JOINED TO IDOLS
"Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone." —Hosea 4:17
The opening words of this chapter introduce the rest of the book. From here to the end we have a condensed account of the burden of the prophet's messages, lasting, as we have said before, according to the dating, for a long period of years. At least for seventy years Hosea was the preacher of righteousness in the northern kingdom of Israel
This chapter in itself is a message to the whole nation. We may call it an indictment of the nation. The nation is portrayed in its terrible pollution. The cause of the pollution is clearly declared. “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge." The result is described as that of the uttermost desolation, the judgment of God falling upon them, not as the stroke of a capricious Judge, but as the inevitable outworking and result of the fact that they had rejected knowledge, and so were perishing for the lack of it.
Now in this chapter these oft-quoted words are found, and our first business is to ask very simply and yet very definitely, what do they mean? "Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone." In answering that question I shall have to run counter to a popular and almost universal interpretation. The common interpretation has been that at this point in this chapter of judgment, God says that because Ephraim is joined to his idols, He will abandon him, He will let him alone. "Ephraim is joined to idols," therefore God says, I leave him. It is remarkable, the almost complete agreement of expositors at this point. Nevertheless they are wrong. Expositors have a habit, like sheep, of going in flocks, and sometimes it may be said of them, "All we like sheep have gone astray." (Isa. 53:6) It is certainly so here. That certainly is not the meaning of the words. God was not abandoning Ephraim. That would contradict the whole teaching of the prophet. That would contradict the truth already revealed, that of the valley of troubling as the door of hope. And that would contradict the great sigh and cry of God which emerges later on, "How shall I give thee up, Ephraim?" (Hos. 11:8)
Therefore we ask again, what does it mean? Let us note the context. Verses fifteen, seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen constitute a separate paragraph, which is part of the address, part of the message, and yet in some senses is separated from it. Hosea was a prophet to the northern kingdom of Israel. Israel was going rapidly down the steep declivity that led soon to exile. Judah, in the south, was more loyal to God than Israel, and at this point the prophet who was prophesying to Israel, as it were, flung a message across to Judah in the south. "Though thou, Israel, play the harlot, yet let not Judah offend." It was a word to Judah. "Come not ye unto Gilgal, neither go ye up to Beth-aven." Bethel was the house of God; but the prophet with a fine satire does not call it Bethel, the house of God, but Beth-aven, the house of vanity. He said to Judah, "Do not go to Gilgal, neither go up to Beth-aven, nor swear, As Jehovah liveth." Still thus talking to Judah he said, "For Israel hath behaved himself stubbornly, like a stubborn heifer; now will Jehovah feed them as a lamb in a large place. Ephraim"—that is Israel, the name of the dominant tribe, which he so constantly used—"Ephraim is joined to his idols; let him alone."
It was not the statement that God would let Ephraim alone. It was a warning to Judah that she must let him alone "Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone." The prophet was warning Judah, that she enter into no alliance, either trade, or political, or military, with Israel. While Hosea was prophesying to the northern kingdom, his compatriot and fellow-prophet, Isaiah, was preaching in the southern kingdom, and he thus reinforced the messages of Isaiah with this brief word, "Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone." It was the word of the prophet to the loyal to have no complicity with the disloyal. It was the word of warning to those who were still in greater measure maintaining their right relationship with God, not to imperil their own safety by coming into any contact with Ephraim, "Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone."
While it is perfectly true that God does not abandon the disloyal, the loyal must not enter into alliance with the disloyal. Thus the message constitutes the emergence in this prophecy of a principle which runs through all the Biblical literature, and finds crystallized expression more than once, as you will remember, in the New Testament Scriptures. "Come ye out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch no unclean thing. What concord hath Christ with Belial? or what portion hath a believer with an unbeliever." (2 Cor. 6:17) It reveals the necessity of refraining from, and refusing complicity with evil, on the part of those who are standing for God.
Three matters then arrest our attention: First, the thing forbidden, idolatry; second, the condition described, Ephraim joined to idols; and third, the warning uttered to Judah, "Let him alone."
