Hosea 10:1-7

An Empty Vine

Hos 10:1-6

This chapter is an admirable piece of human criticism, even if it had no claim to that which we gladly assign it, namely, divine inspiration. Viewed from a merely literary standpoint, it is beautiful; listened to as men listen to music, it is enchanting. This we say, apart altogether from its claim to be considered a distinctly inspired criticism and message. Sometimes expositors of the broader sort are charged with reading things into the Bible. It is impossible to read into the Bible anything that is true, wise, pure, good, beautiful, because all such things are there already; they are the offspring of eternity. Every man should read his own experience into the Bible, that he may see whether he can get it out again or not, and if he can get it out, then he may conclude with himself that his experience is profoundly true. Say to the sculptor: You have read that statue into the marble; Nature did not put it there; when you got that marble into your hands it was without form or beauty or comeliness; all this chiselling, all this shapely suggestiveness, all this almost life, you have put into it. That would be as just a criticism as to say to the true expositor of the Bible, You have read these things into the Bible, if they be things that are in themselves true, beautiful, musical, useful, beneficent, and moving in the direction of heroic and useful life. Say to the composer: You have read that Oratorio into the seven notes of music; the seven notes were simple enough, why were you not content to sound them in their purity, and let them stand for what they were worth? All this Oratorio, sublimity, inventiveness, apocalyptic charm all this only shows that you have read yourself into the seven notes. It would be just as wise a criticism as to say to the true Bible reader that he had read himself into the Bible, because he finds in that infinite sky all stars, all planets, Pleiades innumerable, ineffable, and burning centres that men dare not even name. He is a poor Bible reader that does not see everything in the Bible. There are a thousand times ten thousand Bibles in the Bible; yet all the Bibles are one in their spirit of love, in their purpose of redemption, in the glitter of their beneficent all-illuminating light Have no confidence in the critic that finds nothing but grammar in the Bible; have as much confidence in the man who tells you all the literature you need is in the alphabet. He could defend his declaration, but it would be at the expense of his sanity. All literature is in the alphabet; words are useless in their singularity: so oftentimes are men; they are nothing in units. The dictionary is nothing in the way of exposition, education, illumination, stimulus, when it stands there in its mere catalogue of words. Words must be put together; must colour one another; must combine and recombine, and be made to palpitate with soul: then the dictionary may become a poem, and its catalogue may be evolved into a "Paradise Lost." It is even so with God's book. It is never read: Lord, evermore give us this bread. Let the child read the Bible, and make a child's book of it; above all, let the woman read the Bible, and get out of it all its music.

"Israel is an empty vine." Yet, literally, it might read, Israel is a luxuriant vine; he bringeth forth fruit unto himself; and yet, literally, he brings forth no fruit at all, only long stem and tendril and leaves innumerable; his fruit is all foliage. The apostle said the grace of God that was in him was not in vain; that is to say, it was not useless, not introspective; not only useful to himself, but it was expressive, outwardly, beneficently, feedingly, so that all men who came in contact with that grace ate bread from Heaven and drank the wine of Paradise. The figure is very Hebraic and very grand. Israel is a vine, and a growing vine, but Israel misses the purpose of the vine by never growing any wine; growing nothing but weed, leaves, and so disappointing men when they come to find fruit thereon and discover none. The Church is an empty vine; theology is an empty vine. All religious controversy that is conducted for its own sake that is to say, with the single view of winning a victory in words is an empty vine, luxuriant enough, but it is the luxuriance of ashes; as who should say, His iron safe is full; open it, and out runs the worthless dust to the ground, without a sparkle of gold, or precious metal of any kind. The safe was full, but full of nothingness; the vine was luxuriant, but only in that which never yet appeased human hunger. "According to the multitude of his fruit he hath increased the altars; according to the goodness of his land they have made goodly images." They have gone pari passu with the Almighty he the living Father doing the good, and they the rebellious men doing proportionate evil. When the harvest has been plentiful the idolatry has been large, increasing in urgency and importance; when the vine has brought forth abundantly another image has been put up. That is the teaching of the prophet; yea, that is the impeachment of God. God may be represented as saying, Your wickedness has been in proportion to my goodness; the more I have given you, the less I have received from you; the larger the prosperity with which I have crowned you, the more zealous have you been in your idolatry; the more lovingly I have revealed myself to you, the greater your wantonness, selfishness, and rebellion. That is not only Hebrew, it is English; that is not only ancient history, it is the tragedy, the blasphemy of to-day.

