Pilgrim Traveller

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 21^st 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?

RECONCILED – REDEEMED – RESTRICTED – RESTORED…a prophetic picture of God’s constant and unchanging love for the people of Israel…and for each one of us too.

Read Hosea 3: 1-4

This is pretty amazing stuff. We return to the story of Hosea and his unfaithful wife, Gomer. By this time she seems to be in a whole lot of trouble…for some reason she has sold herself into slavery. God instructs Hosea be reconciled to her, to redeem her and to have her back in his home as his wife. When she comes home a restriction is placed on her…she is to abstain from sex for a while; maybe like an addict she needs to be removed from the thing that has enslaved her mind and attitudes – a sort of spiritual detox – before she can be whole again. This is not conditional love…it’s about healing and restoration for the relationship.

RECONCILED – REDEEMED – RESTRICTED – RESTORED…a prophetic picture of God’s constant and unchanging love for the people of Israel. God promises they too can be reconciled to God, that he will redeem them from exile, a time when their lives will be restricted by the absence of king, temple, priesthood and religious practices and they will long to be restored to their relationship with God as his people.

And it’s also a picture of what Jesus has done for the people that make up his church, redeeming them from slavery to a sinful life and restoring them to a full relationship with the God who loves them.

Is there someone you need to be reconciled to, someone to whom you need to show the same restoring love that Jesus showed to you?

Ask God to help you to love that person. Ask what that ‘love’ might look like. Consider the possible cost of loving that person in the way God wants you to.

If it’s possible, take the first steps towards renewing the connection and restoring the relationship.

After the harsh words at the beginning of chapter 2, these are tender words.

They reminded me of a song I used to sing in concerts, written by singer/songwriter Julie Miller

“You knew the way to my heart,
I had a good defence but you tore it all apart.
You knew, you knew the way to my heart.

There were other lovers, knocking at my door,
You were like no other I had known before.
When nobody else could touch me, nobody else could see
Your compassion reached the deepest part of me.”

I have experienced the compassion of God for the rebel and the runaway.

I first became a follower of Jesus when I was about 10 years old. I didn’t come from a church-going family. How, even at such a young age, I was attracted to Jesus and saw my need for a relationship with him, is another story.

In my early twenties I quite deliberately chose to stop living as a follower of Jesus, and to take back control of my life and do my own thing. The causes of this reversal were several and complicated…over a period of time relationships, unanswered prayer and a sense that God really had no interest in me, all added up until the burden of trying to live something I no longer really believed and serving a God I no longer trusted became to much, and I just walked away.

However, God, who it turns out is very reluctant to lose anyone and who, it seems, often lets us live through things for our good refused to walk away from me.

Chance encounters with old friends who also followed Jesus, friends who refused to judge me and continued to show God’s love to me. Talking with a friend at college who was searching for God and who, despite my best efforts to make them cautious, still went ahead and gave their life to Jesus. Eventually, one day I walked back into the church where I first started to grow as a follower of Jesus, was welcomed back with tears and much joy and, later, made my peace with God.

At the end of my time away from God, I had discovered that doubt is OK, and my trust in God was stronger than ever before, even when I failed to understand the way God works and why he does the things he does in the way he does.

In the end, God knew the way to my heart, and I knew that nothing else in life could replace the relationship I had with him.

In Hosea, God reminds Israel of his love for them. He talks of leading them into the desert (which happened later when they went into a time of Exile)…and of course, many years before, it was in the desert, after God freed Israel from slavery in Egypt, that their relationship with him was forged. He reminds them that they have exchanged his love for slavery to other gods, who are like slave masters to them (the name of the god who they have been worshipping, Baal, means “master”). He woos them and invites them to fall in love with him all over again.

Because of my own experience of God’s unrelenting compassion, that prophecy really resonates with me.

Has your relationship with God cooled off, or got off track? It’s often not something that happens suddenly, but rather it happens because of creeping neglect on our part to grow the relationship. Maybe we stop spending time with God every day in prayer and the scriptures. Maybe something happens that causes us to doubt God or to lose our trust in him, and instead of taking it to God we allow it to fester and make us bitter.

Take a long, honest look at yourself. If you truly value your relationship with God, do all you can to put things right. God hasn’t stopped loving you!