In all the Old Testament Literature, and quite definitely in the New Testament, idolatry is viewed as an intolerable evil. It was the sin of Israel, the thing that cursed it, and blighted it, and blasted it. What then is idolatry? I know that the question sounds almost absurd, for of course the thing is so familiar that we are all inclined to say that everyone knows what idolatry is. But I am not sure that our thinking is always accurate or adequate on the subject. So I do ask—what is idolatry? It certainly is a serious question, and we ought to face it.
Let me say first that idolatry is by no means dead. We sometimes speak of Britain and America as Christian countries. There is a sense in which such a description may be permissible, but in the full sense there is no Christian country and both are farther and farther from that being true. We are still saturated and cursed with idolatry and growing more so each day.
What then is idolatry? Let us first recognize that idolatry is pre-eminently religious. The idolater is not a man who has broken with religion. He is practicing it whether he realizes it or not. If a man is avowedly an atheist, and honestly so, then he cannot be an idolater. And yet in his case, however honest he may be in his claim to be an atheist, his whole life is mastered by some central devotion, which is his god, and so in the last analysis he also is an idolater. But in our general use of the word, it applies to those who themselves claim to be religious, or have a religion. I repeat, the idolater is not the man who has broken with religion, but the one who is practicing it. All the forms of idolatry, which exist where the Christian light has not broken, are religious. Every form under which man worships is a demonstration of his capacity for religion, and his attempt to realize and satisfy that capacity. This applies to those with which we are familiar in our reading of the Bible; the worship of Baal, the worship of Moloch, and the worship of Mammon; or those familiar to us in our reading of history, outside the Bible; the worship of Zeus, of Diana, of Astarte, all of them. They are all religious. When Paul went to Athens, he saw the city full of idols. When he began to address the Stoics and Epicureans, on Mars Hill, he said, "I perceive that ye are"—not, very superstitious; never was there a more unfortunate mistranslation than that, but—"I perceive that ye are very religious." Idolatry is religious. (Acts 17:22)
Well, what are idols? Let us first confine ourselves to the word as it occurs in our text: "Joined to idols." The word so translated simply means images. Quite literally the word, Atsab, means something carved. By use it means a carved representation of something else. Idolatry is the worship of an image, as the image is supposed to represent God—a god, if you like so to say. That is idolatry. Idolatry is the worship of false representations of God. Churches are full of “suggested” images of Jesus with His long locks of hair. (1 Cor. 11:14; Exod. 20:4). Modern aid to worship.
Let us consider this briefly in application to the history of the kingdom of Israel. When Solomon died, the popular voice was heard appealing against the burdens of taxation, and so forth, imposed upon the people by the king. As a king, Solomon was a ghastly failure. The period of Solomon's reign for forty years over the whole nation was very much like the sway of Lorenzo de' Medici in Florence. He held the people enthralled by magnificent display and artistic splendor, and songs and flowers, and the refined and the beautiful, and nearly crushed their life out by extortion. Savonarola was raised up and broke his power. Solomon's reign was like that, and when Solomon died, the voice of Jeroboam was heard speaking out on behalf of the oppressed people, asking Rehoboam, the son of Solomon, to lift their burdens. Rehoboam, the young fool, imagining that autocracy is hereditary, and taking counsel with some of the younger men, came back with the answer, "If my father chastised you with whips, I will chastise you with scorpions"; (1 Kings 12:11) then the cry went up, "To your your tents, O Israel," and the kingdom was torn in two; Israel in the north, Judah in the south. What then did Jeroboam do? He did not advise the people to give up the worship of God. He felt the worship of God was vital; but because, if they travelled down into Judah and Jerusalem for their great feasts and festivals, they would put in danger his political program in the north, he said, we will have a system of our own. Consequently, for political reasons, he set up two centers for their worship, one was Bethel, and the other Gilgal and he set up the two golden calves to be worshipped. He did not, however, call them to worship the calves, but God, as represented by the calves. That was the beginning of the idolatry of Israel. It ran on down the years, until all sorts of misrepresentations of God were brought in. But they were still worshipping. They would have told you they were worshipping God, but they were worshipping God falsely represented. That is idolatry; it is religion seeking to worship God through any representation of Himself except that which has come to men by direct revelation. That is idolatry. That is the evil which includes within itself all misery, all disaster, and all judgment ultimately.
