_THE SIN AGAINST LOVE_
HOSEA i.-iii.; iv. 11 ff.; ix. 10 ff.; xi. 8 f.
The Love of God is a terrible thing--that is the last lesson of the
Book of Hosea. _My God will cast them away._[768]
_My God_--let us remember the right which Hosea had to use these
words. Of all prophets he was the first to break into the full
aspect of the Divine Mercy--to learn and to proclaim that God is
Love. But he was worthy to do so, by the patient love of his own
heart towards another who for years had outraged all his trust and
tenderness. He had loved, believed and been betrayed; pardoned and
waited and yearned, and sorrowed and pardoned again. It is in this
long-suffering that his breast beats upon the breast of God with
the cry _My God_. As he had loved Gomer, so had God loved Israel,
past hope, against hate, through ages of ingratitude and apostasy.
Quivering with his own pain, Hosea has exhausted all human care
and affection for figures to express the Divine tenderness, and he
declares God's love to be deeper than all the passion of men, and
broader than all their patience: _How can I give thee up, Ephraim?
How can I let thee go, Israel? I will not execute the fierceness of
Mine anger. For I am God, and not man._ And yet, like poor human
affection, this Love of God, too, confesses its failure--_My God
shall cast them away._ It is God's sentence of relinquishment upon
those who sin against His Love, but the poor human lips which deliver
it quiver with an agony of their own, and here, as more explicitly in
twenty other passages of the book, declare it to be equally the doom
of those who outrage the love of their fellow men and women.
We have heard it said: "The lives of men are never the same after
they have loved; if they are not better they must be worse." "Be
afraid of the love that loves you: it is either your heaven or your
hell." "All the discipline of men springs from their love--if they
take it not so, then all their sorrow must spring from the same
source." "There is a depth of sorrow, which can only be known to
a soul that has loved the most perfect thing and beholds itself
fallen." These things are true of the Love, both of our brother and
of our God. And the eternal interest of the life of Hosea is that he
learned how, for strength and weakness, for better for worse, our
human and our Divine loves are inseparably joined.
I.
Most men learn that love is inseparable from pain where Hosea learned
it--at home. There it is that we are all reminded that when love
is strongest she feels her weakness most. For the anguish which
love must bear, as it were from the foundation of the world, is the
contradiction at her heart between the largeness of her wishes and
the littleness of her power to realise them. A mother feels it,
bending over the bed of her child, when its body is racked with
pain or its breath spent with coughing. So great is the feeling of
her love that it ought to do something, that she will actually feel
herself cruel because nothing can be done. Let the sick-bed become
the beach of death, and she must feel the helplessness and the
anguish still more as the dear life is now plucked from her and now
tossed back by the mocking waves, and then drawn slowly out to sea
upon the ebb from which there is no returning.
But the pain which disease and death thus cause to love is nothing to
the agony that Sin inflicts when he takes the game into his unclean
hands. We know what pain love brings, if our love be a fair face and
fresh body in which Death brands his sores while we stand by, as if
with arms bound. But what if our love be a childlike heart, and a
frank expression and honest eyes, and a clean and clever mind. Our
powerlessness is just as great and infinitely more tormented when Sin
comes by and casts his shadow over these. Ah, that is Love's greatest
torment when her children, who have run from her to the bosom of sin,
look back and their eyes are changed! That is the greatest torment
of Love--to pour herself without avail into one of those careless
natures which seem capacious and receptive, yet never fill with
love, for there is a crack and a leak at the bottom of them. The
fields where Love suffers her sorest defeats are not the sick-bed
and not death's margin, not the cold lips and sealed eyes kissed
without response; but the changed eyes of children, and the breaking
of "the full-orbed face," and the darkening look of growing sons
and daughters, and the home the first time the unclean laugh breaks
across it. To watch, though unable to soothe, a dear body racked with
pain, is peace beside the awful vigil of watching a soul shrink and
blacken with vice, and your love unable to redeem it.
