'In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria took Samaria, and
carried Israel away into Assyria, and placed them in Halah and in
Habor by the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes. 7. For so
it was, that the children of Israel had sinned against the Lord their
God, which had brought them up out of the land of Egypt, from under
the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and had feared other gods, 8. And
walked in the statutes of the heathen, whom the Lord cast out from
before the children of Israel, and of the kings of Israel, which they
had made. 9. And the children of Israel did secretly those things that
were not right against the Lord their God, and they built them high
places in all their cities, from the tower of the watchmen to the
fenced city. 10. And they set them up images and groves in every high
hill, and under every green tree: 11. And there they burnt incense in
all the high places, as did the heathen whom the Lord carried away
before them; and wrought wicked things to provoke the Lord to anger:
12. For they served idols, whereof the Lord had said unto them, Ye
shall not do this thing. 13. Yet the Lord testified against Israel,
and against Judah, by all the prophets and by all the seers, saying,
Turn ye from your evil ways, and keep My commandments and My statutes,
according to all the law which I commanded your fathers, and which I
sent to you by My servants the prophets. 14. Notwithstanding they
would not hear, but hardened their necks, like to the neck of their
fathers, that did not believe in the Lord their God. 15. And they
rejected His statutes, and His covenant that He made with their
fathers, and His testimonies which He testified against them; and they
followed vanity, and became vain, and went after the heathen that were
round about them, concerning whom the Lord had charged them, that they
should not do like them. 16. And they left all the commandments of the
Lord their God, and made them molten images, even two calves, and made
a grove, and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served Baal. 17.
And they caused their sons and their daughters to pass through the
fire, and used divination and enchantments, and sold themselves to do
evil in the sight of the Lord, to provoke Him to anger. 18. Therefore
the Lord was very angry with Israel, and removed them out of His
sight: there was none left but the tribe of Judah only.'--2 KINGS
xvii. 6-18.
The brevity of the account of the fall of Samaria in verse 6 contrasts
with the long enumeration of the sins which caused it, in the rest of
this passage. Modern critics assume that verses 7-23 are 'an
interpolation by the Deuteronomic writer,' apparently for no reason
but because they trace Israel's fall to its cause in idolatry. But
surely the bare notice in verse 6, immediately followed by verse 24,
cannot have been all that the original historian had to say about so
tragic an end of so large a part of the people of God. The whole
purpose of the Old Testament history is not to chronicle events, but
to declare God's dealings, and the fall of a kingdom was of little
moment, except as revealing the righteousness of God.
The main part of this passage, then, is the exposition of the causes
of the national ruin. It is a _post mortem_ inquiry into the
diseases that killed a kingdom. At first sight, these verses seem a
mere heaping together, not without some repetition, of one or two
charges; but, more closely looked at, they disclose a very striking
progress of thought. In the centre stands verse 13, telling of the
mission of the prophets. Before it, verses 7-12, narrate Israel's sin,
which culminates in provoking the Lord to anger (ver. 11). After it,
the sins are reiterated with noticeable increase of emphasis, and
again culminate in provoking the Lord to anger (ver. 17). So we have
two degrees of guilt--one before and one after the prophets' messages;
and two kindlings of God's anger--one which led to the sending of the
prophets, and one which led to the destruction of Israel. The lessons
that flow from this obvious progress of thought are plain.
I. The less culpable apostasy before the prophets' warnings. The first
words of verse 7, rendered as in the Revised Version, give the purpose
of all that follows; namely, to declare the causes of the calamity
just told. Note that the first characteristic of Israel's sin was
ungrateful departure from God. There is a world of pathos and meaning
in that 'their God,' which is enhanced by the allusion to the Egyptian
deliverance. All sins are attempts to break the chain which binds us
to God--a chain woven of a thousand linked benefits. All practically
deny His possession of us, and ours of Him, and display the short
memory which ingratitude has. All have that other feature hinted at
here--the contrast, so absurd if it were not so sad, between the worth
and power of the God who is left and the other gods who are preferred.
The essential meanness and folly of Israel are repeated by every heart
departing from the living God.
The double origin of the idolatry is next set forth. It was in part
imported and in part home-made. We have little conception of the
strength of faith and courage which were needed to keep the Jews from
becoming idolaters, surrounded as they were by such. But the same are
needed to-day to keep us from learning the ways of the world and
getting a snare to our souls. Now, as ever, walking with God means
walking in the opposite direction from the crowd, and that requires
some firm nerve. The home-made idolatry is gibbeted as being according
to 'the statutes of the kings.' What right had they to prescribe their
subjects' religion? The influence of influential people, especially if
exerted against the service of God, is hard to resist; but it is no
excuse for sin that it is fashionable.
The blindness of Israel to the consequences of their sin is hinted in
the reference to the fate of the nations whom they imitated. They had
been cast out; would not their copyists learn the lesson? We, too,
have examples enough of what godless lives come to, if we had the
sense to profit by them. The God who cast out the vile Canaanites and
all the rest of the wicked crew before the sons of the desert has not
changed, and will treat Israel as He did them, if Israel come down to
their level. Outward privileges make idolatry or any sin more sinful,
and its punishment more severe.
Another characteristic of Israel's sin is its being done 'secretly.'
Of the various meanings proposed for that word (ver. 9) the best seems
to be that it refers to the attempt to combine the worship of God and
of idols, of which the calf worship is an instance. Elijah had long
ago taunted the people with trying 'to hobble on both knees,' or on
'two opinions' at once; and here the charge is of covering idolatry
with a cloak of Jehovah worship. A varnish of religion is convenient
and cheap, and often effectual in deceiving ourselves as well as
others; but 'as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,' whatever his
cloak may be; and the thing which we count most precious and long most
for is our god, whatever our professions of orthodox religion.