I have already referred to Isaiah as contemporary with Hosea. In the southern kingdom of Judah, somewhere about the same time, he thundered against this attempt to represent God. Hear his words (Isa. 40:18-22): "To whom then will ye liken God? Or what likeness will ye compare unto Him? The image, a workman hath cast it and the goldsmith overlayeth it with gold, and casteth for it silver chains. He that is too impoverished for such an oblation chooseth a tree that will not rot; he seeketh unto him a skillful workman to set up a graven image, that shall not be moved.”
"Have ye not known? have ye not heard? hath it not been told you from the beginning? have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is He that sitteth above the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers, that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in."
"To whom then will ye liken Me?" saith God. The prophet was showing the impossibility of representing God by any likeness. That is , the sin forbidden in the Second Commandment, "Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them."
All of which is based upon the recognition of the fact that no man can make a representation of God; and that as surely as he do so, or attempt to do it, and then worship God through his own representation, he is worshipping God through a misrepresentation, which will react upon him for his own blasting. That is idolatry. Oh how this sin exists inside the church house.
If man thinks of God, recognizes God, and then says, now I must grasp God, and understand God, and I must have something that represents God to me, and proceeds to create that representation, he is attempting the impossible. Yet it is such an easy thing, a natural thing to do. Man says: Give me something at which I can look, something that will keep God before my eyes. Then if a man attempts to satisfy his own demand he can only do it in one way, and that is by projecting his own personality, or the personality of some other human being into infinitude. That is the history of all the great idolatries. Some lower forms of idolatry have deified animals, always with bestial results in the lives of the devotees. But when man projects himself into infinitude, and says God is an infinite human Being, and then what he projects is an abortion, a monstrosity, a failure. The result is Zeus, the god of force; Moloch, the god of brutal cruelty; Baal, the god of lust and impurity. All idols which are representations of God, projected from the thinking of human personality, are necessarily misrepresentations of God, because man is in himself a failure.
Israel had taken the lower level in making calves represent God. They had rejected the true knowledge, with the result that they were filthy and polluted with sins which were animal in their nature. Evolutionary thought was in their day also.
Every form of religion which is based upon a denial of the God of revelation is idolatry. I am not now thinking about India, I am not thinking about China, I am not thinking about Africa. I am thinking about countries nominally Christian in so far as, in their thinking about God, they have turned from revelation. But men must have some representation; and God has given us the representation. In the fullness of time He came; and in that most illuminative words of Paul, when writing about Jesus, He is "the Image of the invisible God." (Col. 1:15) Idolatry today consists in an attempt to worship God while denying the finality of the unveiling of God that came in the personality of Jesus. If men merely treat Jesus as on the human level, and say, we will take His teaching, such as we agree with, and try and obey that, and work out our own salvation, they are idolaters. They are worshipping at the shrine of a false representation of God. And today, as always, such sin of the spirit reacts, and becomes soon the pollution of all life, individual, and family, social, national. Trouble everywhere today is due to the fact that man is an idolater that he is turning from the unveiling of God given in Christ.
Now let us examine the condition of Israel as revealed in the words: "Joined to idols." "Joined" is an arresting word. The primitive root means simply joined, but in common use in the Hebrew language, as revealed in other places in the Literature, it was used in the sense of being held under, as by a spell. It suggested being fascinated in an evil sense; to be held by the spell of idolatry. Israel is drugged with its own pollutions, deluded by its false idea of God; and that at the first by its own choice, until shortly, more terrible yet, contentedly the nation was seen by the prophet so drugged and deluded by idolatry, linked up with it, held by it, satisfied with it; while all the time it was working its ruin—"joined to idols." Are the countries of this earth there yet?