Such a clinical study Hosea endured for years. The prophet of God, we
are told, brought a dead child to life by taking him in his arms and
kissing him. But Hosea with all his love could not make Gomer a true
whole wife again. Love had no power on this woman--no power even at
the merciful call to make all things new. Hosea, who had once placed
all hope in tenderness, had to admit that Love's moral power is not
absolute. Love may retire defeated from the highest issues of life.
Sin may conquer Love.
Yet it is in this his triumph that Sin must feel the ultimate
revenge. When a man has conquered this weak thing and beaten her down
beneath his feet, God speaks the sentence of abandonment.
There is enough of the whipped dog in all of us to make us dread
penalty when we come into conflict with the strong things of
life. But it takes us all our days to learn that there is far
more condemnation to them who offend the weak things of life, and
particularly the weakest of all, its love. It was on sins against the
weak that Christ passed His sternest judgments: _Woe unto him that
offends one of these little ones; it were better for him that he had
never been born._ God's little ones are not only little children,
but all things which, like little children, have only love for their
strength. They are pure and loving men and women--men with no weapon
but their love, women with no shield but their trust. They are the
innocent affections of our own hearts--the memories of our childhood,
the ideals of our youth, the prayers of our parents, the faith in
us of our friends. These are the little ones of whom Christ spake,
that he who sins against them had better never have been born. Often
may the dear solicitudes of home, a father's counsels, a mother's
prayers, seem foolish things against the challenges of a world,
calling us to play the man and do as it does; often may the vows and
enthusiasms of boyhood seem impertinent against the temptations which
are so necessary to manhood: yet let us be true to the weak, for if
we betray them, we betray our own souls. We may sin against law and
maim or mutilate ourselves, but to sin against love is to be cast out
of life altogether. He who violates the purity of the love with which
God has filled his heart, he who abuses the love God has sent to meet
him in his opening manhood, he who slights any of the affections,
whether they be of man or woman, of young or of old, which God lays
upon us as the most powerful redemptive forces of our life, next to
that of His dear Son--he sinneth against his own soul, and it is of
such that Hosea spake: _My God will cast them away_.
We talk of breaking law: we can only break ourselves against it. But
if we sin against Love, we do destroy her; we take from her the power
to redeem and sanctify us. Though in their youth men think Love a
quick and careless thing--a servant always at their side, a winged
messenger easy of despatch--let them know that every time they send
her on an evil errand she returns with heavier feet and broken wings.
When they make her a pander they kill her outright. When she is no
more they waken to that which Gomer came to know, that love abused is
love lost, and love lost means Hell.
II.
This, however, is only the margin from which Hosea beholds an
abandonment still deeper. All that has been said of human love and
the penalty of outraging it is equally true of the Divine love and
the sin against that.
The love of God has the same weakness which we have seen in the love
of man. It, too, may fail to redeem; it, too, has stood defeated on
some of the highest moral battle-fields of life. God Himself has
suffered anguish and rejection from sinful men. "Herein," says a
theologian, "is the mystery of this love, ... that God can never by
His Almighty Power compel that which is the very highest gift in the
life of His creatures--love to Himself, but that He receives it as
the free gift of His creatures, and that He is only able to allow men
to give it to Him in a free act of their own will." So Hosea also
has told us how God does not compel, but allure or _woo_, the sinful
back to Himself. And it is the deepest anguish of the prophet's
heart, that this free grace of God may fail through man's apathy
or insincerity. The anguish appears in those frequent antitheses
in which his torn heart reflects herself in the style of his
discourse. _I have redeemed them--yet have they spoken lies against
Me._[769] _I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness--they went to
Ba'al-Peor._[770] _When Israel was a child, then I loved him ... but
they sacrificed to Ba'alim._[771] _I taught Ephraim to walk, but they
knew not that I healed them._[772] _How can I give thee up, Ephraim?
