THE FATHERHOOD AND HUMANITY
OF GOD
Hosea 11
FROM the thick jungle of Hosea’s travail, the
eleventh chapter breaks like a high and open mound. The prophet
enjoys the first of his two clear visions-that of the past. Judgment
continues to descend. Israel’s sun is near his setting, but before
he sinks-
"A lingering light he fondly throws
On the dear hills, whence first he rose."
Across these confused and vicious years, through which he has
painfully made his way, Hosea sees the tenderness and the romance of
the early history of his people. And although he must strike the old
despairing note-that, by the insincerity of the present generation,
all the ancient guidance of their God must end in this!-yet for some
moments the blessed memory shines by itself, and God’s mercy appears
to triumph over Israel’s ingratitude. Surely their sun will not set;
Love must prevail. To which assurance a later voice from the Exile
has added, in Hos 10:10-11, a confirmation suitable to its own
circumstances.
"When Israel was a child, then I loved him,
And from Egypt I called him to be My son."
The early history of Israel was a romance. Think of it historically.
Before the Most High there spread an array of kingdoms and peoples.
At their head were three strong princes-sons indeed of God, if all
the heritage of the past, the power of the present, and the promise
of the future be tokens. Egypt, wrapt in the rich and jeweled web of
centuries, basked by Nile and Pyramid, all the wonder of the world’s
art in his dreamy eyes. Opposite him Assyria, with barer but more
massive limbs, stood erect upon his highlands, grasping in his sword
the promise of the world’s power. Between the two, and rising both
of them, yet with his eyes westward on an empire of which neither
dreamed, the Phoenician on his sea-coast built his storehouses and
sped his navies, the promise of the world’s wealth. It must ever
remain the supreme romance of history, that the true son of God,
bearer of His love and righteousness to all mankind, should be
found, not only outside this powerful trinity, but in the puny and
despised captive of one of them-in a people that was not a state,
that had not a country, that was without a history, and, if
appearances be true, was as yet devoid of even the rudiments of
civilization-a child people and a slave.
That was the Romance, and Hosea gives us the Grace which made it.
"When Israel was a child then I loved him." The verb is a distinct
impulse: "I began, I learned, to love him." God’s eyes, that passed
unheeding the adult princes of the world, fell upon this little
slave boy, and He loved him and gave him a career: "from Egypt I
called" him "to be My son."
Now, historically, it was the persuasion of this which made Israel.
All their distinctiveness and character, their progress from a level
with other nomadic tribes to the rank of the greatest religious
teachers of humanity, started from the memory of these two
facts-that God loved them, and that God called them. This was an
unfailing conscience-the obligation that they were not their own,
the irresistible motive to repentance even in their utmost
backsliding, the unquenchable hope of a destiny in their direst days
of defeat and scattering.
Some, of course, may cavil at the narrow, national scale on which
such a belief was held, but let them: remember that it was held in
trust for all mankind. To snarl that Israel felt this sonship to God
only for themselves, is to forget that it is they who have persuaded
humanity that this is the only kind of sonship worth claiming.
Almost every other nation of antiquity imagined a filial relation to
the deity, but it was either through some fabulous physical descent,
and then often confined only to kings and heroes, or by some
mystical mingling of the Divine with the human, which was just as
gross and sensuous. Israel alone defined the connection as a
historical and a moral one. "The sons of God are begotten not of
blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of
God." Sonship to God is something not physical, but moral and
historical, into which men are carried by a supreme awakening to the
Divine love and authority. Israel, it is true, felt this only in a
general way for the nation as a whole; but their conception of it
embraced just those moral contents which form the glory of Christ’s
doctrine of the Divine sonship of the individual. The belief that
God is our Father does not come to us with our carnal birth-except
in possibility: the persuasion of it is not conferred by our baptism
except in so far as that is Christ’s own seal to the fact that God
Almighty loves us and has marked us for His own. To us sonship is a
becoming, not a being-the awakening of our adult minds "into the
surprise of a Father’s undeserved mercy, into the constraint of His
authority and the assurance of the destiny He has laid up for us. It
is conferred by love, and confirmed by duty. Neither has power
brought it, nor wisdom, nor wealth, but it has come solely with the
wonder of the knowledge that God loves us, and has always loved us,
as well as in the sense, immediately following, of a true vocation
to serve Him." Sonship which is less than this is no sonship at all.
But so much as this is possible to every man through Jesus Christ.
