AMOS III.

THE INEXORABLENESS OF LAW.

"You only have I known . . . therefore I will punish you " (iii. 2).

AMOS was only a simple shepherd, but we have just seen how wide was the range of his political and religious vision. There was not a man in Israel who watched more closely or understood so perfectly the national and international situation of his day. From his solitude he carefully observed all the signs of the times. He knew the world in which he lived, and the God whose laws he sought to lay upon the conscience of his people, and these are the two indispensable conditions of effective preaching. But though the nations beyond Israel are within his horizon, it is, as we have seen, upon Israel herself that he concentrates the passion of his soul. The preacher is a patriot. He is concerned first of all with the condition of his own country: it is there, and among his own people, that anything he can do for God and the world has, for the most part, to be done. So, after his indignant challenge and denunciation of the foreign nations for the cruelties which had marked their conduct towards each other, he turns his sorrowful eyes to his own people, and throughout the rest of the message which makes up his book, he keeps them steadily fixed upon the sins by which they had insulted God and wronged one another, and upon the doom to which those sins were so surely bearing them.

But behind the book we must always remember that there is a living man addressing a message of overwhelming importance to a real audience. The words which still flash and burn even upon the pages of Amos never allow us to forget that for long. "Listen," he begins, "listen to this word that Jehovah hath spoken against you, O children of Israel." The words which he is about to utter are his own: but so conscious is he of being divinely inspired as he utters them, that he can describe them as the words of God Himself. The message to which he solemnly calls attention begins thus: " You only have I known of all the families of the earth/ In the Old Testament, " to know " often means " to care for," to know not only with the understanding but with the heart; and this word of the prophet is simply a strong expression for the unique place which God had assigned to Israel in the world. It does not mean that He cared for Israel only, and not at all for the rest of the world: least of all could it mean this in Amos, who believed, as we have already seen, that God was deeply concerned with the moral welfare of all the surrounding nations, and who had, as we shall see very clearly later on, a passionate faith in Jehovah as the God of all history, controlling the migrations of other nations no less than Israel's exodus from Egypt (cf. ix. 7). But it does mean that God had drawn specially near to Israel—that, in some perfectly real sense, He had made a covenant with her, as the Old Testament phrase has it—and this is one of the most indubitable facts of history. To watch how Christianity has covered the world with her beneficent influence, and to remember that Christianity is the daughter of Judaism, is to be persuaded that Judaism is no accident, but a Providence, and that the Hebrew people were, as they believed them selves to be, called of God to a place of unique distinction among the nations of the world. The people of Amos's time had no doubt of their election. God had started them on their career as a nation by delivering them from the bondage of Egypt. He had brought them through the wilderness and settled them on the goodly land of Canaan; and, as Amos had reminded them (ii. 11), He had given them a succession of earnest men to interpret His will by word and deed. They believed in their election without understanding the reasons for it; they failed to realize that election to privilege is always election to duty and responsibility. But on the simple fact of their election, Amos and his audience were at one; and they would listen with satisfaction to the comfortable doctrine that fell, in the first sentence, from the preacher's lips, and that seemed to flatter their national vanity—"you only have I known of all the families of the earth."

