1.  A little historical context.

After the death of David, the Kingdom splits into the Northern Tribes (Israel) and the Southern Tribes (Judah) each with their own line of kings. It’s hard to tell who has the worse track records for leadership. Now and then there is a good king but, on the whole, they are corrupt and lead the people into wars, economic decline and upheavals. Both kingdoms are blessed with prophets who keep calling the leadership and the people back to obedience and with few exceptions they are all treated badly and ignored.

Hosea is a prophet to the Northern Kingdom a few years before they are taken into captivity by Assyria. For a few years prior to their fall, Israel experiences an economic and political revival. Under Jeroboam there is something of a return to strength and prosperity. Their external enemies are weakened by power struggles and intrigue and Israel takes advantage of that to increase trade and strengthen their own borders. However, prosperity also brings with it moral and religious laxity. The priests have lost all sense of authority and direction and actually encourage the people in what Ross Douthat calls “bad religion” and idolatry. When Jeroboam dies he is followed by chaos. His successor only rules for six months and is assassinated. His killer is assassinated after only one month. After that, there is a ten year period that is characterized by even more spiritual decline and a renewed subservience to the growing power of outside forces. “Prosperity had brought an unprecedented degree of cultural corruption. Every holy memory was effaced by present corruption.”

2.  One of the questions scholars have asked for years is whether this is an allegory or a parable or an actual marriage. One writer said, “It is grotesque to imagine a prophet’s deliberately establishing a marriage with a harlot in order to act out a parable of God’s relation to Israel.” I don’t find it impossible to believe God would do that when I think about the many other “grotesque” things God has called people to do to illustrate His relationship with us. Jeremiah’s life was nothing but hardship. Ezekiel’s sometimes bizarre behavior was always directed by God to illustrate a message.

Think about Abraham being asked to sacrifice Issac to illustrate God’s faithfulness and foreshadowing His own sacrifice. I think this is an actual marriage and not simply a parable. Too often we think of those in full-time service as being blessed but God has often used them in ways we would not call blessed.

3.  For Hosea, the essence of sin for Israel is to rely upon anyone or anything other than God. That is why the word “hesed” is repeated many times in the book. It is not just love – it is unending love. It is not romantic, not a contract or a license. It is not simply a moral obligation but an enduring and unalterable commitment. Too often we quote the Gospel of John and say “God is love” but we have in mind something that does not include wrath, punishment, exile and destruction. We have in mind something that will attract people to God as non-threatening and all-inclusive. That is partly right but not completely. God’s love includes obedience, hardship, discipline, reproof, and wilderness experiences. We don’t understand it because we want something other than that. Hesed is his permanent commitment to love a people who will not keep their commitment.

But hesed is also the standard by which Hosea judges our relationships with each other. We are to make the same commitment to each other. Our treatment of each other is to be a reflection of the relationship we have with God. We are to persevere in our love. We are to endure in our love. We are to be long-suffering in our love and, as Paul says, never fail or give up. The whole book of Hosea is about God’s complete and complex enduring love for Israel.

Without this knowledge of God and understanding of faithful love, all of society falls into disorder. All relationships and institutions are corrupted. Life without a knowledge of and dependence on God is doomed to corruption – no matter what the substitute is. Law, government, morality, natural affection are all corrupted without the knowledge of God. That is why Paul says in Romans the knowledge of God is the fundamental of any society. “The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them…..For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.” As Deuteronomy says, “They followed worthless idols and became worthless themselves.”

There is no society that can survive without basing their fundamental rules on the knowledge of God. As John Adams said about the Constitution: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Hosea was saying the same about Israel’s relationship with God. Without the recognition of their dependence on him they would become corrupt and worthless and weak.

4.  The besetting sin of Israel from the beginning was idolatry – and a particular form of idolatry – the worship of Baal outside the worship of God and, worse, the incorporation of the worship of Baal inside the worship of God. In other words, while some people abandoned God completely for Baal, others – including the priests and the kings, tried to merge elements of Baal worship into the worship of God. They ended with a religion that was contradictory and false – but it appealed to people. They could have the trappings of their traditions and the excesses of their idolatry.

