Grace and Glory

Geerhardus Vos

• Publisher: GLH Publishing
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781648630712
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

This work contains six sermons preached at Princeton Seminary in the early 1900's by the great scholar of Biblical Theology reflecting the power of the word of God. It is clear that Vos has wrestled with every text and has come away having better known its challenges and wanting to share what he has discovered. John Murray said of him, "Dr. Vos is, in my judgment, the most penetrating exegete it has been my privilege to know, and I believe, the most incisive exegete that has appeared in the English-speaking world in this century."

Grace

and

Glory

Geerhardus Vos

GLH Publishing

Louisville, KY

Sermons Preached in the Chapel of Princeton Theological Seminary

Originally published in 1922.

Public Domain.

Republished by GLH Publishing, 2021.

ISBN:

Paperback 978-1-64863-070-5

Epub 978-1-64863-071-2

For information on new releases, weekly deals, and free ebooks visit
www.GLHpublishing.com

Contents

I. The Wonderful Tree

II. Hungering and Thirsting After Righteousness

III. Seeking and Saving the Lost

IV. “Rabboni!”

V. The More Excellent Ministry

VI. Heavenly-Mindedness

I. The Wonderful Tree

“I am like a green fir-tree; from me is thy fruit found.”

Hosea xiv. 8.

This prophetic utterance represents one of the two inseparable sides in the make-up of religion. If we say that religion consists of what God is for man, and of what man is for God, then our text in the divine statement, “From me is thy fruit found,” stands for the former. To balance it with the other side some such word as that of Isaiah might be taken, “The vineyard of Jehovah of Hosts is the house of Israel.” Nor would it be an arbitrary combination of disconnected passages thus pointedly to place the one over against the other. In each case a careful study of the prophet would reveal that not some incidental turn of thought, but an habitual point of view, imparting tone and color to the entire religious experience, had found expression in a characteristic form of statement. The two points of view are supplementary, and, taken together, exhaustive of what the normal relation between God and man involves. Until we learn to unite the Isaiah-type of piety with that of Hosea, we shall not attain a full and harmonious development of our religious life.

Let us this time look at the half-circle of truth expressed by the older prophet. The text stands in the most beautiful surroundings, not merely within Hosea’s own prophecy, but in the entire Old Testament. There is a charm about this chapter more easily felt than described. It is like the clear shining after rain, when the sun riseth, a morning without clouds. In what precedes there is much that is hard to understand. Hosea’s style is abrupt, full of strange leaps from vision to vision. But here we suddenly pass out of the labyrinth of involved oracles into the clear open. It is a prophecy suffused with deep feeling. All the native tenderness of the prophet, the acute sensitiveness and responsiveness of his emotional nature, rendering him, as it were, a musical instrument expectant of the Spirit’s touch, are here in striking evidence; the dissonances of the many prophecies of woe resolve themselves in the sweet harmony of a closing prophecy of promise. And besides, the incomparable light of the future shines upon this chapter. It is bathed in the glory of the latter days, those glories which no prophet could describe without giving forth the finest notes of which his organ was capable. In the repertoire of the prophets the choicest always belongs to the farthest. When their eye rests on the world to come, a miracle is wrought in their speech, so that, in accord with the things described, it borrows from the melodies of the other world.

Still the spell thrown upon our minds by this piece is by no means wholly, or even chiefly, due to its form. It is the peculiar content that captivates the heart as the music captivates the ear. It is not to be expected of any prophet that he shall put into his prophecies relating to the end indiscriminately of his treasure, but chiefly what is to him its most precious part, that which the Spirit of revelation had led him, and him above others, to apprehend and appreciate. From utterances of this kind, therefore, we get our best perception of what lay nearest to the prophet’s heart. So, certainly, it is here with Hosea. In its last analysis, the charm of this chapter is none other than the innate charm of the prophet’s most cherished acquaintance with Jehovah. And, applied to the future, this may be summed up in the idea that the possession of Jehovah Himself by his people will be of all the delights of the world to come the chief and most satisfying, the paradise within the paradise of God. The whole description leads up to this and revolves around it. As preparing for it, the return to Jehovah is mentioned first. The end of the great change is that the people may once more live in the presence of God. The prayer the prophet puts upon their lips is, “Take away all iniquity,” with the emphasis upon the all, so as to indicate that not otherwise than by the absolute removal of all sin can the cloudless atmosphere be created for the supreme enjoyment of God. And the people pledge that their eyes and hearts henceforth shall be closed to the lure of idols. As a helpless orphan Israel casts herself upon Jehovah’s grace: “We will not say anymore to the work of our hands, ye are our gods, for in Thee the fatherless findeth mercy.” But clearest of all the idea appears in the direct speech Jehovah is represented as in that day addressing the people, to the effect that He Himself is eagerly desirous to pour out the riches of his affection upon the heart of Israel and meet her desire for Him to the utmost measure of its capacity: “I have answered and will regard him; I will be as the dew to Israel: he shall blossom as the lily, and cast forth his roots as Lebanon. His branches shall spread, and his beauty shall be as the olive-tree, and his smell as Lebanon. They shall revive as the grain, and blossom as the vine; I am like a green fir-tree; from me is thy fruit found.”

