AMOS IX.

DARK AND DAWN.

" Behold, the eyes of the Lord Jehovah are upon the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from off the face of the earth; save that I will not utterly destroy " (ix. 8).

FOUR visions of destruction, each more terrible than the one before it, have already passed before the eyes of Amos, and been set by him before our eyes in his inimitably vivid way; but the most terrible of all is yet to come. It is a vision of truly titanic power. In the temple, whose courts were crowded with infatuated worshippers, Amos saw the Lord standing beside the altar—ominous sight: for the people who there, of all places, must have felt most secure, had denied Him the service for which He supremely cared—the service of an honourable public and private life, gentle and just in all its relations; and beside the altar, reeking with their foolish sacrifices, stands the mighty God whom they have insulted, ready to destroy them. Suddenly across the crowded courts rings out the dreadful word Smite, addressed by the Lord to some unseen angelic minister of vengeance. A blow from his puissant arm shatters the columns which support the roof; columns and roof come crashing down upon the heads of the worshippers, most of whom are buried beneath the ruins—happy they! for their end, if it has been violent, has at least been speedy. But far more awful is the fate of those who survive; and Amos here surpasses himself in the grim power with which he delineates their futile efforts to escape the inescapable wrath of God. How thoroughly this prophet must have loathed the worship of his time, wedded as it was to a cruel, wicked, immoral social life, comes out in this vision of destruction, which falls upon the very church itself, despite its venerable age and sacred associations, and annihilates the worshippers in the midst of their zealous exercises. If the civic, the social, the political life is rotten, then church, worship, priest, altar, rite, ceremony will not avail to stay the uplifted hand of the avenging angel who has received the command from God to smite.

The vision is one of a judgment from which there can be no escape. Amos has repeatedly expressed in weird and graphic language the impossibility of evading the divine judgment. The swiftest can neither outrun nor outride it (ii. 15). "It is as if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him; or went into the house, and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him " (v. 19). But never has he expressed himself so terribly as here. " Not one of them shall flee away, and not one of them shall escape." In their mad efforts to escape, Amos pictures the survivors as digging their way down through the ground to the under -world, where Jehovah, as they suppose, has no jurisdiction, and where they may feel safe. But, ah! there is no escape from God. " If I make my bed in Sheol, behold! Thou art there." He has jurisdiction in the world below as surely as in the world above. His arm is long: it can stretch across the universe, and down to the depths of the nether world, to lay hold of the oppressors and the hypocrites. And though those unhappy wretches, in their desperate efforts to escape, should reach the under-world, as, indeed, they never can, " even thence," says Jehovah, " shall My hand take them."

From the deepest depths the prophet pictures them as mounting to the highest heights; climbing, in their wild despair, from the nether world, which yields them no refuge, to the heights of heaven. But there they will fare worse, if possible; there they will be even more surely caught: for the God from whom they are fleeing is the God of heaven: that is—so to speak—His home. "And though they climb up to heaven, thence will I bring them down." Brought down again to this world by that dread irresistible Hand, they make with what speed they may for the lofty Carmel which stands up so proudly and gracefully near the shore of the sea, and they seek to hide themselves in its dense forests and its welcome, tortuous caves. But no forest is so dense and no cave so dark and tortuous as to shelter from the all-seeing eye: " And though they hide themselves on the top of Carmel, I will search and take them out thence."

Hell, heaven, earth affords no shelter: what of the sea? So we are to picture the poor silly victims of this inexorable pursuit as throwing themselves from the top of Carmel into the Mediterranean Sea, in the desperate hope that there they may find rest. But no! The Lord of hosts has His ministers everywhere. The sea is His, and He made it, and the monsters there have to do His pleasure. So, though the sinners should descend to the very floor of the sea, " and hide themselves there from My sight, thence will I command the great sea serpent, and it shall bite them." Though they run across the universe, they will be seized, bitten, devoured at the last (cf. v. 19). Anywhere, anywhere, away from the gaze of His searching eye, and the reach of His omnipotent hand: but there is no escape in all the world from the infinite God and the operation of His inexorable laws.

"Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit?

Or whither shall I flee from Thy presence?

If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there;

If I make my bed in Sheol, behold! Thou art there.

If I take the wings of the morning,

And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;

Even there shall Thy hand lead me,

And Thy right hand shall hold me."

The thought of the omnipresence of God, which to the Psalmist was such a source of comfort and joy, becomes, when interpreted by the righteous imagination of Amos, almost more than we can bear. The gracious hand that leads and holds the Psalmist, becomes the terrible hand that seizes the sinner for judgment. It is Amos's grimly magnificent way of saying that for the man or the society that flouts the dictates of conscience, honour, morality, pity, there can be, in the end, nothing but ruin, irretrievable and inescapable. How shall we escape destruction, if we dash ourselves against the solid walls of the City of God?

The doom which Amos has just painted in such fierce colours is, expressed in terms of historical experience, that of political extinction and exile. This he has hinted at again and again; as, for example, in his denunciation of the worship of Gilgal (v. 5), or in the plain declaration with which he had parted from Amaziah on the day of their ever memorable conflict, that Israel would assuredly be driven from her own land into exile (vii. 17). The people, over whose heads hang the awful menaces of Amos, console themselves with the reflection that if the worst should come to the worst, and they should really be driven into exile, at any rate there they would be safe. The implacable Jehovah would surely be satisfied with that: He would not follow them there. Yes, says the remorseless Amos: He will follow you with His sharp, avenging sword even into exile. "And though they go into captivity before their enemies, thence will I command the sword, and it shall slay them."

