We are reading in Hosea, chapter 12, how God is asking His people to repent and return. Even their ancestor, Jacob, crafty and manipulating as he was, he still managed to return to God--he even had the privilege of meeting God face to face! (12:4)
The people of Israel have the same opportunity. God is asking them to return and in essence, meet Him face to face--metaphorically speaking. They can walk, confer and interact with Him as Jacob did. They can honor Him in their worship and in their behavior. They, too, can go from being crafty to contrite to connected.
But no.
God continues to speak through Hosea:
But no, the people are like crafty merchantsselling from dishonest scales—
they love to cheat.
Israel boasts, “I am rich!
I’ve made a fortune all by myself!
No one has caught me cheating!
My record is spotless!” (12:7-8)
Isn't it funny when we use the world's standards to prove how spiritual we are? The world is fallen, so the standard it sets is--no surprise here--fallen. We do not measure how good we are by how the world defines it. We do not measure how spiritual we are by how the world defines it.
God is the standard. Period.
Again: "You shall be holy to me, for I the Lord am holy and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine." (Lev. 20:26)
God's character is one of utter integrity, compassion, justice and mercy. We, who are His, cannot use any other standard than the one He sets for us.
But as fallen creatures, how can we be holy? God gave His people His Law. Then His prophets. Then His Son. He never asks us to be holy without providing the means.
Yes, we are imperfect. He prepared for that by setting up the sacrificial system that allowed us to be cleansed from our sins. First, from a lamb. Then from the Lamb. His Son is the final revelation and fulfillment of how God provided the means whereby we can be holy--set aside for His sacred use and a testimony to His presence in the world.
But we were once slaves to sin. Slaves are anti-holy. They have been set aside for exploited use. Evil use. Alienated use.
In Hosea, God wants to remind His people of their pre-holy use.
They were set aside long before the Exodus but later the verses in Leviticus reminded them of that call. The verses about being holy answered the question, "Why did God redeem us? For what purpose?"
Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Gen. 12:1-3)
But later in their history, the enslavement of His people moved them into an anti-use. You cannot be used by God if you are enslaved to sin. You have another master. Sin will seep into you, driving you deeper into bondage, and into places that God, in His holiness, will not countenance.
But later in their history, the enslavement of His people moved them into an anti-use. You cannot be used by God if you are enslaved to sin. You have another master. Sin will seep into you, driving you deeper into bondage, and into places that God, in His holiness, will not countenance.
But He is the Redeemer. God recounts His liberation of His people, implying that now they are back to operating in an anti-holy capacity. Verses 7-8 show their attitude. They show their hardened hearts as they think they have been successful due to their own ability and that their record is "spotless." With all we've read in Hosea, their record is quite the opposite. It is full of sin. They are steeped in arrogance, disobedience, corruption, violence and an utter disregard of God and His holiness.
Their record is spotless only because they think they haven't been caught.
But God sees them in the shadows, just as He did when Adam and Eve hid away after they sinned.
But I am the Lord your God,
who rescued you from slavery in Egypt.
And I will make you live in tents again,
as you do each year at the Festival of Shelters.
I sent my prophets to warn you
with many visions and parables. (12:9-10)
But I am the Lord your God,
who rescued you from slavery in Egypt.
And I will make you live in tents again,
as you do each year at the Festival of Shelters.
I sent my prophets to warn you
with many visions and parables. (12:9-10)
So, children of Israel, you want to be like pagans? God will allow a ruthless pagan army to sweep in one day and take you into a society that does not love Yahweh and His holiness in any way.
You want to choose how you live? Then one day you will be homeless, living in make-shift dwellings, torn away from your homes and back to being slaves of an imperious empire that cares not a wit for the values of Yahweh.
God is very specific about how this is going to end, not due to a capricious decision on His part, but because of the natural consequences of the people's utter disregard for His holiness:
because of their idol worship.
And in Gilgal, too, they sacrifice bulls;
their altars are lined up like the heaps of stone
along the edges of a plowed field.
Jacob fled to the land of Aram,
and there he earned a wife by tending sheep.
Then by a prophet
the Lord brought Jacob’s descendants out of Egypt;
and by that prophet
they were protected.
But the people of Israel
have bitterly provoked the Lord,
so their Lord will now sentence them to death
in payment for their sins. (12:11-14)
Earlier in Hosea, God describes Gilead as "a city of wicked men, stained with footprints of blood." (6:8) Gilgal in 4:15 is described as a place where the Israelites put up a religious shrine and Bethel ("House of God") was sarcastically rendered as Beth Aven ("House of Wickedness"). [1]
In other words, both places are invoked by Hosea as reminders of the kind of evil that stalks the land--pagan in practice and in values.
Jacob came to repentance by settling down with a wife, going on the become one of the founding fathers of Israel. Moses, redeemed from a kind of slavery in the pagan Pharaoh's house by God's call, led the people out and brought them back into their purpose to be a blessing to all the nations.
Now? Having gone back to a spiritual Egypt, and having embraced an anti-use, an anti-holy set of values, they will receive the consequences of their choices.
It hurts our hearts to read of this, because we know what happened to them.
It hurts God's heart to see what we are doing, because He knows what will happen to us.
His love endures forever, but His justice does as well.
[1] NIV Study Bible, 1985, p. 1327.
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