IN NEED OF GLASSES

DISTORTED VISION

"The prophet is a fool, the man that hath the spirit is mad, for the abundance of thine iniquity, and because the enmity is great."—Hosea 9:7

            The chapter in its completeness is again a description of calamities which were to overtake Israel because of its pollution. There are five distinct notes sounded as to these calamities; five elements, shall I say, in the overwhelming calamity that was falling upon the nation that had mislaid its God. The first was the death of joy; the second, actual exile from their own land; the third, the loss of spiritual discernment; the fourth, a falling birth-rate; and the last, actual casting out.

            The text that I have chosen has to do with the central one of these five, namely, the loss of spiritual discernment, and very briefly, by way of introduction to our meditation, I think it is necessary and fair that we refer to the fact that there is admittedly on the part of scholars some obscurity in the text. By that I mean, there are differences of opinion as to what was the simple meaning of the prophet when he uttered the words: "The prophet is a fool, the man of the spirit is mad." Was he then referring to false prophets?

            That is the opinion of Pusey and of George Adam Smith. Or was the prophet describing a false estimate of the prophets held by the people? That is the opinion of Cheyne and Bullinger.

My own conviction is that Cheyne and Bullinger are right. The prophet Hosea was not here referring to false prophets: "The prophet is a fool, and the man of the spirit is mad." The word "prophet" might have been used for the false prophets. It constantly was so used; but the phrase, "the man of the spirit," was never used for a false prophet. Hosea is rather declaring the false estimate of the prophet and the man of the spirit which characterized the age that he addressed, and the people to whom his messages were being delivered. This was what men were saying. "The prophet is a fool, and the man of the spirit is mad." Therefore, immediately continuing, he gives the reason for the opinion: "For the abundance of thine iniquity, and because the enmity is great."

            Thus, in the text, we are brought face to face with a false conception and the reason for it. The false conception of the prophetic word, and of spiritual life. "The prophet is a fool." So they were saying. "The man of the spirit is mad." So they were saying. Yes, said Hosea, that is your view, and the reason that you hold that view is to be found in the abundance of your iniquities, and the greatness of your hatred. You have no discernment.

            Now, leaving all the local color, we find great principles flash out upon the page, and I invite you to consider these; first of all this conception of the prophet and the man of the spirit, and then the reason for such conception; and so finally the delusion of those who hold it.

            Centuries have run their course since the times of Hosea, and the conditions of life today are, in a thousand and one details, entirely different from the conditions of life then; but human nature is exactly the same. In the profound and elemental things of human life there is no change. We change the manner of our dress. If you deny that, all you have to do is to get down the family album, and look at your grand­mother's picture! But you are just the same sort of woman your grandmother was. The elemental things of human nature abide the same through the running centuries. Mothers had broken hearts millenniums ago, as today. Youth was exactly what it is; is exactly what it was. I do not believe the degeneracy of youth today is any greater than in the days of my boyhood and youth. Today it may be more violent in expression; but then it was more deceitful. Men are still saying, and perhaps with a new insistence and a greater arrogance than they did, the same things; shall I put it thus? There is a recurrence of this conception of the prophet and the man of the spirit ­"The prophet is a fool, and the man of the spirit is mad."

            Let us consider this false conception. "The prophet is a fool." The word there translated fool (evil) is a somewhat rare one in the Old Testament Scriptures. As a matter of fact it only occurs twenty-five times. There is another word, also rendered "fool" in our versions. For instance, "The fool hath said in his heart." That is not the same word, and the idea is not the same. In the statement, "The fool hath said in his heart there is no God," the word for fool (nabal) has a moral element. The reference is to one degenerate morally. Such is not the thought of the text. I have said it occurs twenty-five times. It is found only in the Wisdom literature, the poetry, and the prophetic books. It occurs twice in the Book of Job; only once in the one hundred and fifty Psalms; Isaiah, contemporary with Hosea, uses it twice, and Hosea only once; and eighteen times in the Book of Proverbs.

