Good for a Time
Hosea vi. 4
Imagine yourself in a tropical country, dependent for its fertility on the periodic rains. For months there has been neither rain nor dew: the brooks are beds of stones, the pools caked and dry; the rivers have dwindled to silver streaks; the land burns as a furnace; vegetation is scorched; the husbandman cannot drive his plow through the obdurate earth; and the cattle, with blood- 3hot eyes, stand on the hilltops and quaff the hot air in the extremity of their fever. But one morning there are symptoms of a change. A little cloud is seen by hundreds of eyes, like a wreath of gauze on the face of the intense blue of the sky.” See the cloud — rain is coming! ,J The cry goes through the land. But as men watch, it vanishes. It is a morning cloud, that passes away. Such are many of our resolutions in their slightness and evanescence.
Hosea lived on the eve of the dissolution of the northern kingdom, and graphically describes the awful deterioration of the people. His pages give a graphic picture of the desperate wickedness that prevailed among all classes. There was no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land; naught but swearing, and breaking faith, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery; blood touched blood. Gross impurity and intemperance had taken away their heart.
The people sacrificed upon the tops of the mountains and burned incense upon the hills, under oaks and poplars and terebinths, because their shadow was dense enough to hide the shame of their impurities. Therefore God withdrew Himself from among them and gave them up to suffer the results of their sins. He became to Ephraim as a moth, and to Judah as rottenness, and threatened to tear and carry them off, as a lion pounces on a shepherdless flock, harries the sheep, and bears off the lambs to his den. “I will go,” said the almighty Redeemer and lover of Israel, “and return to My place, till they acknowledge their offense, and seek My face: in their affliction they will seek Me early.”
On hearing this there is an immediate revulsion of feeling. “Come,” the people cry, “and let us return unto the Lord: for He hath torn, and He will heal us; He hath smitten, and He will bind us up.... Let us know, let us follow on to know the Lord.” But as soon as their words are reported the Almighty seems to say:” I have heard all this many times before; from the days of the judges, when My people have been stricken for their rebellions, they have turned to Me with promises of amendment, which have never been realized. They have always suffered the same fate. Their goodness has been like the morning cloud, and as the dew that goeth early away. O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee? O Judah, what shall I do unto thee? Something more must be done, but what? It is useless to look to resolutions and promises of amendment as the foundation of the new life. I must go further, and lay My hand to establish something that shall become the steadfast foundation of a lasting edifice.,,
The divine question, “What shall I do unto thee?” is answered in the proclamation of the new covenant. “What shall I do? I will give My Son. What shall I do? I will give My Spirit. What shall I do? I will come and indwell. What shall I do? I will expend blood for their cleansing, and fire for their sanctification. What shall I do? I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers, in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them forth out of the land of Egypt; for they continued not in My covenant, and I regarded them not. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days: I will put my laws into their mind, and on their heart also will I write them.” This is the difference between the old covenant, under which God’s people lived in the days of Hosea, and the new covenant, which was introduced to take its place and remedy its confessed failure. For if that first covenant had been faultless, then would no place have been sought for a second. But there was a disannulling of the former because of its weakness and unprofitableness, for it made nothing perfect.
The difference between the first covenant and the second may be therefore stated in a word. Under the first, Israel, after the flesh, sought to realize its fair ideals and fulfil its resolutions in the energy of its own will and power; under the second, God enters the heart, in Jesus and through the Holy Spirit, to effect within us His own ideal, and to make permanently our own those visions of beauty that, like the New Jerusalem, come down to us from God out of heaven. It is because we choose to live under the old, rather than to exercise our privileges under the new, that our goodness, like Israel’s, has resembled the morning cloud and the dew that goeth early away.
We hear an appeal for some dire need, and beneath the burning eloquence of the speaker we resolve to give, say, five pounds, for the relief of the sufferers, it may be in Armenia or in the droughtstricken provinces of northern India. But when his voice has ceased we think that half the amount will suffice, while on the following morning we deem half a guinea ample, even if we have not altogether receded from our resolve.
We hear a sermon on the nobility and beauty of a life of self-sacrifice; we are told that the fullest field for its manifestation is in the home; we see how we may acquire this noble quality amid the daily attrition and fret of the home circle, and are quite anxious to get back to commence; but when we find ourselves face to face with the hard facts, the harsh reality, the thorns and briers, our resolution fails us, and we are as crabbed, awkward, and morose as ever; it seems impossible to break through the reign of frost and be genial, tender, and self-forgetting. Again our goodness has become as the morning cloud.
We hear an address on the need for more prayer, more Bible study. The still hour with God is so presented as to enthrall our interest and enchain our desires. We hear the Master saying, “Can ye not watch with Me one hour? “and ardently respond, “With all our hearts, ‘On the following morning we spring from our couch an hour earlier than our wont; the next morning we manage only half an hour; and within a day or two we are just as sluggish and careless as ever. Our goodness is like the morning cloud.
