Hosea 11:1-12.  Chapter 11 brings us another complaint from God.  It is not a continuation of the one in the second half of chapter 10.  The alternating complaints in chapters 8-10 for a group focused on the bad behavior of Israel.  They were following false gods and trusting in their own strength and the strength of their allies.  The next set of alternating complaints seem to focus n=ore on the consequences of Israel’s bad behavior (Chapters 11-13).

In chapter 11 God gives the Israelites a little history lesson.  He reminds them that he took them from being slaves in Egypt and made a nation out of them.  God uses the idea of a child to make this point.  He calls the Ephraim his son and uses the idea of teaching a child to walk to show how he helped them grow into a nation.  Ephraim has been used as a name for the northern kingdom in Hosea.  Although the whole nation of Israel was brought out of Egypt Hosea is still talking about just the northern kingdom in these verses.  We know this because the judgment described in verse 5 only happened to the northern kingdom.  Unfortunately we see in these verses that Israel was unfaithful to God from the earliest days after they left Egypt.  The second and third lines of Hosea 11:1 are difficult to understand but it appears that the people of Egypt were “calling out” to the Israelites from the very beginning.  In Exodus 16 the Israelite had been in the wilderness south of the promised land and east of Egypt for a couple of months when they started complaining about needing food, they wanted to go back to Egypt.  God responded by giving them a miraculous food from the sky that they called manna.  In Numbers 5 the people of Israel had been in the desert for a couple more years.  They clearly were not starving to death.  The people began to complain again and in verses 4-5 we see them again wanting to return to Egypt.  Three months into the journey God called Moses, the leader, up onto a mountain to receive instructions.  While he was up there the people got impatient and started to complain.  In Exodus 32 we see this story.  The people asked Aaron, Moses’ brother, to make a god for them, which he did from their gold jewelry.  The god was in the form of a calf or bull.  This was a common symbol of fertility gods in that area of the world and was the symbol of the fertility god Baal in Caanan (the land where the Israelites would eventually settle).  God also used the picture of an ox in verse 4 where he describes himself like a caring farmer gently leading the ox and making sure the yoke was not hurting it.  So in these first four verses we see God caring for and leading the Israelites in spite of the fact that they were unfaithful from the beginning.

Verses 5-6 tell us the consequences of their unfaithfulness (remember this is 700 later, talk about patience).  God tells them they will be returned to slavery, not in Egypt , but in Assyria.  I like the little side note, “Because they refused to return to God”.  God is always wanting us to turn back to him.  In verse 6 we see that the Assyrian conquest will be a bloody and destructive military battle.  The middle of the verse contains an interesting Hebrew word, “bad”, that can mean “post”, priest”, “boast”, “linen”, or “solitude”.  Most translator pick “post” and translate that part of the verse, “destroy their gates”.  The word destroy can mean “put and end to”.  The better translation would probably be, “put and end to their boasting”.  IN that case the invasion by Assyria would be the tool God used to put and end to the Israelites over inflated attitude about themselves.  That fits with the last line of the verse in which following their own ideas on living would eat them up or destroy them.  In verses  7 we see the Israelites showing false respect for God.  Throughout this complaint we see God using their name for him, “El”, which means god.  The problem is that name is weak and incomplete, later in Hosea we will see a more fitting title for Yahweh.

In verses 8-9 we see the heart of God filled with love for his people. Adamah and Zeboiim were sister cities with Sodom and Gomorrah.  Sodom and Gomorrah were cites near the Dead Sea that God destroyed because of their evil (Genesis 18-19).  We see in these  verses that God does not want to give up the Israelites to destruction.

In verse 5 we learned, though, that the Israelites would go back into bondage, they would be slaves of a new king, Assyria would be their New Egypt.  Scholars call the original journey out of Egypt “The Exodus”.  Here Hosea 11:10 we see a second “exodus” from the New Egypt, Assyria.  Verse 12 explains why.  In spite of their unfaithfulness God is still faithful  In spite of their disobedience and disrespect God is still going to find a way to save them. We see too that Judah will eventually go down the same path as the northern kingdom of Israel (called Ephraim here).

It is awesome how loving God is, but notice that there were consequences for their unfaithfulness.  In fact I’m not entirely sure if the northern kingdom has been restored to this day.  We have seen Jewish people return to their land after the Second World War but the promises God mad to the Israelite Nation and to their special king David have yet to be completely fulfilled.  The people of Judah also were removed from the land about 140 years after the people of Israel.  They returned 70 years later but were again exiled around 70 AD.  What we see is God working in history and constantly working on those he loves to bring them back to himself.  According to Romans 11:25 God is interested in not just Jewish people for his kingdom but for all of us (See 1 John 2:2; 2 Peter 3:9).  God loves all of us.  He has allowed the Jewish people to stubbornly ignore him while the rest of us turn to him.  But they will return too.  God’s plan is loving and he is giving the most time for the most people to have the best opportunity to come back to him.  Sometimes this means we need to suffer the consequences of our rebellious ways.  But there is always hope, as long as it is still called today there is a chance to return to God (Hebrews 3:12-15).

Thank you god for your extreme love, patience, and wisdom.  Thank you for giving me a chance to respond.  Thank you for giving many a chance to respond.  Help me be a faithful son.  Let me honor you every day for who you truly are, the great and powerful one true God, Yahweh.