It will be seen from this that our text is really the climax of this speech of Jehovah. Through the addition of image to image the divine purpose of giving Himself gathers intensity, till at last God appears as a green tree, bearing fruit for his people. This is truly a marvelous representation, well adapted to startle us, when we think ourselves into it. It seems to imply something in God that, in the desire for self-communication exceeds even the strongest affection of a human parent for his children. And yet, my hearers, when reflecting upon it for a moment, can we fail to observe that the marvel in it is nothing else than the heart-miracle of all true religion, the great paradox underlying all God’s concern with us. That He, the all-sufficient One, forever rich and blessed in Himself, should, as it were, take Himself in His own hands, making of Himself an object to be bestowed upon a creature, so as to change before the eyes of the prophet into a tree, showering its fruit upon Israel, lavish as nothing in all nature but a tree can be, this surely is something to be wondered at, and something which, though it recurs a thousand times, no experience or enjoyment ought to be able to rob of its wonder. There is in it more than we convey by the term “communion with God.” That admits of relativity, there are degrees in it, but this figure depicts the thing in its highest and deepest possibility, as flowing from the divine desire so to take us into the immediate, intimate circle of his own life and blessedness, as to make all its resources serve our delight, a river of pleasures from his right hand. It might almost seem as if there were here a reversal of the process of religion itself, inasmuch as God appears putting Himself at the service of man, and that with the absolute generosity born of supreme love. This relation into which it pleases God to receive Israel with Himself has in it a sublime abandon; it knows neither restraint nor reserve. Using human language one might say that God enters into this heart and soul and mind and strength. Since God thus gives Himself to his people for fruition, and his resources are infinite, there is no possibility of their ever craving more or seeking more of Him than it is good for them to receive. To deprive religion of this, by putting it upon the barren basis of pure disinterestedness, is not merely a pretense to be wiser than God; it is also an act of robbing God of His own joy through refusing the joy into which He has, as it were, resolved Himself for us. So far from being a matter of gloom and depression, religion in its true concept is an exultant state, the supreme feast and sabbath of the soul.

Of course, in saying this, we do not forget that such religion in its absoluteness can be for a fallen race but a memory and a hope. The painful and distressing elements that enter into our Christian experience are by no means the product of a perverted and bigoted imagination. Religion need not be in error or insincere when it makes man put ashes on his head, instead of every day anointing his countenance with the oil of gladness. In order to be of any use whatever to us in a state of sin it must assume the form of redemption, and from redemption the elements of penitence and pain are inseparable. Here lies the one source of all the discomfort and self-repression entering into the occupation of man with God, of the sad litany which revealed religion, and to some extent even natural religion, has chanted through the ages. Let no one in a spirit of superficial light-heartedness ridicule it, for, though it may have its excrescences and hypocrisies, in itself it is as inevitable as the joy of religion itself. There is as much reason to pity the man to whom religion has brought no sorrow as the one to whom it has brought no joy. The bitter herbs may not be omitted from the Paschal feast of deliverance. Perhaps the saddest thing to be said of sin is that it has thus been able to invade religion at its very core of joy, injecting into it the opposite of its nature. And yet it is equally true that there is no religious joy like the joy engendered by redemption. Nor is this simply due to the law of contrast which makes the relief of deliverance proportionate to the pain which it succeeds. A more particular cause is at work here. In redemption God opens up Himself to us and surrenders his inner life to our possession in a wholly unprecedented manner of which the religion of nature can have neither dream nor anticipation. It is more clearly in saving us than in creating us that God shows Himself God. To taste and feel the riches of his Godhead, as freely given unto us, one must have passed not only through the abjectness and poverty and despair of sin but through the overwhelming experience of salvation. He who is saved explores and receives more of God than unfallen man or even the unfallen angel can. The song of Moses and of the Lamb has in it a deeper exultation than that which the sons of God and the morning-stars sang together for joy in the Creator.

