Hilton Head Island, SC – June 24, 2018
The Chapel Without Walls
Hosea 5:15-6:6; Hosea 11:1-9
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart recoils within me. My compassion grows warm and tender. – Hosea 11:8 (RSV)
There is no question that in most of his prophecy, the prophet Hosea hurled blistering words upon his own fellow subjects of the kingdom of Israel. There is no question that Hosea was greatly angered by their behavior. The only prophet who poured more bile than Hosea on the floundering Israelites was Hosea’s fellow eighth-century BCE prophet, Amos.
Israel had gone through a long period of prosperity, and its economy still was humming, but it had plunged into a downward spiral of idolatry and immorality. Hosea’s heart ached for his countrymen, yet he felt compelled by God to scold them for their many egregious errors.
Hosea quotes the Israelites as telling God that they had repented. “Come, let us return to the Lord; for he has torn, that he may heal us; he has stricken, and he will bind us up. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him” (6:1-2).
Hosea, however, is certain they have not repented, nor shall God heal them. Therefore Hosea puts these words into the mouth of the Lord: “What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? What shall I do with you, O Judah? Your love is like a morning cloud, like dew that goes early away. Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets, I have slain them by the words of my mouth, and my judgment goes forth as the light. For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings” (6:4-6).
The prophet’s heart is broken by the sins of his people. His mind is thrown into deep depression by their willful violation of the laws of God. He feels duty-bound to tell his friends and neighbors about their misdeeds, and he knows it will make him a community persona non grata. However, because he is undeviatingly committed to speaking on behalf of God, he goes on saying what he believes he must say, knowing that it will be met by increasing resistance. Nevertheless Hosea was sure it must be said.
The Bible tells very little about the details of any of the prophets’ lives. We hear a little about Elijah and Elisha, the ninth century BCE prophets who didn’t write prophetic books but whose activities are described in I and II Kings. And we learn a little about Isaiah and Jeremiah from their prophecies, which were written in the eighth and sixth centuries BCE. But about Hosea we know almost nothing. Certainly the first three chapters of his prophecy are an extended literary metaphor to explain how far Israel had fallen from the paths of God, but are not biographical.
The writers of every book in the Bible were inspired by God. Whatever they wrote they believed came to them from the spirit of God. But God didn’t dictate actual words to anyone. It is unhelpful and misleading to imagine that He did. The prophets wrote what they wrote because they were convinced that is what God wanted them to write, but they were their words, not God’s. There is no other way for this process to occur.
Were things really as bad in Israel as Hosea said? The only other records of that time we have are all in the Bible; there are no extra-biblical historical writings. II Kings and II Chronicles also have very negative accounts of Israel in the middle of the eighth century. But then, both of those books were written by men of Judah, not Israel, and the Judeans never spoke well of the Israelites anyway. The other clearest indication of how events unfolded in the northern kingdom is found in the prophecy of Amos. Amos was a contemporary of Hosea. Unlike Hosea, however, he was from Judah, and he went north to find work as a day laborer. Amos said he was a “pruner of sycamore trees,” whatever specifically that might mean, and no one is certain about that.
Amos wrote that there was growing gap between the rich and the poor in Israel. As is so often true throughout history, Amos insisted that the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer. Hosea also wrote at length about the glaring disparity of wealth. As the writer of Ecclesiastes said, “There is nothing new under the sun.”
It is impossible to determine clearly from any part of the Bible whether the collapse of Israel was essentially economic, military, or political, or a combination of all three. This much is known, both from the Bible and from other ancient sources: In either 722 or 721 BCE, the Assyrian army under their king Sargon came and conquered Israel. They took many of the Israelites with them as captives back to Assyria. Assyria, by the way, was located on today’s map in what is now northwestern Iraq and northeastern Syria.
Apparently Israel was not essentially obliterated from without, however. Instead, it rotted from within. It had become too corrupt to survive.
Assyria was not content to defeat only Israel. A few years later, under a new king named Sennacherib, they attacked the southern kingdom of Judah, and laid siege to Jerusalem. That siege is made famous via a poem by George Gordon, otherwise known as Lord Byron. The poem is called The Destruction of Sennacherib.
The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in silver and gold,
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue waves roll nightly on deep Galilee.
Incidentally, that poem was technically composed in what is known as anapestic tetrameter. If anapestic tetrameter were sounded on a drum, the sound would be: dah-dah-DAH; dah-dah-DAH; dah-dah-DAH, dah-dah-DAH. Further, incidentally, I tell you this latter historical-poetic note not because it is germane to this sermon, although it is tangentially germane, but simply to try to maintain your interest. We don’t get very many of these very biblical sermons around here very often, so I have to try to keep you awake. But if anyone’s interest is piqued by this, you can read more about it in II Kings 18 and 19 and Isaiah 36 and 37. In my opinion, those chapters are even more informative, though far less poetic, than Lord Byron.
