CHAPTER XVII
Bands of Love. Amos and Hosea
Agnes M. Lawson
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to Bible Study
The Colorado College of Divine
Science
Denver, 1920.
In the
latter part of the eighth century B.C., a
shepherd who owned a small place with a
few sycamore trees on it and a peculiar
breed of sheep, foretold an earthquake
two years before it occurred. This man
was not one of the school of prophets;
but he is the first to write his speeches
and so begin that unique class of
literature known as Prophetic. The
primary function of the prophet (one who
speaks for another) is not the
foretelling of events, but to speak for
Jehovah or in place of Him, and in this
sense he was the upholder of
righteousness and the condemner of evil
wherever found. Prediction was merely
secondary and incidental; for anyone who
comprehends principles knows that to
fulfill them means safety, to violate
them is disaster.
The book of
Amos, according to Prof. Moulton,
“is made up of two parts; one a
single prophetic utterance of four lines;
the other the most elaborately
constructed piece of writing in all
literature.”
The words of
Amos, who was among the herdsmen of
Tekoa, which he saw concerning Israel in
the days of Uzziah, king of Judah, and in
the days of Jeroboam, king of Israel, two
years before the earthquake. And he
said:
”The Lord shall roar from
Zion,
And utter his voice from
Jerusalem;
And the habitations of the shepherds
shall mourn,
And the top of Carmel shall
wither.”
The
fulfillment of this prediction brings the
obscure herdsman into prominence, and was
accepted as the seal of his prophetic
calling.
To Amos,
with his positive conviction that God is
the supreme power in all human destiny
and natural phenomena, there was no such
thing as chance. Faith has lines of
communication, and knows of things to
come, for it is moved by the tides of
unseen causes, in rhythm with
nature’s pulse. It was said that at
the eruption of Mount Pelee not a wild
animal was found in its vicinity, but
man, who had blunted by heedlessness and
sin the finer instinct which feels the
divine warnings, was destroyed. The faith
of Amos was intuitive perception, which
we may call educated instinct; it is
instinct brought to the nth power
of consciousness. This soul faculty
belongs to each, as sight and hearing are
universal faculties of man.
Elijah and
Elisha stand out as lovers of God, and
walk as supermen, above the normal level
of man; but Amos and Hosea are lovers of
man and will not save themselves until
mankind is saved with them, and walk down
among them, one telling the doom that
must come, because the justice of God
will permit no unrighteousness to
flourish; the other with a message of the
yearning love of the Father to reclaim
His erring children.
Amos has
been called “a moral
reformer,” in distinguishment of
the practical work of reclamation which
is the distinct note of his message. He
comes from Judah to tell Israel of the
impending doom that awaits her if she
will not change. It is a courageous act,
and he has a style of extreme boldness.
Conditions in Israel were deplorable; the
king and nobles have “houses of
ivory” and “summer and
winter” houses; the poor are
oppressed and helpless. He preaches the
justice of God; and the guilty must
suffer because of this supreme attribute
of God. He fearlessly denounces
oppression, deceit, false balances, and
inhumanity. “Hear this, O ye that
would swallow up the needy, and cause the
poor of the land to fail, making the
ephah small and the shekel great, and
dealing falsely with balances of deceit;
that ye may buy the poor for silver, and
the needy for a pair of shoes, and sell
the refuse of wheat. Shall not the land
tremble for this, and everyone mourn that
dwelleth therein?”
But mortals
at all times like to be comfortable, and
insist upon it, even when standing on the
edge of a precipice. The one who speaks
“comfortable words” is
welcome; but the “doom
prophets” are disturbers that they
dread to hear. Coming from Judah, always
less worldly-minded than Israel, already
they think of their southern brethren as
foreigners, Amos is invited to go home.
“Amos, O thou seer, go, flee away
into the land of Judah, and there eat
bread, and prophesy there; but prophesy
not any more at Beth-el, for it is the
king’s sanctuary, and it is a royal
house.”
