_THE FATHERHOOD AND HUMANITY OF GOD_
HOSEA xi.
From the thick jungle of Hosea's travail, the eleventh chapter breaks
like a high and open mound. The prophet enjoys the first of his two
clear visions--that of the Past.[595] Judgment continues to descend.
Israel's Sun is near his setting, but before he sinks--
"A lingering light he fondly throws
On the dear hills, whence first he rose."
Across these confused and vicious years, through which he has painfully
made his way, Hosea sees the tenderness and the romance of the early
history of his people. And although he must strike the old despairing
note--that, by the insincerity of the present generation, all the
ancient guidance of their God must end in this!--yet for some moments
the blessed memory shines by itself, and God's mercy appears to triumph
over Israel's ingratitude. Surely their sun will not set; Love must
prevail. To which assurance a later voice from the Exile has added, in
verses 10 and 11, a confirmation suitable to its own circumstances.
_When Israel was a child, then I loved him,_
_And from Egypt I called_ him _to be My son._
The early history of Israel was a romance. Think of it historically.
Before the Most High there spread an array of kingdoms and peoples.
At their head were three strong princes--sons indeed of God, if all
the heritage of the past, the power of the present and the promise of
the future be tokens. Egypt, wrapt in the rich and jewelled web of
centuries, basked by Nile and Pyramid, all the wonder of the world's
art in his dreamy eyes. Opposite him Assyria, with barer but more
massive limbs, stood erect upon his highlands, grasping in his sword
the promise of the world's power. Between the two, and using both
of them, yet with his eyes westward on an empire of which neither
dreamed, the Phœnician on his sea-coast built his storehouses and
sped his navies, the promise of the world's wealth. It must ever
remain the supreme romance of history, that the true son of God,
bearer of His love and righteousness to all mankind, should be found,
not only outside this powerful trinity, but in the puny and despised
captive of one of them--in a people that was not a state, that had
not a country, that was without a history, and, if appearances be
true, was as yet devoid of even the rudiments of civilisation--a
child people and a slave.
That was the Romance, and Hosea gives us the Grace which made it.
_When Israel was a child, then I loved him._ The verb is a distinct
impulse: _I began, I learned, to love him_. God's eyes, that passed
unheeding the adult princes of the world, fell upon this little slave
boy, and He loved him and gave him a career: _from Egypt I called_
him _to be My son_.
Now, historically, it was the persuasion of this which made Israel.
All their distinctiveness and character, their progress from a
level with other nomadic tribes to the rank of the greatest
religious teachers of humanity, started from the memory of these
two facts--that God loved them, and that God called them. This was
an unfailing conscience--the obligation that they were not their
own, the irresistible motive to repentance even in their utmost
backsliding, the unquenchable hope of a destiny in their direst days
of defeat and scattering.
Some, of course, may cavil at the narrow, national scale on which such
a belief was held, but let them remember that it was held in trust for
all mankind. To snarl that Israel felt this sonship to God only for
themselves, is to forget that it is they who have persuaded humanity
that this is the only kind of sonship worth claiming. Almost every
other nation of antiquity imagined a filial relation to the deity, but
it was either through some fabulous physical descent, and then often
confined only to kings and heroes, or by some mystical mingling of the
Divine with the human, which was just as gross and sensuous. Israel
alone defined the connection as a historical and a moral one. _The sons
of God are begotten not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor
of the will of man, but of God._[596] Sonship to God is something not
physical, but moral and historical, into which men are carried by a
supreme awakening to the Divine love and authority. Israel, it is true,
felt this only in a general way for the nation as a whole;[597] but
their conception of it embraced just those moral contents which form
the glory of Christ's doctrine of the Divine sonship of the individual.
The belief that God is our Father does not come to us with our carnal
birth--except in possibility: the persuasion of it is not conferred by
our baptism except in so far as that is Christ's own seal to the fact
that God Almighty loves us and has marked us for His own. To us sonship
is a becoming, not a being--the awakening of our adult minds into the
surprise of a Father's undeserved mercy, into the constraint of His
authority and the assurance of the destiny He has laid up for us. It is
conferred by love, and confirmed by duty. Neither has power brought it,
nor wisdom, nor wealth, but it has come solely with the wonder of the
knowledge that God loves us, and has always loved us, as well as in the
sense, immediately following, of a true vocation to serve Him. Sonship
which is less than this is no sonship at all. But so much as this is
possible to every man through Jesus Christ. His constant message is
that the Father loves every one of us, and that if we _know_[598] that
love, we are God's sons indeed. To them who feel it, adoption into the
number and privileges of the sons of God comes with the amazement and
the romance which glorified God's choice of the child-slave Israel.