Presumably Hosea completed his prophecy before the fall of Samaria, and before the Assyrian attack on Jerusalem. So after the cascading avalanche of his doom and gloom, he says that God cannot and will not give up on Israel. Even in the depth of their sins against Him, and in the likelihood they shall be conquered by a foreign army, Hosea says that God remembers the covenant He made with the children of Israel centuries before, in the time of the patriarchs Abraham, and Jacob.
Hosea quotes God as saying these words: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son” (11:1). God commanded Moses to lead Israel out of their slavery in Egypt. But in the Wilderness Wandering in the Sinai Desert, and during the time after Israel conquered Canaan, the Israelites continued to break their side of the covenant with God. Thus God says, “The more I called them, the more they went from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals, and burning incense to idols” (11:2).
Hosea portrays God as being beside Himself. “Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms; but they did not know that I had healed them. I led them with cords of compassion, with bands of love” (11:3-4).
But then, Hosea being a mere human and not God, even though Hosea speaks on behalf of God, Hosea puts human, not divine, words into God’s mouth. Hosea speaks as though God is a spurned parent, and He lashes out at His wayward children. “They shall return to the land of Egypt, and Assyria shall be their king, because they have refused to return to me….My people are bent on turning away from me; so they shall be appointed to the yoke, and none shall remove it” (my italics: 11:5-7).
In these verses it is not God who is expressing His wrath on Israel; it is Hosea! Hosea suddenly realizes this, so he writes what he knows is truly in the heart of God, the God of Israel. It is one of the most beautiful, memorable, and powerful statements in the entire Bible about the deepest nature of God.
“How can I give you up, O Ephraim! How can I hand you over, O Israel! How can I make you like Admah! How can I treat you like Zeboiim!” (Admah and Zeboiim were Moabite kings destroyed in a terrible natural catastrophe described in Genesis 14.) “My heart recoils within me, my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger, I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come to destroy” (11:8-9; my italics).
Hosea felt Israel deserved to be destroyed. He was convinced they needed to be crushed. But in the midst of his human disgust with his own people, Hosea suddenly realized that he does not see human failure in the same way God sees it. It is God who created everything that ever existed, including every human being who ever existed, and God is loath to lose any of His children --- any of them! No matter how wayward, no matter how rebellious, God will not give up on anyone.
Even the most gifted of God’s servants --- and Hosea surely was in that rare company --- cannot see ultimate reality with the vision only God can possess. God alone can be God. As much as they may strive to speak for God, even the prophets cannot fully describe the reality of God. Occasionally they get fleeting glimpses, and Hosea 11 is such an extraordinary glance into the divine essence. Nevertheless, all of us are consigned to see through a glass darkly, as the apostle Paul so eloquently expressed it.
From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible is filled with countless instances of humanity’s rebellion against our Creator. It is a chronology of continuous rebellion. Through it all, the prophets, observing this misbehavior, speak as though God has had His fill of sin, and is about to unload His wrath on the most elevated of His earthly beings. Those are reflections of what most of us would do to disobedient people if we were God.
Thank God we are not God! Thank God God is God! That is what Hosea remembered in the incomparable eleventh chapter of his prophecy.”I am God, and not man, and I will not come to destroy.”
To know God means that, constantly we must seek to follow God’s will. We cannot deliberately break God’s laws, expecting that God will forgive us anyway. To act in such a cavalier manner shows that we do not really know God.
Nevertheless, God never gives up on people. Never. Not on anyone. Not on any nations in their worst atrocities against other nations, not on any individuals in their most heinous crimes against other individuals. God is more aggrieved by such things than we are capable of imagining, but He never gives up on us, because He is God. He is God. He is God.
Many people find that it hard to believe that God cannot wash His hands of us. Many find it impossible to believe. If God is so ceaselessly forgiving, they say, they want no part of God. That says much more about the mental and spiritual inelasticity of such people than it says about God.
God is God, and we are us. Probably neither in time nor in eternity shall we ever fully grasp the nature of the chasm between us and God.
For reasons known only to Him, God created the universe, the Earth, everything in and on the Earth, including every human being who ever existed. He doesn’t want the destruction of any of it, not any species of plants or animals or humans, nor the Earth itself. In the ever-ongoing process of universal creation, whole worlds and stars and solar systems and galaxies come into existence and pass into oblivion, but so far as we know, it is not because God directly wills it. Apparently He allows it, because astronomers assure us it happens. That is one of the many mysteries we shall likely never understand.
“How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel?”
Humanity is capable of destroying all of humanity. The current number of nuclear weapons, if all were detonated within minutes or hours of one another, could extinguish human and most other forms of life on the earth. Through other technological calamities, we also could all be exterminated. Our environmental thoughtlessness might result in the extinction of most forms of life on our planet, including human life. But God never turns His back on people.
“How can I give you up, O Earth? How can I hand you over, O Universe?”
He watching over Israel slumbers not nor sleeps.