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"Nazim": Nazim's origin is Arabic.
Nazim means "a
prophet's name."
-- RhymingNames.com
The Lectures contained in this volume were delivered
last winter to large popular audiences in Edinburgh
and Glasgow, at the invitation of an influential committee of gentlemen interested in the progress of Biblical
study.
***
The practical point in all
controversy as to the distinctive character of the revelation of
God to Israel regards the place of Scripture as the permanent
rule of faith and the sufficient and unfailing guide in all our
religious life. When we say that God dealt with Israel in the
way of special revelation, and crowned His dealings by
personally manifesting all His grace and truth in Christ Jesus
the incarnate Word, we mean that the Bible contains within
itself a perfect picture of God's gracious relations with man,
and that we have no need to go outside of the Bible history to
learn anything of God and His saving will towards us, — that the
whole growth of the true religion up to its perfect fulness is
set before us in the record of God's dealings with Israel
culminating in the manifestation of Jesus Christ.
***
[I]t is plain that a personal
knowledge of God and His will — and without personal knowledge
there can be no true religion — involves a personal dealing of
God with men. Such personal dealing again necessarily implies a
special dealing with chosen individuals. To say that God speaks
to all men alike, and gives the same communication directly to
all without the use of a revealing agency, reduces religion to
mysticism.
***
[I]f revelation were not to be
altogether futile it was necessary that each new communication
of God should build on those which had gone before, and
therefore that it should be made within that society which had
already appropriated the sum of previous revelations....there
must have been a society of men possessed of the whole series of
divine teachings in a consecutive and adequate form. And under
the conditions of ancient life this society could not be other
than a nation....There is nothing unreasonable, therefore, in
the idea that the true religion was originally developed in
national form within the people of Israel; nay, this limitation
corresponds to the historical conditions of the problem....The
coming of Christ coincided under divine providence with the
breaking down of national barriers and the establishment of a
cosmopolitan system of politics and culture under the first
Roman emperors, and so Christianity was able to leave the narrow
field of Old Testament development and become a religion not for
one nation but for all mankind....It will not be denied that the
knowledge of God reached by Gentile nations was fragmentary and
imperfect, that there was no solid and continuous progress in
spiritual things under any heathen system, but that the noblest
religions outside of Christianity gradually decayed and lost
whatever moral power they once possessed....the religion of the
Bible can be shown to have run a different course... in it truth
once attained was never lost and never thrust aside so as to
lose its influence ...in spite of all impediments the knowledge
of God given to Israel moved steadily forward till at last it
emancipated itself from national restrictions, and, without
changing its consistency or denying its former history, merged
in the perfect religion of Christ, which still satisfies the
deepest spiritual needs of mankind ... the essential advantage
claimed by the religion of the Bible does not lie in details,
but in the consistent unity of scheme that runs through its
whole historical development, and gives to each part of the
development a share in the unique character that belongs to it
as a whole....
There is an external evidence
of the truth of the Biblical revelation which lies behind the
question of the supernatural as it is usually stated, an
evidence which lies, not in the miraculous circumstances of this
or that particular act of revelation, but in the intrinsic
character of the scheme of revelation as a whole. It is a
general law of human history that truth is consistent,
progressive, and imperishable, while every falsehood is
self-contradictory, and ultimately falls to pieces. A
religion which has endured every possible trial, which has
outlived every vicissitude of human fortunes, and has never
failed to reassert its power unbroken in the collapse of its old
environments, which has pursued a consistent and victorious
course through the lapse of eventful centuries, declares itself
by irresistible evidence to be a thing of reality and power.
If the religion of Israel and of Christ answers these tests, the
miraculous circumstances of its promulgation need not be used as
the first proof of its truth, but must rather be regarded as the
inseparable accompaniments of a revelation which bears the
historical stamp of reality....
In the long struggle with the
empires of the East the Word of Jehovah was tried as gold in the
furnace, and its behaviour under this crucial test is the best
demonstration of its incorruptible purity and enduring worth....
We have already had occasion to
note that the conception of a personal revelation of God to man,
which underlies the scheme of Biblical religion in both
Testaments, implies that God approaches man in the first
instance in the way of special dealing with chosen individuals.
According to the Old Testament prophets, the circle chosen for
this purpose is the nation of Israel, the only nation, as Amos
expresses it, among all the families of the earth which Jehovah
knows in a personal way (Amos iii. 2). To the prophets, then,
the nation of Israel is the community of the true religion. But
it is important to observe how this is put. Amos does not say
that Israel knows Jehovah, but that Jehovah knows or personally
recognises Israel, and no other nation. The same idea is
expressed by Hosea in figures drawn from domestic life. Israel
is Jehovah's spouse (chaps, i. to iii.), or His son (chap. xi.
1). Thus the basis of the prophetic religion is the conception
of a unique relation between Jehovah and Israel, not, be it
observed, individual Israelites, but Israel as a national unity.
