The Story of God: Hosea

Listen along as we work our way through the minor prophets.

Notes/Quotes:

Hosea 14:1-9 - Denise

Hosea 14:1-9

“The task of the prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.” Walter Brueggeman 

Hosea 1:2
Hosea 1:10-2:1
Hosea 2:14-21

“For all its brevity, this little prophecy entwines together strands which only separately delight us in other more familiar passages. In a few lines we have the picture of nature at peace with man (cf. Is. 11:6-9; 65:25), of weapons discarded (cf. Ps. 46:9; Is. 9:5; Mi. 4:3) and of God’s people at one with Him (cf. Je. 31:33f.; Ezk. 36:26f.). It is the last of these that God lingers over, for it is the heart of the matter.” - Derek Kidner 

“Perhaps this is why Hosea captures, as no other writer does, the tension within God’s love for His elect – for He refuses to ease the pain of the relationship either by compromise or by quitting. He loves these people despite their blatant unfaithfulness (‘they turn to other gods’), which He cannot for a moment condone, and despite their fatuous and brutish scale of values.” - Derek Kidner

3:5

In every direction His people have played Him false: in religion, with other gods, another cult; in politics, with shabby intrigues and dubious patrons; in morals, with unbridled sex and violence. His reaction might well have been to write them off and waste no more affection on them. But He is not so easily dismissed. - Derek Kidner

“Amos cries, “Turn, for in front of you is destruction;” but Hosea, “Turn, for behind you is God.” George Adam Smith

It is rather easy to grow up with a naïve idea of God – something like a child’s impression of the adult world – and with a worrying conundrum about His way of doing things. The conundrum is this old one: If God is all- powerful and all-good, why does He not rid the world of evil? (The church too, for that matter?)
One of the things that Hosea does for us is to give us, with extraordinary frankness, the other side of that anomaly. God’s side. The child’s idea of his elders is a puzzled one. They make the rules (he says to himself) – there’s power for you! And they have money, whatever they may say – there’s freedom! What couldn’t we do, we children, with all that freedom, all that power? In this book we see things not in these simplistic terms, where situations and people are uncomplicated and power is like a magic wand. Hosea introduces us to a family which is a miniature of our world, but it is a problem family, and God compares His situation not to that of an autocrat whose orders nobody dares question, nor of a father who rejoices in an adoring wife and children, but to that of a husband whose wife has left him, and a father whose children are like strangers in his own house and are fast destroying themselves. - Derek Kidner

The ‘whoever’ of this verse suddenly exposes us to the same searching encounter, for the word of God goes on speaking; it never slips safely into the past. The rightness of God’s ways as revealed in this book is so far above us in both holiness and love, as to leave self-sufficient man without excuse, self-condemned, while those who turn into the way of righteousness find themselves met more than half-way. - Derek Kidner