Hosea: God's Response to our Stuff*
Hosea: God's Response to our Stuff*
Introduction:
There was a sadness in the separation of Northern and Southern Kingdoms after the death of Solomon (1 Kings 12)
There was insecurity in the Northern Kingdom (Israel or Ephraim or Samaria) as 2 Kings 14-17 describe. They were a vassal state paying tribute to the bully Assyria, until they were besieged and finally taken into exile.
Our Stuff*
“There is no faithfulness, hesed, or yada.” 4.1; 6.6
Breakdown in leaders and people alike, “like people, like priest.” 4.9
1. “We will figure it out on our own.” Alliances with Assyria & Egypt
They go to Cosmic (Hosea) 7.11: “Silly and without sense, calling out to Egypt, going to Assyria.”
They cry, but not to me. (7.14).
They come back, but not to me. (7.16)
They make decisions, but without consulting me. (8.4)
Why is an alliance attractive? Security!
2. Deity Tinder. Idolatry with our local gods.
“My people inquire of a piece of wood.” 4.12
During times of insecurity, we are tempted to see God as a means to our own ends. We put God on trial. God has to justify himself and his ways to us. Deity Tinder is the ultimate swipe left/swipe right.
They keep building altars, but not to me (8.11)
Why are idols attractive? They are tailor-made! We control them. They answer to us.
God’s Response: Pathos
God’s heartbreak when Israel looks for salvation in Egypt. “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son” (Hosea 11.1)
1. Anger
4 But I am the LORD your God from the land of Egypt; you know no God but me, and besides me there is no savior.
5 It was I who knew you in the wilderness, in the land of drought;
6 but when they had grazed, they became full, they were filled, and their heart was lifted up; therefore they forgot me.
7 So I am to them like a lion; like a leopard I will lurk beside the way.
8 I will fall upon them like a bear robbed of her cubs; I will tear open their breast, and there I will devour them like a lion, as a wild beast would rip them open. - Hosea 13:4-8
“How deeply Hosea must have sensed the pathos of God to have been able to convey such dreadful words against his own people whom he loved so deeply. These words, however, were neither a final judgment nor an actual prediction. Their true intention was to impart the intensity of divine anger. And yet that anger did not express all that God felt about the people. Intense is His anger, but profound is His compassion. It is as if there was a dramatic tension in God.” Abraham Heschel, The Prophets, 56-57.
God’s is a justified anger, and Israel’s (and our’s) a punishable offense.
8 How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender.
9 I will not execute my burning anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and not a man, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath. - Hosea 11:8-9
2. Love (Heschel)
Love expressed as compassion (11.8)
Love expressed as a mother’s tenderness (1.6-8, 2.3,6,21,25, 11.1)
Love expressed as that between a husband and wife. (3.1)
What does that kind of pathos look like? Like the Marriage and family of your nightmares: Gomer and Hosea and their delightful kids Jezreel (punishment), No Mercy, and Not My People.
This story is so visceral in pathos and offensive, Ibn Ezra, Maimonides, and other commentators have taken this to be either a dream or an allegory. (Heschel)
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. - 1 Peter 2:9-10
Integration Question:
First, introduce yourselves to one another. Hosea’s wife was Gomer and they had kids named “No Mercy” and “Not My People.” Share the strangest name you have ever heard.
1. The Prophet Hosea presents God as feeling deeply. This is what the author, Abraham Heschel calls “pathos.” What have you felt more deeply during this time of quarantine?
2. Heschel writes, “To the prophets, God was overwhelmingly real and shatteringly present; they never spoke of Him as from a distance” (286). They “knew” (yada) God. And, they wanted their hearers to know Him too. What do you know—I mean, really know—about God? What do you want those you love to know about Him?
How can this small group pray for you during this next week? The host will close the group in prayer.
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