What is the explanation? Where is the point at which we can stand and say, This is the beginning of the mischief? The answer is in the second verse, "Their heart is divided." That has always been the difficulty of God; he has so seldom been able to get a consenting heart. "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." That is not a jeremiad; it is a fact. God says, These people want to do two irreconcilable things they want to serve God and mammon; they want to courteously recognise the existence of Jehovah, and then run to kiss the lips of Baal. Their heart does not all go one way; they cannot wholly throw off the true religion; it has indeed become to them little better than a superstition, but men do not like to gather up all the traditions of the past, and cast them in one bundle into the flowing river in the hope that it may be carried away and lost for ever. So they come to the altar sometimes; now and again they look in at the church door; intermittently they listen to the old psalm and the half-remembered hymn; but in the soul of them they are drunk with idolatry. There are persons very anxious to maintain orthodoxy who are the most notorious thieves in society; there are those who would subscribe to any society to defend Sunday if they might do on Monday just what they liked; they are zealous about the Sabbath, and specially zealous that other people should keep it, but on Monday you would never imagine that there was a Sunday. "Their heart is divided"; they have no sympathy with Arianism largely because they do not know what it is, but have a great horror of it; mainly because somebody else has been alarmed by it. They would not have any written creed disturbed in jot or tittle; whatever happens, that creed in its mechanical form must be observed, though it damn three-fourths of the universe without law or reason. This is called orthodoxy; it is miscalled, not truly denominated; orthodoxy is love, hope, the very passion of the Cross of Christ. Whilst we train our young men to maintain certain intellectual positions about which the world cares absolutely nothing, we ought to take pains to train them to meet certain moral and social conditions that are actual, that are crying in their necessity, that are tragic in their pathos. Where one man has heard about Arius, thousands of men have felt the torment of a disappointed life. Let us pay less heed to men who are puzzled by ancient history than we pay to those who this very day are slowly dying. "Now shall they be found faulty;" literally, Now shall they be found guilty. "He shall break down their altars;" literally, he himself; for the pronoun is emphatic, as we have read in our Caesar's Commentaries as boys at school, ipse , he himself, Cæsar himself. So here we read, He himself, the living God, "shall break down their altars"; literally, shall take their heads off. He comes forth and plays the part of a guillotine; down it flashes, and the head is gone; he comes forth from eternity as an executioner, and he severs the head from the body. He comes forth as a divine iconoclast and shivers the altar, so that the head of it falls into the dust, and the stump of it is utterly without worth. "He shall spoil their images": there is a tone of taunting in this; he shall rub them together, he shall break them in pieces, he shall return them to powder, he shall evolve them the other way, by retrogression and debasement, so that in the morning the idolators will not know their own gods. Why all this decapitation, mockery, and bitterness of taunting? Because the heart of the people is divided. There is no difficulty in dealing with an unbeliever his whole heart is steeped in disbelief; there is no difficulty in dealing with an honest man his whole soul is bathed in the righteousness and purity of God, his sincerity is his glory and his defence. The difficult man to deal with is the man who prays on Sunday, and robs his customers on Monday; the man it is impossible to make anything of is the creature that mumbles his psalm in the church, and takes the last penny from the oppressed poor when he collects his rents on the following day.

To what straits this heart-divided people were reduced:

"Now they shall say, We have no king, because we feared not the Lord; what then should a king do to us?" ( Hos 10:3 ).

The bitterness of that complaint is found in the fact that they had a king, and yet had no king; they had a figure-head, they had a man who was called king, and to whom certain courteous loyalty was reluctantly paid; but as to faculty, true sovereignty, noble influence, he was no king. This is as bad as the divided heart to be nominally one thing and really another; to have a pulpit, and no gospel; to have a church, but no way out of it to heaven; to have the form of a man, with the heart of a beast: these are the ironies that may be said to perplex and grieve the very Spirit of God. There are those who boast of their consistency; but always be assured that a man has no consistency when he boasts of it. There is a consistency that is worthless; there is a consistency that is consistent with itself, but is inconsistent with the spirit of progress and with the law and necessity of life; the inconsistency that God blames is to be found in a divided heart, and in a nominal sovereignty that is associated with practical subservience. Pity the king who is not royal; pray for the removal of the prince that is not princely; his name will be a burden to him; the very elevation which belongs to his office will become an impeachment upon his manhood. Pity the church that does not save the outcast, feed the hungry, and shelter those who have no home; it is a church, but not a house of God; it may be a Bethaven, but it is not a Beth-el.