Death and destruction, whichever way they turn. It is too terrible: nay, it is false, they shout. For we have heard with our ears, our fathers have told us, that the eyes of our God are continually upon us. True, retorts Amos, His eyes are upon you—but for evil, not for good. He ruthlessly tears from them every article of the creed which they had so jealously cherished: at least he annihilates their interpretation of it. Of that creed no article was more firmly believed than that Israel was Jehovah's privileged people. In a sense that was true (iii. 2), but not in their sense. Israel had been uniquely endowed (ii. n), but that did not mean that she was the darling of God. God has no favourites, His secret is for them that fear Him. The God who had called and endowed Israel for her great world task was the God of all the world. One nation was as dear to Him as another: all were within His care, all had a place in His purpose. "And as for you," says the stern, impartial prophet, "are ye not as the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? "—no more important, no better, no dearer, than the black men on the banks of the Nile. At one stroke Amos smites through their boasted prerogative by this comparison with the negroes—a comparison which must have stung them to the quick with a sense of humiliation and insult. Indignantly they remind the audacious prophet of the exodus, that wonderful experience at the beginning of their national history which even Amos himself had admitted to be conclusive proof of the love of God (ii. 10, iii. 1). "Yes," retorts Amos, " but do not deceive yourselves: other nations had their exodus too. I did indeed bring Israel up out of the land of Egypt, but it was I, too, no less, who brought the Philistines from Crete, and the Syrians from Kir." The God for whom Amos pleads is the God of all history, not of Hebrew history only: He is behind all the great world movements, the migrations of the peoples contribute to His purpose, and are ultimately determined and effected by Him.

What a magnificent conception of God must the prophet have had who could speak thus of Him, and who could so boldly challenge the national pride which had dared to identify the kingdom of God with the kingdom of Israel! We, too, who have sometimes spoken as if the kingdom and the cause of God were indissolubly associated with the British Empire, may do well to listen, with chastened hearts, to the challenge of Amos, " Are ye not as the children of the Ethiopians unto Me? " and to remind ourselves that the only empire that will live is that which seeks good and not evil, which consciously moves along the line of the divine purpose and seeks to be an adumbration of that kingdom of God which is not eating and drinking and victory and territory, but righteousness and peace. It is everlastingly true, as Amos told his astonished people, that the eyes of the Lord are upon the sinful kingdom to destroy it from off the face of the earth.

At this point the message of the book suddenly and completely changes. Denunciation and threat now merge in hope and promise. The contrasted messages meet in the eighth verse: " I will destroy the kingdom from off the face of the earth, save that I will not utterly destroy it." It is as if we had emerged from a tunnel, with its crashing and its roar, its smoke and thick darkness, out upon a smiling and far-stretching landscape. The prospect opened for us by the last few verses is one of great beauty. The land is to be blessed with supernatural fertility. No more youths and maidens fainting for thirst (viii. 13), no more fire devouring the great deep (vii. 4), no more blasting and mildew, no more plagues of locusts devouring the gardens and vines and fig trees and olive trees (iv. 9); but, in the days that are coming, the ploughman shall overtake the reaper—so rapid will be the growth; and the treader of grapes him that soweth seed—so abundant will be the vintage; and the mountains shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt with it—dissolved, as it were, in the streams that pour down from the vineyards upon their sides. Better still, the ruins would be built as in the days of old. Out of the ashes of the cities that had been burned and laid waste would rise nobler cities, inherited by a happy and prosperous people, who would regain their ancient territory, plant gardens and eat the fruit of them, and live evermore in peace and security, undisturbed by any haunting fear of attack; for they had the Lord's own promise, " I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be plucked up out of their land which I have given them."

These coming days are so unlike that other day announced by Amos, which was to be thick darkness, without a streak of light across it (v. 20); this vista of populous cities and lovely gardens and happy faces is so unlike the destruction that crashes through the rest of the book in image after image; this manifest delight in the vineyards and their wine is so unlike the horror manifested elsewhere of the peril that streamed from the vine-clad hills; this seeming satisfaction with a merely material prosperity is so unlike the prophet's passionate and reiterated appeal for the establishment of justice in human society, that many scholars find it impossible to believe that the last few verses can have come from his pen. They are content to let the book end with the terrible words, " I will destroy you from off the face of the earth." If Amos modified that message, then, they tell us, the less Amos he.

This is not the place to discuss that question. Enough here to say that, whether the words are Amos's or not, they have a perfect right to stand in his book: indeed, without them the book would be incomplete as a revelation of the divine heart. The last word of God can never be destruction. The old order of society is swept away, that it may give place to another and a fairer. The ninth and tenth verses of the last chapter contain a precious truth which must not be forgotten, that the fierce discipline to which the nation is to be subjected is but a sifting, in which not the least kernel of good grain will fall upon the ground. All that is best in the world's experience will be conserved and transmitted to the future days. The living God would not be God, if His purpose were to be ultimately frustrated. So we face the future with good hope, believing in some better thing to be, and remembering that, through all social and political change the new Jerusalem is slowly, but surely, emerging.

The lesson which Amos proclaimed with such elemental power is that social injustice is the way to national ruin: that sin of all kinds—the wronging of the poor, the exploitation of the helpless, the selfish disregard of public interests, the absorption in pleasure, the practice of fraud in business, the abandonment of personal honour, the insincere worship of God, or the forgetfulness of Him—carries with it inexorable and inevitable penalties. For these things, unrepented of and unforsaken, a day of retribution is coming, and " I will not turn it back." This is a stern gospel but a wholesome one, worth laying to heart by this and every age. The ideal for which Amos pled so passionately is that of a justly ordered society, through which the spirit of fair play and brotherhood will flow unimpeded like the waves of the sea. Every generation which resolutely faces its social problems in the spirit of Him who, though He was rich, yet for our sakes became poor, will bring humanity a little nearer that blessed con summation when God shall be all in all.