the opening of our truest life. Regard all men from thy great throne; let thy providence be a ministry of helpfulness to all lives, to all workers, sufferers, travellers, strangers. Make the strange land a home; show where the garden grows even in the wilderness, and when thy loved ones are athirst lead them to secret fountains. On the old man and the little child let the sunlight of thy love fall in impartial fulness, and may all men know thy nearness by beholding the goodness which enriches their life. Establish us in the faith; when we want to do wrong send a sudden cloud upon us that shall make us forget our evil purpose; when we want to pray come and be thyself the Altar and the Sovereign; and when we think of our sin lead us to the Cross, whence no faithful soul ever brought his sin back again. The blood of Jesus Christ thy Son cleanseth from all sin. At the Cross we leave it, and there it shall never be found any more; for is not the miracle of thy love the forgetfulness of our sin? Amen.