THE THICK NIGHT OF ISRAEL
Hosea 4-14
It was indeed a "thick night" into which this
Arthur of Israel stepped from his shattered home. The mists drive
across Hosea’s long agony with his people, and what we see, we see
blurred and broken. There are stumbling and clashing; crowds in
drift; confused rallies; gangs of assassins breaking across the
highways; doors opening upon lurid interiors full of drunken riot.
Voices, which other voices mock, cry for a dawn that never comes.
God Himself is Laughter, Lightning, a Lion, a Gnawing Worm. Only one
clear note breaks over the confusion-the trumpet summoning to war.
Take courage, O great heart! Not thus shall it always be! There wait
thee, before the end, of open Visions at least two-one of Memory and
one of Hope, one of Childhood and one of Spring. Past this night,
past the swamp and jungle of these fetid years, thou shalt see thy
land in her beauty, and God shall look on the face of His Bride.
Chapters 4-14 are almost indivisible. The two Visions just
mentioned, chapters 11 and Hos 14:3-9, may be detached by virtue of
contributing the only strains of gospel which rise victorious above
the Lord’s controversy with His people and the troubled story of
their sins. All the rest is the noise of a nation falling to pieces,
the crumbling of a splendid past. And as decay has no climax and
ruin no rhythm, so we may understand why it is impossible to divide
with any certainty Hosea’s record of Israel’s fall. Some arrangement
we must attempt, but it is more or less artificial, and to be
undertaken for the sake of our own minds, that cannot grasp so great
a collapse all at once. Chapter 4 has a certain unity, and is
followed by a new exordium, but as it forms only the theme of which
the subsequent chapters are variations, we may take it with them as
far as Hos 7:7; after which there is a slight transition from the
moral signs of Israel’s dissolution to the political-although Hoses
still combines the religious offences of idolatry with the anarchy
of the land. These form the chief interest to the end of chapter 10.
Then breaks the bright Vision of the Past, chapter 11, the temporary
victory of the Gospel of the Prophet over his Curse. In chapters
12-14:2 we are plunged into the latter once more, and reach in Hos
14:3 if. the second bright vision, the Vision of the Future. To each
of these phases of Israel’s Thick Night-we can hardly call them
Sections-we may devote a chapter of simple exposition, adding three
chapters more of detailed examination of the main doctrines we shall
have encountered on our way-the Knowledge of God, Repentance, and
the Sin against Love.
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