Verses 1-17
Interrogative Parables
We now come to one of the "Therefores" which are so characteristic of this practical prophet. He builds up his reasoning well; then he plunges into his conclusions. He is emphatically a great preacher, never concluding without a rousing application. We have considered what apostate men have done, and we move into this practical "Therefore" with abundant intelligence. We have seen men recklessly at ease in Zion, and trusting to the mountain of Samaria; we have seen them lying upon beds of ivory, and pouring themselves out upon couches of luxury, ordering the lambs out of the flock that they might increase their fatness. What can we expect the "Therefore" of the prophet to lead to? Shall we strike out the words after "Therefore," and fill the blank as we like? Let us see how far our moral sense replaces inspiration.
The men are apostate. They have gone down so rapidly that they are now drinking wine in bowls consecrated to sacrifice. They are not drinking the wine, they are swallowing it, devouring it: Therefore they shall be glad and rejoice; they shall be strong and happy; they shall shut the north wind out of their garden; their vines shall be plentiful in fruitfulness, and their day shall be long, warm; yea, the sun shall stand still to admire their enjoyments, and the moon shall halt that she may look down upon the glad festival. Conscience itself would not allow the use of such words. There is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth him understanding, even where he has not seen the written Bible. With an introduction so immoral we must have a conclusion adapted to it. We cannot replace the words we find here with better; the balance of the chapter is equal. There is a sublimity of style even in describing immorality, and that sublimity is well-balanced by the sublimity of the denunciation of judgment in which the ardent prophet indulges. The vengeance will be measured by the immorality. We do not know what the immorality is until we receive its punishment. We are not judges of our own actions; we cannot tell where they begin, how they proceed, how far their influence palpitates and throbs on the lake of being. We must know ourselves by studying providence; in the blight of the harvest we must see what we ourselves have been; in the action of the body reduced to a groan of helplessness we must see what sin really means. Sin was never meant to be theorised about, to be defined as a dictionary word, to be treated as a theological term; it is one of those words that stand apart from speech, gathering up into themselves colours, forces, suggestions, that do not lie within the limited function of word-explainers.
Only history can tell what sin is; nothing but divine judgment can give you a definition of bad doing. We must watch the desolation if we would know the meaning of certain terms, and know the range of certain actions. Men have shown folly herein, deep and incredible, for they have set themselves to writing books about sin; as if sin would ever consent to have itself passed through an inkhorn, to be explained by made pen, and by weary incapable hand, that cannot supply its own wants, much less write the tragedy of creation. We must study divine judgment if we would know human sin. The difficulty of the teacher herein is that so many persons are unconscious of sin, and are therefore mayhap the greater sinners. Some do not distinguish between crime and sin. They have not been criminals, and therefore they think they have not been sinners, as if all the story of life did not lie in the disposition rather than in the action. The action is nothing a poor impotent hand stretched out to do something it cannot accomplish. The heart is the seat of evil. None knoweth the heart but God. The heart does not know itself; the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; and if there were not a concurrent line called history or providence or judgment, we should never know the real state of the heart. What have we then in books but elaborate mistakes, metaphysics perverted to immoral uses, made to show that there is no sin; and in showing that there is no sin metaphysics leave unexplained the penal providences of life, the tremendous devastations that have been wrought by fire and plague and angry skies in every mood of indignation. How are all these to be explained, understood, or received into the line of education, and made to instruct the growing life? Never by any theory that undervalues or mistakes the force of sin. The young cannot enter into this; the life that has been lived in easy frivolity can never understand so grim a doctrine; the girl that has always had her own way and enjoyed herself abundantly at home, and has only had to ask for luxuries in order to receive them, and who has never been tried beyond the point of being called upon to thank her friends for their lavish kindness, what can she understand of this tragedy? To her, they who preach it must be fanatics, yea, madmen. We must, however, go to the broader history, the larger experience of mankind, and find, not in it alone, but in it as interpreted by divine providence, God's meaning of the term sin.
When the Lord putteth forth the whole of his judgment the desolation is terrible:
"A man's uncle shall take him up, and he that burneth him, to bring out the bones out of the house, and shall say unto him that is by the sides of the house, Is there yet any with thee? and he shall say, No. Then shall he say, Hold thy tongue [hush]" ( Amo 6:10 ).
That is God's judgment. There is nothing left but the man's uncle; that is to say, in Biblical language, the man's goel, the man's next-of-kin, whose duty it is to burn the dead body or to bury it; and he shall come to seek the corpses, and shall grope round the sides of the house to know if there are any more dead there, and one shall say in a whispered groan, Hush! "We may not make mention of the name of the Lord," either because we have proved ourselves unworthy to take that holy name into our lips, or because the judgment is so tremendous that even to mention the name of the Lord may seem to provoke but a repetition of his wrath. "Hold thy tongue" is a term which is best interpreted by the word, Hush! There is a time when we want no speech, a time when God's wrath has had free play, and is glorified not in destruction, but in the attestation of right. There are times when God himself must define terms and show us their meaning, and when he is driven to this he writes with a sword, he speaks with a tempest trumpet.
