Hosea 5-8

Here is more of Boadt’s commentary on Hosea….

Hosea blames this rebellion against the very heart of God’s covenant on Israel’s selfishness and its forgetting. The nation is so tied up in what it can get for itself right now that it throws aside all that God has done and abandons him for the pleasures and profits offered by pagan gods and peoples. Their behavior is stupid and senseless and will only bring them to ruin. “Ephraim is like a dove, silly and senseless” (Hos 7:11), says the prophet as he calls tenderly to the people of Israel by their old tribal name of Ephraim (the place where the capital city of Samaria was located). He laments: “They sow the wind and shall reap the wirlwind” (Hos 8:7). “Ephraim herds the wind and pursues the east wind all day long” (Hos 12:1). “Your love is like the cloud at dawn, like the dew that disappears early in the day” (Hos 6:4). The emptiness in what they do seems so clear to Hosea.

I wonder: are we ever tempted to give up on God just as Israel did thousands of years ago? C. S. Lewis, like Hosea before him, compared our relationship with God to a marriage. In a letter to a female correspondent whose husband was unfaithful to her, Lewis wrote:

One point in your story looms large in my mind—the fatal consequences of your husband’s lack of faith in you when he did not get those letters. For this is just how we also might desert God. If nothing, or nothing we recognize comes through, we imagine He has let us down and reject Him, perhaps at the very moment when help was on its way. (From a letter to “Mrs. Lockley,” September 2, 1949)

I know that right now I am waiting on the Lord in prayer for something very specific. Perhaps you are too. How will we respond if the Lord seemingly does not come through for us, or does not come through on time, answering our prayer the way that we want? Will we have faith to believe that God still has our best interests in mind even when circumstances seem to indicate otherwise? Can we trust that the reason God said “no” to one of our requests is because he has something much better in mind to give us, in his perfect timing?

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