Divine withdrawal

He hath withdrawn Himself from them.
Hosea 5:6

"Withdrawn" is a word that may well chill our heart. It would be enough to express intolerable displeasure, if it stood just as it stands in this verse; but a larger meaning belongs to the word. "Withdrawn" is in some senses a negative relation, but it was a distinctly positive and we may add repelling action which the Lord meant to convey by the use of the term. All words were originally pictures, and the real dictionary when it appears will be pictorial. The Lord in this instance frees Himself from them. That is the literal and broader meaning of the prophecy. He releases Himself, He detaches Himself, He shakes off an encumbrance, a nuisance, a claim that is without righteousness. This may be taken in two senses.
1. The people are going with flocks and herds as if bent on sacrificial purpose; they will give the Lord any quantity of blood — hot, reeking blood; but the Lord says, I will have no more of your sacrifices; they are an abomination to Me; I hate all the programme of ritual and ceremony and attitude, if it fail to express a hunger and a reverence of the heart and mind. So the Lord is seen here in the act of taking up all these flocks and herds, and all these unwilling priests, and freeing Himself from them, throwing them away, as men pass out of their custody things that are offensive, worthless, and corrupting. Or —
2. It may mean that the Lord shakes Himself free from the clutch of hands that have no heart in them: He will walk alone. He will not give up His shepherdliness, though He have no flock to follow Him. Every woman is mother, every man is father, and a man is not the less father that all his children are thrice dead, and are as plants plucked up by the roots, and cast out to the burning. The shepherdliness is not determined by the number of sheep following or going before; shepherdliness is a quality, a disposition, an inspiration, an eternal solicitude. If need be God will continue His shepherdliness though every sheep go astray, and every lamb should die. Mark the disastrous possibility! Men may be left without "God; the Almighty and All-merciful may have retired, gone away; away into the shade, the darkness of night; He may have enshrouded Himself in a pavilion of thick darkness, where our poor prayers are lost on the outside. To this dreadful issue things may come.
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