Amos is fond of interrogative parables. We have seen how often he puts a parable into an enigma. Here he has recourse to his favourite method of exposition and suggestion, saying, "Shall horses run upon the rock? Will one plow there with oxen?" Amos was a philosopher before the time. He talks here, though hardly knowing that he is so talking, about the "laws of nature." The passage may be interpreted variously. We may take it for practical purposes as indicating a certain law of cause and effect, a law of fitness of things, a law of possible and impossible. "Shall horses run upon the rock," and break their limbs? "Will one plow there with oxen?" who can make a plough that will cut rocks? Then there is a law of nature. How easily we assent to that proposition! But how difficult it is for us to understand the term "law of nature" in its larger uses and applications! There are those who are eloquent upon the laws of nature who only talk about those laws on one side or aspect. Is there no law of nature of a moral kind? Has the whole spiritual region of life no law, no philosophy, no genius which represents the fitness of things? Is there not a law of nature which demands that the child shall be filial? Is there not a law of nature which says that there are sovereignties that must be obeyed? Is there not a law of nature which calls for thankfulness as the natural sequence of benefaction? Is there no impulse toward the Eternal? Is there not a law which says to him who would find eternity in time, Set down the goblet, for out of that small vessel thou canst not drink immortality? We talk about these laws of nature as if they were limited, mechanical, ponderable, and such as can be represented in plain figures. Or, if we talk about laws of nature, why not take in all the laws of nature, all impulses, volitions, tendencies, aspirations, dumb strugglings after things above and beyond? Never imagine that the laws of nature are confined to certain mechanical and dynamical actions which are accessible only by the physiologist, or the chemist, or the biologist. There are laws of nature, and it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks. It will be hard for thee to turn wrong into right. "The way of transgressors is hard": that is as certainly a law of nature as any procession of the stars or sequence of the seasons. In talking, therefore, about laws of nature take in all life, all nature, all possibilities of being; then you will not be pedants, but philosophers.
"Thus hath the Lord God showed unto me; and, behold, he formed grasshoppers in the beginning of the shooting up of the latter growth; and, lo, it was the latter growth after the king's mowings. And it came to pass, that when they had made an end of eating the grass of the land, then I said, O Lord God, forgive" ( Amo 7:1-2 ).
There is the triune God forming for the verb should be represented as rather an immediate and continuous action than an action already accomplished. This, indeed, is the key of many passages of Scripture, that the action is still proceeding. God is still forming man out of the ground; God is still creating man in his own image and likeness; God is still forming judgments, and making heavens of reward. The Lord humbles his creatures by the very instruments which he sometimes uses. An army could meet an army; but what soldiery could fight a grasshopper? or what cannon can strike the beast in a vital part? Where is it? What its magnitude? What its weight? What space does it occupy? Give us these data, and we will take them to the mathematician, and he will make elaborate calculations, and shape his weapon accordingly. That cannot be done. There may be a greater population on a green leaf than you find in all England. There may be a larger congregation in a drop of water than ever assembled in a cathedral. The Lord will not send some red-coated soldiery down to fight those apostates; he will make grasshoppers, and in the morning the grass will all be gone. We are told by those who have lived in lands known to grasshoppers and locusts, and other devouring insects, that to-day there shall be fifty acres of luxuriant corn waving in the summer wind, radiant, and beautified by the summer sun, and in less than twenty-four hours it shall be cut off within an inch of the root. By what? By swords? No; there were dignity in dying by a sword; the murder is not so rough, the instrument is long and sharp and silver-handled. By what ministry has this destruction been wrought? There is a tone of contempt in the very enunciation of the name this is the work of locusts, this is the miracle of grasshoppers.
Amos sees another vision,
"Thus he showed me: and, behold, the Lord stood upon a wall made by a plumbline, with a plumbline in his hand. And the Lord said unto me, Amos, what seest thou? And I said, A plumbline. Then said the Lord, Behold, I will set a plumbline in the midst of my people Israel" ( Amo 7:7-8 ).
These words are open to two meanings: I have measured up Israel, and none of it shall be lost; or, I will try Israel by a plumbline, and whatever is out of plumb shall be thrown down. The Lord's government is represented by a plumbline. He will have no leaning pillars; he builds no fancy Pisas; he is not a God of eccentricity. The Lord will have right; he will have the square, the vertical, the exact; he will not accept a rough polygon for a circle. His eyes are flames of fire; he weighs the actions of men in the scales of the sanctuary. The king knows what is written on the wall. Men have made wonderful expositions of "MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN," simply meaning, Pounds, ounces, pennyweights. There need be no esoteric meaning about the writing. The king knew it; he said, This means weighing: I have to go upon the scales; the weighing time has come: "Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting." Sometimes we have to be weighed without our consent being obtained. All life has to be weighed; the plumbline has to be set against every wall, and if the building be bad, as bad as it will be if not built first with the plumbline, down it goes, not arbitrarily, but because the laws of nature, gravitation, will not have crooked lines and bad speculative building and mean jerry-work in its holy universe. There must be a great tumbling down of bad building. On the other hand, we can lay comfort to ourselves by saying that because there is a plumbline in the hand of God no good action shall be allowed to fall, no good building shall perish; nothing that is right shall suffer loss; the judgment of God is but an aspect of his mercy.
Amos talked thus roughly and frankly, and Amos had a poor congregation. Men do not like this kind of speech. Better talk in polysyllables that jingle to one another, and call rhyme poetry; better sing some wordless lullaby, for thieves like sleep after felony. Who cares for judgment? If Amos were to return to the church there is not a congregation in the world that he would not dissolve. Amaziah represents what would happen: "O thou seer" there is mockery in the tone: thou man of eyes; seeing, penetrating, piercing looker; thou cowherd seer "go, flee thee away into the land of Judah, and there eat bread, and prophesy there [sell thy judgments in Judah]: but prophesy not again any more at Beth-el: for it is the king's chapel, and it is the king's court" go, talk to the rabble, but do not let the king hear thy raving! The prophet of God has always been handed down to the poor. There is a refinement that cannot speak above whispers; there is a delicacy that goes daintily down to hell, quietly, easily, gracefully; but you can hear the rustle of the silk as it goes down to be burned. The religious teachers have always been handed over to the canaille, to the rubbish of society. Religion has always been regarded as an excellent thing for the East-end.
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