ON TIME’S HORIZON
Mic 4:1-7
THE immediate prospect of Zion’s desolation which
closes chapter 3 is followed in the opening of chapter 4 by an ideal
picture of her exaltation and supremacy "in the issue of the days."
We can hardly doubt that this arrangement has been made of purpose,
nor can we deny that it is natural and artistic. Whether it be due
to Micah himself, or Whether he wrote the second passage, are
questions we have already discussed. Like so many others of their
kind, they cannot be answered with certainty, far less with
dogmatism. But I repeat, I see no conclusive reason for denying
either to the circumstances of Micah’s times or to the principles of
their prophecy the possibility of such a hope as inspires Mic 4:1-4.
Remember how the prophets of the eighth century identified Jehovah
with supreme and universal righteousness; remember how Amos
explicitly condemned the aggravations of war and slavery among the
heathen as sins against Him, and how Isaiah claimed the future gains
of Tyrian commerce as gifts for His sanctuary; remember how Amos
heard His voice come forth from Jerusalem, and Isaiah counted upon
the eternal inviolateness of His shrine and city, -and you will not
think it impossible for a third Judean prophet of that age, whether
he was Micah or another, to have drawn the prospect of Jerusalem
which now opens before us.
It is the far-off horizon of time, which, like the spatial horizon,
always seems a fixed and eternal line, but as constantly shifts with
the shifting of our standpoint or elevation. Every prophet has his
own vision of "the latter days"; seldom is that prospect the same.
Determined by the circumstances of the seer, by the desires these
prompt or only partially fulfill, it changes from age to age. The
ideal is always shaped by the real, and in this vision of the eighth
century there is no exception. This is not any of the ideals of
later ages, when the evil was the oppression of the Lord’s people by
foreign armies or their scattering in exile; it is not, in contrast
to these, the spectacle of the armies of the Lord of Hosts imbrued
in the blood of the heathen, or of the columns of returning captives
filling all the narrow roads to Jerusalem, "like streams in the
south"; nor, again, is it a nation of priests gathering about a
rebuilt temple and a restored ritual. But because the pain of the
greatest minds of the eighth century was the contradiction between
faith in the God of Zion as Universal Righteousness and the
experience that, nevertheless, Zion had absolutely no influence upon
surrounding nations, this vision shows a day when Zion’s influence
will be as great as her right, and from far and wide the nations
whom Amos has condemned for their transgressions against Jehovah
will acknowledge His law, and be drawn to Jerusalem to learn of Him.
Observe that nothing is said of Israel going forth to teach the
nations the law of the Lord. That is the ideal of a later age, when
Jews were scattered across the world. Here, in conformity with the
experience of a still unraveled people, we see the Gentiles drawing
in upon the Mountain of the House of the Lord. With the same lofty
impartiality which distinguishes the oracles of Amos on the heathen,
the prophet takes no account of their enmity to Israel; nor is there
any talk-such as later generations were almost forced by the
hostility of neighboring tribes to indulge in-of politically
subduing them to the king in Zion. Jehovah will arbitrate between
them, and the result shall be the institution of a great peace, with
no special political privilege to Israel, unless this be understood
in Mic 4:5, which speaks of such security to life as was impossible,
at that time at least, in all borderlands of Israel. But among the
heathen themselves there will be a resting from war: the factions
and ferocities of that wild Semitic world, which Amos so vividly
characterised, shall cease. In all this there is nothing beyond the
possibility of suggestion by the circumstances of the eighth century
or by the spirit of its prophecy.
A prophet speaks:-
"And it shall come to pass in the issue of the days, That the Mount
of the House of Jehovah shall be established on the tops of the
mountains, And lifted shall it be above the hills, And peoples shall
flow to it,"
"And many nations shall go and say: "Come, and let us up to the
Mount of Jehovah, And to the House of the God of Jacob, That He may
teach us of His ways, And we will walk in His paths.’ For from Zion
goeth forth the law, And the word of Jehovah from out of Jerusalem!
And He shall judge between many peoples,"
"And decide for strong nations far and wide; And they shall hammer
their swords into plough shares, And their spears into
pruning-hooks: They shall not lift up, nation against nation, a
sword, And they shall not any more learn war. Every man shall dwell
under his vine And under his fig-tree, And none shall make afraid;
For the mouth of Jehovah of Hosts has spoken."
What connection this last verse is intended to have with the
preceding is not quite obvious. It may mean that every family among
the Gentiles shall dwell in peace; or, as suggested above, that with
the voluntary disarming of the surrounding heathendom, Israel
herself shall dwell secure, in no fear of border raids and
slave-hunting expeditions, with which especially Micah’s Shephelah
and other borderlands were familiar. The verse does not occur in
Isaiah’s quotation of the three which precede it. We can scarcely
suppose, fain though we may be to do so, that Micah added the verse
in order to exhibit the future correction of the evils he has been
deploring in chapter 3: the insecurity of the householder in Israel
before the unscrupulous land-grabbing of the wealthy. Such are not
the evils from which this passage prophesies redemption. It deals
only, like the first oracles of Amos, with the relentlessness and
ferocity of the heathen under Jehovah’s arbitrament these shall be
at peace, and whether among themselves or in Israel, hitherto so
exposed to their raids, men shall dwell in unalarmed possession of
their houses and fields. Security from war, not from social tyranny,
is what is promised.