The whole Old Testament religion deals with the relations
between two parties — Jehovah on the one hand, and the nation of
Israel on the other. Simple as this conception is, it requires
an effort of attention to fix it in our minds. We are so
accustomed to think of religion as a thing between individual
men and God that we can hardly enter into the idea of a religion
in which a whole nation in its national organisation appears as
the religious unit, — in which we have to deal, not with the
faith and obedience of individual persons, but with the faith
and obedience of a nation as expressed in the functions of
national life.
***
It is only on the march and in
time of war that a nomad people feels any urgent need of a
central authority, and so it came about that in the first
beginnings of national organisation, centering in the sanctuary
of the ark, Israel was thought of mainly as the host of Jehovah.
The very name of Israel is martial, and means "God (El) fighteth,"
and Jehovah in the Old Testament is Iahwe Cebaoth, the Jehovah
of the armies of Israel. It was on the battlefield that
Jehovah's presence was most clearly realised; but in primitive
nations the leader in time of war is also the natural judge in
time of peace, and the sanctuary of Jehovah, where Moses and the
priests, his successors, gave forth the sacred oracle, was the
final seat of judgment in all cases too hard for the ordinary
heads of the Hebrew clans.
***
It was the faith of Jehovah
that united the Hebrews to final victory, and Jehovah who
crowned His gift of the goodly land of Canaan by bestowing on
Israel a king to reign in His name, and make it at length a real
nation instead of a loose federation of tribes. And so the
religion of Jehovah was not only a necessary part of the state,
but the chief cornerstone of the political edifice. To Jehovah
Israel owed, not only the blessings of life, but national
existence and all the principles of social order; and through
His priests, His prophets, but above all His anointed king. He
was the source of all authority, and the fountain of all law and
judgment in the land.
***
[T]he official prophets, connected with the sanctuary, were, according to the testimony of Jeremiah and Micah, often not distinguishable
from sorcerers.
***
Another seat of the influence
of the movement was the prophetic guilds. Elijah himself, so far
as we can judge, had little to do with these guilds; but his
successor Elisha, who had the chief share in giving political
effect to his ideas, found his closest followers among the "sons
of the prophets." The idea of ''schools of the prophets," which
we generally connect with this Biblical phrase, is a pure
invention of commentators. According to all the laws of Semitic
speech the sons of the prophets were not disciples of a school,
but members of a guild or corporation, [17] living together in
the neighbourhood of ancient sanctuaries, such as Gilgal and
Bethel, and in all likelihood closely connected with the
priests, as was certainly the case in Judah down to the
extinction of the state (Jer. xxix. 26, cf. XX. 1, 2; Lam. ii.
20, etc.).
***
We have already seen that the
revolution inaugurated by Elijah and Elisha appealed to the
conservatism of the nation. It was followed therefore by no
attempt to remodel the traditional forms of Jehovah worship,
which continued essentially as they had been since the time of
the Judges. The golden calves remained undisturbed, though they
were plainly out of place in the worship of a Deity who had so
markedly separated himself from the gods of the nations; and
with them there remained also many other religious institutions
and symbols — such as the Ashera or sacred pole at Samaria (A.V.
"grove," 2 Kings xiii. 6) — which were common to Israel with the
Canaanites, and in their influence on the popular imagination
could only tend to efface true conceptions of the God of Elijah,
and drag Him down again to the level of a heathen deity. Yet the
sanctuaries which contained so many elements unfavourable to a
spiritual faith were still the indispensable centres of national
religion. True religion can never be the affair of the
individual alone. A right religious relation to God must include
a relation to our fellow-men in God, and solitary acts of
devotion can never satisfy the wants of healthy spiritual life,
which calls for a visible expression of the fact that we worship
God together in the common faith which binds us into a religious
community. The necessity for acts of public and united worship
is instinctively felt wherever religion has a social influence,
and in Israel it was felt the more strongly because Jehovah was
primarily the God and King of the nation, who had to do with the
individual Israelite only in virtue of his place in the
commonwealth. It was in the ordering of national affairs, the
sanctioning of social duties, that Jehovah made Himself directly
present to His people, and so their recognition of His Godhead
necessarily took a public form, when they rejoiced before Him at
His sanctuary. The Israelite could not in general have the same
personal sense of Jehovah's presence in his closet as when he
"appeared before Him" or "saw His face" at the trysting-place
where He met with His people as a king meets with his subjects,
receiving from them the expression of their homage in the usual
Oriental form of a gift (Exod. xxiii. 15, 17), and answering
their devotion by words of blessing or judgment conveyed through
the priest (Deut. x. 8; xxxiii. 8, 10). It was at the altar that
Jehovah came to His people and blessed them (Exod. xx. 24), and
acts of worship at a distance from the sanctuary assumed the
exceptional character of vows, and were directed towards the
sanctuary (1 Kings viii.), where in due time they should be
supplemented by the payment of thank-offerings. How absolutely
access to the sanctuary was conceived as the indispensable basis
of all religion appears from the conception that Jehovah cannot
be worshipped in foreign lands (1 Sam. xxvi. 19); that these
lands are themselves unclean (Amos vii. 17); and that the
captives in Assyria and Egypt, who cannot offer drink offerings
and sacrifices to Jehovah, are like men who eat the unclean
bread of mourners "because their food for their life is not
brought into the house of Jehovah" (Hosea ix. 4). So too when
Hosea describes the coming days of exile, when the children of
Israel shall remain for many days without king or captain,
without sacrifice or macceba (the sacred stone which marked the
ancient sanctuaries), without ephod (plated image), or teraphim
(household images), he represents this condition as a temporary
separation of Jehovah's spouse from all the privileges of
wedlock. [6]
***
Under the
kingship the judicial functions of the priests were
necessarily brought into connection with the office of
the sovereign, who was Jehovah's representative in
matters of judgment, as well as in other affairs of state
(2 Sam. viii. 15; xiv. 17; 1 Kings iii. 28). The priests
became, in a sense, officers of the Court, and the chief
priest of a royal sanctuary, such as Amaziah at Bethel
(Amos vii. 10, 13), was one of the great officials of state.
