Today in our journey through the 66 books of the Bible we come to the book of Hosea. This is the first part of what the Hebrew Bible calls “The Twelve”. Christians often refer to this section of the Old Testament as the minor prophets. We call this section of Scripture the minor prophets not because The Twelve are less important than Isaiah, Jeremiah, or Ezekiel,[1] but simply because these books are shorter. In ancient times, perhaps as early as the 2nd century BCE, all twelve of the minor prophets were put together on one scroll.
Author
Hosea probably appears as the first book among the Twelve for two reasons: (1) Hosea was considered the first of four prophets who prophesied during the eighth century BCE, the others being Isaiah, Amos, and Micah. (2) Hosea is the longest book out of all the minor prophets. Hosea served as a prophet to the Northern Kingdom of Israel and was the only one of the literary prophets to come from that kingdom.
In Hosea 1, the prophet is commanded by the Lord to marry a prostitute. Hosea immediately obeys the Lord and marries Gomer...
Not that Gomer!
But a prostitute named Gomer...
That's probably not the right picture either. We don't know if Gomer was pretty or not. All we are really told about her is that she is a prostitute and she is the daughter of someone named Diblaim.
Gomer bears children for Hosea who are each given prophetically significant names. God tells Hosea to name the first one, a son, “Jezreel; for, I will soon punish the House of Jehu for the bloody deeds at Jezreel and put an end to the monarchy of the House of Israel.” The second child, a daughter, God tells Hosea to name “Lo-ruhamah; for I will no longer accept the House of Israel or pardon them.” Hosea’s third child, a son, God says shall be named “Lo-ammi; for you are not my people, and I will not be your God.”
Scholars today are divided over whether we as readers should take this situation literally or metaphorically. Did Hosea literally marry a prostitute or adulterous woman? Or are we to understand the story merely in an allegorical fashion?
Date
Hosea’s career began in the relatively quiet years of the reign of Jeroboam II (c. 786-746 BCE), during or shortly after the ministry of Amos. Amos threatened God’s judgment against Israel at the hands of an unnamed enemy. Hosea identifies that enemy as Assyria. Judging from the kings mentioned in 1:1, Hosea must have prophesied for 38 years, but nothing is known about Hosea from outside this book. The biblical accounts of the period are found in 2 Kings 14:23-17:41.
Since Hosea 1:1 also refers to certain kings of Judah, it may be that the book was written in Judah after the fall of the northern capital, Samaria (722-721 BCE). There are numerous references throughout the book to Judah as well as Israel. Whether Hosea wrote the book himself or whether a later editor or editors brought together Hosea’s prophecies is unknown.
The time of Hosea’s ministry was one when religious pluralism was evident in Israel. Worship of the storm god Baal flourished. Baal was worshipped in various manifestations at local shrines. Hosea refers at times to a plurality of Baals. The other important factor of this time-period was political. After Jeroboam’s reign there was a series of revolutions involving assassinations. In this time of instability, the Israelite kings reached out to various foreign powers seeking help to cope with the looming possibility of Assyrian invasion.
Themes
Hosea’s main themes are Israel’s abandoning of the Lord, the Lord’s punishment of Israel for that abandonment, calls for Israel’s repentance, and hope for an ideal future of reconciliation between the Lord and Israel. Israel’s sins included cultic, religious, social, sexual, and political offenses. Hosea often employs sexual and family metaphors to express the relationship between God and Israel. The threat of Assyrian invasion of Israel hovers in the background of this book, set as the book is in the time prior to the fall of Samaria in 722 BCE.
Structure
The book of Hosea has two major parts. The first part, chapters 1 through 3, is organized around the theme of marriage as a metaphor for God’s relationship to his people Israel. God portrays Israel as a promiscuous wife. There is much of judgment in this section, but there is also the promise of restoration after punishment.
The second part of the book, chapters 4 through 14, is composed wholly of sayings arranged in literary units of varying length. These literary units do seem to flow chronologically, following the course of Hosea’s career as a prophet. Beginning in chapter 9, these literary units focus on recollections of Israel’s past. This is followed by a promise of salvation in chapter 11 that introduces an intermediate conclusion to the preceding message of judgment. Then the judgment sayings of chapters 12 and 13 are followed again by a promise of restoration in chapter 14. The whole structure works out like this…
- Superscription (1:1)
- The Unfaithful Wife and the Faithful Husband (1:2-3:5)
- The Unfaithful Nation and the Faithful God (4-14)
Key Concept—God Desires Mercy
I would like to focus the rest of our time on Hosea 6:1-6. Listen for God’s word to you…
“Come, let us return to the Lord.
He has torn us to pieces
but he will heal us;
he has injured us
but he will bind up our wounds.
After two days he will revive us;
on the third day he will restore us,
that we may live in his presence.
Let us acknowledge the Lord;
let us press on to acknowledge him.
As surely as the sun rises,
he will appear;
he will come to us like the winter rains,
like the spring rains that water the earth.”
“What can I do with you, Ephraim?
What can I do with you, Judah?
Your love is like the morning mist,
like the early dew that disappears.
Therefore I cut you in pieces with my prophets,
I killed you with the words of my mouth—
then my judgments go forth like the sun.[a]
For I desire mercy, not sacrifice,
and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.
It would be easy, too easy, to get the idea from reading quite a bit of Hosea that God is mad at us. As one person summarized the beginning of Paul’s letter to the Church at Rome, “Man is bad, and God is mad.” That seems to be the message of Hosea as well.