_Behold_, they cry, _what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon
us, that we should be called the sons of God_.[599]
But we cannot be loved by God and left where we are. Beyond the
grace there lies the long discipline and destiny. We are called from
servitude to freedom, from the world to God--each of us to run a
course, and do a work, which can be done by no one else. That Israel
did not perceive this was God's sore sorrow with them.
_The more I_[600] _called to them, the farther they went from Me._[601]
_They to the Ba'alim kept sacrificing, and to images offering
incense._ But God persevered with grace, and the story is at first
continued in the figure of Fatherhood with which it commenced; then
it changes to the metaphor of a humane man's goodness to his beasts.
_Yet I taught Ephraim to walk, holding them on Mine arms,_[602] _but
they knew not that I healed them_--presumably when they fell and hurt
themselves. _With the cords of a man I would draw them, with bands of
love; and I was to them as those who lift up the yoke on their jaws,
and gently would I give them to eat._[603] It is the picture of a team
of bullocks, in charge of a kind driver. Israel are no longer the
wanton young cattle of the previous chapter, which need the yoke firmly
fastened on their neck,[604] but a team of toiling oxen mounting some
steep road. There is no use now for the rough ropes, by which frisky
animals are kept to their work; but the driver, coming to his beasts'
heads, by the gentle touch of his hand at their mouths and by words
of sympathy _draws_ them after him. _I drew them with cords of a man,
and with bands of love._ Yet there is the yoke, and it would seem that
certain forms of this, when beasts were working upwards, as we should
say _against the collar_, pressed and rubbed upon them, so that the
humane driver, when he came to their heads, eased the yoke with his
hands. _I was as they that take the yoke off their jaws_;[605] and
then, when they got to the top of the hill, he would rest and feed
them. That is the picture, and however uncertain we may feel as to some
of its details, it is obviously a passage--Ewald says "the earliest of
all passages"--in which "human means precisely the same as love." It
ought to be taken along with that other passage in the great Prophecy
of the Exile, where God is described as He that led them through _the
deep, as an horse in the wilderness, that they should not stumble: as
a beast goeth down into the valley, the Spirit of the Lord gave him
rest_.[606]
Thus then the figure of the fatherliness of God changes into that
of His gentleness or humanity. Do not let us think that there is
here either any descent of the poetry or want of connection between
the two figures. The change is true, not only to Israel's, but to
our own experience. Men are all either the eager children of happy,
irresponsible days, or the bounden, plodding draught-cattle of life's
serious burdens and charges. Hosea's double figure reflects human
life in its whole range. Which of us has not known this fatherliness
of the Most High, exercised upon us, as upon Israel, throughout our
years of carelessness and disregard? It was God Himself who taught
and trained us then;--
"When through the slippery paths of youth
With heedless steps I ran,
Thine arm unseen conveyed me safe,
And led me up to man."
Those speedy recoveries from the blunders of early wilfulness, those
redemptions from the sins of youth--happy were we if we knew that
it was _He who healed us_. But there comes a time when men pass
from leading-strings to harness--when we feel faith less and duty
more--when our work touches us more closely than our God. Death must
be a strange transformer of the spirit, yet surely not more strange
than life, which out of the eager buoyant child makes in time the
slow automaton of duty. It is such a stage which the fourth of these
verses suits, when we look up, not so much for the fatherliness as
for the gentleness and humanity of our God. A man has a mystic power
of a very wonderful kind upon the animals over whom he is placed. On
any of these wintry roads of ours we may see it, when a kind carter
gets down at a hill, and, throwing the reins on his beast's back,
will come to its head and touch it with his bare hands, and speak to
it as if it were his fellow; till the deep eyes fill with light, and
out of these things, so much weaker than itself, a touch, a glance, a
word, there will come to it new strength to pull the stranded waggon
onward. The man is as a god to the beast, coming down to help it,
and it almost makes the beast human that he does so. Not otherwise
does Hosea feel the help which God gives His own on the weary hills
of life. We need not discipline, for our work is discipline enough,
and the cares we carry of themselves keep us straight and steady.