Still the impeachment rolls on, growing in fulness and urgency: "They have spoken words, swearing falsely in making a covenant": literally, we should say, Their life is words, words, words, Hamlet before the time. Israel is an empty vine, a leaf-bearing vine; Israel is a mass of words, incarnate verbiage, so that even when he makes a covenant he makes it only in words, and when he swears an oath he makes no impression beyond his lips; the oath is not red with the blood of his heart. What is the consequence? "thus judgment springeth up as hemlock in the furrows of the field." There is judgment enough, but of what kind? Of the hemlock sort. The meaning is, that though there be plentifulness of judgment it is of a poisonous nature; there is a great show of righteousness and equity, and a wonderfully tender care of the law-courts, to preserve them from dilapidation, and to save the judges from imperilling their valuable lives: but they are law-courts of iniquity; the judgment is a lie, and the word of equity is as a dose of hemlock. A graphic figure is this of hemlock growing in the furrows of the field. The idea is that iniquity is cultivated; this is no casual iniquity, this is no hap-chance wickedness, as who should say, How surprised we are to have been confronted by this image of wrong. Nay, verily there is no surprise, for the bullocks were taken out and yoked together, and the plough was set in the field, and the furrow was straightly ripped, and the seed was sown with a liberal hand, and in the black harvest-time hemlock sprang up, and darkness was garnered for judgment. This is human history, this is no ancient dream. Inspired or not inspired, it is an awful book for getting hold of realities, and searching the heart, and trying the reins, and disturbing us by a cruel analysis of our most hidden motives. It may be inspired. How impressive and humiliating the figure that men may make a fine art of the cultivation of judgment a judgment that is iniquity; how disennobling in the midst of all our fine theories to find that the devil has got hold enough of men to make them artists in wrongdoing! So this judgment is no weed that has grown of itself, this kind of judgment is not to be reckoned as a casual growth; it was thought about, arranged for; it had its seedtime, and the harvest has come to be taken home. Harvest home, harvest home, hemlock home! You cannot escape the consequences of your actions; you cannot have seedtime of one sort, and harvest of another. Be not deceived, God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind; sow hemlock, reap hemlock; turn judgment into iniquity, and there is nothing like it for quick execution. The finest wine makes the sourest vinegar.

"The inhabitants of Samaria shall fear because of the calves of Bethaven"; literally, the cow-calves, she-calves. Poor Samaria, thou art not left even with a bull-calf in sign of strength and nobleness; fill thy sheds with the cow-calves, and go fall on their necks, and pray to them. "Bethaven," literally, the house of vanity; once that same place was called "Beth-el," that is to say, the house of God; and Beth-el has become Bethaven. Such the deteriorations, the retrogressions, the apostasies of life. How is the fine gold become dim! How is the noble youth that was going to make quite a giant of a hero doubled up, and shuffling his backward way into a nameless grave! "The people thereof shall mourn over it;" but it is a mourning of despair, not a mourning of repentance. Between the one mourning and the other there is an infinite difference. Many men are sorry for the consequences of their acts who are never sorry for the acts themselves. Repentance does not take place in any man who is sorry simply because his action has brought him to ruin. A criminal said, "Have pity upon me, for think of my beautiful house my beautiful home being broken up!" Not a word about his character being shattered. There are men who prize their furniture more than their reputation; there are those who are sorry in the morning after the night's debauch because the head aches, and the blood is in a fever, and the eyes are bleared and unsteady. That is not repentance. He repents who sees the sin in the crime, and who, without hiding the crime, cries before God that he should have offended the spirit of righteousness.

"It shall be also carried unto Assyria for a present to king Jareb": they shall not only take away the people, but they shall take away their God. Who can be so mocking as the Holy One? Who can laugh like Jehovah? Their god shall be taken away, and made a present of to any man who will take it. "I will laugh at their calamity and mock when their fear cometh." Lord of heaven, God of the Cross, spare us that laughter!