But I think that interpretation is, at best, incomplete, and at worst, a distortion of the truth. I believe the truth is that God is mad about us. He is jealous and zealous for us, just as a husband who is completely in love with his wife is jealous and zealous toward her. Yes, we feel the blast of God’s fiery wrath in this book. But God’s desire is not to burn us up. Rather, he desires to burn away that which corrupts his perfect creation. He burns us, if at all, only the way a silversmith burns impurity out of silver. He keeps boiling the silver until he sees his own image reflected in it. God longs to see his image reflected in us, in you and me. And he is constantly working toward the end that this should be so.
At first it would seem that the response of Israel to God’s entreaties is finally what it ought to be at the beginning of Hosea 6. “Come let us return to the Lord,” the Israelites say. Isn’t that what the Lord has called for all along? And if that is the response the Lord has called for, why does the Lord say in verse 4, “What can I do with you, Ephraim?”
I think this is God’s response because, while right sounding, beautiful and eloquent even, Israel’s response to him is not a lasting one. That’s why the Lord says, “Your love is like the morning mist, like the early dew that disappears.”
Israel is looking for a quick fix to her problems. “After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence.”
God knows it is going to take more than a quick fix for his people to be put right. The curious thing is that God is going to set his people right, but not in the way they imagine. God is going to put his people right, even by something accomplished in three days. God is going to do it by the death and resurrection of his Son, crucified on a Friday and raised on a Sunday. But that solution to Israel’s problem is going to cost God everything.
God’s statement, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” may sound odd in this context but what I think the Lord is getting at is something like this… just as Israel’s repentance is superficial, so her whole practice of her religion is only skin deep. It seems that Israel was thinking all she had to do was offer the appropriate sacrifices at God’s temple and then all would be well. Attend a few services and God should be happy with that. Right?
No, God desires something far deeper. He wants mercy. Hosea 6:6 seems to be an expansion or deepening of the statement in 1 Samuel 15:22,
Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices
as much as in obeying the Lord?
To obey is better than sacrifice,
and to heed is better than the fat of rams.
The Hebrew word for mercy in Hosea 6:6 is one we have encountered numerous times in our study of the Old Testament. It is the Hebrew word “hesed”. It refers to God’s covenant love.
You see, religion cannot ultimately save anyone, for it is applied like whitewash on the outside of a building. God wants change from the inside out. He wants to be in right relationship with us and us with him—a relationship defined by covenant love.
It is deeply meaningful to me that Jesus quotes this verse from Hosea more than once. Hosea is quoted multiple times in the New Testament. (See Matthew 2:15; 9:13; 12:7; Luke 23:30; Romans 9:25-27; 1 Peter 2:10; Revelation 6:16.) But Jesus quotes this one verse twice. That seems rather important to me. Let me set the context for how Jesus uses Hosea 6:6…
When Jesus called Matthew the tax collector to follow him, the first thing Matthew did, after leaving his tax booth and following Jesus, was to throw a party. Jesus came to the party and ate with Matthew and all his friends. The Pharisees, who were good at the outward show of religion, could not or would not understand this. They asked Jesus’ disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and ‘sinners’?”
Jesus’ response was classic. “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”
Mercy became the watchword of Jesus’ ministry. Not ritual, not religion, but relationship, covenant love.
On another occasion, the Pharisees got upset with Jesus and his disciples because they began to pick some heads of grain and eat them on the Sabbath. The Pharisees were upset because this violated their understanding of the Sabbath law.
Jesus responded by saying…
Haven’t you read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? He entered the house of God, and he and his companions ate the consecrated bread—which was not lawful for them to do, but only for the priests. Or haven’t you read in the Law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple desecrate the day and yet are innocent? I tell you that one greater than the temple is here. If you had known what these words mean, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice, you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.
The word that Jesus uses for mercy in both these passages is “eleos”. It means mercy, pity, or compassion. It is the word used in the Greek translation of Hosea 6:6. “Eleos” in the Greek translation of the Old Testament is mercy as defined by loyalty to God’s covenant.
I wonder, what defines your life? What defines my life? Are our lives defined by religion or relationship? Manners or mercy? Covenant love or rule-keeping? Compassion or nit-picky judgment? Pity or condemnation?
Yes, there is a note of warning and judgment in Hosea. But the book ends on a note of mercy. Why is it that we hear the judgment but miss the mercy? Perhaps it is because we cannot imagine God truly forgiving us, showing us mercy. And if we haven’t accepted God’s mercy, how can we possibly show his mercy to others?
What would it sound like if we translated Hosea 6:6 as, “I desire mercy and not churchgoing.”? Radical huh?
Of course, mercy and churchgoing are not mutually exclusive. But I have a sneaky suspicion that God desires mercy more than our attending services.
This simple word in Greek, “eleos”, became so important to the early Jesus followers that it became enshrined in a bit of liturgy that we use in the church to this day. In Greek the words of the liturgy are “Κύριε, ἐλέησον; Χριστέ, ἐλέησον.” In English that translates to:“Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.”
These words derive from a story told in Luke 18:35-42. When Jesus was on his way up to Jerusalem where he would be crucified and rise again from the dead, he was passing through Jericho. A blind man was sitting by the roadside begging. When he heard the crowd, the blind man asked what was happening. He was told, “Jesus of Nazareth is passing by.” So, the blind man began to call out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
People in the crowd told him to be quiet, but he shouted again, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”
Jesus stopped and asked the blind man, “What do you want me to do for you?”
The blind man said, “Lord, I want to see.”
Jesus replied, “Receive your sight; your faith has healed you.” Immediately the man received his sight and followed Jesus, praising God.
Personally, I believe that “Lord, have mercy,” while being one of the simplest prayers is also one of the most profound. If we ask for mercy, the Lord Jesus will give us mercy. And when we receive mercy, then we have mercy to pass on to others.
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