(Compare 2 Sam. viii. 17 seq., where the king's priests
already appear in the list of grandees.) Thus the
priesthood were naturally associated in feelings and
interests with the corrupt tyrannical aristocracy, and
were as notorious as the lords temporal for neglect of
law and justice. The strangest scenes of lawlessness
were seen in the sanctuaries — revels where the fines
paid to the priestly judges were spent in wine-drinking,
ministers of the altars stretched for these carousals on
garments taken in pledge in defiance of sacred law
(Amos ii. 8; comp. Exod. xxii. 26 seq.). Hosea accuses
the priests of Shechem of highway robbery and
murder (Hosea vi. 9, Heb); the sanctuary of Gilead was
polluted with blood, and the prophet explains the
general dissolution of moral order, the reign of lawlessness in all parts of the land, by the fact that the priests,
whose business it was to maintain the knowledge of
Jehovah and His laws, had forgotten this holy trust
(Hosea iv.).
***
[B]y simply concentrating our
attention on undeniable historical facts, and giving them their
due weight, we have been able to form a consistent account of
the progress of the religion of Jehovah from Moses to Elijah.
***
It is important to
indicate these deductions in a general way, but for our present
purpose it is unnecessary to follow them out in detail, because,
speaking broadly, they affect the interpretation rather than the
substance of the history. In the time of Amos and Hosea the
truest hearts and best thinkers of Israel did not yet interpret
Jehovah's dealings with His people in the light of the
Deuteronomic and Levitical laws; they did not judge of Israel's
obedience by the principle of the one sanctuary or the standard
of the Aaronic ritual; but they had heard the story of Jehovah's
dealings with their fathers, and many of them, perhaps, had read
it in books, great part of which is actually incorporated in our
present Bible. Take, for example, the history of the Northern
Kingdom as it is given in the Kings. No attentive reader, even
of the English Bible, can fail to see that the substance of the
narrative, all that gives it vividness and colour, belongs to a
quite different species of literature from the brief
chronological epitomes and theological comments of the Judaean
editor. The story of Elijah and Elisha clearly took shape in the
Northern Kingdom; it is told by a narrator who is full of
personal interest in the affairs of Ephraim, and has no idea of
criticising Elijah's work, as the Judaean editor criticises the
whole history of the North, by constant reference to the
schismatic character of the northern sanctuaries. Moreover, the
narrative has a distinctly popular character; it reads like a
story told by word of mouth, full of the dramatic touches and
vivid presentations of detail which characterise all Semitic
history that closely follows oral narration. The king of Israel
of whom we read in 2 Kings viii. 4 was, we may be sure, not the
only man who talked with Gehazi, saying, "Tell me, I pray thee,
all the great things that Elisha hath done." By many repetitions
the history of the prophets took a fixed shape long before it
was committed to writing, and the written record preserves all
the essential features of the narratives that passed from mouth
to mouth, and were handed down orally from father to child. The
same thing may be said of the earlier history, which in all its
main parts is evidently the transcript of a vivid oral
tradition. The story of the patriarchs, of Moses, of the Judges,
of Saul, and of David is still recorded to us as it lived in the
mouths of the people, and formed the most powerful agency of
religious education. Even the English reader who is unable to
follow the nicer operations of criticism may by attentive
reading satisfy himself that all the Old Testament stories which
have been our delight from childhood for their dramatic
pictorial simplicity belong to a different stratum of thought
and feeling from the Deuteronomic and Levitical laws. They were
the spiritual food of a people for whom these laws did not yet
exist, but who listened at every sanctuary to Jehovah's great
and loving deeds, which had consecrated these holy places from
the days of the patriarchs downwards. Beersheba, Bethel, Shechem,
Gilgal, and the rest, had each its own chain of sacred story,
and wherever the Israelites were gathered together men might be
heard "rehearsing the righteous deeds of Jehovah, the righteous
deeds of His rule in Israel " (Judges v. 11).
