AMOS IV.

THE SEVERITY OF GOD.

" I have smitten you. . . yet ye did not return unto Me" (iv. 9).

No one can deny that Amos had the courage of his convictions. There is something superb in the daring with which he faces the happy crowd of worshippers and declares that, because their social life is cruel and rotten and their religion nothing but a gorgeous sham, the day is speedily coming when God will sweep it all away, levelling their ancient places of worship and their palatial mansions with the ground. Now he turns to the women—the wives of the aristocracy and the well-to-do—and hurls at them a speech as scathing as any that has ever caused the ears of haughty dames to tingle. " Listen," he says, " you cattle, to this word of mine, this word of God s." With a contempt which sounds almost coarse to delicate modern ears, but which in reality is as just as it is vivid and drastic, he com pares the fine ladies of Samaria to the sleek and well-fed cattle that roam on the famous pastures east of the Sea of Galilee. All the Hebrew prophets know that for the temper and quality of a civilization the women are greatly responsible. A country is largely what its women make it; if they are cruel or careless or unwomanly, the country is on the road to ruin. But these cattle on the hills of Samaria at whom Amos flings his words of scorn are worse than the cattle on the hills of Bashan; for they have done what no animal could do—they have made coarse pleasure the deliberate end of life. They are fit partners for the lords already denounced, who " store up violence and robbery in their palaces" (iii. 10). "Bring," they say, " and let us drink "—them and their lords together. If that were all, it would be bad enough; for drink, as we have seen, was one of the national perils of the day (ii. 8, 12), and no sight can be uglier than a drunken woman. But that is not all. The money that pays for the wine is got by crushing the poor. "Bring," they say, in their haughty impatience; so long as they have it, they care not a whit where it is brought from. And, to get it, those who are already poor enough will have to be ground and crushed yet more; in the strong and vivid Hebrew words you can almost hear the crunching of the bones (cf. Mic. iii. 3). In temperance and cruelty went together then, as they go so often still. When women, who should be pitiful, sink to such depths of shame and heartlessness, it must be made plain that God will soon appear to mete out to them what they had meted to the poor. So He swears by His holiness—that holiness which these cruel and drunken women have so brutally insulted in the persons of the poor—He swears, that is, a solemn binding oath, that " days are coming "—not the yet more brilliant and prosperous days to which the light-hearted people looked forward (cf. v. 1 8), but days when the foemen would surround the mountain city in which they trusted, and batter in the walls, and drag them away, one and all; and, as the hook of the angler jerks the fish suddenly and violently out of the element with which it is familiar, so would they be whisked away from their silken couches and their strong city to a fate even more awful than that to which they had reduced the poor. Their womanly honour would be exposed to insult, and helplessly they would have to submit. It would then be too late for repentance, too late even to gather together the things they loved. Through the breaches that the enemy would make in the walls of the beleaguered city they would be dragged to their awful doom.

How furious must the women and their lords have been at the threats of this unconventional stranger! Indeed, the whole people would be indignant at the very mention of this coming national catastrophe which Amos announces as a certainty, thus manifestly branding himself in their eyes as an un patriotic blasphemer. They angrily repel his threats of doom by pointing to the zeal, the costliness, the splendour of their worship. " Are we not faithful," they ask, " in our attendance at the places of worship? Do we not make regular pilgrimages to the ancient sanctuaries? and could anything surpass the devotion which we there show to our God? Do we not pay Him His dues, and more than His dues? Do we not, in our zeal, seek to make our offerings even more worthy of our God by the use of leaven? We are not only just, but generous in our relations to Him, and prompt in rendering Him the service that is His due. We offer the prescribed sacrifices the very morning after we arrive at the sanctuary, and the very next day after that we present our tithes, following the custom of father Jacob long ago on this very spot at Bethel (Gen. xxviii. 22). Nay, over and above the gifts prescribed by law, we give evidence of our glad devotion by presenting freewill offerings of our own."