The following verse (Mic 4:5) gives in a curious way the contrast of
the present to that future in which all men will own the sway of one
God. "For" at the present time "all the nations are walking each in
the name of his God, but we go in the name of Jehovah forever and
aye."
To which vision, complete in itself, there has been added by another
hand, of what date we cannot tell, a further effect of God’s blessed
influence. To peace among men shall be added healing and redemption,
the ingathering of the outcast and the care of the crippled.
"In that day-‘tis the oracle of Jehovah-I will gather the halt, And
the cast-off I will bring in, and all that I have afflicted; And I
will make the halt for a Remnant, And her that was weakened into a
strong people, And Jehovah shall reign over them In the Mount of
Zion from now and forever."
Whatever be the origin of the separate oracles which compose this
passage Mic 4:1-7, they form as they now stand a beautiful whole,
rising from Peace through Freedom to Love. They begin with obedience
to God and they culminate in the most glorious service which God or
man may undertake, the service of saving the lost. See how the
Divine spiral ascends. We have, first, Religion the center and
origin of all, compelling the attention of men by its historical
evidence of justice and righteousness. We have the world’s
willingness to learn of it. We have the results in the widening
brotherhood of nations, in universal Peace, in Labor freed from War,
and with none of her resources absorbed by the conscriptions and
armaments which in our times are deemed necessary for enforcing
peace. We have the universal diffusion and security of Property, the
prosperity and safety of the humblest home. And, finally, we have
this free strength and wealth inspired by the example of God Himself
to nourish the broken and to gather in the forwandered.
Such is the ideal world, seen and promised two thousand five hundred
years ago, out of as real an experience of human sin and failure as
ever mankind awoke to. Are we nearer the Vision today, or does it
still hang upon time’s horizon, that line which seems so stable from
every seer’s point of view, but which moves from the generations as
fast as they travel to it?
So far from this being so, there is much in the Vision that is not
only nearer us than it was to the Hebrew prophets, and not only
abreast of us, but actually achieved and behind us, as we live and
strive still onward. Yes, brothers, actually behind us! History has
in part fulfilled the promised influence of religion upon the
nations. The Unity of God has been owned, and the civilized peoples
bow to the standards of justice and of mercy first revealed from
Mount Zion. "Many nations" and "powerful nations" acknowledge the
arbitrament of the God of the Bible. We have had revealed that High
Fatherhood of which every family in heaven and earth is named; and
wherever that is believed the brotherhood of men is confessed. We
have seen Sin, that profound discord in man and estrangement from
God, of which all human hatreds and malices are the fruit, atoned
for and reconciled by a Sacrifice in face of which human pride and
passion stand abashed. The first part of the Vision is fulfilled.
"The nations stream to the God of Jerusalem and His Christ." And
though today our Peace be but a paradox, and the "Christian" nations
stand still from war not in love, but in fear of one another, there
are in every nation an increasing number of men and women, with
growing influence, who, without being fanatics for peace, or blind
to the fact that war may be a people’s duty in fulfillment of its
own destiny or in relief of the enslaved, do yet keep themselves
from foolish forms of patriotism, and by their recognition of each
other across all national differences make sudden and unconsidered
war more and more of an impossibility. I write this in the sound of
that call to stand upon arms which broke like thunder upon our
Christmas peace; but, amid all the ignoble jealousies and hot
rashness which prevail, how the air, burned clean by that first
electric discharge, has filled with the determination that war shall
not happen in the interests of mere wealth or at the caprice of a
tyrant! God help us to use this peace for the last ideals of His
prophet! May we see, not that of which our modern peace has been far
too full, mere freedom for the wealth of the few to increase at the
expense of the mass of mankind. May our Peace mean the gradual
disarmament of the nations, the increase of labor, the diffusion of
property, and, above all, the redemption of the waste of the people
and the recovery of our outcasts. Without this, peace is no peace;
and better were war to burn out by its fierce fires those evil
humors of our secure comfort, which render us insensible to the
needy and the fallen at our side. Without the redemptive forces at
work which Christ brought to earth, peace is no peace; and the
cruelties of war, that slay and mutilate so many, are as nothing to
the cruelties of a peace which leaves us insensible to the outcasts
and the perishing, of whom there are so many even in our
civilization.
One application of the prophecy may be made at this moment. We are
told by those who know best and have most responsibility in the
matter that an ancient Church and people of Christ are being left a
prey to the wrath of an infidel tyrant, not because Christendom is
without strength to compel him to deliver, but because to use the
strength, would be to imperil the peace, of Christendom. It is an
ignoble peace which cannot use the forces of redemption, and with
the cry of Armenia in our ears the Unity of Europe is but a mockery.
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