***
In the Blessing of Moses the
religion of Israel is described in a tone of joyous and hopeful
trust — the glory of Jehovah when He shined forth from Paran and
came to Kadesh full of love for His people, the gift of the law
through Moses as a possession for the congregation of Jacob, the
final establishment of the state when there was a king in
Jeshurun uniting the branches of the people, and knitting the
tribes of Israel together (ver. 5). The priesthood is still
revered as the arbiter of impartial divine justice. The tribes
are not all prosperous alike; Simeon has already disappeared
from the roll, and Reuben seems threatened with extinction; but
the princely house of Joseph is strong and victorious, and round
the thousands of Manasseh and the myriads of Ephraim the other
tribes still rally strong in Jehovah's favour. "There is none
like unto the God of Jeshurun, who rides on the heavens for thy
help, and in His loftiness on the skies. The God of old is thy
refuge and the outspreading of the everlasting arms; He drives
out the enemy before thee, and saith, Destroy. Then Israel
dwells secure; the fountain of Jacob flows unmixed in a land of
corn and wine, where the heavens drop down dew. Happy art thou,
Israel; who is like unto thee, a people victorious in Jehovah,
whose help is the shield, whose pride is the sword, and thy foes
feign before thee, and thou marchest over their high places."
***
"Ye cannot serve Jehovah, for
He will not forgive your sins; if ye forsake Him and serve
foreign gods, then He will turn and do you hurt, and consume you
after He hath done you good."
***
[A] preacher in the modern
sense, whose words are addressed to the heart of the individual,
and who can discharge his function wherever he can find an
audience willing to hear a gospel that speaks to the poor as
well as to the great.
***
Amos had many things to say to
the nation and its rulers, but they all issued in the
announcement of swift impending judgment. The sum
of his prophecy was a death-wail over the house of
Israel: "The virgin of Israel is fallen, she
cannot rise again:
She is cast down upon her land, there is none to raise her up.
(V. 2.)
" This judgment is the work of Jehovah, and its cause is
Israel's sin. ''You only have I known of all the
families of the earth; therefore will I punish you for
all your iniquities." In the characteristic manner of
Eastern symbolism, Amos expressed these thoughts in
a figure. He saw Jehovah standing over a wall with a
plumb-line in His hand. Jehovah is a builder, the fate
of nations is His work, and, like a good builder, He works
by rule and measure. And now the great builder speaks,
saying, "Behold I set the plumb-line — the rule of divine
righteousness — in the midst of Israel; I will not pass them by any
more; and the high places of Isaac shall be desolate, and the
sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, and I will rise against the
house of Jeroboam with the sword."
***
We have seen from the words he addressed to
Amaziah that Amos looked for the fall of Israel before
its enemies within his own generation; in the figure of
the roar of the lion, which is silent till it makes its
spring, he seems to imply that the destroying power
was already in motion. What this power was Amos
expresses with the precision of a man who is not dealing
with vague threats of judgment, but has the destroyer
clearly before his eyes. "Behold, I raise up against you
a nation, house of Israel, and they shall crush you
from the frontier of Hamath" on the north "to the
brook of the Arabah," or brook of willows, a stream
flowing into the Dead Sea, which separated Jeroboam's
tributary Moab from the Edomites (vi. 14; comp. Isa.
XV. 7). The seat of the invader is beyond Damascus,
and thither Israel shall be carried captive (v. 27). It
is plain, therefore, that Amos has Assyria in his mind,
though he never mentions the name. It is no unknown
danger that he foresees; Assyria was fully within the
range of his political horizon; it was the power that
had shattered Damascus by successive campaigns following at intervals since the days of Jehu, of which
there is still some record on the monuments, one of
them being dated B.C. 773, not long before the time
when, so far as we can gather from the defective chronology of 2 Kings, Amos may be supposed to have
preached at Bethel. When the power of Damascus was
broken, there was no barrier between Assyria and the
nations of Palestine; in fact, the breathing space that
made it possible for Jeroboam II. to restore the old
borders of his kingdom was only granted because the
Assyrians were occupied for a time in other directions,
and apparently passed through a period of intestine disturbance which terminated with the accession of Tiglath
Pileser II. (B.C. 745). The danger, therefore, was visible
to the most ordinary political insight, and what requires
explanation is not so much that Amos was aware of it
as that the rulers and people of Israel were so utterly
blind to the impending doom. The explanation, however, is very clearly given by Amos himself. The source
of the judicial blindness of his nation was want of knowledge of the true character of Jehovah, encouraging a
false estimate of their own might. The old martial
spirit of Israel had not died, and it had not lost its
connection with religious faith and the inspiriting words
of the prophets of the old school. Elisha was remembered as the best strength of the nation in the Syrian
wars — ''the chariots and horsemen of Israel" (2 Kings
xiii. 14). The deliverance from Damascus was "Jehovah's victory"
(Ibid. ver. 17), and more recently the
subjugation of Moab had been undertaken in accordance
with the prophecy of Jonah. Never had Jehovah been
more visibly on the side of His people. His worship
was carried on with assiduous alacrity by a grateful
nation. Sacrifices, tithes, thank-offerings, spontaneous
oblations, streamed into the sanctuaries (Amos iv. 4 seq.).