This redemptive self-communication of God is what the prophet has particularly in mind in recording the promise of our text. As already stated, it is a gift of the future, and, of course, the entire future stands to him, as to every prophet, in the sign of redemption. Not as if the future meant only redemption. There is no more characteristic trait in prophecy than that it never makes the crisis of judgment a road to mere restoration of what existed before, but the occasion for the bringing in of something wholly new and unexperienced in the past, so that Jehovah comes out of the conflict, not as one who has barely snatched his work from destruction, but as the great Victor who has made the forces of sin and evil his servants for the accomplishment of a higher and wider purpose. There is an exact correspondence in this respect between the large movement of redemption, taken as a whole, and the enactment of its principles on a smaller scale within the history of Israel. As the second Adam is greater than the first, and the paradise of the future fairer than that of the past, so the new-born Israel to the prophet’s vision is a nobler figure and exists under far more favorable conditions than the empirical Israel of before. Once its Peniel-night is over, it will live in the light and feed upon the goodness of God, and be beautified through its religious embrace of Him. This thought is not unclearly suggested by the very figure of our text. Whatever may be the precise tree species designated by the word “berosh,” here rendered as fir-tree, at any rate an evergreen is meant, a tree retaining its verdure in all seasons of the year, never failing in its power to shade and to refresh. The reason is none other than that for which in vs. 6 Israel in its beauty is compared to the olive-tree, a tree likewise perennially clothed with foliage. But there is still something else and far more wonderful about this tree. While by nature not a fruit-bearing tree in the ordinary sense, it changes itself into one before the eyes of the prophet. If nothing more than the idea of fruitfulness were intended, the figure of the olive-tree would have lain closer at hand. But the labor of the olive is a process of nature and bound to the seasons, and evidently what Hosea wishes to express is the concurrence in the same tree of miraculous fruitage, perennial yield, and never-failing shade, for the context emphasizes all three. It is evident that we are here in another tree-world than that of Palestine; it is the neighborhood of the tree of life of which we read elsewhere that it yields its fruit every month. Plainly Jehovah is thus represented on account of his specific redemptive productiveness, and that in its heightened future form, when new unheard of influences shall proceed from Him for the nourishing and enjoyment of his people. Surely here is something that nature, even God’s goodness in nature, could never yield. Perhaps we are not assuming too much by finding still another element in the comparison. In emphasizing the verdant, living character of Jehovah with reference to Israel, the prophet may have had in mind, by way of contrast, the pagan deity from which these qualities of life and fruitfulness and miraculous provision are utterly absent. There used to stand beside the altar of idolatry a pole rudely fashioned in the image of Asherah, the spouse of Baal and goddess of fruitfulness. Nothing could have more strikingly symbolized the barrenness and hopelessness of nature worship than this dead stump in which no bud could sprout, and on which no bird would alight, and of which no fruit was to be found forever. How desperate is the plight of those Canaanites, modern no less than ancient, who must look for the satisfaction of their hunger to the dead wood of the Asherah of nature, because they have no faith in the perpetual miracle of the fruit-bearing fir-tree of redemption.

But let us endeavor to ascertain what concrete meaning the prophet attaches to the image of the text. What is the fruit that is promised to Israel? To answer this we shall have to go beyond the confines of the text and look around us in the preceding prophecy. The study of this will teach that there are four outstanding features to Jehovah’s gift to Israel of the fruition of Himself. We find that it is eminently personal, exclusive, individual, and transforming in its influence.

