_ON TIME'S HORIZON_
MICAH iv. 1-7.
The immediate prospect of Zion's desolation which closes chap. iii.
is followed in the opening of chap. iv. by an ideal picture of her
exaltation and supremacy _in the issue of the days_. We can hardly
doubt that this arrangement has been made of purpose, nor can we deny
that it is natural and artistic. Whether it be due to Micah himself,
or whether he wrote the second passage, are questions we have already
discussed.[873] Like so many others of their kind, they cannot be
answered with certainty, far less with dogmatism. But I repeat, I
see no conclusive reason for denying either to the circumstances
of Micah's times or to the principles of their prophecy the
possibility of such a hope as inspires chap. iv. 1-4. Remember how
the prophets of the eighth century identified Jehovah with supreme
and universal righteousness; remember how Amos explicitly condemned
the aggravations of war and slavery among the heathen as sins against
Him, and how Isaiah claimed the future gains of Tyrian commerce as
gifts for His sanctuary; remember how Amos heard His voice come forth
from Jerusalem, and Isaiah counted upon the eternal inviolateness
of His shrine and city,--and you will not think it impossible for a
third Judæan prophet of that age, whether he was Micah or another, to
have drawn the prospect of Jerusalem which now opens before us.
It is the far-off horizon of time, which, like the spatial horizon,
always seems a fixed and eternal line, but as constantly shifts
with the shifting of our standpoint or elevation. Every prophet has
his own vision of _the latter days_; seldom is that prospect the
same. Determined by the circumstances of the seer, by the desires
these prompt or only partially fulfil, it changes from age to age.
The ideal is always shaped by the real, and in this vision of the
eighth century there is no exception. This is not any of the ideals
of later ages, when the evil was the oppression of the Lord's people
by foreign armies or their scattering in exile; it is not, in
contrast to these, the spectacle of the armies of the Lord of Hosts
imbrued in the blood of the heathen, or of the columns of returning
captives filling all the narrow roads to Jerusalem, _like streams
in the south_; nor, again, is it a nation of priests gathering
about a rebuilt temple and a restored ritual. But because the pain
of the greatest minds of the eighth century was the contradiction
between faith in the God of Zion as Universal Righteousness and the
experience that, nevertheless, Zion had absolutely no influence upon
surrounding nations, this vision shows a day when Zion's influence
will be as great as her right, and from far and wide the nations
whom Amos has condemned for their transgressions against Jehovah
will acknowledge His law, and be drawn to Jerusalem to learn of
Him. Observe that nothing is said of Israel going forth to teach
the nations the law of the Lord. That is the ideal of a later age,
when Jews were scattered across the world. Here, in conformity with
the experience of a still untravelled people, we see the Gentiles
drawing in upon the Mountain of the House of the Lord. With the same
lofty impartiality which distinguishes the oracles of Amos on the
heathen, the prophet takes no account of their enmity to Israel; nor
is there any talk--such as later generations were almost forced by
the hostility of neighbouring tribes to indulge in--of politically
subduing them to the king in Zion. Jehovah will arbitrate between
them, and the result shall be the institution of a great peace, with
no special political privilege to Israel, unless this be understood
in ver. 5, which speaks of such security to life as was impossible,
at that time at least, in all borderlands of Israel. But among the
heathen themselves there will be a resting from war: the factions
and ferocities of that wild Semitic world, which Amos so vividly
characterised,[874] shall cease. In all this there is nothing beyond
the possibility of suggestion by the circumstances of the eighth
century or by the spirit of its prophecy.
A prophet speaks:--
_And it shall come to pass in the issue of the days,_[875]
_That the Mount of the House of Jehovah shall be established on the
tops_[876] _of the mountains,_
_And lifted shall it be above the hills,_
_And peoples shall flow to it,_
_And many nations shall go and say:_
"_Come, and let us up to the Mount of Jehovah,_
_And to the House of the God of Jacob,_
_That He may teach us of His ways,_
_And we will walk in His paths._"
_For from Zion goeth forth the law,_
_And the word of Jehovah from out of Jerusalem!_
_And He shall judge between many peoples,_
_And decide_[877] _for strong nations far and wide;_[878]
_And they shall hammer their swords into ploughshares,_
_And their spears into pruning-hooks:_
_They shall not lift up, nation against nation, a sword,_
_And they shall not any more learn war._
_Every man shall dwell under his vine_
_And under his fig-tree,_
_And none shall make afraid;_
_For the mouth of Jehovah of Hosts has spoken._
What connection this last verse is intended to have with the preceding
is not quite obvious. It may mean that every family among the Gentiles
shall dwell in peace; or, as suggested above, that with the voluntary
disarming of the surrounding heathendom, Israel herself shall dwell
secure, in no fear of border raids and slave-hunting expeditions, with
which especially Micah's Shephelah and other borderlands were familiar.
The verse does not occur in Isaiah's quotation of the three which
precede it. We can scarcely suppose, fain though we may be to do so,
that Micah added the verse in order to exhibit the future correction
of the evils he has been deploring in chap. iii.: the insecurity of
the householder in Israel before the unscrupulous land-grabbing of the
wealthy. Such are not the evils from which this passage prophesies
redemption. It deals only, like the first oracles of Amos, with the
relentlessness and ferocity of the heathen: under Jehovah's arbitrament
these shall be at peace, and whether among themselves or in Israel,
hitherto so exposed to their raids, men shall dwell in unalarmed
possession of their houses and fields. Security from war, not from
social tyranny, is what is promised.
