AMOS I. II.

THE LION's ROAR.

"The words of Amos... two years before the earth quake" (i. 1).

"The LORD will roar from Zion " (i. 2).

"I will not turn it back " (i. 3).

Two years before the earthquake! What an ominous beginning! But no words could better introduce the stern book of Amos. The world into which it ushers us is a world crowded with wrong of every kind, as we shall abundantly see— of false worship and social injustice. Such a world needed to be shaken, and Amos knew that it would be. That, indeed, is the burden of his message; and already in the opening words the rumbling of the coming shock is heard.

Sharp ears, however, were needed to detect it. To the average man of those days, society must have seemed stable enough. For the time was about the middle of the eighth century B.C.— the splendid days of Jeroboam the second of Israel, whose long and brilliant reign had been marked by peace and prosperity. But not far beneath this shining surface the clear eyes of Amos saw the symptoms of rottenness and inevitable decay; and the words of his first recorded message are that Jehovah, the God of this easy-going people, would roar from His temple in Jerusalem, like a lion just before he makes his spring. The implication is that Jehovah will soon spring upon His people, to tear them in pieces; and Amos's message we might describe as the Gospel of the Lion's Roar.

The man who thus boldly announces his appalling message was a shepherd, accustomed to the stern scenery of the Judæan hills, where he tended his sheep, about twelve miles south of Jerusalem. The Dead Sea was not far off; and it is very possible that the loneliness and ruggedness of his surroundings deepened the native sternness of his soul. Among the sheep and the frowning scenery he had time to brood over the sins and follies of the nation, and of the doom upon which he knew in his soul that she was rushing; and he flashes, meteor-like, upon his audience— gathered, apparently, at some sanctuary for worship—with his brief but awful message that the God they worshipped would roar and spring upon them; or, changing the figure, that He would come in the terrible storm, and utter His word of thunder, and wither all their beautiful land from the south to the north, even to Carmel, the noble, densely-wooded mount, on which a hundred years before the cause of Jehovah had been so triumphantly vindicated in the contest between Elijah and the prophets of Baal.

Amos is a Judæan; but it is nearly, if not always, Israel, the sister kingdom to the north, and not his own kingdom, that he addresses; and this, too, may partly explain the almost unmitigated severity of his message. Such a people deserves to be torn in pieces, such a land deserves to wither. Amos knows that the storm is coming, he knows that it must come. His heart tells him so, his God tells him so. The sound of the coming storm is already in his ears. God works His dread will by human agents; and there was, in the world of Amos's day, a power capable of inflicting irreparable hurt upon Israel in the Assyrians. Already their mighty hand had been felt in the west; and Amos, who knew how to read the signs of the times, saw what this gradual advance must ultimately mean for Israel, especially for an Israel which deserved the wrath of God.

Then, without warning, the prophet suddenly passes from this vision of the land of Israel, withered and in mourning, to a series of stern oracles which affect not Israel, but her heathen neighbours. These oracles are characterized by a fine impressive symmetry. They all begin: " Thus saith Jehovah, For three transgressions, and for four, I will not turn it back/* They then name one sin, as a specimen, out of the many which justify the doom; then they go on to describe that doom in terms of devouring fire—" I will send a fire, and it shall devour the palaces." There is a certain fierce grandeur about these successive oracles which march inexorably on to the repeated refrain of doom, and culminate in their surprising and incredible announcement of the doom of Israel herself. But the prophet's audience does not yet know how they will culminate, and they listen with complacency and delight to the announcement of the blow that is to annihilate the peoples, one after another,—with all the more complacency, as all these peoples had been, either in the remote or recent past, enemies of Israel. To a nation surrounded as she was by enemies on every hand, no news could be more welcome than that their doom was sealed and certain.

It is worth noting, to begin with, that Jehovah, the God in whose name Amos speaks, is interested in the moral conduct of men beyond the borders of Israel. Already, at the very beginning, we are led to feel that this God of Israel is no mere petty national God, but one whose " eyes behold the world, whose eyelids try the children of men " in every land (Ps. xi. 4), and that He will punish sin wherever He finds it. Each of the nations mentioned is guilty" of " three transgressions, yea, four "—the Hebrew way of saying, of accumulated transgressions: three would he terrible, four are intolerable. The sins are quite concrete and definite, Amos could put his finger on them; but in each case he mentions only one as typical, and hints that there are many more like that; so that among the foreign nations we are given to understand that the cup of iniquity is running over, and the direst doom is richly deserved. If we carefully note the sins which Jehovah punishes as they come up one by one, we shall learn where His interests lie, and what conception the prophet held of His character.

