MANY HAVE MISLAID GOD

GOD MISLAID

"For Israel hath forgotten his Maker, and builds palaces; and Judah hath multiplied fortified cities: but I will send a fire upon his cities, and it shall devour the castles thereof."—Hosea 8:14

            That is the final verse in a chapter which contains a message of judgment, judgment in the sense of punish­ment and calamity about to fall upon the people and all those who live by the flesh saying they are spiritual people. The chapter is dramatic in its method. It opens with two clarion cries and our translators have just a little robbed the passage of its arresting character by the introduction of certain words, in order to pleasant words, and the making of smooth reading and sense. There is something of value in the very method of abruptness and arousal. In our Bibles the first verse reads: "Set the trumpet to thy mouth. As an eagle he cometh against the house of Jehovah, because they have transgressed My covenant, and tres­passed against My law."

            The first word there is the word "set." There is no such word in the Hebrew text. It has been supplied. And again, in the sentence "as an eagle he cometh," the words "he cometh" do not occur in the Hebrew text. They have been supplied. Now, if we are seeking for beauty of literature merely, according to our English standards, all that may be very good; but I am simply drawing attention to the fact that in the Hebrew text there is an abruptness about it. Two trumpet cries sharply follow: the first, "The trumpet to thy mouth"; the second, "As an eagle against the house of Jehovah." The text does not say "Set"; it does not say "He cometh." As a matter of fact, we have not improved it from the literary standpoint by the introduction of these words. The method of the Hebrew suggests two sudden trumpet blasts. The message of the prophet was intended to be one of arousal; and it began with those two clarion cries: "The trumpet to thy mouth," "As an eagle against the house of Jehovah."

            Now I do not know anything experimentally about the playing of a trumpet, but I do know that the Hebrew word here means, The trumpet to the roof of your mouth. Is there some peculiar, wailing sound produced by that action? I don't know; but it is a startling word, "The trumpet to the roof of the mouth. As an eagle against the house of Jehovah." Then the prophet runs on, "Because they have trans­gressed My covenant, and trespassed against My law. They shall cry unto Me, My God, we Israel know Thee. Israel hath cast off that which is good; the enemy shall pursue him"—and so forth.

            The chapter, I repeat, is a chapter of judgment, and if it be carefully examined .it will be found that the prophet gives the reasons for the calamity which he is declaring to be imminent; and it is as though he does so in five blasts upon the trumpet. Or, in other words, he names five causes of the coming judg­ments, and he does so with a crescendo effect as he reveals the failure and the sin of the nation. What are the five charges he makes against them? First, transgression and trespass; second, false kings and princes set up to rule without consulting God ; third, idolatry, the calf of Samaria set up as a center of worship; fourth, the madness of seeking safety in alliance with Assyria; fifth, false altars, and sin as the result of them. That is the entire chapter, until we reach our text.

            Then in the words of the text he summarizes the whole situation. "Israel hath forgotten his Maker, and builds palaces; and Judah hath multiplied fortified cities; I will send a fire upon his cities, and it shall devour the castles thereof."

            This, then, is clearly a message of judgment, and in these words we find the prophet's declaration of the all-containing malady, of which all the other things are symptoms.

            What, then, is the malady? That is inclusively stated in the words, "Israel hath forgotten his Maker." America, Europe, and all the rest have also this malady and are witnesses to God’s judgment. Having made this inclusive statement, the prophet describes the resulting activity of the people who have forgotten their Maker. In this charge Judah is implicated as well as Israel. There are two activities described. "Israel (Europe) has built palaces," and "Judah (America) has multiplied fortified cities." The activities which result when the people have forgotten God, are—building palaces, and multiplying fortified cities. The final word is the declaration of judgment, "I will send fire upon the cities . . . and destroy the castles." (Earthquakes, volcanoes, tropical storms, etc.) Let us follow the lines suggested, considering: the All-containing Malady; the Resulting Activity; the Issue.

            The all-containing malady. "Israel hath forgotten his Maker." Everyone knows what it is to forget. But do we? Does this mean that the nation of Israel and of Judah—Hosea speaking specially to Israel, but ever and anon, as we have seen, talking to Judah as implicated in the wrongdoing of Israel, and so including the whole nation—does this mean, I say, that these people had really forgotten God in the usual sense of the word? By no means! Men cannot forget God. They can deny Him, but in so doing they are still remembering Him! Men do not forget God intellectually. This nation certainly had not forgotten God in that first and simple sense of the word. What then is this idea of forgetting God? In order to under­stand the statement, to see the real significance of the word that is employed here, and employed so con­stantly through these Old Testament Scriptures to describe a peril, and to describe an awful possibility, we need to recognize the real meaning of the Hebrew word. Now, shall I very much surprise you if I tell you that the Hebrew word means quite simply to mislay? That is the exact meaning of it. Israel hath mislaid his Maker. You know what it is to mislay something. You have not forgotten it, but you have mislaid it. That is the idea.