There was no question as to the stability of the newly-won prosperity, or the military power of the state (vi.
13). Israel was once more the nation victorious in
Jehovah, whose help was the shield, whose pride was
the sword (Deut. xxxiii. 29). Everything indeed was
not yet accomplished, but the day of Jehovah's crowning victory was doubtless near at hand, and nothing
remained but to pray for its speedy coining (Amos
V. 18). [15]
We see, then, that it was not political blindness or
religious indifference, but a profound and fanatical faith,
that made Israel insensible to the danger so plainly
looming on the horizon. Their trust in Jehovah's
omnipotence was absolute, and absolute in a sense
determined by the work of Elijah. There was no
longer any disposition to dally with foreign gods. There
was none like unto the God of Jeshurun, who rode on
the heavens for His people's help. That that help
could be refused, that the day of Jehovah could be
darkness and not light, as Amos preached, that the
distant thunder-roll of the advance of Assyria was the
voice of an angry God drawing nigh to judge His people,
were to them impossibilities.
Amos took a juster view of the political situation,
because he had other thoughts of the purpose and
character of Jehovah. In spite of their lofty conceptions of the majesty and victorious sovereignty of
Jehovah, the mass of the people still thought of Him
as exclusively concerned with the affairs of Israel.
Jehovah had no other business on earth than to watch
over His own nation. In giving victory and prosperity
to Israel He was upholding His own interests, which
ultimately centred in the maintenance of His dignity
as a potentate feared by foreigners and holding splendid
court at the sanctuaries where He received Israel's
homage. This seems to us an extraordinary limitation
of view on the part of men who recognised Jehovah as
the Creator. But, in fact, heathen nations like the
Assyrians and Phoenicians had also developed a doctrine
of creation without ceasing to believe in strictly national
deities. Jehovah, it must be remembered, was not first
the Creator and then the God of Israel. His relation to
Israel was the historical foundation of the religion of
the Hebrews, and continued to be the central idea in all
practical developments of their faith. To Amos, on the
other hand, the doctrine of creation is full of practical
meaning. "He that formed the mountains and created
the wind, that declareth unto man what is His thought,
that maketh the morning darkness and treadeth on the
high places of the earth, Jehovah, the God of hosts is
His name" (iv. 13). This supreme God cannot be
thought of as having no interest or purpose beyond
Israel. It was He that brought Israel out of Egypt,
but it was He too who brought the Philistines from Caphtor and the Aramaeans from Kir (ix. 7). Every
movement of history is Jehovah's work; it is not Asshur but Jehovah who has created the Assyrian
empire, and He has a purpose of His own in raising up
its vast overwhelming strength and suspending it as a
threat of imminent destruction over Israel and the surrounding nations. To Amos, therefore, the question is
not what Jehovah as King of Israel will do for His
people against the Assyrian, but what the Sovereign of
the World designs to effect by the terrible instrument
which He has created. The answer to this question is
the "secret of Jehovah," known only to Himself and
His prophet; and the key to the secret is Jehovah's righteousness, and
the sins, not of Israel alone, but of the whole circle of nations from
Damascus to Philistia.
***
The fundamental law of Jehovah's special relations
to Israel as they bear on the approach of the Assyrian
is expressed in a verse which I have already cited.
"You only have I known of all the families of the
earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities" (iii. 2). To know a man is to admit him to your
acquaintance and converse. Jehovah has known Israel
inasmuch as He has had personal dealings with it. The
proof of this is not simply that Jehovah brought up His
people from Egypt and gave them the land of Canaan
(ii. 9, 10), for it was Jehovah who brought up the
Philistines from Caphtor and the Aramaeans from
Kir (ix. 7) although they knew it not. But with
Israel Jehovah held personal converse. "I raised up
of your sons for prophets, and of your young men for Nazarites" (ii. 11). "The Lord Jehovah will not do
anything without revealing His secret to His servants
the prophets" (iii. 7). This is the real distinction
between Israel and the nations — that in all that
Jehovah did for His people in time past, in all that He
is purposing against them now, He has been to them
not an unknown power working by hidden laws, but
a God who declares Himself to them personally, as a
man does to a friend. And so the sin of Israel is not
merely that it has broken through laws of right and
wrong patent to all mankind, but that it has refused
to listen to these laws as they were personally explained to it by the Judge Himself. They gave the Nazarites
wine to drink, and commanded the prophets not to prophesy (ii. 12).