how can I let thee go, O Israel?... Ephraim compasseth Me with lies,
and the house of Israel with deceit!_[773]
We fear to apply all that we know of the weakness of human love to
the love of God. Yet though He be God and not man, it was as man He
commended His love to us. He came nearest us, not in the thunders
of Sinai, but in Him Who presented Himself to the world with the
caresses of a little child; Who met men with no angelic majesty
or heavenly aureole, but whom when we saw we found nothing that
we should desire Him, His visage was so marred more than any man,
and His form than the sons of men; Who came to His own and His own
received Him not; Who, having loved His own that were in the world,
loved them up to the end, and yet at the end was by them deserted and
betrayed,--it is of Him that Hosea prophetically says: _I drew them
with cords of a man and with bands of love_.
We are not bound to God by any unbreakable chain. The strands which
draw us upwards to God, to holiness and everlasting life, have the
weakness of those which bind us to the earthly souls we love. It is
possible for us to break them. We love Christ, not because He has
compelled us by any magic, irresistible influence to do so; but, as
John in his great simplicity says, _We love Him because He first
loved us_.
Now this is surely the terror of God's love--that it can be resisted;
that even as it is manifest in Jesus Christ we men have the power,
not only to remain, as so many do, outside its scope, feeling it to
be far-off and vague, but having tasted it to fall away from it,
having realised it to refuse it, having allowed it to begin its moral
purposes in our lives to baffle and nullify these; to make the glory
of Heaven absolutely ineffectual in our own characters; and to give
our Saviour the anguish of rejection.
Give Him the anguish, yet pass upon ourselves the doom! For, as I
read the New Testament, the one unpardonable sin is the sin against
our Blessed Redeemer's Love as it is brought home to the heart by
the power of the Holy Spirit. Every other sin is forgiven to men but
to crucify afresh Him who loved us and gave Himself for us. The most
terrible of His judgments is "the wail of a heart wounded because
its love has been despised": _Jerusalem, Jerusalem! how often would
I have gathered thy children as a hen gathereth her chickens, and ye
would not. Behold, your house is left unto you desolate!_
Men say they cannot believe in hell, because they cannot conceive how
God may sentence men to misery for the breaking of laws they were
born without power to keep. And one would agree with the inference,
if God had done any such thing. But for them which are under the law
and the sentence of death, Christ died once for all, that He might
redeem them. Yet this does not make a hell less believable. When we
see how Almighty was that Love of God in Christ Jesus, lifting our
whole race and sending them forward with a freedom and a power of
growth nothing else in history has won for them; when we prove again
how weak it is, so that it is possible for millions of characters
that have felt it to refuse its eternal influence for the sake of
some base and transient passion; nay, when _I myself_ know this power
and this weakness of Christ's love, so that one day being loyal I
am raised beyond the reach of fear and of doubt, beyond the desire
of sin and the habit of evil, and the next day finds me capable
of putting it aside in preference for some slight enjoyment or
ambition--then I know the peril and the terror of this love, that it
may be to a man either Heaven or Hell.
Believe then in hell, because you believe in the Love of God--not
in a hell to which God condemns men of His will and pleasure, but a
hell into which men cast themselves from the very face of His love
in Jesus Christ. The place has been painted as a place of fires.
But when we contemplate that men come to it with the holiest flames
in their nature quenched, we shall justly feel that it is rather a
dreary waste of ash and cinder, strewn with snow--some ribbed and
frosted Arctic zone, silent in death, for there is no life there, and
there is no life there because there is no Love, and no Love because
men in rejecting or abusing her have slain their own power ever again
to feel her presence.
FOOTNOTES:
[768] x. 17.
[769] vii. 13.
[770] ix. 10.
[771] xi. 1, 2.
[772] xi. 4.
[773] xi. 8; xii. 1.
_MICAH_
"But I am full of power by the Spirit of Jehovah
To declare to Jacob his transgressions, and to Israel his
sin."