But Amos has
been sent to Israel by Jehovah, and must
deliver his message. His insight into the
divine nature and the conditions in
Israel enable him to perceive her
impending downfall as clearly as he had
foreseen the earthquake. God’s
righteousness cannot be ignored; Israel
is steeped in debauchery, luxuriousness,
and idolatry. Over against this he
perceives a Power advancing to overthrow
this condition--locusts, plagues, drouth,
enemy powers, swords in their hands to
destroy immortal Israel.
Reading
Amos, and perceiving the superb literary
climaxes that he attains, makes one
wonder if we have not come far astray in
our culture and education. To cram the
stomach with food will not make the
graceful, lithe form; to cram the brain
with impressions does not give easy
literary forms of expression. Amos makes
the structure of his composition reflect
his thought; and the general movement of
his prose poem conveys the action of sin
followed by judgment, not in a future
life, but here and now; and he achieves a
distinct literary triumph.
In the
wilderness of Judah, David had grown
under the open sky into greatness; here
also Amos, another shepherd, in solitary
communion with the Soul of Things,
becomes sensitized to the rhythmical
movements of mental forces. His imagery
is direct, drawn from the rural affairs
with which he is familiar--wagons,
harvests, cattle--and from nature--hills,
mountains, lions, birds. Chapter IV is a
literary gem, the denunciations because
of divine warnings unheeded naturally
reaching the climax: “Yet ye have
not returned unto me, said
Jehovah.”
Yet there is
more than justice to God, according to
Amos. He is merciful too, and he will not
forget his suffering poor in the
“great day” when wickedness
will be overthrown; all the faithful will
be saved. Judah and Israel will again be
united. Not only this but all the nations
about them will be united to them, whom
before this the Hebrew had rigidly
excluded from the salvation of
Jehovah.
“In
that day will I raise up the tabernacle
of David that is fallen, and close up the
breaches thereof; and I will raise up his
ruins, and I will build it as in the days
of old; that they may possess the remnant
of Edom, and the nations that are called
by my name, said the Lord that doeth
this. Behold, the days come that the
plowman shall overtake the reaper, and
the treader of grapes him that soweth the
seed; and the mountains shall drop sweet
wine, and all the hill shall melt. And I
will bring again the captivity of my
people Israel, and they shall build the
waste cities and inhabit them; and they
shall plant vineyards and drink wine
thereof; they shall also make gardens and
eat the fruit of them. And I will plant
them upon their land which I have given
them, said the Lord, thy God.”
As the
message of Christianity is given by the
four evangelists, the last one being the
climax because it reveals the supreme
attribute, love, the last of the four
prophets to Israel reaches the heart of
the universe, Love. “Life is just
our chance o’ the prize o’
learning love”; and Hosea stands
out in human history as the first seer to
understand the Love that is infinite, and
that it never, never lets us go.
Hosea lived
a little later than Amos; possibly near
the time of the fall of Israel under the
Assyrians in 722 B.C. He is the second
prophet to leave a written record of his
teachings. He is a little difficult to
follow, as he makes reference to
conditions with which we are not
familiar; and he gives fragments of what
we should judge were oral speeches.
Israel could not reject Hosea on the
grounds that she rejected Amos; for Hosea
is no “foreigner” but native
and a living flame of patriotism, in its
best and highest sense.
Two
political parties had sprung up in both
Israel and Judah; divided and almost
constantly at war with each other, both
had become weakened. Weakness reaches for
aid outside itself, so one party
advocated an Assyrian alliance, the other
an alliance with Egypt. Hosea, like our
own George Washington, protested against
entangling alliances. Jehovah was the
strength of the nation, and to make an
alliance with a foreign and heathen power
was unfaithfulness to Him.
Hosea had
learned the great truth “the state
is the individual writ large, for he sees
his own unhappy domestic affairs repeated
in the state on a larger scale." He had
learned to gauge Jehovah’s love by
the measure of his own heart throbs; he
understood the love that is infinite by
the unquenchable love in the depths of
his own being, measureless, unfathomable,
unfailing; a love that “alters not,
when it alteration finds” but loves
on in undiminished fervor; and must win
in the end, because it can accept no end
by unity.