"Therefore "—the preacher went on—and probably not one of his hearers had any doubt or misgiving as to what was to follow. From such premises there could be but one conclusion: " therefore I will bless you abundantly. I will be ever at your right hand, so that you shall never be moved. I will protect and defend you. I will give you peace, prosperity, and victory. I will bless your going out and coming in, and set you on high above all the nations of the earth." Jehovah was bound to do all this, bound by His election of them,—bound by the covenant He had made with them and the favours He had already bestowed upon them bound, at any rate, so long as they did their part; and their part, as they imagined, was to offer Him animal sacrifice and sumptuous ceremonial. What must have been their indignation, their horror, when this strange preacher followed up his " therefore " by the words " I will punish you "? " This terrible 'therefore,'"as one has said, " must have been as a bolt from the blue." They must have listened with an amazement which would break into fury to the audacious, blasphemous words of the rugged preacher. For blasphemous they must have sounded to those orthodox ears. Jehovah, they argued, must be true to His people, so long as they were true to Him; and they were, as we shall see, serving Him most assiduously, after their own ceremonial, superficial style. The prophet's impious conclusion contradicted not only the popular creed, but the indubitable fact of the nation's existing prosperity, which, to the popular mind, was a sure sign of the divine favour. So Amos's pronouncement was at once a lie, a heresy, and a blasphemy. His message was unwelcome, because it disturbed the comfort able equanimity of his audience, and dealt a blow at their most cherished convictions. Starting from the same premises, Amos reached a conclusion diametrically opposite to theirs, because his conception of the character of God was a whole world apart from theirs. The demands of the God he worshipped were for a just and honourable social life, and He would not be put off with ceremonial, however splendid. Their lives, however, were stained with deliberate sin; sin inevitably drags Something on, and " I will not turn it back. I will come and visit you indeed—not, however, to bless, but to smite you, for all your iniquities"—the intemperance, the immorality, and above all the oppression of the poor, which he has already drawn for us in such lurid colours. " You only have I known... therefore I will punish you." The conclusion which so appalled his hearers, was the most natural and logical in the world to Amos. Just because God had cared for them so deeply, He must punish them so severely. Special privilege means special responsibility; and if that be evaded or mocked, then destruction is at the doors.

The people are horrified at the message of this unknown and unauthorized stranger. Who is he, they ask, this rough man who has so defiantly challenged their ancient creed, and by what authority has he dared by his gloomy threats to disturb the joy of their sacred festival? In a very powerful passage which leads up to a splendid climax, Amos justifies his appearance and his message. For these things there is an adequate cause, as there is for everything in the universe. Here Amos sets forth with unusual power that wonderful conception, of which we have already had a glimpse, of the reign of law which he sees to control the world. No thing is isolated or haphazard: for every phenomenon there is a rational explanation. Every event has a cause, and for illustration he points his hearers, like the skilful speaker that he is, to incidents in the life with which he and they were familiar. Two people are seen walking together: what may we infer from that? That they have made a tryst, or at least that they know each other. Through out the world, this answers to that: there is a meaning and a cause for everything. But it is highly characteristic of the grim mind of Amos that all his subsequent illustrations of the great law of cause and effect are stern. Law reigns, and law is a stern thing; the man or the nation that fails to recognize this is living in a fool's Paradise. Lions, snares, and war—it is from these fierce things that Amos draws his illustrations. If you hear a lion roaring in the forest—and Amos in his shepherd life has heard one many a time—what may you infer from that? Is it not a sign that he has caught something? The roar means that he has sprung upon some poor little sheep, and is tearing it in pieces; and we cannot help thinking—though this is not in the direct line of his argument—of that earlier threat of Amos's in which he had compared Jehovah Himself to a lion about to roar and spring upon His people. Again, if you see a snare flying up suddenly from the ground, what does that mean? for in God's world everything means something. It means that some unhappy little bird has been caught in its cruel meshes. And this stern law runs everywhere, through the city as well as the country. If you hear the sudden blare of the trumpet in the city, what does that mean? It means the alarum of war: the enemy are near and the people are terrified. If a catastrophe overtakes a city, Jehovah is behind it, as He is behind every thing.

Now surely Amos has made his point abundantly clear. His message, like every thing else in the world, has a cause: he appears as he does and says what he says, because Jehovah has told him His secret—the awful secret of Israel's doom—and has sent him to declare it. The prophet is Jehovah's servant, who knows his master's bidding and does his master's will, and the terrible words with which he startled his incredulous hearers are the words of none other than God: " Surely the Lord Jehovah does nothing without revealing His secret to His servants the prophets." Amos himself is in the grasp of that great law which explains and runs through all the phenomena of the universe, or rather of that great Person who is behind all phenomena. The great Cause which explains the prophet's appearance and justifies his message is Almighty God Himself. "When the lion roars, who is not afraid? and when the Lord Jehovah speaks"—and he had spoken loudly enough in the events of the time and to the soul of Amos—"who can help prophesying? " He preaches, because he must.

