Hosea

In the new year, I decided to spend a bit of time in the minor prophets instead of reading through the Bible in a year. There are twelve of them and twelve months in the year, so it seemed like a reasonable plan. Moreover, some of them are quite short (Obadiah, anyone?) and that afforded some flexibility in the study as well.

Because this is the first go-round for me in any depth, I don't expect that it's going to yield insights much beyond the surface. Even so, it's an interesting experience.

Hosea is largely concerned with Israel, that is, the northern kingdom—perhaps better said than kingdom, the whoredom, but there are references made to Judah, too (the book is written during the times of Uzziah, Jotham, and Hezekiah).

There are a few solid bullet point insights I can offer before my time is up:

• Israel was a very religious nation: their primary sin was not that they didn't worship Jehovah, but that they mixed their worship of the Baals with their worship of the true God. They worshiped calves as they did in the wilderness, and called them Jehovah.
• Israel by all accounts worshiped with roughly the correct forms: otherwise God would have had no need to reprove them by saying, "I desire mercy, and not sacrifice." Jesus would use exactly the same argument against the religious leaders of his time, who worshiped the Law instead of God.
• Judah and Israel are contrasted subtly in the book, but their failings are rather similar. (The kings of Judah during this time were mostly good kings, excepting Ahaz, but the people had corrupt practices.) One of the common themes from the OT is that one's military success was the result of having the more powerful deity—at least in the pagan world, this is what is expected. So part and parcel of Israel's whoring after other gods is their desire to be as militarily successful as the nations that conquered them. Judah is somewhat less afflicted by this malady, but instead of trusting in God, she trusts in her fortified cities. It is a study to see that Uzziah had an exceptionally strong military, but all of his fortified cities were destroyed by Sennacherib. God rescued Hezekiah by divine miracle, and not by strength of arms.

There are obvious applications, I think, to our own perspectives and thinking today. One is that being religious is no safeguard to idolatry: indeed this is part and parcel of idolatry. We want the form of religion and its familiar comforts, but we are unwilling to come to God on his terms and worship him in the way he must be worshiped. We are content to put him on the shelf as first among money, success, and security, but never to take the other things off. (I say this as a principal offender in these matters.)

But we also see the irony in Judah's failures, that those who do worship God truly and are blessed by him forget him and trust instead to their own strength—falling prey, as it were, to the same idols that consume the former group. We have the right forms, the right location, the right rules, the worship of a single God. We tithe mint and dill and cumin. But we neglect the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy.

There is also the lesson to be learned that military success is no real indicator of God's favor; he often uses military might as a tool of judgment against nations in the OT, even though those nations are terrible nations (Assyria and Babylon especially, but of course there's also all those nations in Judges).

Contrariwise, while we might expect military failures to indicate God's displeasure—and this is true in the OT—it is also his means of purification. The horror that the Israelites endured from the Babylonians and Assyrians nonetheless did not purge them utterly from the earth. And he likewise superintends the rebuilding of the temple, even in troublesome times.

I guess part of the takeaway for me, then, is that looking at circumstances as the indicator of God's favor or blessing is probably a mistake. Instead, we should be looking at the person and work of Jesus Christ through whom we have a sure inheritance and exceedingly precious promises.