Jacques Barzun died in October and left a masterpiece titled: From Dawn to Decadence – 500 years of Western Cultural Life:

“As one would expect, the sources of decadence are many and varied. Mr. Barzun shows how, from one perspective, the symptoms of decadence can be understood as resulting from the overemphasis of those very traits that defined the West: primitivism, emancipation, self-consciousness, individualism, and so on. What appear as motors for cultural development can, when pursued ruthlessly and without regard to other virtues, degenerate into engines of decadence and decline. There is, first of all, the spiritual paralysis that results from willing contradictory things.   Western nations spend billions on public schooling for all, urged along by the public cry for Excellence. At the same time the society pounces on any show of superiority as elitism. The same nations deplore violence and sexual promiscuity among the young, but pornography and violence in films and books, shops and clubs, on television and the Internet, and in the lyrics of pop music cannot be suppressed, in the interests of “the free market of ideas.” The confusion generated by such contradictions attends every aspect of cultural endeavor.”

So it was with Israel. Hoping they could have a religion that was both practical and comforting they ended up with, first, spiritual paralysis, and then spiritual death. They became worthless.

A recent New Yorker article on Rob Bell, the author of “Love Wins” describes what has happened when mainline churches in America have attempted to merge the demands of the Gospel with the desires of the ever-changing culture around them. “Given the recent history of mainline Protestants, it’s unclear that a more liberal theology would be healthy for the evangelical movement. Throughout American history, the most successful church movements have been not the ones that kept up with contemporary culture but the ones that were confident enough to tug hard against it.. From a certain evangelical perspective, Bell’s life can look like a cautionary tale: his desire to question the doctrine of Hell led to his departure from the church he built. And maybe, like many other theological liberals in recent decades, he will drift out of the Christian church altogether and become merely one more mildly spiritual Californian, content to find moments of grace and joy in his everyday life; certainly, that’s what many of his detractors expect. But it’s also possible that his new life will end up strengthening many of his old convictions.”

5.  Idolatry does not take hold because it is seen as evil but because it offers control of life. It takes what is often uncontrollable and gives us a sense we can direct our own lives. We celebrate the traits and characteristics of powerful people who design their own destinies. It’s almost a national trait that we desire independence – not reliance. We want freedom to shape our own lives – not obedience to a God who dictates and demands. “God is watching – from a distance.”

We want to believe we have made our lives with our own hands and we own them. We want to believe what the people of Israel wanted to believe in Deuteronomy 8:17-20: “If you start thinking to yourselves, “I did all this. And all by myself. I’m rich. It’s all mine!”—well, think again. Remember that God, your God, gave you the strength to produce all this wealth so as to confirm the covenant that he promised to your ancestors—as it is today. If you forget, forget God, your God, and start taking up with other gods, serving and worshiping them, I’m on record right now as giving you firm warning: that will be the end of you; I mean it—destruction. You’ll go to your doom—the same as the nations God is destroying before you; doom because you wouldn’t obey the Voice of God, your God.”

Their fascination with Baal is like our own fascination with freedom or capitalism or even justice. They only work with a moral base and in and of themselves and left to themselves they destroy us.

Idolatry is not just immorality. It is a way of understanding our relationship with the world. We make our gods to fit our circumstances and needs. We make our gods to create order from chaos. We want a religion that deals with facts – life as it really is and not faith. Baal was the god of rain and fertility…and those were basics in life. Those things made their life either good or bad. Our gods are created by our anxieties. Our anxieties are no longer fertility and rain. We don’t live in an agricultural society. They are psychological, political and economic. What was the last election about? Jobs and the middle class. An economy in decline. We look for gods who can give us jobs and tax relief. We look for gods who can bring order to our world and solve real problems – not rain and fertility. And then we incorporate those values into our religion. What candidate or party shares those values? What spiritual leaders speak to us about what is on our minds and creates uncertainty?  How much have those values become a part of our religion?

Those gods cannot genuinely love us but they can reward us with false security and some kind of comfort and protect us from chaos. Or so we think. We think that until we recognize too late what the word Baal meant then and means even now. It is the word for “master”. In our search for security and control we find only a god who becomes our master.

6.  But just as the New Yorker writer holds out hope for Rob Bell, Hosea holds out hope for Israel.

Read 2:14-23.

And that is the hope of Advent after all. Out of the darkness will come light. Out of chaos will come order. Out of fear will come security. Out of corruption will come righteousness, justice, love, compassion and faithfulness. Out of exile will come “You are my people and you are my God.”

In a poem titled “The Tree” Madeline L’Engle writes a line that summarizes this whole lesson: “We grasp for truth And lose it till it comes to us by love.”

That is the definition of hesed on the part of God. Read 3:1-2. The price for redemption from idolatry and spiritual adultery and the suppression of the truth of God is not 15 shekels. It is not the death of the one who is unfaithful. It is the sacrifice of the life of God himself.