The Kingdom of God. John Bright
generations. But heretofore the hope had persisted that the state could be made God’s order, or at least driven into some conformity with it, by political action. Amos quite gave up any hope of this. Indeed, after Jehu’s horror any sensible man might. It is true that Amos was taken for a revolutionary, another nābî’ plotter preaching sedition against the state (7:10-13), but his indignant denial (7:14-15) is borne out by the facts. Here is a new thing: never again, so far as we know, did a prophet seek to reform the state by direct political action.
But we certainly cannot see in this any lessening of tension with the state, but rather a heightening of it. There is no attempt to purge the state, because the state is beyond external correction. It is under the judgment of God. The bond between Israel and God has been broken; idolatry, gross immorality, and unbrotherly greed on a nationwide scale have broken it. “Call his name Lo-ammi, for you are not my people and I will not be your God,” said Hosea (1:9). And since Israel has parted company with God, is truly no longer his people, all her exuberant confidence in the future is a false confidence. She has no future but utter and inescapable ruin. Thus it was that Amos leaped upon the popular desire for the Day of Yahweh, the day when Yahweh would intervene in history to establish his rule and to judge his foes. Israel has nothing to hope for from that day—for Israel is herself among Yahweh’s foes:
Ah you that eagerly desire the Day of Yahweh,
What do you want with the Day of Yahweh?
it is darkness, not light;
As if a man were fleeing from a lion,
and a bear attacks him;
Or were to come home and lean his hand on the wall,
and a snake bites him.
Is not the Day of Yahweh darkness and not light,
even black darkness with not a ray of light in it?
(5:18-20)
Here is the most shockingly novel note in all eighth-century prophecy: that God can and will cast off his people. This note runs through Amos’ preaching and rises to a thundering crescendo: “Behold, the eyes of Lord Yahweh are on the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from off the face of the earth” (9:8a). God has rejected the Israelite state, and has rejected it totally.
This meant that the hope of the establishment of the Kingdom of God—the hope embodied in the dream of the Day of Yahweh—began to be divorced from the Israelite state and driven beyond it. The northern kingdom is under sentence of death; Israel’s hopes can never be fulfilled in terms of that kingdom. If we had to put Amos’ message in a word, might we not paraphrase it thus? The Kingdom of Israel is not the Kingdom of God! It can neither be that Kingdom nor inherit it. It cannot be the Kingdom of God, because it has flouted the laws of God and violated the covenant brotherhood. The Kingdom of Israel is under the judgment of God—and the judgment is history!
4. Let us not suppose that the words of Amos are ancient words. They are very modern. They are spoken to us and clamor for our attention. We dare not refuse to listen, for it is very late. We are, to be sure, in all externals as little like ancient Israel as possible. Yet in us there is written her hope, and also her delusion and her failure.
We, too, have longed and do long for the Kingdom of God, and dark days heighten the longing. Of course, tongue-tied as we are in the language of faith, we would never put it that way. We would speak of an end to war and fear, a community of nations, the triumph of justice and brotherhood, a moral world order. But there is small difference, in the stuff of it, between what we long for and the hope of ancient Israel that God’s people would one day be established under his rule to live out its days in peace and plenty. We earnestly desire the Kingdom of God, although we do not know by what name to call it. With but a recollection of a parent’s recollection of a grandparent’s faith in that Kingdom, we desire it because we cannot help doing so.
But we might ask to what extent Amos’ indictment of society is applicable to us today. In one sense the answer is obvious: it is fully applicable. It takes no skill, nor even a very sharp conscience, to point out that our society, like that of ancient Israel, is shot through with the crimes which Amos denounced: injustice and greed, immorality, pleasure-loving ease, and venality. Nor does one have to be a Cassandra to understand that these things are society’s sickness, for which a doctor’s bill will surely have to be paid. The indictment of Amos is an indictment of all societies, including our own.
But are we then to apply directly to our society the thundering negation which Amos gave to the hope of the Israelite kingdom? Have we nothing to look forward to but an impending and well-deserved doom? There is a sense in which to say so would not seem fair. To admit that we are guilty before the indictment of Amos is to say but half the truth. For, if compared with other societies that have existed and do exist, ours is not a bad society at all but a very good one. We are a nation founded on Christian principles; our political institutions and our national dogma of the rights and the dignity of man have grown out of these principles. We have so many churches, and these have so many active members, that we can claim to be a Christian nation. What is more, the shadow of the Church and her teachings falls across the nation and the national character more powerfully than most of us realize. The indictment of Amos, and of the other prophets and of Christ, has been, in a measure, taken seriously: stupendous efforts have been made to better the lot of mankind; injustices have been corrected and will continue to be corrected. Ours is a society as good to live in as any that has ever been. We ought to give thanks for it. For all its obvious faults it is worth defending; if we do not defend it, we are forty times purblind. Surely we may pray for God’s guidance as we do so!
But will we then commit the fatal error? Will we, like Israel, imagine that our destiny under God and God’s purposes in history are to be realized in terms of the society we have built? The temptation to do so is subtle. After all, we may claim a Christian heritage from which human liberties have flowed; we have churches and support them lavishly; but Communism, for example, is totally godless and so destructive of all that is noble in man that scarcely one redeeming thing can be said of it. Between the two there is simply no comparison. Surely God, if he be just, will further our efforts and will defend us from his foe and ours—for we are his good Christian people! As for ourselves, we will labor and pray for the winning of the world to Christ and the victory of his Kingdom—for it is either that sort of world or a chaos in which nothing which we value would be safe. And if the victory of Christ—which we tend to equate with our own best interests—seems remote, we will turn to yet busier activity, for that is all we know how to do. Surely if we thus energetically serve him, God will protect us and give us the victory!
To this hope Amos speaks a resounding No! Let us understand his words clearly: God does not in that sense have favored people. No earthly state is established of God, guaranteed of God, and identified with his purposes. Nor has any earthly order, however good, the means of setting up God’s order in terms of its own ends. On the contrary, all societies are under the judgment of God’s order, and those that have been favored with the light doubly so! Indeed, before we can have any hope of a righteous order established by God, we must, like Israel, learn that our order is not God’s but must conform to it or perish. Wherever, says Amos, the schism of society is set forward, there is society perishing. Wherever men who have known of righteousness can speak only of their right to crowd for what they can get; wherever men who have known of Christian brotherhood behave as if they believed in favored races; wherever men who have heard a higher calling grow soft in the enjoyment of the ease that money can buy—there is society under judgment. And the judgment is history. Nor will it greatly matter to those who have to face it whether the barbaric tool of that judgment is Assyria or Russia.
Does Amos then leave society no hope? For sinful society, as sinful society, none! Man’s disorder cannot inherit the Kingdom of God but must, on the contrary, live ever in history’s judgment. The very hope of peace must remain for it a Utopian dream, which it pursues as a will-o’-the-wisp. Nor are there any external means by which an unrighteous society may avert the judgment that awaits it. Certainly the busy activity of its religion, and the formal correctness of its worship, is of no avail. It is true—although Amos does not mention