To this elaborate self-defence the prophet replies with bitter irony: " Go to Bethel and transgress; to Gilgal "—another sanctuary—"and multiply transgression." He does not say, " Go to Bethel and worship," but " Go to Bethel and transgress ": by which he means that their very worship was a sin. We have already seen that some of the practices indulged in at the sacred places were positively and shockingly immoral (ii. 7 f.), but here Amos practically con demns their whole conception of worship as immoral. With an almost impetuous zeal they had offered their tithes and their sacrifices, they had promptly and generously paid their sanctuary dues, they had made a parade of their freewill offerings. But the true service of Jehovah did not consist in these things at all. " That is what you like," he says, turning to them in bitter scorn; but that is not what Jehovah likes. He hates and despises a ceremony which recognizes no moral obligation, just as much as He hates your palaces (v. 21, vi. 8). These two tragic follies are connected by the closest bond. You exploit men, because you misunderstand God; you are cruel to the poor, because you have no proper idea of what religion is, and demands. What you care much for, God cares nothing for. Is this not the service that He demands, to let the oppressed go free, to cover the naked, to deal bread to the hungry, to bring the outcasts home (Isa. Iviii. 6 f.). Here we strike upon the fundamental difference between Amos and his contemporaries, and this in general is the feature of Hebrew prophecy which invests it with permanent interest and importance. To the people, religion was a matter of ceremony; that was what they loved: to the prophets it was a matter of character and social service, resting upon a humble walk with God (Mic. vi. 8). We shall come upon this distinction again and again; in a sense it is the core of Amos's message, as, indeed, of all Hebrew prophecy.

How did Jehovah respond to the popular worship? He responded to it by an ascending climax of affliction—by famine, drought, blight, locusts, pestilence, war, earthquake, and something more awful still. That is the connection between what Amos has just said and what he is about to say. " Not justice and kindness, but ritual and ceremony—that is what you practise. Very well; then I also on my part have given you cleanness of teeth and want of bread in all your places." Clean teeth are teeth that have had nothing to bite, and the allusion is to famine. If you on your part have done that, then I on my part have done this. Here again is the stern doctrine of law, of cause and effect, the answering of this to that which runs alike throughout the physical and the moral world: to Amos there is but one world, one law, one will, one God. But the fierce discipline of famine was not only, not even chiefly, to punish the people, but rather to stir them to reflection and repentance, and to win them to Himself, though the discipline failed of its purpose—"ye did not return unto Me." Famine was followed by a drought so severe that the people of one city would go fainting and staggering to another city for water"—yet ye did not return unto Me." Drought was followed by a blight which withered the crops, and a plague of deadly locusts which devoured the fruit trees, and this again by pestilence and war, those two dread scourges which so regularly go together; but in every case with the result that " ye did not return unto Me."

Thus these calamities, in which terror succeeds terror, are regarded in two aspects: on the one hand they are calls to repentance, on the other they are God's answer to the popular religion. Amos's conception of God forced upon him a moral interpretation of the national calamities. Jehovah was displeased with their ceremonial worship, because it was justice that He loved; and because it is justice that He loves, everything that He does in history or nature will be done in moral interests. Nature is not God, it is God s, and He wields its forces to further the interests of His kingdom. He is the Creator, the God of hosts, as Amos often calls Him, hosts in the heaven and on the earth, hosts of the rain showers and the locusts, hosts of the Syrians and the Assyrians. Add to Jehovah as Creator the conception of Jehovah as righteous, and nature is seen to be a moral instrument, a force or forces radiant with ethical purpose. It was no superstition that led Amos to see in the thirsty land and the swarms of locusts the smiting hand of God; it was his belief in God as the righteous Creator, lifted above the forces which He had called into being, and therefore able to wield those forces as He pleased; but His pleasure was always regard for ethical interests. It was never exercised in any capricious or arbitrary way, but always, whether obviously or not, through law. The God of order could act in no other way. Those apparent exceptions to the operations of natural law, those inexplicable droughts and blights and famines and pestilences and locusts, were to Amos the highest confirmation of law; for they proved to a demonstration the omnipotence of moral law, the supremacy of spiritual interests in the economy of the universe, the unswerving regard of God for the moral welfare of men, and His purpose to direct the inexhaustible resources of His world to the upholding of the moral law, and to the betterment of human character.

It is more difficult for the modern man than it was for Amos to accept this view of the meaning and purpose of calamity. It is more natural for us to regard the giant forces of nature as moving inevitably and inexorably on their way, often dealing death as they go, and without the faintest regard to the moral merits or dements of those whom they over whelm: and so with calamity and suffering of every kind. It was our Lord Himself who reminded us that the eighteen who were killed by the fall of a tower in Jerusalem were no worse than the thousands who escaped. The religious temper to which a great disaster seems to point unerringly to special sin on the part of the sufferer or sufferers is rarer in the world than it used to be, and is particularly incompatible with the purely scientific temper. Men are not so ready as they would once have been with edifying explanations of the Tay Bridge disaster, or of the earthquake which all but destroyed San Francisco, or of the colossal tragedy in which the Titanic was engulfed in the waters of the Atlantic. Mr. Lecky re marks, in his History of European Morals, that " there arises in the minds of scientific men a conviction, amounting to absolute moral certainty, that the theological habit of interpreting the catastrophes of nature as Divine warnings or punishments or disciplines, is a baseless and pernicious superstition "; and Mr. Edmund Gosse, in Father and Son, speaks of his father as retaining "the singular superstition, amazing in a man of scientific knowledge and long human experience, that all pains and ailments were directly sent by the Lord in chastisement for some definite fault, and not in relation to any physical cause."

