THE SIN AGAINST LOVE
Hosea 1-3; Hos 4:11 ff.; Hos 9:10 ff.; Hos 11:8 f.
The Love of God is a terrible thing-that is the
last lesson of the Book of Hosea. "My God will cast them away."
{Hosea 10}
"My God"-let us remember the right which Hosea had to use these
words. Of all the prophets he was the first to break into the full
aspect of the Divine Mercy to learn and to proclaim that God is
Love. But he was worthy to do so, by the patient love of his own
heart towards another who for years had outraged all his trust and
tenderness. He had loved, believed and been betrayed; pardoned and
waited and yearned, and sorrowed and pardoned again. It is in this
long-suffering that his breast beats upon the breast of God with the
cry "My God." As He had loved Gomer, so had God loved Israel, past
hope, against hate, through ages of ingratitude and apostasy.
Quivering with his own pain, Hosea has exhausted all human care and
affection for figures to express the Divine tenderness, and he
declares God’s love to be deeper than all the passion of men, and
broader than all their patience: "How can I give thee up, Ephraim?
How can I let thee go, Israel? I will not execute the fierceness of
Mine anger. For I am God, and not man." And yet, like poor human
affection, this Love of God, too, confesses its failure-"My God
shall cast them away." It is God’s sentence of relinquishment upon
those who sin against His Love, but the poor human lips which
deliver it quiver with an agony of their own, and here, as more
explicitly in twenty other passages of the book, declare it to be
equally, the doom of those who outrage the love of their fellow men
and women.
We have heard it said: "The lives of men are never the same after
they have loved; if they are not better, they must be worse." "Be
afraid of the love that loves you: it is either your heaven or your
hell." "All the discipline of men springs from their love-if they
take it not so, then all their sorrow must spring from the same
source." "There is a depth of sorrow, which can only be known to a
soul that has loved the most perfect thing and beholds itself
fallen." These things are true of the Love, both of our brother and
of our God. And the eternal interest of the life of Hosea is that he
learned how, for strength and weakness, for better or for worse, our
human and our Divine loves are inseparably joined.
I.
Most men learn that love is inseparable from pain where Hosea
learned it-at home. There it is that we are all reminded that when
love is strongest she feels her weakness most. For the anguish which
love must bear, as it were from the foundation of the world, is the
contradiction at her heart between the largeness of her wishes and
the littleness of her power to realize them. A mother feels it,
bending over the bed of her child, when its body is racked with pain
or its breath spent with coughing. So great is the feeling of her
love that it ought to do something, that she will actually feel
herself cruel because nothing can be done. Let the sick-bed become
the beach of death, and she must feel the helplessness and the
anguish still more as the dear life is now plucked from her and now
tossed back by the mocking waves, and then drawn slowly out to sea
upon the ebb from which there is no returning.
But the pain which disease and death thus cause to love is nothing
to the agony that sin inflicts when he takes the game into his
unclean hands. We know what pain love brings, if our love be a fair
face and a fresh body in which Death brands his sores while we stand
by, as if with arms bound. But what if our love be a childlike
heart, and a frank expression and honest eyes, and a clean and
clever mind. Our powerlessness is just as great and infinitely more
tormented when sin comes by and casts his shadow over these. Ah,
that is Love’s greatest torment when her children, who have run from
her to the bosom of sin, look back and their eyes are changed! That
is the greatest torment of Love-to pour herself without avail into
one of those careless natures which seem capacious and receptive,
yet never fill with love, for there is a crack and a leak at the
bottom of them. The fields where Love suffers her sorest defeats are
not the sick-bed and not death’s margin, not the cold lips and
sealed eyes kissed without response; but the changed eyes of
children, and the breaking of the "full-orbed face," and the
darkening look of growing sons and daughters, and the home the first
time the unclean laugh breaks across it. To watch, though unable to
soothe, a dear body racked with pain, is peace beside the awful
vigil of watching a soul shrink and blacken with vice, and your love
unable to redeem it.
Such a clinical study Hosea endured for years. The prophet of God,
we are told, brought a dead child to life by taking him in his arms
and kissing him. But Hosea with all his love could not make Gomer a
true, whole wife again. Love had no power on this woman-no power
even at the merciful call to make all things new. Hosea, who had
once placed all hope in tenderness, had to admit that Love’s moral
power is not absolute. Love may retire defeated from the highest
issues of life. Sin may conquer Love.
Yet it is in this his triumph that Sin must feel the ultimate
revenge. When a man has conquered this weak thing, and beaten her
down beneath his feet, God speaks the sentence of abandonment.
There is enough of the whipped dog in all of us to make us dread
penalty when we come into conflict with the strong things of life.
But it takes us all our days to learn that there is far more
condemnation to them who offend the weak things of life, and
particularly the weakest of all, its love. It was on sins against
the weak that Christ passed His sternest judgments: "Woe unto him
that offends one of these little ones; it were better for him that
he had never been born." God’s little ones are not only little
children, but all things which, like little children, have only love
for their strength. They are pure and loving men and women-men with
no weapon but their love, women with no shield but their trust. They
are the innocent affections of our own hearts-the memories of our
childhood, the ideals of our youth, the prayers of our parents, the
faith in us of our friends. These are the little ones of whom Christ
spake, that he who sins against them had better never have been
born. Often may the dear solicitudes of home, a father’s counsels, a
mother’s prayers, seem foolish things against the challenges of a
world calling us to play the man and do as it does; often may the
vows and enthusiasms of boyhood seem impertinent against the
temptations which are so necessary to manhood: yet let us be true to
the weak, for if we betray them, we betray our own souls. We may sin
against law and maim or mutilate ourselves, but to sin against love
is to be cast out of life altogether. He who violates the purity of
the love with which God has filled his heart, he who abuses the love
God has sent to meet him in his opening manhood, he who slights any
of the affections, whether they be of man or woman, of young or of
old, which God lays upon us as the most powerful redemptive forces
of our life, next to that of His dear Son-he sinneth against his own
soul, and it is of such that Hosea spake: "My God will cast them
away."