His constant message is that the Father loves every one of us, and
that if we know that love, we are God’s sons indeed. To them who
feel it, adoption into the number and privileges of the sons of God
comes with the amazement and the romance which glorified God’s
choice of the child-slave Israel. "Behold," they cry, "what manner
of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called
the sons of God." {1 John 3}
"But we cannot be loved by God and left where we are. Beyond the
grace there lie the long discipline and destiny. We are called from
servitude to freedom, from the world of God-each of us to run a
course, and do a work, which can be done by no one else. That Israel
did not perceive this was God’s sore sorrow with them. "The more I
called to them the farther they went from Me. They to the Ba’alim
kept sacrificing, and to images offering incense." But God
persevered with grace, and the story is at first continued in the
figure of Fatherhood with which it commenced; then it changes to the
metaphor of a humane man’s goodness to his beasts. "Yet I taught
Ephraim to walk, holding them on Mine arms; but they knew not that I
healed them"-presumably when they fell and hurt themselves. "With
the cords of a man I would draw them, with bands of love; and I was
to them as those who lift up the yoke on their jaws, and gently
would I give them to eat." It is the picture of a team of bullocks,
in charge of a kind driver. Israel are no longer the wanton young
cattle of the previous chapter, which need the yoke firmly fastened
on their neck, {Hos 10:11} but a team of toiling oxen mounting some
steep road. There is no use now for the rough ropes, by which frisky
animals are kept to their work; but the driver, coming to his
beasts’ heads, by the gentle touch of his hand at their mouths and
by words of sympathy draws them after him. "I drew them with cords
of a man, and with bands of love." Yet there is the yoke, and it
would seem that certain forms of this, when beasts were working
upwards, as we should say "against the collar," pressed and rubbed
upon them, so that the humane driver, when he came to their heads,
eased the yoke with his hands. "I was as they that take the yoke off
their jaws"; and then, when they got to the top of the hill, he
would rest and feed them. That is the picture, and however uncertain
we may feel as to some of its details it is obviously a passage-Ewald
says "the earliest of all passages-in which "humane means precisely
the same as love." It ought to be taken along with that other
passage in the great Prophecy of the Exile, where God is described
as He that led them through "the deep, as a horse in the wilderness,
that they should not stumble: as a beast goeth down into the valley,
the Spirit of the Lord gave him rest." {Isa 63:13-14}
Thus then the figure of the fatherliness of God changes into that of
His gentleness or humanity. Do not let us think that there is here
either any descent of the poetry or want of connection between the
two figures. The change is true, not only to Israel’s, but to our
own experience. Men are all either the eager children of happy,
irresponsible days, or the bounden, plodding draught-cattle of
life’s serious burdens and charges. Hosea’s double figure reflects
human life in its whole range. Which of us has not known this
fatherliness of the Most High, exercised upon us, as upon Israel,
throughout our years of carelessness and disregard? It was God
Himself who taught and trained us then; -
"When through the slippery paths of youth
With heedless steps I ran,
Thine arm unseen conveyed me safe,
And led me up to man."
Those speedy recoveries from the blunders of early willfulness,
those redemptions from the sins of youth-happy were we if we knew
that it was "He who healed us." But there comes a time when men pass
from leading-strings to harness when we feel faith less and duty
more-when our work touches us more closely than our God. Death must
be a strange transformer of the spirit, yet surely not more strange
than life, which out of the eager buoyant child makes in time the
slow automaton of duty. It is such a stage which the fourth of these
verses suits, when we look up, not so much for the fatherliness as
for the gentleness and humanity of our God. A man has a mystic power
of a very wonderful kind upon the animals over whom he is placed. On
any of these wintry roads of ours we may see it, when a kind carter
gets down at a hill, and, throwing the reins on his beast’s back,
will come to its head and touch it with his bare hands, and speak to
it as if it were his fellow; till the deep eyes fill with light, and
out of these things, so much weaker than itself, a touch, a glance,
a word, there will come to it new strength to pull the stranded
wagon onward. The man is as a god to the beast, coming down to help
it, and it almost makes the beast human that he does so. Not
otherwise does Hosea feel the help which God gives His own on the
weary hills of life. We need not discipline, for our work is
discipline enough, and the cares we carry of themselves keep us
straight and steady. But we need sympathy and gentleness-this very
humanity which the prophet attributes to our God. God comes and
takes us by the head; through the mystic power which is above us,
but which makes us like itself, we are lifted to our task. Let no
one judge this incredible. The incredible would be that our God
should prove any less to us than the merciful man to his beast. But
we are saved from argument by experience. When we remember how, as
life has become steep and our strength exhausted, there has visited
us a thought which has sharpened to a word, a word which has warmed
to a touch, and we have drawn ourselves together and leapt up new
men, can we feel that God was any less in these things, than in the
voice of conscience or the message of forgiveness, or the restraints
of His discipline? Nay, though the reins be no longer felt, God is
at our head, that we should not stumble nor stand still. Upon this
gracious passage there follows one of those swift revulsions of
feeling, which we have learned almost to expect in Hosea. His
insight again overtakes his love. The people will not respond to the
goodness of their God; it is impossible to work upon minds so fickle
and insincere. Discipline is what they need. "He shall return to the
land of Egypt, or Asshur shall be his king" (it is still an
alternative), "for they have refused to return" to ‘Tis but one more
instance of the age-long apostasy of the people. "My people have a
bias to turn from Me; and though they" (the prophets) "call them
upwards, none of them can lift them."
Yet God is God, and though prophecy fail He will attempt His love
once more. There follows the greatest passage in Hosea-deepest if
not highest of his book-the breaking forth of that exhaustless mercy
of the Most High which no sin of man can bar back nor wear out.
"How am I to give thee up, O Ephraim?
How am I to let thee go, O Israel?
How am I to give thee up?
Am I to make an Admah of thee a Seboim?
My heart is turned upon Me,
My compassions begin to boil:
I will not perform the fierceness of Mine anger,
I will not turn to destroy Ephraim;
For God am I and not man,
The Holy One in the midst of thee, yet I come not to consume!"
Such a love has been the secret of Hosea’s persistence through so
many years with so faithless a people, and now, when he has failed,
it takes voice to itself and in its irresistible fullness makes this
last appeal. Once more before the end let Israel hear God in the
utterness of His Love!
The verses are a climax, and obviously to be succeeded by a pause.
On the brink of his doom, will Israel turn to such a God, at such a
call? The next verse, though dependent for its promise on this same
exhaustless Love, is from an entirely different circumstance, and
cannot have been put by Hosea here.
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