            What, then, is the meaning of this word? It means simply absurd, or, as we should say, silly—when speak­ing in contempt. The prophet is just silly; daft; inane. The word does not mark immorality in any sense. It marks inanity. The prophet is conceived of as just a fool, to be dismissed as unworthy of attention; beneath contempt.

            And "The man of the spirit." Our rendering gives it, "The man that hath the spirit"; but the blunter reading is, "The man of the spirit." He is the spiritual man. What is the matter with him? He is "mad"; and here the simple meaning is, he is "raving." The man of the spirit, the man of emotion, the man of force in utterance, the man who is swept by a conviction until he breaks through all con­ventionalities, is just raging or raving.

            That was the conception that these people had of Hosea and of Isaiah and of Micah, and of all others who were uttering to them the words of God, and who, swept by their own message, consumed by it as by a fire, violated the conventionalities, broke through the barriers of supposed accuracy and decency and orderliness, and flamed in fire and fury against them.

            Let us linger for a moment to remember the per­sistence of this conception. I have referred to Isaiah. In chapter twenty-eight of that prophecy we have the account of how he, after a long period of private ministry, which began at the death of Ahaz, broke out into speech in a political situation. The politicians were playing the fool. They were attempting to secure national security by going down to Egypt; and Isaiah broke out upon them: "Woe to the crown of pride of the drunkards of Ephraim, and to the fading flower of his glorious beauty." (Isa. 28:1) Right in the middle of that message we hear these men. They are mocking him; they are taunting him; they are laughing at him. At verse nine we have this inter­polation of the mockery of the politicians, What were they saying? “Whom will he teach knowledge? And whom will he make to understand the message? Them that are weaned from the milk, and drawn from the breasts? For it is precept upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, there a little." They are laughing at him, and what did they mean? He is just silly! He is mad! He is a fool! Who does he think is going to listen to him? He has lost his wits!

            Later, in the history of Judah, when Shemaiah the false prophet was denouncing Jeremiah, he spoke of him by the very same term. He said, he is just mad.

            If we leave those old days, and pass into the New Testament, in the tenth chapter of John we find what His enemies said about Jesus. He is mad, or hath a demon. Read again a little farther on. When Paul was talking to Agrippa, suddenly Festus broke in, and said, "Paul, thou art mad; thy much learning is turning thee mad."

            Or we run on down through the ages; the Pope said that Luther ought to be in Bedlam; they charged the Wesleys with madness, drawing from them the retort: "Fools and madmen let us be, Yet is our sure trust in Thee."

            When William Booth broke through the barrier of an ecclesiasticism that was strangling his message, they said, "He is not quite all there"; and I have heard something very like it said about Billy Sunday. So the conception persists: "The prophet is a fool"; "The man of the spirit is mad."

            Think of these to whom I have thus made reference. Think of Isaiah's message. Remember the magnificence of its dialectics; the splendor of its rhetoric; the beauty of its poetry; and its grasp upon the elemental things of human life. And yet they said that he was a fool that he was raving.

            Listen to the cadences of the heart-broken Jeremiah. He was perhaps the most heroic among all the prophets, in that for over forty years he preached, with no report that he could give statistically that would have been accepted by ecclesiastical courts as being worthwhile. Yet he thundered forth persistently the message of God to that nation. Consider the marvel of his teaching; the splendor of his philosophy; but they said, "He is a plain fool, he is silly, he is mad."

Softly now, and reverently. They said our Lord was mad. Think of His teaching. No more need be said.

            They said Paul was mad. I know it has been the fashion in some theological quarters to dismiss him; but he cannot be dismissed until we have accounted for the wonder of his personality and the marvel of his writings, and the fact that he is seen triumphing through the ages as interpreter of Christ and His Church. And what about Martin Luther; and William Booth; and Billy Sunday. Test them by results. And yet of all of them the world said they were mad.

            As I survey the whole array, and others I have not named, I am inclined to get Charles Wesley to help me to express myself, and so I repeat his words: "Fools and madmen let us be, Yet is our sure trust in Thee."