The following verse (5) gives in a curious way the contrast of the
present to that future in which all men will own the sway of one God.
_For_ at the present time _all the nations are walking each in the
name of his God, but we go in the name of Jehovah for ever and aye_.
To which vision, complete in itself, there has been added by another
hand, of what date we cannot tell, a further effect of God's blessed
influence. To peace among men shall be added healing and redemption,
the ingathering of the outcast and the care of the crippled.
_In that day--'tis the oracle of Jehovah--I will gather the halt,_
_And the cast-off I will bring in, and all that I have afflicted;_
_And I will make the halt for a Remnant,_[879]
_And her that was weakened_[880] _into a strong people,_
_And Jehovah shall reign over them_
_In the Mount of Zion from now and for ever._
Whatever be the origin of the separate oracles which compose this
passage (iv. 1-7), they form as they now stand a beautiful whole,
rising from Peace through Freedom to Love. They begin with obedience
to God and they culminate in the most glorious service which God or
man may undertake, the service of saving the lost. See how the Divine
spiral ascends. We have, first, Religion the centre and origin of
all, compelling the attention of men by its historical evidence of
justice and righteousness. We have the world's willingness to learn
of it. We have the results in the widening brotherhood of nations,
in universal Peace, in Labour freed from War, and with none of her
resources absorbed by the conscriptions and armaments which in our
times are deemed necessary for enforcing peace. We have the universal
diffusion and security of Property, the prosperity and safety of the
humblest home. And, finally, we have this free strength and wealth
inspired by the example of God Himself to nourish the broken and to
gather in the forwandered.
Such is the ideal world, seen and promised two thousand five hundred
years ago, out of as real an experience of human sin and failure as
ever mankind awoke to. Are we nearer the Vision to-day, or does it
still hang upon time's horizon, that line which seems so stable from
every seer's point of view, but which moves from the generations as
fast as they travel to it?
So far from this being so, there is much in the Vision that is not
only nearer us than it was to the Hebrew prophets, and not only
abreast of us, but actually achieved and behind us, as we live and
strive still onward. Yes, brothers, actually behind us! History
has in part fulfilled the promised influence of religion upon the
nations. The Unity of God has been owned, and the civilised peoples
bow to the standards of justice and of mercy first revealed from
Mount Zion. _Many nations_ and _powerful nations_ acknowledge the
arbitrament of the God of the Bible. We have had revealed that High
Fatherhood of which every family in heaven and earth is named; and
wherever that is believed the brotherhood of men is confessed. We
have seen Sin, that profound discord in man and estrangement from
God, of which all human hatreds and malices are the fruit, atoned
for and reconciled by a Sacrifice in face of which human pride and
passion stand abashed. The first part of the Vision is fulfilled.
_The nations stream to the God of Jerusalem and His Christ._ And
though to-day our Peace be but a paradox, and the "Christian" nations
stand still from war not in love, but in fear of one another, there
are in every nation an increasing number of men and women, with
growing influence, who, without being fanatics for peace, or blind
to the fact that war may be a people's duty in fulfilment of its own
destiny or in relief of the enslaved, do yet keep themselves from
foolish forms of patriotism, and by their recognition of each other
across all national differences make sudden and unconsidered war
more and more of an impossibility. I write this in the sound of that
call to stand upon arms which broke like thunder upon our Christmas
peace; but, amid all the ignoble jealousies and hot rashness which
prevail, how the air, burned clean by that first electric discharge,
has filled with the determination that war shall not happen in the
interests of mere wealth or at the caprice of a tyrant! God help us
to use this peace for the last ideals of His prophet! May we see, not
that of which our modern peace has been far too full, mere freedom
for the wealth of the few to increase at the expense of the mass of
mankind. May our Peace mean the gradual disarmament of the nations,
the increase of labour, the diffusion of property, and, above all,
the redemption of the waste of the people and the recovery of our
outcasts. Without this, peace is no peace; and better were war
to burn out by its fierce fires those evil humours of our secure
comfort, which render us insensible to the needy and the fallen at
our side. Without the redemptive forces at work which Christ brought
to earth, peace is no peace; and the cruelties of war, that slay and
mutilate so many, are as nothing to the cruelties of a peace which
leaves us insensible to the outcasts and the perishing, of whom there
are so many even in our civilisation.
One application of the prophecy may be made at this moment. We are
told by those who know best and have most responsibility in the
matter that an ancient Church and people of Christ are being left a
prey to the wrath of an infidel tyrant, not because Christendom is
without strength to compel him to deliver, but because to use the
strength, would be to imperil the peace, of Christendom. It is an
ignoble peace which cannot use the forces of redemption, and with the
cry of Armenia in our ears the Unity of Europe is but a mockery.
FOOTNOTES:
[873] See above, pp. 365 ff.
[874] See above, Chap. VII.
[875] אחרית is the hindmost, furthest, ultimate, whether of space
(Psalm cxxxix. 9: "the uttermost part of the sea"), or of time (Deut.
xi. 12: "the end of the year"). It is the end as compared with the
beginning, the sequel with the start, the future with the present
(Job xlii. 12). In Proverbs it is chiefly used in the moral sense
of issue or result. But it chiefly occurs in the phrase used here,
הימים אחרית, not "the latter days," as A.V., nor ultimate days,
for in these phrases lurks the idea of time having an end, but the
_after-days_ (Cheyne), or, better still, the _issue of the days_.
[876] LXX.
[877] Or _arbitrate_.
[878] Literally: "up to far away."
[879] That which shall abide and be the stock of the future.
[880] LXX. _cast off_.