Hosea 14 (Immerse Prophets p. 39)
“Confession”
August 30, 2020 – Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
There are a lot of cars in our neighbors’ driveway. She’s an older woman who lost her husband years ago. But during the pandemic it seems some of her adult children have come home to stay. That story is playing out in other homes around our neighborhood and our country. Young people who might have been at college or otherwise on their own are having a hard time. So they return home.
At the beginning of our text for today on Prophets page 39, chapter 14, Hosea asked his people, God’s children, to return to the Lord. They were having a hard time, of their own making. They had forsaken their God and worshipped other gods. Hosea’s book painfully and tenderly portrays their departure from God as the unfaithfulness of a beloved spouse and the ingratitude and rebellion of children. God shows up as both a betrayed husband and a rejected parent. But He wants those He loves to return.
Like Amos whom we heard from last week, Hosea prophesied to the northern kingdom of Israel during its prosperous years under king Jeroboam II. Unlike Amos, Hosea’s prophetic career lasted past Jeroboam’s death in 750 B.C. According to the first verse of the book, he survived into the reign of Hezekiah in the southern kingdom of Judah. He lived to see the prophecies of judgment and destruction come true when Israel in the north fell to the Assyrians in 722 B.C. The first part of the book is a warning delivered during times of prosperity, while the longer second part gives us glimpses of Israel falling apart before it was destroyed.
This call to return at the end of Hosea is not his first invitation of that sort. Back at the beginning of chapter 6, the top of page 28 in Prophets, Hosea himself appeals to Israel, “Come, let us return to the Lord. He has torn us to pieces; now he will heal us.” That invitation sums up the whole message of the Bible and Christian faith. As he says here on page 39, just after asking Israel to return, “your sins have brought you down.” Our sins have separated us from God from the beginning. All of Scripture is about God’s great mission to bring us back, to have us return.
How do we get back, though? How is a return to God possible? Throughout Hosea, the people’s relationship with God is portrayed in the most basic human terms. In relation to God, Israel is an unfaithful spouse or an ungrateful and rebellious child. It is not surprising, then, that the conditions for healing their broken relationship with God is very much like what is needed for healing broken human relationships.
A subplot of the mystery novel I’m listening to as I run this week goes like this. Husband and wife are at odds. He wants to be sheriff in their small community, returning to an occupation in law enforcement he left years before. She fears for his safety and for their time together as a family. She knows his obsession with police work takes him away from home both in time and attention. She is upset that when townspeople ask him to run for the position, he doesn’t tell her. He talks to others about it before he talks to her. When it finally comes out and they confront each other, the result is silence on both sides. They both walk away saying nothing more. He, in particular, is at a loss about what to say.
The reader, or listener in my case, of course knows what is needed. They both just need to go back and say, “I’m sorry,” and start the conversation again. Silence will not work. They need words. That’s what God has Hosea tell the people of Israel there in what is verse 2 of the chapter in traditional Bibles. Our translation says, “Bring your confession, and return to the Lord,” but literally Hosea wrote, “Bring words, and return to the Lord.”
“Bring words” sounds strange. We might think it is part of a general prophetic opposition to sacrifices made to appease God without any intention of living in keeping with God’s commands. Over on page 31, the end of chapter 8, Hosea told the Israel, “The people love to offer sacrifices to me, feasting on the meat, but I do not accept their sacrifices.” Next week we will hear the prophet Micah say that it is not huge sacrifices that God wants, but mercy, justice, and humility. So we could hear “Bring words” as “Bring honest words instead of false sacrifices.” But that would miss the point.
The failure of sacrifices is there in Hosea, but it’s not a major issue. Instead, his concern is to restore relationship with God. To do that, like in human relationships, words are needed, words of apology, of confession. To that end, God does for Israel what some of those estranged lovers in books and film need. God gives Israel the words it needs. When Hosea says, “Bring words, and return to the Lord,” he immediately follows it with the very words that should be said. He means “Bring [these] words.”
So the prophet tells them, “Say to him,” and then offers the exact words, the exact prayer to pray. And of course, in this sense the NLT translation is right. Those words are a confession, and a request for forgiveness, as well as an expression of faith and trust in God.
How often have we seen the story played out both in our own lives and in fiction? There have been acts of unfaithfulness or broken promises or thoughtless failures. To begin the process of healing, there need to be words—not just any words, not words that deepen wounds or speak trivial things, but words of confession and repentance, words that ask for forgiveness, words that say to those we’ve hurt that we acknowledge our wrong. Just that sort of word also begins our return to God.
It is part of the mercy of God that He gives us the words, words that we likely do not have for ourselves. Jesus taught us to say, “forgives us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” Ultimately, for our forgiveness, God gave us the Word Himself, Jesus Christ, spoken by God from all eternity. To return to God we offer words of confession and then come pleading the Word who became flesh and died and rose again so our sins might be forgiven. “Bring words” in the end is an invitation to receive words, to receive the living Word who is our Savior.
Yet we know that, except for the living Word who is Jesus, words in themselves are not enough. Empty words can be like empty sacrifices. The words of a spouse who apologizes for unfaithfulness mean nothing if he goes back to that other lover. The words of a small child expressing love for a parent are empty if she refuses to obey. Like our text from Romans 12 begins today, “Let love be genuine.” Let the words of love we say to each other and to God be genuine. So in order to communicate the authenticity of their repentance and love for God, in the middle of verse 3 Israel is supposed to say what especially an adulterous spouse needs to say, “Never again…”
That “never again” is a sign of true repentance. Israel was to no longer trust in armed force, whether it was allies from other nations or their own cavalry. That trust in God was not just until the next crisis, when the next enemy surrounded them, but forever. That “never again” to trusting idols was not just until a crop failed or a disease swept through, but an unending commitment to make the Lord their only God.