            Nevertheless, that is the attitude of the world towards the prophet. His message is accounted silly; the Word of God, and the prophet's passion of utter­ance, are accounted mere raving. All of which means the loss of spiritual discernment. The people of Hosea's day had come to that condition. They were turning to Assyria; they were going to Egypt; they were consulting wizards; persisting in pollutions; to go back upon our previous consideration, they had mislaid God, forgotten God, and they were turning here and there and everywhere; and when the mes­senger of God spoke, they said: "The prophet is a fool"; and when his passion burned with a flame, when there was fury, they said, "The man of the spirit is raving."

            And so we turn to consider what the prophet said here as to the reason of this false conception, "Because of the abundance of thine iniquity." The Old Version had it, "The multitude of iniquity." The word suggests the piling up of iniquities. What had that to do with the conception? Hosea's contemporary, Isaiah, said: "Your iniquities have separated between

you and your God." (Isa. 59:2) The false conception of the prophet's work, and the false conception of the meaning of the passion of the man of the spirit, were due to blindness with regard to God. This is created by moral declension. That which makes men look upon the messenger of God as a fool, and treat the man of the spirit as mad is sin.

            Consequently, comes the second line of declared reason. Hosea declared that their enmity was great. At the back of the criticism of the prophet and the man of the spirit is hatred. Hatred first of God, and then and therefore, hatred of the messengers of God.

            Think of these people! What had happened? Mark the process. They disobeyed God. What next? They forgot Him in the sense of failing to maintain vital relationship with Him: they mislaid Him, and put Him out of their calculations. With what result? They misinterpreted Him. With what result? They hated Him.

            The Christian apostle, Paul, speaks of the psychic man. Our Versions render the phrase "the natural man." (1 Cor. 2:14) The Greek word there is psychic; and I think it would be a great gain if we so read it. The man who is merely the man of mentality, the man whose mentality is divorced from spirituality; the man who is trying to grasp the operations of the universe, but who fails to realize the spiritual element that pervades the universe. Paul says that man, the merely psychic man, is at enmity against God. Why is it the psychic man is at enmity against God? There is only one reason; he does not know God, and has a false idea of God. His false idea may be due to his own false philosophy. That old German singer, whose hymns John Wesley translated, expressed a great truth in a couplet, when he sang:

"O God, of good the unfathomed sea,

Who would not give his heart to Thee?"

            Why don't men give their hearts to God? Why don't men reckon with God? Why do they hate God? Because they do not know Him. Misapprehension of God is at the root of all hostility to God in the human soul. If I could reveal Him to you, there is neither man nor woman, nor youth, listening to me, who would not be drawn to Him, not one. But the God of our own imagination or interpretation, distant, cruel, vindictive, oftentimes men hate. But that is not God; that is man's vain imagining concerning, Him. This mistaken idea comes of sin, and blindness that has resulted from sin. "Your iniquities have separated between you and your God."

            God disobeyed always becomes God distanced from consciousness; and even when men hold on to some belief in His existence, they are still in revolt, because their conception of Him is false. That is why they call His prophet silly and the man of the spirit mad.

            Let us turn for illustration to a story found in the first Book of the Kings, chapter twenty-two. Ahab was King of Israel, the northern kingdom, and Jehoshaphat King of Judah, the southern kingdom. Ahab an incarnation of wickedness. Jehoshaphat a well-meaning man, without any backbone. These two men were forming an alliance to make themselves safe against the common enemy; and Jehoshaphat went up and had a meeting with Ahab. The religious undercurrent in Jehoshaphat, and perhaps in Ahab too, made them feel it was necessary to get some kind of religious sanction; and Ahab had arranged a wonderful gathering. He got prophets of his own together, and one of them, Zedekiah, the son of Chenaanah, arranged a very remarkable display. He put on horns of iron to show how victorious they were going to be. Jehoshaphat, however, was not satisfied; and he had said: "Is there not here a prophet of Jehovah besides?" There was one named Micaiah. Now hear what Ahab said concerning him: "The King of Israel said unto Jehoshaphat, there is yet one man by whom we may inquire of Jehovah, Micaiah, the son of Imlah; but I hate him." Care­fully observe that, "I hate him." Why? "For he doth not prophesy good concerning me, but evil." There was the trouble. The prophet of the Lord will make no terms with sin. This Ahab knew, and so he hated him.

