Bible Commentaries

CALF-RELIGION

‘Thy calf, O Samaria, hath cast thee off.’

Hosea 8:5

I. Man is a religious animal.—Both terms in this definition are needed to describe him. Man has what a molluse has not, namely, a conscience. And man’s conscience tells him that he must be religious.

To be religious is something more than simply to be moral. Our word morality comes from the Latin word for manners, and relates itself simply with the etiquette of earth. It does not look above earth’s depressed levels. Religion, on the other hand, though not, perhaps, etymologically the thing that ‘binds back’ to God, is practically the energising belief which associates the spiritual nature of man with a superhuman being, thus supplying the heavenly sanctions and impulses for a true morality.

II. An unfortunate tendency, however, is observable in many directions to disassociate the idea of religion from that of morals, as though a man might be religious or moral, either or neither, as he chooses. But pure religion is morality spiritualised, spirituality etherised, and only exists when the life of the human subject is absorbed in the grace and service of Him Whose will and worship alone make a religious religion possible.

Men do not, will not, always recognise this, and go about to establish a righteousness and a religiousness of their own. Hence results a multiplication of man-made ‘faiths,’ which, during history’s crowded, diversified day spring up for awhile, like rank-growing weeds, but having no deepness of earthly rootage, after a little fade away and disappear. Page after page of the annals of the race are occupied with the records of such futile attempts to manufacture novel forms of religion.

III. This sort of arbitrarily conceived and artificially cultivated piety may well be denominated calf-religion.—The term is suggested by the course of the scheming Jeroboam, who was not prepared wholly to break with the past, nor to be entirely iconoclastic in respect to the old faiths of united Israel. He would make two calves, yet he would not cry over them a wholly pagan cry of ‘gods,’ but would try to persuade Israel to make the calves a symbolic means of the lifting of their thoughts to the one God on high.

IV. By calf-religion, therefore, we mean a crude, incomplete, unsympathetic imitation of true religion or awkward travesty on genuine faith.—The inferior imitation may not consist literally of two golden images of the calf Mnevis, but the deceptive, underlying Satanry is the same in every period, under many forms of particular manifestation. Anything that takes man a little distance toward the worship of God, but halts him far this side of the true position of a spiritual adoration, is a phase of calf-religion.

Again, superstitious obscurations of the light of revelation, veiling its doctrines from the view of the common people, are but stupid bovine exhibits of unintelligent piety. The system of Islam, an unartistic and unreliable amalgam of Jewish, Persian, and Christian elements, a patchwork of Abraham, Gabriel, and Mohammed, is a colossal calf now planted over a far wider domain than from Bethel to Dan.

So, too, sordid admixtures of greed with godliness, counting godliness without contentment to be great gain, are thoroughly foreign to the purposes and spirit of a true faith, since a calf is no less a calf because made of gold. Such covetousness, from Korah to Simon the sorcerer, and from Simon the sorcerer to modern times, is an unrelenting and irreconcilable foe of spirituality.

Heretical distortions of the faith once delivered to the saints are vealy, too. Heresy is at best immature doctrine, and at worst it is a decaying carrion. Jeroboam’s calves may have been shiny beasts, and his counsel to Israel, ‘Ye have gone up to Jerusalem long enough,’ appeared very plausible. ‘Jerusalem is not up to date’ was what he meant to say, ‘and the doctrines down there are a trifle hard. Let us make our own theology hereafter, up here at Bethel and Dan, where the critical breezes blow freer, where “traditionalists” cease from troubling and innocent innovators are at rest.

V. Still, calves are calves, even if they are new calves, and Jeroboam was wrong, even though he was a radical. His whole scheme of revised Judaism is dismissed by the sacred chronicler with the decisive comment: “This thing became a sin.” That is the trouble with calf-religion. It makes people to sin. The chief trouble with it is not that it causes people to be disappointed and discouraged, but disobedient to the heavenly vision, to the pattern of true piety shown once for all from the mount. No Jeroboam can make a religion. A Divine Author holds the copyright on revelation.

Illustration

‘Riches will cast you off; the world will cast you off; pleasure will fling you from her polluted arms over into the pit; let me tell you of One Who will not—will never cast you off. May I prevail on one and another to come; and cast themselves into His arms; and close this hour with His offered mercy? A great statesman, abandoned in his old age by his sovereign, lay dying one day in England; and it is recorded of him that he said, “If I had served my God as faithfully as I have served my king, He had not cast me off now.” How true, Blessed God! Thou wilt never abandon any who put their trust in Thee. “They that trust in the Lord shall be as Mount Zion, that cannot be moved.” I have seen an earthly master cast off an old, faithful servant. When his hair was grey, and his back was bent, and his arm was withered, and his once stalwart, iron frame was worn out in service, he has been thrown on the parish, or the cold charity of the world. Blessed Jesus! Thou never didst cast off any old servant or old soldier of Thine!’