Now he is free to go on with his challenge; and in support of his condemnation of Israel he appeals to imaginary spectators from other lands less privileged than Israel; for even those untutored hearts would be more than shocked by the evils that were rampant there. He appeals to a wider audience than those immoral ritualists who crowded the sanctuaries, while they crushed the poor. He appeals to that moral sense which Israel had repudiated, and which it least of all became her, with her peculiar privileges, to repudiate, for it was the common heritage of humanity. He appeals to the Philistines (or perhaps the Assyrians)1 and the Egyptians. He summons this imaginary crowd of hated foreigners, in whose heart there yet flickers a spark of humanity and justice, to gather on the mountains round about Samaria, the capital of the kingdom, and from this height to look down into the wicked city. And, when they look, what do they see? Just what you might except they would see among a people whom peace and prosperity, succeeding the ravages of war, had left free for the unscrupulous prosecution of trade and commerce, and who were too blind to read the signs of the times, too deaf to hear the roll of Jehovah's thunder which smote from afar so distinctly upon the ears of Amos. Confusion and oppression—that was what was to be seen in the midst of Samaria. They would see gorgeous palaces, with inlaid work of ivory and ebony, filled with the ill-gotten gains of violence and robbery. They would see indolent nobles sitting on their fine silk couches—nobles who, not content with a single palace all the year round, must needs have a house for winter and a house for summer. In the light of all this luxury, resting on iniquity, it is not hard to understand the scorn and indignation of the shepherd of Tekoa, who knew in his heart that such pride must provoke the avenging justice of God. Can we wonder at his threat that an enemy would one day encompass the land—already the tramp of their hosts is in his ears—and lay all that cruel and haughty luxury in the dust?

The simple explanation of all this social injustice, which was to cost the people so dear, is, as Amos says, that they did not know to do the straightforward thing, they had lost all ideas of right and wrong. But that did not excuse them. They did not know, but they should have known; the very heathen knew,—the Assyrians and the Egyptians to whom Amos appealed,—and even they would have been shocked at the confusion and oppression which reigned in Hebrew society. In the mad haste after riches, in the dissolute luxury of city life, they had lost touch with the eternal facts, they had forgotten God's everlasting and inexorable laws; they had no time for reflection, no interest in it, no eyes for facts that would have been plain and probable enough to thinking men, no ears for the rumbling thunder that foretold the storm. To such a civilization, with no heart for the needless sorrows of the poor, and no mind for anything but the exploitation of the weaker members of society, there can be but one end. The God whom it has insulted, will smite it, the whole of it, the holiest and most cherished emblems of its religion no less than the symbols of its social and political splendour; its churches and its palaces alike will be laid, by the terrible hand of the enemy whom He will send, in one welter of ruin. When we remember that the sanctuary of Bethel was the royal chapel (vii. 13) hallowed by ancient and precious traditions associated with the name of father Jacob, we can imagine the horrified looks upon the faces of Amos's hearers when he announced that the very horns of its altar would be hewn off and dashed to the ground. What blasphemy! and this fierce message was delivered, too, in the name of the very God to whose sanctuaries the people were so zealously flocking. Impossible, incredible, away with him!

Even granting that there might be a measure of truth in what he said, at the worst there would always be a remnant, they argued; the annihilation could not be complete, some would be saved. Yes, says Amos, in his grim and terrible way, some of you will be saved. But this will be the manner of your salvation: " As a shepherd saves a pair of legs or a piece of an ear from the mouth of a lion, so shall the children of Israel be saved." The lion will come and tear the poor silly sheep in pieces, and mangle it so horribly that only a few fragments will be left to identify it. The Assyrians will come and tear you in pieces and smash your civilization into atoms, and there will only be a few fragments, a few survivors left, where by it and you may be identified. You are welcome to call that salvation, if you think it worth your while. But do not deceive your selves. God will not be mocked, the destruction will be very complete. The places of worship will be hurled to the ground, "and I will smite the winter house with the summer house, and the houses of ivory shall perish, and the houses of ebony shall have an end."

1 So the Septuagint reads in iii. 9.