            Let us examine this carefully. At first blush such a statement seems to take the sting out of it; but if it be carefully considered it will be found that it puts the sting into it. To understand this, let us turn aside briefly and look for this Hebrew word Shakach in other places in the Literature.

            When this nation was in the making, when it was coming to national constitution and consciousness, the great God-given leader was Moses. After Moses had led this people through that tremendous time of constitution, and had been with them for forty years in their wanderings up and down in the wilderness, he was about to leave them; and taking the Book of Deuteronomy at its face value—and I believe that is the only value—we find in that book his farewell addresses to this very nation.

            In these addresses he constantly warned them against one grave peril. What was it? Forgetting God; and whenever he did so he used this same Hebrew word. In chapter four, and verse nine, we read: "Take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes saw, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life; but make them known unto thy children and thy children's children." (Deut. 4:9)

            That is the meaning of forgetting. Forgetting is personal neglect of the things that are intellectually believed, and failure to make them the central things of family life. Israel had mislaid God in its individual action, in its national outlook, and in its dealing with its children.

Glance on, and in chapter six, verse ten, we read: "And it shall be, when Jehovah thy God shall bring thee into the land which He sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give thee; great and goodly cities, which thou buildedst not, and houses full of all good things, which thou filledst not, and cisterns hewn out, which thou hewedst not, vineyards and olive trees, which thou plantedst not, and thou shalt eat and be full ; then beware lest thou forget Jehovah."

            In other words, When you come into a land where you will be prosperous, said Moses, when you are in the midst of easy prosperity, that dire and disastrous peril to national life and individual life; beware lest you mislay God.

            Yet again; in chapter eight, and verses eleven and seventeen, we read: "Beware, lest thou forget Jehovah thy God, in not keeping His commandments, and His ordinances, and His statutes, which I command thee this day;—And lest thou say in thy heart, My power and the might of my hand hath gotten me thy wealth."

            The peril indicated is that of self-satisfaction, which follows when God is mislaid. And yet once more, in chapter nine, verse one, we read: "Hear, O Israel; thou art to pass over Jordan this day."

            Verse four: "Speak not thou in thine heart, after that Jehovah thy God hath thrust them out from before thee, saying, For my righteousness Jehovah hath brought me in to possess this land . . . not for thy righteousness, nor for thy uprightness of thy heart, dost thou go in to possess their land."

            Verse seven: "Remember, forget thou not."

            These are but scattered sentences from these fare­well discourses, but they reveal Moses' sense of the danger of the people. He saw this nation, and he saw it down the coming years, and he knew its ultimate peril would be that God should be forgotten. If they could not intellectually forget God, they could put Him out of calculation, they could mislay Him.

            From these four quotations we see personal neglect, neglect within the family to train the child; self-satisfaction that comes from such neglect; and the self-righteousness which issues, the pride that says, we have made ourselves great; and finally that terrible mislaying of God which comes from prosperity, which says because of our righteousness and upright­ness of heart God has blessed us, and has given us these things; and so God is put out of sight, mislaid.

            To return to Hosea. The years had run on, centuries had run on, and everything Moses had warned them against had come to pass; and now this prophet of tears and thunder, as he declared an imminent judgment, said: Here is your malady; accounting for your transgressions and your trespasses, your false kings and your false princes, your calf in Samaria, your alliance with Assyria, the altars you are building, these are all symptoms. The malady is that you have mislaid God, just mislaid Him, till you have become oblivious of Him. That is the peril of a man (Husband, wife, child), the peril of a nation (America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Far East, etc.); mislaying God. They care less what His thoughts and ways are. Malady is the result from God’s love.

            What is the process? How do men come to mislay God? First, they give an intellectual assent to the fact of His existence without seeing to it that their conduct corresponds with their assent. Intellectual orthodoxy will blast a man as surely as heresy will, unless there is the action in life that corresponds with the accurate assent of the mind to His truth. That was the story of this nation; and whenever there is intellectual assent without corresponding action, there is spiritual dullness. God intellectually accepted without response in obedience, fades away from the immediateness of consciousness. He is relegated, it may be, to the temple, and left there; is relegated, it may be, to the Church on Sunday, and is left there, until we get back next Sunday. If that is so, God help us, we are not Christian. God is mislaid; He is lost. That was the trouble with Israel. It is the trouble with humanity, God forgotten in that sense; mislaid, lost as an active power, touching life, con­ditioning it, inspiring it, driving it, building it up. Israel hath forgotten his Maker.