In the first place, then, Israel’s fruition of Jehovah is eminently personal. One might truthfully say that the idea of the possession of one’s God in this pointedly personal sense is an idea grown on the soil of revelation, nurtured by the age-long self-communication of God to his own. To be sure, the thought that the fortunes of life must be related to the deity is a common one in Semitic religion. Edom and Moab and Ammon also have joy before their gods. But this is still something far different from having joy in one’s God. The latter is Israel’s distinction. To have a god and to have God are two things. The difference can be measured by the presence and the absence of the covenant idea in the two different circles. When Jehovah, entering into covenant with Israel says, “I will be unto you a God, and ye shall be unto me a people,” this means infinitely more than the trite idea: henceforth ye shall worship me and I will cultivate you. It is the mutual surrender of person to person. Jehovah throws in his lot with Israel, no less truly than Israel’s lot is bound up with Jehovah. To express it in terms of the text one would have to force the figure and say that not merely the fruit, nor merely the tree for its fruit, but the tree itself, as a glorious living being, is the cherished treasure of the owner. The sense of this is so vivid that it has given rise to the phrase “Portion of Israel” as a personal name of God. To the mind of Hosea the most forcible, indeed final and absolute, expression of this precious truth had been reached in the form of the marriage-union between God and Israel. That is simply a closer specification of the covenant idea, and it brings out precisely that side of it on which we are dwelling, the personal aspect of the union involved. While this is from the nature of the case conceived of as mutual, yet the emphasis rests perceptibly on the divine side of it. To be sure, Israel also personally surrendered herself to Jehovah, for we read that she made answer in the days of her youth, and through Jeremiah God declares: “I remember thee for the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals, how thou wentest after me in the wilderness, in a land that was not sown.” But that was in the beginning; in the sequel Israel soon proved indifferent and faithless. The burden of the message lies in the ascription of this to Jehovah as a permanent, unchangeable disposition. He had not for one moment ceased to be the personal and intimate life companion of Israel. The covenant might be suspended, but so long as it lasted, it could have no other meaning than this, for this lay at its heart. In a number of delicate little touches the prophet reveals his consciousness of it. After the dire calamities of the judgment have overwhelmed the people and seemingly left nothing further to be swept away, then, as a climax, by the side of which all else shrinks into insignificance, Jehovah announces that He will now personally withdraw from Israel. And corresponding to this, after they have sat many days in the desolation of exile, all but divorced from God, the first and supremely important step in their conversion is that they come trembling unto Jehovah and unto his goodliness in the latter days. Even in the Messianic outlook this strongly personal view-point appears. With a peculiarly affectionate turn to the thought the prophet represents the people as in the end seeking David their king, through remembrance of the sure covenant mercies attaching to the name of one who was the man after God’s heart, and thus in himself a pledge of the divine love towards the people. In the sphere of external, terrestrial gifts the same principle applies. Here, of course, revealed religion comes nearest to the circle of ideas of paganism. Baal, no less than Jehovah, is supposed to give to his servants the produce of the soil. But what a principle difference between the attitude in which paganism entertains this idea and the spirit in which the prophet expects Israel to cherish it! The pagan cult cleaves to the sod, and buries itself in the heaps of grain and the rivers of oil, and remembers not, except in the most external way, the god who gave. The worship sits loosely upon the life; it is a habit rather than an organic function, and subject to change, if the turn of fortune requires. Paganized Israel herself is introduced as speaking in the distress of harvest failure, “I will go after my lovers, that give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, mine oil and my drink.” “But,” says Jehovah, “she knew not that I gave her the grain and the must and the oil and multiplied unto her silver and gold.” To Hosea the main principle is that the gifts shall come to the people with the dew of Jehovah’s love upon them, deriving their value not so much from what they are intrinsically but from the fact of their being tokens of affection, to each one of which clings something of the personality of the giver. And Jehovah knows such a special art of putting Himself into these favors; He is not imprisoned in them as are the Baals, but freely lives in and loves through them, so as to make them touch the heart of Israel. When the time of her new betrothal comes, and she sees the gifts for her adornment, she exclaims, “Ishi, my husband!” and no longer “Baali, my lord!” Notice the role that nature plays in effecting this; the externals are by no means despised; they have simply ceased to be externals, and been turned into one great sacramental vehicle of spiritual favor. Jehovah sets in motion the whole circuit of nature for the service of his people: “It shall come to pass in that day, I will answer the heavens and they shall answer the earth, and the earth shall answer the grain and the new wine and the oil, and they shall answer Jezreel.” The things do not mutely grow, they speak, they answer, they sing, and the voice that travels through them is the voice of Jehovah. Nature becomes the instrument of grace. That in the spiritual sphere proper everything proceeds along the same line need hardly be pointed out. God speaks comfortably unto Israel to call her back to repentance. He loves her freely, and it is through making her realize this fact that He effects her return. His bridal gifts to Israel are righteousness and mercy and faithfulness and lovingkindness. The mercy that He shows them in their distress is at bottom something far deeper and finer and more spiritualized than the generic sense of pity. It is chesed, loving-kind...

Table of contents

• I. The Wonderful Tree