What can God do with such characters? It is impossible to build temples on shifting quicksands or drive nails into rotten wood. Unless something more is done, all life will be consumed in making resolutions and breaking them; in repenting and relapsing; in dashing merrily down the slope, and in laboriously dragging the sled up to the summit again. Therefore God comes to us with the new covenant, sealed with the precious blood of Jesus, and made effective by the inworking of the Holy Spirit. And each time we raise the cup of the Holy Supper to our lips we ostensibly claim that He will fulfil all its provisions within us and do according to His most gracious engagements — writing His laws on mind and heart, and causing them to appear in character and life. We seem to say, “O blood of Christ, be thou the impassable barrier between me and my past life of failure and disappointment; and do Thou, O blessed Spirit, work in me mightily to will and do of God’s good pleasure, that I may work out what Thou dost work in.”
It is impossible to exaggerate, O soul of man, what God is prepared to do for thee, so that thy goodness should never again be as the morning cloud. Dare to believe in His all-sufficiency, and, having faith in the operation of that mighty power which raised Jesus from the dead, dare once more to resolve. Though thou hast resolved and failed a thousand times, dare to resolve again, and intrust the keeping of thy resolves to thy faithful Redeemer, believing that He will accomplish in thee and for thee all that He has taught thee to desire.
Our resolutions may then take three directions, as suggested in this paragraph.
First, let us resolve to return. “Come, let us return unto the Lord.” Back from the far country to the old place in the Father’s home.
Second, let us resolve to know God. “And let us know.”
Third, let us resolve to follow on to know the Lord, with unswerving patience, till we know even as we are known.
The inception of these resolutions on our part is very grateful to God. His nature longs for our love and trust as the parched soil does for rain. We do not sufficiently apprehend how necessary we are to God, how dear, or how longed for. The first symptom of increasing earnestness is welcomed by Him, as the parched vegetation thankfully welcomes the sound of the abundance of rain, or drinks in the first few pattering drops of descending moisture.
He will do more than welcome: He will protect, maintain, and quicken into stronger and healthier growth. The Holy Spirit will take charge of the feebly smoking flax and fan its flame into a fire.
He which hath begun the good work will complete it. There shall be a perfecting of the tender purpose, a blossoming of the fragile bud. Is not this included in that nourishing and cherishing which is predicted of the Lord’s body, and which might be applied to a nurse’s or mother’s solicitude for some flickering baby life, that keeps standing still and asking whether or not it should continue, or whether it would not be better to give up the fight altogether? “After two days will He revive us, on the third day He will raise us up, and we shall live before Him.” The power that raised Jesus from the dead on the third day waits to do as much for us, not spasmodically and intermittently, but regularly, certainly, ceaselessly, until it seats us, beyond all principality and power, beside His own steadfast throne.
Let us, then, gird up the loins of our mind, and resolve again in the resurrection grace of the Holy Spirit. Let us dare to register vows of absolute consecration and surrender, laying aside every weight and the sin that doth so easily beset, and let us follow on with patience to know the Lord; and as we do so we shall find ourselves strengthened with all might, according to His glorious power, unto all patience and long-suffering. We cannot expect to snatch so great an attainment with one swift rush; we must follow on, placing it before us as an acquisition which, at all cost and by any sacrifice, must be ours. And it shall be ours; for, though His going forth is as gentle and gradual as the morning, it is as sure. As an old saint said, with a touch of a heartbreak in her tone, “The Almighty is tedious, but He’s sure.”
Let us take the grand old rendering,” His going forth is prepared as the morning.,, The spot of the earth’s surface on which you live has taken leave of the sunshine, and is plunging ever farther and farther into the blackness of darkness; as the hour of midnight strikes you are as far removed as possible from the last gleams of the evening glow; but you are hastening toward the dawn, which awaits you in solemn pomp. Let the lonely night-watcher understand that at each swing of the pendulum he is hurrying to meet the smile of the morn which awaits his coming, in preparation of golden clouds and bars of amber light and delicate tints of green and azure.
The morning is prepared; it waits; it has been decked by the hand of the Creator to comfort and bless the returning hilltops and seas and flowers and homes of men. Dare to believe that so God is waiting for you — only follow on. Do not be dismayed by the darkness — follow on. Do not give up heart and hope because the delay is so long — follow on. Do not be wanting through lightness or fickleness — follow on. God will break on thee in all the loveliness of His being; thou shalt see His glory in the face of Jesus; the dawn of a more tender and intimate fellowship is nigh; only follow on till the voice of the herald is heard crying, “Arise, shine; thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.”