***
"If ye be willing
to obey, ye shall eat the fruit of the land. But if ye refuse
and rebel, ye shall he devoured with the sword: for the
mouth of Jehovah hath spoken it."
***
As
yet, however, there was no movement of true repentance.
There was indeed a great external display of eagerness
for Jehovah's help: solemn assemblies were convened in
the courts of the temple, the blood of sacrifices flowed
in streams, the altars groaned under the fat of fed beasts,
and the blood-stained hands of Jerusalem's guilty rulers
were stretched forth to the sanctuary with many prayers. Against these outward signs of devotion,
accompanied by no thought of obedience and amendment, Isaiah thundered forth the words of his first
chapter. Jehovah's soul hates the vain religion of
empty formalism.
***
And the God who had wrought such great things for His
people was not the Jehovah of the corrupt popular worship, for
He had refused to hear the prayers of the adversaries of the
prophet, but the God
of Isaiah, whose name or manifestation the prophet had
seen afar off drawing near in burning wrath and thick
rising smoke, his lips full of angry foam and his tongue
like a devouring fire, and his breath like an overflowing
torrent reaching even to the neck, to sift the nations in
the sieve of destruction, to bridle the jaws of peoples,
and turn them aside from their course.
The eyes of the prophet had seen the salvation for
which he had been waiting through so many weary
years; the demonstration of Jehovah's kingship was the
public victory of Isaiah's faith, and the word of spiritual
prophecy, which from the days of Amos downward had
been no more than the ineffective protest of a small
minority, had now vindicated its claim to be taken by
king and people as an authoritative exposition of the
character and will of the God of Israel.
***
The record of the prophet's work closes
with the triumphant strains of the thirty-third chapter,
written perhaps before the catastrophe of Sennacherib,
but after the result was already a prophetic certainty,
because Judah had at length bent its heart to obedience
to Jehovah's word. In this most beautiful of all Isaiah's
discourses the long conflict of Israel's sin with Jehovah's
righteousness is left behind; peace, forgiveness, and holy
joy breathe in every verse, and the dark colours of present and past distress serve only as a foil to the assured
felicity that is ready to dawn on Jehovah's land. ''Ha,
thou that spoilest and thou wast not spoiled, that robbest
and they robbed not thee; when thou makest an end of
spoiling thou shalt be spoiled; when thou ceasest to rob
they shall rob thee. Jehovah, be gracious, unto us; we
have waited for Thee.
***
There were worldly
interests involved in the policy of religious centralisation which claimed to represent the spiritual aspirations
of the prophets; and the priests of Jerusalem, whose
revenues and influence were directly concerned, were
at no time the most unselfish of reformers....
Thus we see, in the second place, that behind the
legal aspect of the movement of reformation, as it is
expressed in the Deuteronomic code, there lay a larger
principle, which no legal system could exhaust, and
which never found full embodiment till the religion of
the Old Testament passed into the religion of Christ.
The failure of Hezekiah's attempt to give a political
expression to the teaching of Isaiah must have thrown
back the men who had received the chief share of the
prophet's spirit upon those unchanging elements of
religion which are independent of all political ordinances. The religious life of Judah was not wholly absorbed in
the contest about visible institutions, the battle between
the one and the many sanctuaries. The organised prophetic party of Isaiah, which still
found its supporters
in the priesthood as it had done in the first days of that
prophet's ministry, may soon have begun to degenerate
into that empty formalism which took for its watchword
"the Temple of Jehovah," against which Jeremiah
preached as Isaiah had preached against the formalism
of his day (Jer. x. 4). In Jeremiah's day the doctrine
of the inviolability of Zion became in fact the very
axiom of mere political Jehovah-worship. That has
always been the law of the history of religion.
***
"[B]ar naggare is not the son
of a carpenter, but a carpenter as member of the
incorporation." The current notion that the prophets were not a guild is derived from too exclusive attention to the prophets of the school that arose with Amos and expressly disclaimed connection with the established guilds. In Jerusalem, as we see
from Jeremiah, the prophets were under a certain official
control on the part of the priests.
***
In the first chapters of the book of Hosea the
faithlessness of Israel to Jehovah, the long-suffering of God,
the moral discipline of sorrow and tribulation by which He will
yet bring back His erring people, and betroth it to Himself for
ever in righteousness, truth, and love, are depicted under the
figure of the relation of a husband to his erring spouse.
This parable was not invented by Hosea; it is drawn, as we are
expressly told, from his own life. The Divine Word first became
audible in the prophet's breast when he was guided by a
mysterious providence to espouse Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim,
who proved an unfaithful wife and became the mother of children
born in infidelity (i. 2, 3). The details of this painful
story are very lightly touched; they are never alluded to in
that part of the book which has the character of public
preaching — in chapter i. the prophet speaks of himself in the
third person; and as Hosea gave names to the children of Gomer,
names of symbolic form, to each of which is attached a brief
prophetic lesson (i. 4, 5; 6, Y; 8 seq.).), it is plain that he
concealed the shame of their mother and acknowledged her
children as his own, burying his bitter sorrow in his own heart.