            Well, when that is so, what happens next? Hosea said Israel was building. Now, if we are looking at the Old Version, it says, "temples"; the Revised Version says "palaces." Which is right? They are both right, and they are both wrong. I think either word may be used to convey the sense of the Hebrew word. The word that the prophet made use of literally means "spacious buildings." Today the bigger the home, the better. So big they lose them to the bank in little time. The old translators said, That means temples and some look like temples. The new translators say, it means palaces and some look like palaces. It may mean either; it may mean both. The true idea is that of spaciousness. Whether that spaciousness was for pleasure or for worship matters nothing because they were full of idols down to the garage. The passion of the nation came to be to build big things. Somebody says these prophets are out of date! Think again. The passion for big­ness is a symptom of capacity for the eternal, for God; and when men have mislaid God, then they try and build big things without God. Men are always striving to put back the prison walls, and to build something larger, more spacious. It is manifest absolutely today on the material level, for all material activity is the symptom of mental and spiritual condition. Great buildings are the order of the day in New York, Chicago, London, everywhere. It is unconsciously symptomatic. Oliver Wendell Holmes in that choice little poem of his, "The Chambered Nautilus," described the nautilus building his own house ever larger, ever larger; and as he observed it, he wrote the poem, and said in effect that he had learned the secret of life.

"Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,

As the swift seasons roll I

Leave thy low-vaulted past

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,

Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,

Till thou at length are free,

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea."

            That was a great thing. That is humanity's struggle up after the Infinite: "Build thee more stately mansions, O .my soul." I am not going to deal with the poem. I would like to say, in passing, it cannot be done. You cannot build more stately mansions for your soul; and yet the passion is there. It is the passion for the big, the spacious, the infinite, the eternal.

Its expression in the material is tragically futile. Mr. Dooley—one of those magnificent Americans who abound in laughter, and yet are mastered by profound philosophies—wrote an article on machinery. It abounds in merriment, and is full of sanity and sense. At the end of that article he said—I am not quoting the actual words, but the sense of them: We are all busy running round, and building, and putting up, putting up things that are called sky-scrapers by everyone, except the sky! And his last sentence was, "We are still buried by hand."

            What an acid satire is there, biting through the rippling humor. We are building sky-scrapers; we pick up the newspapers and read the descriptions of these vast buildings; we visit them and go up in the latest of them, and still have to look up to the sky. Sky-scrapers, certainly!

And yet the passion for the big in humanity is revealed in the building. The prophet says: You have forgotten, you have mislaid God, and you are putting up spacious buildings, sky-scrapers!

            Then, as to Judah, he said: She has multiplied fortified cities. If building spacious buildings means the quest for spaciousness, what is the meaning of fortified cities? The quest for security, the attempt to secure safety. If the passion for bigness is a symptom of capacity for

God, the passion for safety is a symptom of the sense of peril. Safety first! Have you heard that anywhere? That is what we are all saying. What does America demand? What is Britain seeking? What does France want? What does Italy ask? What do we all want? Security. Security against what? I will tell you. The lack of God, and the things that result from it. This great prophet of Israel under­stood. We have mislaid God, and now we are build­ing sky-scrapers, and engines of war. Humanity forgets God, and then gropes after the spacious, and fights for the secure, and never makes anything so big but that the sky laughs at it; and never secures itself for one five minutes from a possible outbreak of devastation. Our twin-towers are our testimony.

            I said at the beginning that this is a message of judgment, and so it is. We cannot turn it into any­thing else. How does it end? "I will send a fire upon his cities, and it shall devour the castles thereof."

            To forsake God is to ensure ruin. A fire, what does that mean? Does that necessarily mean that God was about to rain down material fire? Oh no. Away down in Judah, when Hosea was pro­phesying in the northern kingdom, Isaiah was also prophesying. Let us go back to Isaiah, and listen to something he said one day: "The sinners in Zion are afraid; trembling hath seized the godless ones. Who among us can dwell with the devouring fire? Who among us can dwell with everlasting burnings?"  (Isa. 33:14)

            Devouring fire, everlasting burnings? What is that?—Hell? Oh no; go on, and hear him as he asks who can dwell in that fire? He answers his question: "He that walketh righteously, and speaketh uprightly; he that despiseth the gain of oppres­sion, that shaketh his hands from taking a bribe; that stoppeth his ears from hearing of blood, and shutteth his eyes from looking upon evil; he shall dwell on high; his place of defense shall be the munitions of rocks; his bread shall be given him; his waters shall be sure. Thine eyes shall see the King in His beauty."

            Who can dwell in fire? (Daniel & friends-those when this earth is burnt up) The pure, those who do not forget God, who live in right relationship with Him. If men do forget Him, then that very Divine presence blasts. The fire that destroys is the fire of the imman­ence of God. We cannot get away from Him. We have mislaid Him. He is at our elbow. We may be oblivious of Him, we may do without Him, but all the while we are living and moving and having our being in Him. In His hand our breath is.

            And according to our relationship to Him, He will bless or blast. If we mislay God, we can run up our sky-scrapers, we can multiply our battleships; but we cannot escape the slowly burning fire, which everywhere is purging out the things effete. We cannot escape God, Who blasts that which forgets Him by attempting to satisfy the inherent passionate craving of human life with palaces and war machinery.