Prayer

Almighty God, if thou hast a controversy with us surely thou dost oftentimes lay it aside that thou mayest comfort us, enrich us, and make us assured of thy presence and thy care. Thou hast set us in wondrous relations: on the one side all is darkness, fear, tumult, uproar; on the other all is quietness, light, beauty, music, hope, the very beginning and pledge of heaven; and between these points how we move, now here, now there; sometimes torn with great pain, and sometimes almost with the angels. The meaning of this is that thou wilt train us for thyself; thou wilt by the agency of thy Holy Spirit cleanse us, purify and ennoble us, and make us meet to be partakers of the inheritance with the saints in light. When we are overborne by the process, may we recover ourselves by thinking of the end. Jesus for us endured the Cross, despising the shame, because he saw beyond, and all the meaning of redemption gladdened his vision. We bless thee that Jesus Christ is our example; being our Saviour and Lord, he is also our exemplar, that we may know what to do and how to do it. He taught us how to bear the Cross, how to die upon the Cross, and how to turn its shame into infinite glory. May we do nothing of ourselves; may we never take counsel with our own foolish wisdom; may we always come to the wise and to the strong and the pure for all we need and want; then shall our life prove that our prayer has been answered. Thou knowest our whole estate how many men each man is thou knowest, what devils tear him, what angels sing to him; how low in wickedness, how grand in piety; thou canst hear the sob underneath all the music of the world. Surely all this is of the Lord's doing and shaping, and there is meaning in it all; nothing of the agony is lost; every drop of the driving storm is brought into the great bow that spans the heavens in token of reconciliation and peace. Help us to think of the purpose, the end, the meaning of it all; then shall the Cross be no burden, and the way to Calvary shall be only dolorous for a moment, its dolor forgotten in the ineffable rapture and joy of heaven. Help us to continue steadfast unto the end; may our ship not founder within sight of land; may we be brought to our desired haven, and leaving the little earth-ship, may we pass into the glory and the blessedness of heaven. For all who have landed we thank thee. Sometimes they thought they would never land, but would by some evil spirit be overborne and plunged into the sea; and lo! they have set foot on shore, and already their song mingles with the anthems of the angels. Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord, for they shall rest: theirs shall be peace, without ruffle or disturbance; theirs shall be the tranquillity of God. Help us to consider those who have gone before, and to know that we are ourselves expected above; may we not cause the expectation to fail; may we turn no blessed one to the misery of heartache and disappointment; may our best ambition, purified of all dross, be to meet those who have gone before, and to see him who has brought us all together in pure and eternal brotherhood. Hear us for all classes and conditions of men; may those who are representing foreign lands feel themselves at home in the sanctuary of God; forgetting all mere circumstances, may they enter into the spirit of fellowship and be lifted up by sacred music, by noble psalm, and profitable meditation into the highest relations, in which all others are not lost, but are sanctified. Be with those who are heart-weary, and filled with wonder that is quickly becoming pain; save them from the perplexity that would disturb their spiritual quietness, and lead them into the liberty of truest joy. Go into our sick-chambers, and make them chief rooms in the house, the rooms of banqueting and feasting, in which the noiseless angels feed the hunger of the heart. Be with all who are in trouble on the sea; thine is the fulness of the earth, and the fulness of the sea is thine; give thy beloved sleep, and rest, and release from burdensome and darkening fear, and teach them that the sea is in thy keeping as solid as the land. As for those who are away beyond all boundaries, violators, trespassers, wicked souls, that have hated father and mother and house and holy companionship, may they yet be found by a pleading prayer; may the supplication of love throw its golden band around them, so that even they may yet come back with tears in their eyes, such tears as precede joy in the heart. We leave them in thine hands; we know that all the houses in history that have known thee have said with one accord, His mercy endureth for ever. May all lonely ones lose their solitariness in Christ; may all sick ones be recovered by the touch of his gentle fingers, and may all bad men be foiled; may all envious men have the devil of jealousy cast out of their hearts, and may all praying men be able to pray in bolder supplication and in larger claim, because they cover all their prayers with the infinite name of God the Son. Amen.