The first to be denounced are the Syrians, the people lying to the north-east of Israel, whose capital was Damascus. During the time of Elisha they had harassed Israel very severely; and in the border warfare Gilead, the district east of the Jordan, and consequently most exposed to border raids, had been ravaged by Syria with a cruelty so complete that it could only be compared to the driving of sharp and heavy threshing-boards over the corn. Now to the God whom Amos worships all kinds of inhumanity are detestable, and He cannot allow it to pass unpunished. In the solemn words of Amos, which are even simpler in the Hebrew than in the English version, He " will not turn it back." The "it" may be some previous threat of Amos, Gut it is perhaps more in accordance with the prophet's manner to regard it as that mysterious Something which inevitably follows in the trail of sin. The world, as Amos saw it, was a world of law, a world in which deeds carried consequences, and causes produced effects. Sin drags Something on: on It is coming, nearer and nearer, and " I will not turn it back." Here for the first time we get a glimpse of that stern conception of law which Amos saw to run throughout God's well-built and ordered world. Nor is it an empty threat that he utters: the Assyrians are there to execute it. The fire of war, Amos knows, will soon be kindled in those ruthless lands which defy the great elemental laws of justice and pity, more especially will it rage among the royal palaces and the houses of the great grandees, till the flames have devoured them completely. The power of the rulers will be broken and the people swept into exile, back to the land from which long ago they had come (cf. ix. 7). The threat was fulfilled: within twenty years, Damascus fell before Assyria. It is not without significance that here, as in all the succeeding announcements of doom, Amos singles out the palaces for special mention. The shepherd, who loves the sheep and the wilderness, and who believes in the simple life, hates them with a perfect hatred; and he thinks with a certain grim delight of the day when they will be reduced to ashes by the devouring fire.

Everywhere among the nations round about Israel, Amos sees with sorrow and indignation the same fundamental pieties violated, the same cruel atrocities perpetrated, and he foresees that they will all be involved in a common doom. The sinners would perish "with shouting on the day of battle, with a tempest on the day of the whirlwind " of war. Even the geographical order in which he names the peoples whose sins he denounces has a subtle significance of its own. Israel is surrounded by nations whose sins are appalling and whose doom is certain. It is a dangerous thing to live in such an environment, compassed about by the sinful and the doomed; and the preacher is skillfully preparing for his announcement of the blow which is to smite Israel—for she, too, is guilty—in the universal ruin. From Damascus in the north-east, his gaze sweeps across to the Philistines in the south-west, then north to Tyre and the Phoenicians, across Israel again south-east to Edom, then north to Ammon, then south to Moab. Round about Israel, north, east, south, and west, rages the storm of doom.

And why? In every case, for three transgressions and for four; that is, for an accumulated record of sin, such as the cruelty in war of which we have seen the Syrians to be guilty. That cruelty is matched by others in the other nations. In the Philistines and Phoenicians, it is the heartless slave-trade that stirs the prophet to indignation; in the Edomites, it is the pitiless and relentless hatred with which they had harassed brother Israel, and " pursued him with the sword "; in the Ammonites, it is their unspeakable barbarity to women in a war whose only justification was the extension of territory; in the Moabites, it is the insolence with which they had defied and insulted the pieties universally cherished towards the dead, by burning to ashes the body of their fallen foe. The world round about Israel was a cruel world, which trampled remorselessly upon the fundamental sanctities of life and liberty and pity and respect for the dead; and to a man of Amos's religious temper it was only just that they in turn should be trampled beneath the iron heel of Assyria.

Then, swift as lightning, Amos hurls his blow at Israel herself. His audience had listened thus far with delight to the announcement of the doom of their neighbours. Imagine their horror to be told by a prophet of their own that a similar doom, stern and irrevocable, was in store for them too. For they, too, had been guilty of three transgressions, yea, four. Their sin, like all sin, had dragged a terrible Something on; on It was coming, and Jehovah would not turn It back. But horrible as this announcement must have been, we have seen that the whole argument of Amos had been a subtle preparation for it. Israel was surrounded by people who were doomed because they had repudiated the reasonable moral demands which had been written by the finger of God upon every unsophisticated conscience; and how, then, could she escape—how, then, should she escape—if she neglected and defied those great demands? She was comprehended under the same moral law as the nations about her, with its simple demands and its inexorable penalties; was there anything un reasonable in this, that she—she especially, to whom in the providence of God had been granted nobler traditions and purer ideals—should be comprehended under the doom which was to sweep so surely over them?

