Knowing all about God is one thing. Acknowledging who God is, and living as if your life depended on it is another thing entirely.
Read Hosea 4: 1-3
One of the problems for modern translators of the scriptures is that they do not live in the time or the culture of when the scriptures were written, and Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek are not their first languages. The English language often limits the richness of meaning of words in the original language and culture of the time. Generally translators are forced to choose one meaning of a word from many possibilities, and this may reflect their own theology and preferences as much as what the original actually means.
The Hebrew word ‘yada’ is one example. We find it in verse 1 of Hosea 4, where it is translated ‘knowledge’. And we immediately have a problem…
To most of us in the 21st century western world knowledge is about knowing facts. However, as the OT scholar John Goldingay writes, “The Hebrew word for know implies that you’re recognising something by the way you live, not merely that you’re aware of some fact.”
One of the downfalls of Western, evangelical theology is that all too often it has been reduced to a set of facts about God, Jesus and Salvation. What often follows is that as long as you can tick off all the right things that you ‘believe’ (another word with richer meaning than we often give it) you must be in…in other words knowing about God often subtly replaces the original meaning of ‘yada’…to acknowledge something to the point that it affects your whole way of living.
Israel, God says through Hosea, knows all the facts about him, but you wouldn’t know it from the way they live. The people are breaking just about all of the Ten Commandments (verse 2), making life pretty bad for themselves. God also seems to say that human sin directly affects the natural world, spoiling the good and beautiful creation that God has made.
One of the promises of hope and restoration that God makes in Hosea 2: 20 is that Israel will finally know him in the ‘acknowledge him’ sense, and will live as if he is their Lord. God says:
Hosea 2: 20
“I will be faithful to you and make you mine, and you will finally know me as the Lord.”
Jesus had something to say about this too, in the story of the Wise and Foolish Builders in Luke 6: 46-49.
“So why do you keep calling me ‘Lord, Lord!’ when you don’t do what I say? [47] I will show you what it’s like when someone comes to me, listens to my teaching, and then follows it. [48] It is like a person building a house who digs deep and lays the foundation on solid rock. When the floodwaters rise and break against that house, it stands firm because it is well built. [49] But anyone who hears and doesn’t obey is like a person who builds a house right on the ground, without a foundation. When the floods sweep down against that house, it will collapse into a heap of ruins.”
It’s not what you know but what you do as a result that makes you a follower of Jesus.
Rock or sand…what are your foundations like?
Pilgrim Traveller 