            So it always is. The reason for the false conception is found in the moral wickedness of those who hold the view. The false conception, so begotten, leads to hatred. Your iniquity is great, and your enmity is great.

            Now, in conclusion, consider the delusion revealed. They said "The prophet is a fool." Let us go to that book in which that word is most often used, eighteen times. In it we find two definitions of a fool. The first, "The foolish despise wisdom and instruction"; (Prov. 1:7) and the second, "Fools make a mock at sin." (Prov. 14:9) Thus the delusion is revealed. The prophet is eternally at war with sin, and that attitude is the ultimate in wisdom. Therefore the man, who counts him a fool, is the fool.

            The man of the spirit is mad. What is madness? In experience it is a false view, a lie. Insanity is a false view of life, producing wildness of action and utterance, a pitiable condition. "The man of the spirit is mad," they said. He is mad. He has a false view of life. His utterances are wild and ex­aggerated, because he fails to understand. Festus said, "Paul, thou art beside thyself; thou art mad." (Acts 26:24) What did Paul say? "I am not mad, most excellent Festus; but speak forth words of truth and sober­ness." It was Festus who was mad, whose view of life was wrong. His outburst against Paul was the outburst of insanity.

            What shall we say of these things considered in the light of all human experience? First, we declare the rationality of faith. Unbelief is the most irrational attitude possible to man. The man who attempts to account for the things in the midst of which he lives by the things in the midst of which he lives, is widowed of reason. I use the expression carefully; the rationality of faith. To me it is infinitely more difficult to believe in this world as I see it—I do not mean as man has often spoiled it, but as it is in itself—its mountains and valleys, its oceans and continents, its magnificent splendors, without a God, than with the God of the Bible accounting for it. I cannot believe that the God in Whom I am bound to believe, Who fashioned the daisy and made a man—I care nothing for the moment about the process—is careless about the man, and not interested in him. If I admit God has some care for human life in any way,

            I cannot believe He is careless about the highest thing in human life which is the moral element and capacity. Faith is utterly rational. To try and account for the things that are by the things that are is to work in a vicious circle. It is the man of faith, the man who endures as seeing Him Who is invisible (Heb. 11:27)—mark the contradiction and paradox, and face them —seeing Him Who is invisible, who is the man of rationality. That is the man of reason that is the man of sanity; that is the man who is not mad.

            Again, I learn as I ponder this message in the light of human life, the inevitableness of passion. One is sometimes tempted to wonder whether people within the Christian Church really do believe the things they say they do believe. I have referred to William Booth, the great founder of the Salvation Army. Do you know what made him the flaming prophet? He heard an infidel lecturing, and laughing at Christi­anity. He said: "If I really believed what you Christian people pretend to believe, I would not rest, day nor night, telling men and women about Jesus." William Booth heard it, and it gripped him; and he said, "The man is right." The result was that he did not rest day or night.

            The Christian Church today has largely become‑"faultily flawless, coldly regular, splendidly worthless."

            There is very little madness among us. Look at the young Church; the Church aflame with fire. In its presence the city of Jerusalem said, "These men are drunk." Has anyone ever suggested we were drunk because of our Christianity? If the things we affirm in our creeds are true, we ought to be on fire. The trouble is we are not. They are still saying we are silly, but they do not often say we are mad; and it is because we have lost—well! What have we lost? As God is my witness, I am not arguing for painted fire. It never burns. I am not pleading for a simulated enthusiasm, and never for excitement, which is like the twitching of a galvanized corpse. That is not what I am pleading for. But if we have lost our flame; if we have lost our fire; if we have lost our fury, under certain circumstances, against evil; it is because we have lost our vision of God, and we have lost our sense of the greatness of our evangel.

            May God restore to us the rationality of faith in fervor, and the passion of enthusiasm that drives us out to do the unusual thing, if necessary, if by any means we may make glad our Lord and our Savior.