Certainly we shall never again be able to believe that every blow inflicted by the so-called physical order falls by reason of some moral transgression—the book of Job is the everlasting protest against that belief; but, all the same, to the sensitive heart every disaster speaks an urgent message. We have no right to interpret it as the punishment of others, but we have every right to regard it as a call to ourselves—a call to reflection and repentance. 46 This, far more than the other, is the point on which Amos's argument, throughout this part of his speech, chiefly fastens. He regards each calamity, as it fell, more as a call than as a chastisement. Its design was to make the people think, to make them come to themselves, like the prodigal son (Luke xv. 17), and so to their God. The recital of each disaster closes with the melancholy refrain, five times told, that the lesson of it had been missed—"yet ye did not return unto Me." Me: behind the calamity which seemed so cruelly inexplicable beat the great heart of God, who was sternly seeking to win His people to Himself. The severity, no less than the goodness of God, should lead men to repentance. Every disaster brings us face to face with that mysterious Force in the universe—call it God or what you will—with which we have all, in some way or other, at some time or other, to reckon, and with which, especially in moments of terror, we should like to be at peace. In that sense calamity is always a call to repentance, a call to face the ultimate things, the ultimate Person behind all things; and in face of experiences the most tragic, how often may it be said of us, as of Israel, that we did not return unto Him?

But Jehovah loves His people too well to abandon them easily. In love He will lay His heavy hand upon them again and again. He will not give them up, not till the last fearful warning, " Prepare to meet thy God," and perhaps not even then; for this, too, may be, as some suppose, a gracious warning to have all things in readiness against the approaching doom which will not overwhelm those whom it finds prepared. In any case, what is it but Love, working in her own stern way, that sends upon the unhappy people a climax of woes, calling ever fiercer instruments into play, if only she may win them and chastise them into the gracious destiny for which God had chosen them out of all the families of the earth (iii. 2)? " Return to the Lord," says the thirsty land; the very locusts sing, " Return to the Lord." Back to the God whose poor they had crushed and whose true demands they had mocked by their idle ceremonies which mattered nothing at all, back to Him they are summoned by the brazen skies and the noisome pestilence and the flashing Syrian swords.

Through this fierce and varied discipline Jehovah had been summoning the people to Himself, and they had turned a deaf ear. Now He will roar like a lion before he leaps upon his prey: perhaps that will terrify them, perhaps they will listen to the roll of His thunder that ushers in the storm. For neither the leap nor the storm can now be averted; on it is coming, and I will not turn it back. Prepare to meet thy God, O Israel. Again the prophet, in that weirdly terrible way of his, holds over them the horrors of a doom he does not name, " Thus will I do unto thee"—not with a backward look at the recital of the blows which had already fallen unheeded, but with a forward glance to a tragedy more awful still. What was it? Perhaps the onslaught of the Assyrians. The sinful state, Amos knew full well, was doomed; and the Assyrian with his bloody sword would drive home the lesson which the famine and the drought had failed to teach. Or perhaps, as has been suggested by some modern scholars, the original threat of Amos was so appalling that the copyist shrank from transcribing it, and it has been lost to us for ever. But one thing is certain, that the fate at which even our present text darkly hints, is nothing less than terrible—incomparably more terrible than anything that has gone before. " Thus will I do unto thee, O Israel; and because I will do this unto thee, prepare to meet thy God, O Israel."

This God of terrors has to be reckoned with, and He will not be satisfied with their ritual and ceremony—the hymns and the music, the tithes and the sacrifices and the offerings of fat beasts—so long as they refuse to find a place in their social life for justice and mercy and pity. How silly all their worship looks in the light of the magnificent revelation of the creative and ever-moving power of God with which the chapter closes, and how stupendous are the forces He can summon in defence of His insulted majesty! How glorious and terrible is the God whom they are to prepare to meet!—the God who formeth the mountains and createth the wind, and declareth unto man what his mind is; that maketh the morning darkness, and treadeth upon the high places of the earth: Jehovah, the God of hosts, is His name.