But this long-suffering tenderness was of no avail. In
chapter iii. we learn that Gomer at length left her husband, and
fell, under circumstances of which Hosea spares the recital,
into a state of misery, from which the prophet, still following
her with compassionate affection, had to buy her back at the
price of a slave. He could not restore her to her old place in
his house and to the rights of a faithful spouse; but he brought
her home and watched over her for many days, secluding her from
temptation, with a loyalty which showed that his heart was still
true to her. ***
In some quarters a great deal too much stress has
been laid upon the prophetic vision as a distinctive note of
supernatural revelation. People speak as if the divine authority
of the prophetic word were somehow dependent on, or confirmed
by, the fact that the prophets enjoyed visions. That, however,
is not the doctrine of the Bible. In the New Testament Paul lays
down the principle that in true prophecy self-consciousness and
self-command are never lost — the spirits of the prophets are
subject to the prophets (1 Cor. xiv. 32). In like manner the
prophets of the Old Testament never appeared before their
auditors in a state of ecstasy, being thus clearly marked off
from heathen soothsayers, who were held to be under the
influence of the godhead just in proportion as they lost
intelligent self-control. And, as the true prophets never seek
in heathen fashion to authenticate their divine commission by
showing themselves in a state of visionary ecstasy, so also they
do not record their visions as a proof that they are inspired.
They knew very well that vision and ecstasy were common in
heathenism, and therefore could prove no commission from Jehovah
(Jer. xxiii.); and so, as we have seen, Isaiah did not even
publish his inaugural vision at the time, but reserved it till
his ministry had been public for years. Moreover, the Hebrews
were aware that the vision, in which spiritual truth is clothed
in forms derived from the sphere of the outer senses, is not the
highest method of revelation. In the twelfth chapter of Numbers,
which belongs to the part of the Pentateuch composed before the
rise of written prophecy, Moses, who received his revelation in
plain words not involved in symbolic imagery, is placed above
those prophets to whom Jehovah speaks in vision or in dream.
This view is entirely conformed to the conclusions of scientific
psychology. Dream and vision are nothing more than a peculiar
kind of thought, in which the senses of the thinker are more or
less completely shut to the outer world, so that his imagination
moves more freely than in ordinary waking moments among the
pictures of sensible things stored up in the memory. Thus, on
the one hand, the images of fancy seem to stand out more
brightly, because they are not contrasted with the sharper
pictures of sense-perception, while, on the other hand, the
power of the will to conduct thought in a predetermined
direction is suspended, or so far subdued that the play of
sensuous fancy produces new combinations, which appear to rise
up of themselves before the mind like the images of real things
before the physical senses. The ultimate elements of such a
vision can include nothing absolutely new; the conceptions of
which it is built up are exclusively such as are supplied by
previous waking experience, the whole novelty lying in their
combination. So far, therefore, as its structure is concerned,
there is no essential difference between a vision and a parable
or other creation of poetic fancy; and this is as strictly true
for the visions of the prophets as for those of other men, so
that it is often difficult to say whether any particular
allegory set forth by a prophet is visionary or not — that is to
say, we often cannot tell whether the prophet is devising an
instructive figure by a deliberate act of thought, or whether
the figure rose, as it were, of itself before his mind in a
moment of deep abstraction, when his thoughts seemed to take
their own course without a conscious effort of will.
***
In
primitive religious thought, the idea of godhead is specially connected with that of fresh unfading life, and
the impurity or unholiness which must be kept aloof
from the sanctuary is associated with physical corruption and death. Fire and water, the pure and life-like
elements, man's chief aids in combating physical corruption, are the main agents in ceremonies of ritual sanctification (Num. xxxi. 23; this passage belongs to the
later legislation, but the antiquity of the principle appears
from Josh. vi. 19, 24). But fire is a more searching principle than water. Fiery brightness is of old the highest
symbol of Jehovah's holiness, and purification by fire
the most perfect image of the total destruction of impurity. To Isaiah, of course, the fire of Jehovah's
holiness is a mere symbol. That which cannot endure
the fire, which is burned up and consumed before it, is
moral impurity. "Who among us shall dwell with devouring fire, who among us shall dwell with everlasting
burnings? He that walketh in righteousness and
speaketh uprightly, that shaketh his hands from holding of bribes, that stoppeth his ears from hearing of
blood [consenting to bloodshed], and shutteth his eyes
from beholding [delighting in] evil; he shall dwell on
high; his place of defence shall be the munitions of
rocks, his bread shall be given him, his water shall be
sure" (xxxiii. 14 seq.). That which can endure the fire
is that which is fit to enter into communion with
Jehovah's holiness, and nothing which cannot stand this
test can abide in His sanctuary of Israel. Thus the fire
which touches Isaiah's lips and consecrates him to prophetic communion with God has its counterpart in the
fiery judgment through which impure Israel must pass
till only the holy seed, the vital and indestructible elements of right national Life, remain. As silver is purified
by repeated smeltings, so the land of Judah must pass,
not once, but again and again through the fire. "Though
but a tenth remain in it, it must pass again through the
fire" (vi. 13), till all that remain in Zion are holy, "even
every one that is ordained to life in Jerusalem, when
Jehovah shall have washed away the filth of the
daughters of Zion, and purged the bloodshed of Jerusalem by the blast of judgment, and the blast of burning"
(iv. 4 seq.)... And yet Isaiah
knows from the first that this consuming judgment at the hand of
the Assyrians moves in the right line of Jehovah's purpose of
holiness. The axe is laid at the root of the tree, and the
present state, corrupt beyond the reach of partial remedies,
must be hewn to the ground. But the true life of Israel cannot
perish. "Like the terebinth and the oak, whose stock remains
when they are hewn down," and sends forth new saplings, so "the
holy seed" remains as a living stock, and a new and better
Israel shall spring from the ruin of the ancient state.
