It is Finished

I will be out for Holy Saturday. It seems appropriate, then, to remind each other of the finished work of Jesus Christ.

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.

Recent Observations

I have about five minutes again, but wanted to put some thoughts down—I had forgotten almost everything in the last entry, and now I've got to do it again because I'll forget otherwise.

I have commented before, I think, about these seemingly out-of-place verses in the Sermon on the Mount (here from the NET Bible):

6:19 Do not accumulate for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth  and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. 6:20 But accumulate for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal. 6:21 For where your  treasure  is, there your heart will be also.

6:22 “The eye is the lamp of the body. If then your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light. 6:23 But if your eye is diseased, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!

6:24 “No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.

What are verses 22 and 23 doing sandwiched in a discussion about making treasure in heaven? There is an interesting corollary in Proverbs:

23:6 Do not eat the food of a stingy person, do not crave his delicacies;

The word "stingy" is literally translated "an evil eye," and the NET notes suggest this word is primarily associated with people who are selfish, not generous. How great the darkness, indeed.

The second thing was from a Sunday sermon taken from 1 Samuel 30:6. The subject was distress. There are three distressed groups in the passage: the biggest one is the wives and children of David's army—they were captured by the Amalekites, who raided the city of Ziklag and burned it with fire. Then, of course, are their husbands. And finally, the king himself.

The text (again, from the NET), reads:

David was very upset, for the men were thinking of stoning him; each man grieved bitterly over his sons and daughters. But David drew strength from the Lord his God.

The phrase "grieved bitterly" is literally "bitter of soul," and the same language is used in 22:2:

All those who were in trouble or owed someone money or were discontented gathered around him, and he became their leader. He had about four hundred men with him.

The NET uses "discontented" here for the same Hebrew phrase. This connection ought not be missed: the same people who were driven to David by their debts and bitterness of soul are those who are bitter of soul for their families.

While I am probably reading the white spaces a bit, it seems like he had assembled a pretty motley crew of down-on-their-luck mercenaries—this was not a respectable band of soldiers.

Don't we see ourselves here? Isn't this basically how Jesus Christ reaches us? Not in our respectability and in working good, but in our bitterness and indebtedness? (Don't look now, but we have another link to the Sermon on the Mount—the Lord's prayer, "Forgive us our debts.") And isn't it likewise true that when the chips are down, the same people he saves are those who desert or crucify him?

We are also among the captives. In our distress, the king comes to save us—each and every one is preserved alive ("There was nothing missing, whether small or great," 30:19ff). We could trace this thread through the Scriptures if we had the time ("When he ascended on high, he led captivity captive," Ps. 68:18, cf. Eph 4:8).