But we need sympathy and gentleness--this very humanity which the
prophet attributes to our God. God comes and takes us by the head;
through the mystic power which is above us, but which makes us like
itself, we are lifted to our task. Let no one judge this incredible.
The incredible would be that our God should prove any less to us than
the merciful man is to his beast. But we are saved from argument
by experience. When we remember how, as life has become steep and
our strength exhausted, there has visited us a thought which has
sharpened to a word, a word which has warmed to a touch, and we have
drawn ourselves together and leapt up new men, can we feel that
God was any less in these things, than in the voice of conscience
or the message of forgiveness, or the restraints of His discipline?
Nay, though the reins be no longer felt, God is at our head, that we
should not stumble nor stand still.
Upon this gracious passage there follows one of those swift revulsions
of feeling, which we have learned almost to expect in Hosea. His
insight again overtakes his love. The people will not respond to
the goodness of their God; it is impossible to work upon minds so
fickle and insincere. Discipline is what they need. _He shall return
to the land of Egypt, or Asshur shall be his king_ (it is still an
alternative), _for they have refused to return_ to Me....[607] 'Tis but
one more instance of the age-long apostasy of the people. _My people
have a bias_[608] _to turn from Me; and though they_ (the prophets)
_call them upwards, none of them can lift them_.[609]
Yet God is God, and though prophecy fail He will attempt His Love
once more. There follows the greatest passage in Hosea--deepest if
not highest of his book--the breaking forth of that exhaustless mercy
of the Most High which no sin of man can bar back nor wear out.
_How am I to give thee up, O Ephraim?_
How _am I to let thee go, O Israel?_
_How am I to give thee up?_
_Am I to make an Admah of thee--a Ṣeboim?_
_My heart is turned upon Me,
My compassions begin to boil:_
_I will not perform the fierceness of Mine anger,_
_I will not turn to destroy Ephraim;_
_For God am I and not man,_
_The Holy One in the midst of thee, yet I come not to
consume!_[610]
Such a love has been the secret of Hosea's persistence through so
many years with so faithless a people, and now, when he has failed,
it takes voice to itself and in its irresistible fulness makes this
last appeal. Once more before the end let Israel hear God in the
utterness of His Love!
The verses are a climax, and obviously to be succeeded by a pause.
On the brink of his doom, will Israel turn to such a God, at such a
call? The next verse, though dependent for its promise on this same
exhaustless Love, is from an entirely different circumstance, and
cannot have been put by Hosea here.[611]
FOOTNOTES:
[595] See above, p. 253.
[596] St. John's Gospel, i. 12, 13.
[597] Or occasionally for the king as the nation's representative.
[598] See below, pp. 321-3.
[599] 1 John iii.
[600] So rightly the LXX.
[601] LXX., rightly separating מִפְּנֵיהֶם into מִפָּנָי and הֵם,
which latter is the nominative to the next clause.
[602] So again rightly the LXX.
[603] The reading is uncertain. The לֹא of the following verse (6)
must be read as the Greek reads it, as לֹו, and taken with ver. 5.
[604] x. 11.
[605] Or lifted forward from the neck to the jaws.
[606] Isa. lxiii. 13, 14.
[607] Ver. 6 has an obviously corrupt text, and, weakening as it does
the climax of ver. 5, may be an insertion.
[608] _Are hung_ or _swung towards turning away from Me_.
[609] This verse is also uncertain.
[610] For בעיר, which makes nonsense, read לבעור, _to consume_, or with
Wellhausen amend further לבער אובה לא, _I am not willing to consume_.
[611] _They will follow Jehovah; like a lion He will roar, and they
shall hurry trembling from the west. Like birds shall they hurry
trembling from Egypt, and like doves from the land of Assyria, and I
will bring them to their homes--'tis the oracle of Jehovah._ Not only
does this verse contain expressions which are unusual to Hosea, and a
very strange metaphor, but it is not connected either historically or
logically with the previous verse. The latter deals with the people
before God has scattered them--offers them one more chance before
exile comes on them. But in this verse they are already scattered,
and just about to be brought back. It is such a promise as both in
language and metaphor was common among the prophets of the Exile. In
the LXX. the verse is taken from chap. xi. and put with chap. xii.