Hosea’s wife is unfaithful to him;
she bears children, but leaves both her
husband and her children for lovers.
Down, down she sinks in the social scale
until she becomes public property;
forsaken by her paramours she is sold as
a slave. Hosea buys her and brings her
home; she is not reinstated as his wife,
but is given the opportunity to redeem
herself; and during this time she shall
be “no man’s wife.”
No one can
look out upon life save through his own
lenses; and Hosea sees Israel--his poetic
name for her is Ephraim--as the beloved
wife of Jehovah; whose love for her was
the same as his love for Gomer. The word
“husband” means
“caretaker,” and after Hosea
many of the prophets use the word as a
synonym for Deity. What more could
Jehovah do for his wife, Israel, than He
had done for her? She is wealthy, and
this wealth had come to her freely from
her husband; she bears His name and is
safe under His protection; she is beloved
of Him and has borne children to Him, the
nation; but faithless Israel runs out
after strange lovers, Assyria and Egypt;
and the idols of these nations are in her
groves and on her high places, badges of
her shameless disgrace. Yet, Jehovah must
do what he himself had been compelled to
do: “Ephraim is joined to idols:
leave him alone.”
After all,
this is “hell” and the
greatest punishment that can be meted to
anyone; for the one thing that none of us
can stand is to be “let
alone” by Love. When we stray do we
not want Love to follow us with its
gentle reminders, that it is still there?
He whom Love lets alone has no
destination, no incentive for work, no
goal of attainment; he is without
friends, without home, without country,
without God, and he is lost. We
may want to stray and make individual
experiments, lose ourselves and find
ourselves; but we never want to be
“let alone” but to know that
Love is still there, that it keeps the
home fires burning, will welcome us on
our return; and never can it leave us
alone.
The hardest
lesson any of us have to learn is the
lesson taught by Hosea; to give freedom
and yet not leave the sinner
alone. This is Hosea’s
lowest note; Jehovah could not leave
Israel alone. She was His wife, He loved
her, and she had borne Him children, He
was God, and could not do otherwise.
Hosea knew he loved Gomer, because
Jehovah loved Israel; that love had
entered his heart and it was impossible
for him to cease to love.
No, Jehovah
could not let His erring wife go,
“I will go and return to my place,
till they acknowledge their offense, and
seek my face; in their affliction they
will seek me earnestly.”
Love’s opportunity is the need of
him; it always comes, and Love, child of
eternity, can well afford to bide its
time. One of the greatest impressions
ever made upon me was from the stage in
“Peer Gynt.” In his youth,
Peer Gynt had wooed and won a beautiful
girl and taken her to his mountain home,
then he deserted his young wife. Over the
whole world he roamed, seeking adventures
and diversions everywhere; and when
satiated, disillusioned, old, he
returned. In the same mountain home where
he had left her he found her, and she
came to greet him with illumined face,
“Thou hast made my life
beautiful.”
It is not
the love that is returned to which we owe
the most gratitude; it is the love that
another can stimulate in us that holds us
debtors and places us in a position that
we can never fully repay. If another has
sent a shaft of the infinite Love into
our hearts, we are born out of this world
into the Real, where “a thousand
years is as one day.”
“Whosoever loveth another is born
of God,” the infinite Love, and can
ask no return, just the privilege of
loving. Love is sublimely independent,
and asks, “And if I love thee, what
is that to thee?” Its satisfaction
is in just being Love.
The yearning
tenderness of God, Hosea had found,
“I will heal their back-sliding, I
will love them freely; for mine anger is
turned away from him. I will be as the
dew unto Israel; he shall blossom as the
lily, and cast forth his roots as
Lebanon. His branches shall spread, and
his beauty shall be as the olive tree and
his smell as Lebanon. They that dwell
under his shadow shall return; they shall
revive as the corn, and blossom as the
vine; the scent thereof shall be the wine
of Lebanon.
And returned
Israel shall say:
"Ephraim--What have I to do any more
with idols?
"The Lord--I have answered and will
regard him.
"Ephraim--I am like a green fir
tree.
"The Lord--From me is thy fruit
found.”
(Modern Readers Bible.)
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