Tehillah Generation Chapel
Daily Manna | Thursday, May 17, 2018 | Topic: Conscience 21
Scripture: My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me. And since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children. Hosea 4:6
Note: The story of Hosea and his unlikely marriage to Gomer, a woman of doubtful background, is still a subject of consideration for Christian believers struggling to come to terms with the oddity of the task handed over to the prophet by Yahweh. At the core of the struggle in our minds and conscience which most believers and preachers have silently endured but are afraid to touch on, was how God could give an instruction that seems to mess up with the minds and knowledge of what they had learnt all along.
There was no allusion to an allegory in the instruction given to Hosea. This was a hard, historical fact concerning a man who was clearly identified with a contemporary of his in the person of Amos, who was the harbinger sent with the crucial message that was about to be accompanied with judgment, if it went unheeded. Prosperity has a delusional way of convincing people of their own self importance in the things that define their destiny. Israel found herself trapped in this seducing delusion of her own indestructibility.
God said to the prophet in Hosea1:2, “Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.” Various understandings from students of the Bible have evolved over the years that sought to mitigate the mess in the minds of people concerning the plight that befell Hosea, with various historical possibilities arising. One of these possibilities is the belief that God was commanding Hosea to marry a woman who had formerly been a prostitute.
Other students of the Bible also contend that with the instruction to go and take a wife of harlotry, what God actually meant was for the prophet to marry a woman who came from the northern kingdom of Israel. As a nation compared to Judah, Israel was considered a land that was in a complete mess, for compromising on the expectations of the law, the prophets and the psalms. Israel was a land that was guilty of spiritual adultery, a position that wasn’t different from the instruction handed down to Hosea. In either of the two explanations, it seemed obvious that Gomer was a woman who had been deeply affected by the moral laxity of her society, and God intended to use Hosea’s personal relationship with her as a penetrating object lesson of His own relationship with His unfaithful people, Israel.
Food for thought: God’s undying love for man compels Him to offer unimaginable sacrifices simply to redeem man.
Declaration: But God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Romans 5:8
©Author: Rev Fred Aboe
