TOMS: Hosea 1-4

For an introduction to this series, click here.

Oct. 29, 2006

Hosea is another strange prophetic book. I'm certainly not the most qualified person to speak on them, but I'm here, and I need to wrap my mind around these things somehow.

God tells Hosea to do a very strange thing: to go find a prostitute and marry her. Think about that for a second... OK. That sounds crazy, and it was. This is certainly not the ideal life course for most people, but that's the point. Hosea finds a woman of the night, marries her, and stays with her for several years.

When they have children, God tells him to give them awful names, at least the second and third: No Mercy and Not My People. Most translations soften the blow in English by approximating what their names sounded like in Hebrew into English letters, but to the people living around Hosea, those were not merely interesting sounds. They mean No Mercy and Not My People. God was telling the Jews that they were about to be destroyed in a very blatant way.

Then the prostitute, Gomer, leaves Hosea and goes back to her pimp, but she ends up on the slave market. God tells Hosea to go buy her back to be his wife as a sign that one day God would redeem Israel from its rejected state. Yes, this a strange story, one that even today makes us uncomfortable. I don't exactly recall making paper cut-outs of Hosea, Gomer and her pimp in kiddie Sunday School.

God's prophets were often forced to become very painful and public object lessons for His people, and Hosea is one of the most extreme examples. It's hard for me not to think of Michael Card's song "The Prophet" when I read through these books. (See the video below.) It's an attempt on his part to try to make sense of some of the strange things God told the prophets to do. He wrote, "I am the prophet and I smolder and burn. I scream and cry and wonder why you never seem to learn. To hear with your own ears, with your own eyes to see. I am the prophet, won't you listen to me?"

In an unrelated note, it is very important to note that the prophets are not in chronological order. Daniel and Ezekiel prophesy in the midst of the captivity of Judah, but Hosea is prophesying in Israel, the northern kingdom, possibly 300 years before Daniel and Ezekiel. Hosea was not writing to people who knew what it meant for God to forsake them. He was writing to people who had heard multiple warnings but had no idea what forsaking God would cost them.

What Does Perfection Look Like?

So I’m studying Mark 3 this week for Sunday Sch… LifeStages, and I can’t help but be struck by how strange this chapter feels. Those people who say the Gospels present an uncritical, whitewashed view of Jesus’ life never read this chapter. As I was reading the chapter I couldn’t help but think of Michael Card’s song “God’s Own Fool.” It is obvious to me that he had this chapter in mind when he wrote the song, and he puts it forth in powerful poetry, communicating it better than I ever could (I added some links to scripture verses that illustrate the points in the song):

It seems I’ve imagined Him all of my life

As the wisest of all of mankind.

But if God’s holy wisdom is foolish to man,

He must have seemed out of His mind.

For even His family said He was mad,

And the priests said a demon’s to blame.

But God in the form of this angry young man

Could not have seemed perfectly sane.

Below is a video of the song so you can hear the music. It's not his best song, as far as I am concerned, but I love how he weaves scripture into his music.

What does all that mean? I’m really not entirely sure. I do know for sure that we as believers often forget that Jesus was fully human as well as fully God. What does perfection look like? We all have our ideas, but Jesus is the only one who ever actually lived a perfect life, and the Jesus of Mark 3 certainly doesn’t fit what I think of when I think of perfection. When I think of perfection I think no controversy, no struggle, no opposition. Who could oppose perfection? That’s not what Jesus’ perfection looked like.

We do ourselves, each other and God a disservice when we treat manifestations of humanity as evil or sinful. Too often we are guilty of simply looking at people who do things differently than we do as somehow wrong rather than different. Jesus was so different that His family was coming to take Him away by the end of this chapter. Not away as in home, but away as in the crazy house. God makes each of us unique, and society tries to make us all alike. There’s nothing wrong with adopting cultural norms: all of us do at some level. But we need to recognize them for what they are: culture, not perfection.

Why do we feel guilty when we cry? Even at times of genuine grief, our American tough guy society tells us crying is bad. It’s not a sin to cry. It is certainly a sin to hold on to our grief when God tells us to place our burdens on Him, but a reaction of grief at the death of a loved one is human, not sinful. It’s no more sinful to weep at a funeral than it is to swing and miss at a baseball. Both are human. Those are just two examples. There are plenty more. The point is that a cultural faux pas may not be sinful, even though society tells us it’s wrong. The opposite is also true. There are certainly things accepted by culture that are sinful. Let’s do the best we can to make our standard for right and wrong closer to God’s standard rather than society’s.

And think about Jesus today. And don't be surprised to encounter someone who defies your expectations. Jesus certainly did that while on earth and He continues to do that to this day.