The idolatry is then described, in rapid touches, as universal.
Wherever there was a solitary watchman's tower among the pastures
there was a high place, and they were reared in every city. Images and
Asherim deformed every hill-top and stood under every spreading tree.
Everywhere incense loaded the heavy air with its foul fragrance. The
old scenes of unnamable abomination, which had been so terribly
avenged, seemed to have come back, and to cry aloud for another
purging by fire and sword.
The terrible upshot of all was 'to provoke the Lord to anger.' The New
Testament is as emphatic as the Old in asserting that there is the
capacity of anger in the God whose name is love, and that sin calls it
forth. The special characteristic of sin, by which it thus attracts
that lightning, is that it is disobedience. As in the first sin, so in
all others, God has said, 'Ye shall not do this thing'; and we say,
'Do it we will.' What can the end of that be but the anger of the
Lord? 'Because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the
children of disobedience.'
II. Verse 13 gives the pleading of Jehovah. The mission of the
prophets was God's reply to Israel's rebellion, and was equally the
sign of His anger and of His love. The more sin abounds, the more does
God multiply means to draw back to Himself. The deafer the ears, the
louder the beseeching voice of His grieved and yet pitying love. His
anger clothes itself in more stringent appeals and clearer revelations
of Himself before it takes its slaughtering weapons in hand. The
darker the background of sin, the brighter the beams of His light show
against it. Man's sin is made the occasion for a more glorious display
of God's character and heart. It is on the storm-cloud that the sun
paints the rainbow. Each successive stage in man's departure from God
evoked a corresponding increase in the divine effort to attract him
back, till 'last of all He sent unto them His Son.' In nature,
attraction diminishes as distance increases; in the realms of grace,
it grows with distance. The one desire of God's heart is that sinners
would return from their evil ways, and He presses on them the solemn
thought of the abundant intimations of His will which have been given
from of old, and are pealed again into all ears by living voices. His
law for us is not merely an old story spoken centuries ago, but is
vocal in our consciences to-day, and fresh as when Sinai flamed and
thundered above the camp, and the trumpet thrilled each heart.
III. The heavier sin that followed the divine pleading. That divine
voice leaves no man as it finds him. If it does not sway him to
obedience, it deepens his guilt, and makes him more obstinate. Like
some perverse ox in the yoke, he stiffens his neck, and stands the
very picture of brute obduracy. There is an awful alternative involved
in our hearing of God's message, which never returns to Him void, but
ever does something to the hearer, either softening or hardening,
either scaling the eyes or adding another film on them, either being
the 'savour of life unto life or of death unto death.' The mission of
the prophets changed forgetfulness of God's 'statutes' into
'rejection' of them, and made idolatry self-conscious rebellion. Alas,
that men should make what is meant to be a bond to unite them to God
into a wedge to part them farther from Him! But how constantly that is
the effect of the gospel, and for the same reason as in Israel--that
they 'did not believe in the Lord their God'!
The miserable result on the sinners' own natures is described with
pregnant brevity in verse 15. 'They followed vanity, and became vain.'
The worshipper became like the thing worshipped, as is always the
case. The idol is vanity, utter emptiness and nonentity; and whoever
worships nothingness will become in his own inmost life as empty and
vain as it is. That is the retribution attendant on all trust in, and
longing after, the trifles of earth, that we come down to the level of
what we set our hearts upon. We see the effects of that principle in
the moral degradation of idolaters. Gods lustful, cruel, capricious,
make men like themselves. We see it working upwards in Christianity,
in which God becomes man that men may become like God, and of which
the whole law is put into one precept, which is sure to be kept, in
the measure of the reality of a man's religion. 'Be ye therefore
imitators of God, as beloved children.'
In verses 16 and 17 the details of the idolatry follow the general
statement, as in verses 9 to 12, but with additions and with increased
severity of tone. We hear now of calves and star worship, and Baal,
and burning children to Moloch, and divination and enchantment. The
catalogue is enlarged, and there is added to it the terrible
declaration that Israel had 'sold themselves to do evil in the sight
of the Lord.' The same thing was said by Elijah to Ahab--a noble
instance of courage. The sinner who steels himself against the divine
remonstrance, does not merely go on in his old sins, but adds new
ones. Begin with the calves, and fancy that you are worshipping
Jehovah, and you will end with Baal and Moloch. Refuse to hear God's
pleadings, and you will sell your freedom, and become the lowest and
only real kind of slave--the bondsman of evil. When that point of
entire abandonment to sin, which Paul calls being 'sold under sin,' is
reached, as it may be reached, at all events by a nation, and
corruption has struck too deep to be cast out, once again the anger of
the Lord is provoked; but this time it comes in a different guise. The
armies of the Assyrians, not the prophets, are its messengers now.
Israel had made itself like the nations whom God had used it to
destroy, and now it shall be destroyed as they were.
To be swept out of His sight is the fate of obstinate rejection of His
commandments and pleadings. Israel made itself the slave of evil, and
was made the captive of Assyria. Self-willed freedom, which does as it
likes, and heeds not God, ends in bondage, and is itself bondage.
God's anger against sin speaks pleadingly to us all, saying, 'Do not
this abominable thing that I hate.' Well for us if we hearken to His
voice when 'His anger is kindled but a little.' If we do not yield to
Him, and cast away our idols, we shall become vain as they. Our evil
will be more fatal, and our obstinacy more criminal, because He
called, and we refused. 'Who may abide the day of His coming? and who
shall stand when He appeareth?' These captives, dragging their weary
limbs, with despair in their hearts, across the desert to a land of
bondage, were but shadows, in the visible region of things, of the far
more doleful and dreary fate that sooner or later must fall on those
who would none of God's counsel, and despised all His reproof, but
cling to their idol till they and it are destroyed together.