Hosea 9:1-17.  Today’s reading contains the next two complaints.  Hosea 9:1-9 is the first of Hosea’s complaints against Israel.  Remember that we are going to see alternating complaints from both God and Hosea.  For his part though Hosea is still a messenger for God so his complaints are really God’s complaints too.

Remember that Hosea was told to marry a “cheating kind” of woman in the beginning of the book.  Also we saw that she actually did cheat on him.  This was a picture of the relationship between God and Israel.  Mostly Hosea’s wife represented the political and religious system of Israel, the “God” culture (or ‘god” culture) there.  The leadership in Israel was playing at being faithful to God when they were really cheating on him and worshipping fase gods.  They also were not trusting him to take care of them.  In fact they were actually looking to false, man made, gods to take care of them.   In this complaint Hosea returns to the example of his wife and charges Israel with being spiritual prostitutes all over Israel.  Because of their unfaithfulness to God he was not going to let the land support them.  In fact God was going to banish them to the very nations they had turned to for help, Egypt and Assyria.  But they would not enjoy the stay in these nations.  They would lose their identity as the “people of God.” (vv. 3-6).

Verse 7 tells us that they are going to be punished because their spiritual live have become so twisted (the meaning of the word iniquity).  They are living live hostile toward God.  Verse 9 tells us that their lives have become extremely depraved or corrupt (the word means beat up or marred).  Hosea tells us that the Israel of his day is like Gibeah.  Gibeah is the place in the book of Judges where the people raped the mistress of a Levite (a priest) and left her for dead.  She actually lay on the door step outside his room all night until she eventually died.  He then took her body home and cut it into 12 pieces that he sent to leaders of each of the 12 tribes of Israel.  This started a civil war among the tribes (Judges 19-21).  The story is completely sick from beginning to end and Hosea tells us that things in his time really are no better (for more read the posts on those chapters in Judges).

In verse 10 we start the next of God’s complaints against the people of Israel.  He had a great deal of hope for them.  I like to garden and when the plants first start to grow I show everybody.  I take the best care of them that I can and look forward to planting them in the garden (I usually start them in little pots so there wont be weeds till they get bigger) and seeing them produce fruit (especially tomatoes).  It is very disappointing when they die or fade or wilt or otherwise do not grow up and become fruitful (especially the tomatoes).  In the same way God is clearly disappointed in the way Israel has rejected him.  God’s compliant ends with very serious language, at one point he says that Ephraim wont have any children and even if they do those children will be killed.  Very dark.  God has rejected them because they have rejected Him (v. 17) so instead of living a blessed life in the promised land they would become wanderers among the nations.  Very bleak.

Again we see personal responsibility with respect to God, we need to listen to him.  We also see the down side of ignoring God, instead of living in the good land he has for us we wind up wandering among nations who don’t really want us.  And we don’t even have a place to honor God if we wanted to.  The lesson is to listen now and avoid God punishment.

Lord help me listen and respond to you.  I know you are not really about punishment but you will do it if it needs to be done.  Help me honor you with my life, I hate spankings.  And I really do love you though I too am sometimes unfaithful.  Help me trust you more each day.  Thank you for your patience and forgiveness.

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.