Hosea 8:1-14.  For most for the rest of the book of Hosea we have a back and forth series of statements made by God and Hosea.  Scholars call this type of structure “antiphonal”, it’s like a song that has two lead vocal parts, maybe a guy and girl singing to or about each other.  Through the beginning of chapter 13 these statements are mostly complaints about what has been going on in Israel.

You may remember that I mentioned before that the Hebrew people loved structure and numbers in their writings.  One structure that is very common in the Old Testament is called a chiasmus.  The word comes from the Greek letter chi that looks like an x.  If you draw a line up and down through the middle of the letter you can see it is like a reflection of itself through the middle.  A chiasmus is like that in a poem or other writing.  The writing will have some number of ideas in a certain order and then will repeat the ideas (or sometimes their opposite ideas) in the opposite order.  Usually scholars use symbols to show the structure something like: A-B-C-D-C’-B’-A’.  Each capital letter represents an idea and the capital letter with the ‘ after it represents the matching idea.  If there is an idea with out a match it is often the main idea (D, in our example).

Chapter 8 of Hosea is the first of the back and forth complaints from God and Hosea.  It is a complaint about Israel from God.  The interesting thing is that the structure is sort of chiastic but then it’s not.  One scholar outlined it like this:  A-B-C-B’-A’-C’-B”-C”.  If Hebrew people like symmetry (the mirror like quality of a chiasmus for example) this structure must have made them crazy.  It could be that very reason, why Hosea, mixed it all up.  Hosea could be using this structure to show how upset God was with the situation in Israel.  Also the language is very choppy like a person who is upset when they talk.  What is clear in this chapter though is that the people of Israel/Ephraim/Samaria have dishonored God.  They don’t listen to him (vv. 1, 3, 4, 12), they turned to other gods and honored them instead (vv. 4, 5, 6, 11), they have chosen leaders for themselves who did not know God and God did not approve of (v. 4), they have relied on their own strength (v. 14 but really the whole thing is about doing it their own way) and they have turned to foreign nations for peace and protection (vv. 8, 9, 10).  Instead of peace with God and peace in life they were on a path leading to trouble (vv. 2-3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13-14).

We need to remember over and over again the words of Jesus to the Samaritan woman, the right way to live for God is in “spirit and in truth” (John 4:23-24).  We need to know God (Hosea 6:3) and we need to work at it (Hosea 6:3).  We need to face the truth about ourselves (we are disobedient toward God, Isaiah 53:6) and that we need to realize that there is a price for our disobedience (sin) (Romans 6:23).  We need God to forgive us and heal us (Hosea 2:23; 6:1).  Finally we need to realize that this is a personal thing, it is between each of us and God.  Following the crowd, the religious and political leaders, resulted in trouble for the people of Israel, they defected together.  But the return to God needed to be on a person by person basis.  Paul told us that they are not Israel who are born Israel (Romans 9:6-7).  In those verses we are told that, physically, it would be the descendants of Isaac who would become the nation of Israel.  But later in Romans 9:30-33 we learn that spiritually the people of God would be people who place their faith in God to make the relationship all right (righteous).  At the very end of Romans 9 Paul talks about a “stumbling stone” that God placed in Israel.  That is a reference to Jesus.  So it is through Jesus that our relationship with God is fixed.  That is the truth and it is up to each of us to deal with it (John 1:12).

Lord thank you for the opportunity to have a new relationship with you.  Thank you for the people in my life who took the time to tell me about Jesus.  Thank you for taking my back.  Help me be faithful.  Let me turn to you for all my needs.  Thank you for loving me.