***
And now this whole fabric of sin and
self-delusion must perish in a moment utterly, like chaff and
stubble at the touch of fire (v. 24). "Sheol [the under world]
hath enlarged its maw and opened its mouth without measure, and
her glory and her multitude and her pomp and the joyous ones of
Zion shall descend into it. And the mean man shall be brought
down, and the mighty man shall be humbled, and the eyes of the
lofty shall be humbled. And Jehovah of hosts shall be exalted in
judgment, and the Holy God shall be sanctified in
righteousness". .. And now "He lifts up a standard to far
nations and hisses to them from the ends of the earth, and
behold they come with speed swiftly. None is weary, and none
stumbleth among them; they slumber not nor sleep; the girdle of
their loins is not loosed, nor the latchet of their shoe broken.
Their arrows are sharp, and all their bows bent; their horses'
hoofs are like the flint, and their chariot wheels like the
whirlwind. Their roar is like the lioness, they roar like young
lions, moaning and seizing the prey and carrying it off safe,
and none can deliver." The roar of the lion marks the moment of
his spring, the sullen moaning that follows shows that the prey
is secured. Judah lies prostrate in the grasp of the Assyrian,
and over all the land no sound is heard but the deep growl of
brutal ferocity as he crouches over the helpless victim. "In
that day he shall moan over Judah like the moaning of the sea,
when the mariner looks for land, but lo, darkness hems him in,
and light is turned to darkness by the clouds".
This picture of judgment, you
observe, has all the precision due to the fact that Isaiah is
not describing an unknown danger, but one very real and imminent
— the same danger which Amos had seen so clearly a generation
before. The intervention of Assyria in the affairs of the
Palestinian states could not in the nature of things involve
anything less than a complete dissolution of the old balance of
power, and of the whole political system. There was nothing in
the circle of the nations round about Judah which could offer
successful resistance to the well-directed force of a great and
disciplined martial power, and the smallest acquaintance with
the politics of Assyria was sufficient to prove that the
absorption of the Mediterranean seaboard by that empire was only
a question of time, and could in no case be very remote. The
politicians of Judah were blinded to this truth by their
characteristic Semitic vanity, by the truly Oriental indolence
which refuse to look beyond the moment, but above all by a false
religious confidence. The kind of Jehovah worship which had not
learned to separate the God of Israel from idols, which left men
to seek help from the work of their own hands, was only possible
to those who knew as little about the world as about God. A just
estimate even of the natural factors of the world's history
would have shown them that the Assyrian was stronger than the
idols, though it needed a prophet's faith to perceive that there
was a God in Israel to whose commands Assyria itself was
constrained to yield unconscious obedience. But, in truth, the
leaders of Judah dared not face the realities of a situation
which broke through all their established ideas, which offered
no prospect but despair. Isaiah had courage to see and proclaim
the truth, because he was assured that amidst the crash of
nations, Jehovah's throne stood unmoved, and He was exalted when
all was abased....
Jehovah's righteousness is nothing else than
kingly righteousness in the ordinary sense of the word,
and its sphere is the sphere of His literal sovereignty —
that is, the land of Israel. Jehovah's great work of
judgment by the hand of the Assyrians has for its
object precisely the same things as a good and strong
human judge aims at — not the transformation of the
hearts of men, but the removal of injustice in the state,
the punishment of offenders, the re-establishment of
law and order, and the ultimate felicity of an obedient
nation. It is such an
ideal as would be actually realised if the judges and
counsellors of the nation again were what they ought
to be in a land whose king is the Holy One of Israel.
*** All
that remain in Zion shall be holy, for
the filth of the daughters of
Zion and the blood-guiltiness of Jerusalem have been
purged away by the fiery blast of judgment.
*** The
principle of the monarchy was plunder. |