We talk of breaking law: we can only break ourselves against it. But
if we sin against Love, we do destroy her: we take from her the
power to redeem and sanctify us. Though in their youth men think
Love a quick and careless thing-a servant always at their side, a
winged messenger easy of dispatch-let them know that every time they
send her on an evil errand she returns with heavier feet and broken
wings. When they make her a pander they kill her outright. When she
is no more they waken to that which Gomer came to know, that love
abused is love lost, and love lost means Hell.
II
This, however, is only the margin from which Hosea beholds an
abandonment still deeper. All that has been said of human love and
the penalty of outraging it is equally true of the Divine love and
the sin against that.
The love of God has the same weakness which we have seen in the love
of man. It, too, may fail to redeem; it, too, has stood defeated on
some of the highest moral battle-fields of life. God Himself has
suffered anguish and rejection from sinful men. "Herein," says a
theologian, "is the mystery of this love that God can never by His
Almighty Power compel that which is the very highest gift in the
life of His creatures-love to Himself, but that He receives it as
the free gift of His creatures, and that He is only able to allow
men to give it to Him in a free act of their own will." So Hosea
also has told us how God does not compel, but allure or "woo," the
sinful back to Himself. And it is the deepest anguish of the
prophet’s heart, that this free grace of God may fail through man’s
apathy or insincerity. The anguish appears in those frequent
antitheses in which his torn heart reflects herself in the style of
his discourse. "I have redeemed them-yet they have spoken lies
against Me. {Hos 7:13} I found Israel like grapes in the
wilderness-they went to Ba’al-Peor. {Hos 9:10} When Israel was a
child, then I loved him but they sacrificed to Ba’alim. {Hos 11:1-2}
I taught Ephraim to walk, but they knew not that I healed them. {Hos
9:4} How can I give thee up, Ephraim? how can I let thee go, O
Israel? Ephraim compasseth Me with lies, and the house of Israel
with deceit." {Hos 11:8; Hos 12:1}
We fear to apply all that we know of the weakness of human love to
the love of God. Yet though He be God and not man, it was as man He
commended His love to us. He came nearest us, not in the thunders of
Sinai, but in Him Who presented Himself to the world with the
caresses of a little child; who met men with no angelic majesty or
heavenly aureole, but whom when we saw we found nothing that we
should desire Him, His visage was so marred more than any man, and
his form than the sons of men; Who came to His own and His own
received Him not; Who, having loved His own that were in the world,
loved them up to the end, and yet at the end was by them deserted
and betrayed, -it is of Him that Hosea prophetically says: "I drew
them with cords of a man and with bands of love."
We are not bound to God by any unbreakable chain. The strands which
draw us upwards to God, to holiness and everlasting life, have the
weakness of those which bind us to the earthly souls we love. It is
possible for us to break them. We love Christ, not because He has
compelled us by any magic, irresistible influence to do so; but, as
John in his great simplicity says, "We love Him because He first
loved us."
Now this is surely the terror of God’s love-that it can be resisted;
that even as it is manifest in Jesus Christ we men have the power,
not only to remain as so many do, outside its scope, feeling it to
be far-off and vague, but having tasted it to fall away from it,
having realized it to refuse it, having allowed it to begin its
moral purposes in our lives to baffle and nullify these; to make the
glory of Heaven absolutely ineffectual in our own characters; and to
give our Savior the anguish of rejection.
Give Him the anguish, yet pass upon ourselves the doom! For, as I
read the New Testament, the one unpardonable sin is the sin against
our Blessed Redeemer’s Love as it is brought home to the heart by
the power of the Holy Spirit. Every other sin is forgiven to men but
to crucify afresh Him who loved us and gave Himself for us. The most
terrible of His judgments is "the wail of a heart wounded because
its love has been despised": "Jerusalem, Jerusalem! how often would
I have gathered thy children as a hen gathereth her chickens, and ye
would not. Behold your house is left unto you desolate!"
Men say they cannot believe in hell, because they cannot conceive
how God may sentence men to misery for the breaking of laws they
were born without power to keep. And one would agree with the
inference if God had done any such thing. But for them which are
under the law and the sentence of death, Christ died once for all
that He might redeem them. Yet this does not make a hell less
believable. When we see how Almighty was that Love of God in Christ
Jesus, lifting our whole race and sending them forward with a
freedom and a power of growth nothing else in history has won for
them; when we prove again how weak it is, so that it is possible for
millions of characters that have felt it to refuse its eternal
influence for the sake of some base and transient passion; nay, when
I myself know this power and this weakness of Christ’s love, so that
one day being loyal I am raised beyond the reach of fear and of
doubt, beyond the desire of sin and the habit of evil, and the next
day finds me capable of putting it aside in preference for some
slight enjoyment or ambition-then I know the peril and the terror of
this love, that it may be to a man either Heaven or Hell.
Believe then in hell, because you believe in the Love of God-not in
a hell to which God condemns men of His will and pleasure, but a
hell into which men cast themselves from the very face of His love
in Jesus Christ. The place has been painted as a place of fires. But
when we contemplate that men come to it with the holiest flames in
their nature quenched, we shall justly feel that it is rather a
dreary waste of ash and cinder, strewn with snow-some ribbed and
frosty Arctic zone, silent in death, for there is no life there, and
there is no life there because there is no Love, and no Love because
men, in rejecting or abusing her, have slain their own power ever
again to feel her presence.
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