To my own heart and soul, the ultimate terror of the current hour is that of the satisfaction of humanity with false forms of religion, which satisfaction is issuing in lust, and license, and dethronement of God. Out of it comes the declaration that there is no God who cares, that we are the victims of our own personality, or the victors, according to our own choices. Behaviorism, humanism, these sciences are the avenues for the denial of moral responsibility. Observe the literature which is being poured out upon our young people in defense of that very view of life; all coming from a false view of God, all advanced in the name of religion. Volumes have issued from the presses which are utterly immoral in their issue and influence, containing teaching which cuts the nerve of morality, claims that there is no value in the moral standards of the Church and the moral standards of Jesus. Yet much of such literature makes a gesture to God, patronizes God. The writers of such books have lost the vision of the God of the Bible, the God of holiness Who can make no compromise with evil, because He is the God of love.
That is idolatry, and it is a terrible thing when it has to be said of any man or of a nation, it is joined to idols.
All of which brings us to, and gives force to the injunction of the prophet, "Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone." Which means, in the terms of our own time and our own thinking, Loyalty to God cannot compromise. God as He has been revealed is God alone and there can be no compromise. Loyalty to Christ cannot co-operate with those who deny Him in any sense. Today there is a tolerance abroad which is high treason. There is a passion saturating the air for a comprehension which sacrifices the very heart of the Christian religion, and the very core of the Gospel of the Nazarene. There is a widespread patronage of Jesus which consents to name Him as one among others, and to put Him into comparison. All in the name of freedom of religion. This is in itself a blank denial, and a subtle form of idolatry; and this word of God has immediate application, "Ephraim is joined to his idols; let him alone." Can we substitute some names in the place for Ephraim at this point? America, England, France, Russia, India, China, etc.?
A man must be true to his own conscience. I have been asked if I would not go to some meeting at which representatives of other religions were to speak—Mohammedan, Muslim and Jewish. No. I will respect the Mohammedan, and I will respect the Jewish rabbi, but I cannot stand on a religious platform with them. They are joined to false representations of God. If someone says he is not sure about that, I shall reply, then he is not sure about Jesus Christ, not sure about His finality. So long as we are prepared to compare Him, we are something less than Christian. So long as we put Him into comparison with others, it is because we have not risen to the height of intellectual comprehension concerning Him, to say nothing of volitional surrender to Him. Until we see Him alone as "the Image of the invisible God," filling the entire horizon to the uttermost bound, we have not really seen Him at all, and our relation to Him lacks the uttermost of devotion. The hour is coming, indeed, the hour is here, when loyal souls ought at least to stand separate from all complicity with any form of the misrepresentation of God, even though the form be some new presentation of Jesus that denies the things of Revelation. There must be no compromise.
It may be objected that to insist upon that will be to thin the ranks of the Christian Church. So much the better for the enterprise of God in Christ. The Church today, alas, has passed under the blight of a passion for statistics and numbers. I tremble sometimes when some of my brethren tell me they have the largest Church membership in the city or the State. They are in danger! I would like to be allowed to have the privilege of revising their Church rolls! It would be of value to know how many of those enrolled really represent vital Christianity! The sifting of the ranks oftentimes is the strengthening of a campaign. Ephraim is joined to his idols. Judah, the spell of idolatry is upon Israel. She is cursed, dazed, drugged. She is deluded, she is doomed. Judah, stand away! No alliance with her! Stand away, as you value your own soul! "Come out from among them, and be ye separate." (2 Cor. 6:17)
Finally, let it be recognized that this call to separation does not include bitterness towards those from whom you separate; but a great love and compassion and courtesy.
"Ephraim is joined to idols," Judah, "Let her alone." God is not going to let her alone. God is going to deal with her. We shall hear the cry of the Divine heart by and by, "How shall 1 give thee up, Ephraim?" But so long as Ephraim gives God up, we are to have no complicity with her in her idolatry. The principle is of application individually. I cannot make it for you; you cannot make it for me. But it is a trumpet call to those who name the Name to stand clear of all complicity with false representations of God.
No comments:
Post a Comment