Hosea 13:2 And now they sin more and more, and have made them molten images of their silver, and idols according to their own understanding… The emphasis is where you would not expect it to be; it is upon the words "all of it." There is not one sacred spot in any idol; there is not one faint signature of the living God upon anything that man has made with his own hands to worship; it is as if eyes of fire had searched the idols through and through, and as if the hands of critics had written their record, and reported in these words: The idol is all base, all dross, all material; all of it is the work of the hands of craftsmen. Men cannot step from the finite to the infinite. A finite creature cannot make an infinite idol. Whatever is made is less than the maker. If a man has made a god, he is greater than the god he has made. To have genius and power to make it is to have another genius and power equal to condemn it. Men get tired of what they halve made. Ambition may arise and say, Make a better; then comes the displacement of the former god, amid every sign and token of contempt. These words should be cried out poignantly, bitterly, sarcastically. A man is standing before the idol, and he has gone through it atom by atom, so to speak, lineament by lineament, and he says at the end — "all of it" there is not one speck of heavenly gold in all. this handful. of earthly rubbish. "They say of them, Let the men that sacrifice kiss the calves." It was said in Israel concerning the calves, "These be thy gods, O Israel." To kiss was in the ancient times a sign of homage, either human or Divine. Men kissed their gods. When they could not kiss their gods, as, for example, in the instance of the heavenly bodies, they kissed their fingers, and waved their kissed hands to the objects of worship. The Divine Being does not hesitate to accept this action, and give it its highest meaning, hence in the Second Psalm there is one who says, "Kiss the Son, lest He be angry, and ye perish from the way." That man should have descended to kiss a god of his own making is the consummation of weakness, and the very climax of ignorance and blasphemy. All this happened in ancient times. That is true, but all this happens letter for letter to-day. Man cannot get beyond the tether of his race. It is man that is tethered; not a man, some man, a particular and dying man, but humanity. We are all in one condemnation; the act of homage has not ceased, the object of desire may have changed. Men live in circumstances, and are lost in details, and therefore it is probable that they may imagine if they have substituted some other object for the calves of Israel, therefore they have left the old idolatry. That is not so. If a man be trusting to his own right arm, he is as great an idolater as any that ever lived in Israel. Whoso says he has money enough to keep out the difficulties of time, the slaves of want, and therefore he need not concern himself with providence in any spiritual or metaphysical sense, is as much an idolater as he who in uncivilised lands bows down to stock or stone, or lifts eyes of wondering ignorance to the blue heavens that he may fix them upon something of which he will make the image of a god. Yet all these heathen practices admit of the highest applications. Let no man reject nature, it is God's handiwork; no craftsman made the sun; no hireling servant set the stars in their places. If any poor heart, iii at ease, should pick out some fair-faced star and say, Be thou god to me, it might be the beginning of a higher religion, the truer and nobler faith. These are mysteries, and are not to be spoken about scornfully. He does not know the human heart who says to men who know no better, that idolatry is a sin. It was a sin in Israel, because it involved backsliding from the true God; but find a man in a savage land who has never heard of God or Christ, and to whom the words, father, mother, brother, sister, carry no dew of blessing, no colour of poetry, no suggestion of wider and eternal fellowships — find a man there clinging to but a handful of mud in the expectation that there is something in it that can help him, and it is no sin: it should be the business of those who know better to, teach him better: let what he has seized be the alphabet out of which to make words, and music, and wisdom. (Joseph Parker, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And now they sin more and more, and have made them molten images of their silver, and idols according to their own understanding, all of it the work of the craftsmen: they say of them, Let the men that sacrifice kiss the calves. |
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