THE PROBLEM THAT AMOS LEFT
AMOS was a preacher of righteousness almost
wholly in its judicial and punitive offices. Exposing the moral
conditions of society in his day, emphasising on the one hand its
obduracy and on the other the intolerableness of it, he asserted
that nothing could avert the inevitable doom-neither Israel's
devotion to Jehovah nor Jehovah's interest in Israel, You alone have
I known of all the farnilies of the ground: therefore will I visit
upon you all your iniquities. The visitation was to take place in
war and in the captivity of the people. This is practically the
whole message of the prophet Amos.
That he added to it the promise of restoration which now closes his
book, we have seen to be extremely improbable. Yet even if that
promise is his own, Amos does not tell us how the restoration is to
be brought about. With wonderful insight and patience he has traced
the captivity of Israel to moral causes. But he does not show what
moral change in the exiles is to justify their restoration, or by
what means such a moral change is to be effected. We are left to
infer the conditions and the means of redemption from the principles
which Amos enforced while there yet seemed time to pray for the
doomed people: Seek the Lord and ye shall live.{Amo 5:4} According
to this, the moral renewal of Israel must precede their restoration;
but the prophet seems to make no great effort to effect the renewal.
In short Amos illustrates the easily-forgotten truth that a preacher
to the conscience is not necessarily a preacher of repentance.
Of the great antitheses between which religion moves, Law and Love,
Amos had therefore been the prophet of Law. But we must not imagine
that the association of Love with the Deity was strange to him. This
could not be to any Israelite who remembered the past of his
people-the romance of their origins and early struggles for freedom.
Israel had always felt the grace of their God; and, unless we be
wrong about the date of the great poem in the end of Deuteronomy,
they had lately celebrated that grace in lines of exquisite beauty
and tenderness:
He found him in a desert land,
In a waste and a howling wilderness.
He compassed him about, cared for him,
Kept him as the apple of His eye.
As an eagle stirreth up his nest,
Fliittereth over his young,
Sprcadeih his wings, taketh them,
Beareth them up on his pinions-
So Jehovah alone led him.
{Deu 32:10-12}
The patience of the Lord with their waywardness and their
stubbornness had been the ethical influence on Israel's life at a
time when they had probably neither code of law nor system of
doctrine. Thy gentleness, as an early Psalmist says for his people,
Thy gentleness hath made me great.{Psalms 18}. Amos is not unaware
of this ancient grace of Jehovah. But he speaks of it in a fashion
which shows that he feels it to be exhausted and without hope for
his generation. I brought you up out of the land of Egypt, and led
you forty years in the wilderness, to possess the land of the
Amorites. And I raised up of your sons for prophets and of your
young men for Nazirites? {Amo 2:10-11} But this can now only fill
the cup of the nation's sin. You alone have I known of all the
families of the earth: therefore will I visit upon you all your
iniquities.{Amo 3:2} Jehovah's ancient Love but strengthens now the
justice and the impetus of His Law.
We perceive, then, the problem which Amos left to prophecy. It was
not to discover Love in the Deity whom he had so absolutely
identified with Law. The Love of God needed no discovery among a
people with the Deliverance, the Exodus, the Wilderness and the Gift
of the Land in their memories. But the problem was to prove in God
so great and new a mercy as was capable of matching that Law, which
the abuse of His millennial gentleness now only the more fully
justified. There was needed a prophet to arise with as keen a
conscience of Law as Amos himself, and yet affirm that Love was
greater still ; to admit that Israel were doomed, and yet promise
their redemption by processes as reasonable and as ethical as those
by which the doom had been rendered inevitable. The prophet of
conscience had to be followed by the prophet of repentance.
Such an one was found in Hosea, the son of Be'eri, a citizen and
probably a priest of Northern Israel, whose very name, Salvation,
the synonym of Joshua and of Jesus, breathed the larger hope, which
it was his glory to bear to his people. Before we see how for this
task Hosea was equipped with the love and sympathy which Amos
lacked, let us do two things. Let us appreciate the magnitude of the
task itself, set to him first of prophets; and let us remind
ourselves that, greatly as he achieved it, the task was not one
which could be achieved even by him once for all, but that it
presents itself to religion again and again in the course of her
development.
For the first of these duties, it is enough to recall how much all
subsequent prophecy derives from Hosea. We shall not exaggerate if
we say that there is no truth uttered by later prophets about the
Divine Grace, which we do not find in germ in him. Isaiah of
Jerusalem was a greater statesman and a more powerful writer, but he
had not Hosea's tenderness and insight into motive and character.
Hosea's marvellous sympathy both with the people and with God is
sufficient to foreshadow every grief, every hope, every gospel,
which make the Books of Jeremiah and the great Prophet of the Exile
exhaustless in their spiritual value for mankind. These others
explored the kingdom of God: it was Hosea who took it by storm. {Mat
11:12} He is the first prophet of grace, Israel's earliest
evangelist yet with as keen a sense of law, and of the
inevitableness of ethical discipline, as Amos himself
But the task which Hosea accomplished was not one that could be
accomplished once for all. The interest of his book is not merely
historical. For so often as a generation is shocked out of its old
religious ideals, as Amos shocked Israel, by a realism and a
discovery of law, which have no respect for ideals, however ancient
and however dear to the human heart, but work their own pitiless way
to doom inevitable; so often must the Book of Hosea have a practical
value for living men. At such a crisis we stand today. The older
Evangelical assurance, the older Evangelical ideals have to some
extent been rendered impossible by the realism to which the
sciences, both physical and historical, have most healthily recalled
us, and by their wonderful revelation of Law working through nature
and society without respect to our creeds and pious hopes. The
question presses: Is it still possible to believe in repentance and
conversion, still possible to preach the power of God to save,
whether the individual or society, from the forces of heredity and
of habit ? We can at least learn how Hosea mastered the very similar
problem which Amos left to him, and how, with a moral realism no
less stern than his predecessor and a moral standard every whit as
high, he proclaimed Love to be the ultimate element in religion; not
only because it moves man to a repentance and God to a redemption
more sovereign than any law; but because if neglected or abused,
whether as love of man or love of God, it enforces a doom still more
inexorable than that required by violated truth or by outraged
justice. Love our Saviour, Love our almighty and unfailing Father,
but, just because of this, Love our most awful Judge-we turn to the
life and the message in which this eternal theme was first unfolded.
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