We begin to get close to the beating heart of Amos when we note what are the sins which vex and provoke him in his own people, and it is natural that he should detail them much more fully than in the case of the foreign nations. The sins which Amos, like other prophets, denounces, are nearly always social sins, wrongs done to the neighbour, especially the helpless neighbour. His very first charge against Israel is dictated by his overwhelming interest in the poor and needy. The cruelty which Amos denounced in Israel's neighbours is repeated on a more bewildering scale by Israel herself; there it was cruelty to the captive, here it is cruelty to the poor. This, to Amos, is the sin of sins, that the lives of the poor should be bartered for money, that for economic gain they should be sold into slavery or trampled to the dust by those who have them in their power, and that the very courts which should have given redress and made such atrocities impossible, were themselves corrupt and venal, so that the love of money poisoned justice at its source. The class whose privilege and duty it was to protect the poor exploited them. Nothing stirs the blood of Amos like that: that is why it comes first and foremost in his indictment.

But two other influences were degrading and destroying the life of the time—immorality and intemperance; the collocation itself is a suggestive one. And, incredible as it may seem to us, these vices were actually associated with the public worship of God. Women were attached to the sanctuaries, as in parts of India to-day, with results which can more readily be imagined than described; the sacred places so called rang with sounds of revelry, and witnessed deeds of robbery and lust. A merciful law had provided that the garment which a poor man had been obliged to pledge must be returned to him before sunset; but in these sanctuaries, where of all places justice ought to have been done, the law was shamelessly violated, the poor man was cruelly wronged. For it was these very garments that the drunken and immoral worshippers made use of for their own convenience; and the money which paid for the wine they drank came from fines imposed, doubtless often unjustly, upon those who had come to consult the venal priests.

This picture of Jehovah's people is as ugly as it could be—given over as they were to wine and women, to love of money and oppression of the poor, and cloaking much of this wrong in the holy garb of religion. But what made this conduct so peculiarly detest able was that it was a sin against light and privilege. Israel knew well enough the difference between right and wrong; the sister nations, as we have seen, are held guilty because they had defied it. But besides this knowledge, which alone would have rendered her inexcusable, the love of God had been shed abroad very conspicuously over all her national history. No one who knew the facts could deny that Jehovah had cared for the people. In the early days—some four centuries and a half before—He had brought them up out of a land and state of slavery, He had led them lovingly through the great and terrible wilderness, and settled them at last safely, in face of the mightiest opposition from native tribes who are de scribed as "strong as the oaks and high as the cedars," in the splendid land upon which they had proved so unfaithful to Him. More than that; for better than land and victory is the gift of men, and this, too, God had given. He had sent them nazirites to protest by their abstinence against the wine which was already showing itself a national peril; He had sent them prophets, like Nathan and Elijah and Amos himself, to interpret His will and declare His demands, to champion right against might, and to protest, by their courageous words, against every attempt to defraud or crush the poor. But how had these gifts been received? They had been received with scorn and violence. The men who stood for the better things in Israel had been ignored or shunned or silenced. Deliberate attempts had been made to induce abstainers to break their most solemn pledge, and to stop the honest mouths of the prophets. Amos did not need to go back to ancient history for his illustrations; his own mouth had been stopped, as we shall see in chapter seven, by no less a man than the foremost Church man of the day.

So Israel's sin is deeper and blacker than that of other nations. She had sinned not only against conscience, but against the manifest love of God and against the special revelations of His will. She had acted against her better knowledge, and she had turned a deaf ear and a stubborn heart to the message of her great preachers. But no man and no nation can do these things with impunity. The doom is inescapable, and " I will not turn it back." This time it is de scribed in terms of that country life which Amos knew so well. The cart piled so heavy and high with sheaves that it sways to and fro as it moves along, is to him a symbol of the shaking and tottering that is in store for Israel. "Behold, I will make the ground totter beneath you, as a cart tottereth that is full of sheaves." The very land will reel, when Jehovah smites it with His mighty hand. The blow which Amos anticipates may be here, as elsewhere, the blow of war: or it may be a threat of an earthquake. But whatever the doom may be, the land will stagger under it, and from it there will be no escape. It will be a doom which the strongest cannot repel, nor the swiftest outrun. That, according to Amos, is what will happen to the nation which crushes its poor, which panders to its lust, which stifles its conscience, which rejects its preachers, which forgets its God. In the face of modern conditions, can we say that this warning is obsolete?