As we will continue to see over and over in the prophets this fall, that unfailing trust in God, and God alone, is based on the truth at the end of the words Israel was given, the conclusion of what they were to say, “No, in you alone do the orphans find mercy.” If Israel would say those words, they would be acknowledging the truth of everything Hosea had said and especially of what he had done.
In the very first chapter, page 21, God told Hosea to name his children as if they were the people of Israel who had been unfaithful to God, as if they were orphans rejected by their parents. He named his daughter Lo-ruhamah, “Not Loved,” and his son Lo-ammi, “Not My People.” But now, if the people come back to God saying these words at the end of the book, the prophecy at the top of page 22 will come true. They will be called “Loved” and “My People” once again. The orphans will find mercy with God and come home.
A couple weeks ago our friends Johnny and Alison escorted three orphan children from Haiti to meet their new families in Miami. Imagine the joy of those meetings between adoptive parents and children who could no longer or perhaps never had called anyone “Mommy” or “Daddy,” who had yet to feel tender love embrace them, who had yet to call a house a home. That’s what God is offering His people if they will only say the words and return to Him.
That same merciful love is offered to anyone who will come to God and bring words, these words or words like these, an honest confession of sin, and an authentic change of heart. The orphan who trusts in God rather than the power and security of this world or other spiritual forces—that orphan will find mercy and a home with God. That mercy and grace is the gift of God to anyone who repents and seeks forgiveness in Jesus.
After the words Israel is to say at the top of page 39 come words that God says to Israel. God makes His own commitment to them in beautiful words, “Then I will heal you of your faithlessness; my love will know no bounds, for my anger will be gone forever.” God is saying that to anyone who comes to Him with words of repentance and confession.
However, you and I must also recognize that we are not much different from Israel. We say our words to God, to Jesus, but don’t always mean them. Or if we mean them, we fail to live up to them. We promise to be faithful forever, but then when things are hard, when a virus comes knocking or a job goes away or family trouble arises, we forget, we turn away, we look for help elsewhere. Israel trusted in idols and war horses. We may trust in politics or the stock market to provide what we need. God keeps on calling us to return and trust in Him.
Abraham Joshua Heschel writes, “In surveying the past, Amos dwells on what God has done; Hosea dwells on what God has felt for Israel.”[1] Those images of a betrayed spouse and a spurned parent are not just colorful metaphors. Hosea has given us a glimpse into the heart of God when we fail to trust Him. As the prophet closes his book, he is giving us one more vivid and moving account of how deeply God loves His people, the divine emotion that lies behind those words, “my love will know no bounds.”
Those pictures of nature blooming and fruitful beginning at the second half of page 39, verse 5 in traditional Bibles, are a love poem God wrote to Israel:
I will be to Israel
like a refreshing dew from heaven.
Israel will blossom like the lily;
it will send roots deep into the soil
like the cedars in Lebanon.
Its branches will spread out
like beautiful olive trees,
as fragrant as the cedars of Lebanon.
My people will again live under my shade.
They will flourish like grain
and blossom like grapevines.
They will be as fragrant as the wines of Lebanon.
God stopped all His scolding, all His warnings of punishment, all His pleas for His people to come back and simply poured out His heart. “Here is what I can be for you. Here is what it is like to love and trust me. You will live. You will flourish. You will be blessed and beautiful like the most gorgeous and sweet-smelling vegetation on earth.”
It’s a love poem from God, but there is another subtle message in it that is easy for you and I to miss if we’re not paying attention. Think about it. Why does Lebanon suddenly show up here? Not just once, but three times? Yes, it was famous for its cedar trees, but there is no historical record of Lebanon having superb wine. Why should the natural beauty of Lebanon be the image God chose for His love song to Israel?
Ancient middle east religion was complicated, but one of the gods which tempted Israel was called Baal. Baal was both a god of storm and rains and a god of the fertile agriculture which comes from good rains. Baal means “lord” and he was sometimes known as the Lord of Lebanon. Worship of Baal came to Israel from that direction, from the north, perhaps because Israel imagined that the tall trees and lush vineyards of Lebanon might be theirs too if they worshipped that god.
So when God sings to Israel that He will make her as fertile and fruitful and fragrant as Lebanon, He is also telling them that they do not need that foreign god Baal. All the blessings they hoped for from that other god would be theirs if they came back to the true God, to the rightful Lord of all the earth. He would in fact give them the joy they mistakenly thought they would receive somewhere else.
Jesus said it in our Gospel lesson from Matthew 16:26 this morning, talking about those who choose to go other directions instead of following Him, those who give up their lives for other lords like money or pleasure or power instead of Him. “For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their lives? Or what will they give in return for their lives?” The way to life is the way back to God. Any other direction, any other proposition is a losing proposition.
Think of stories where a woman is loved by a poor but good man, but she chooses instead to go off with a wealthy but evil man who offers her clothes and cars and a house at the coast. Little does she know that the poor man was himself rich, richer than any other, but he had wanted her to love and be with him for himself and not for his money. In desperate love the first man finally tells her who he really is and reveals all that he could give her. That’s where God is at with Israel in these last few verses of Hosea.
In the next to the last verse, near the bottom of 39, God sounds like a parent again. “O Israel, stay away from idols!” “O my child, stay away from strangers, from evil people who will only do you harm, from greedy souls who only want your money.” Instead, God the heavenly Father says, “I am the one who answers your prayers and cares for you. I am like a tree that is always green; all your fruit comes from me.” You and I need to remember those words from God when we look elsewhere for the answers to our prayers, when we imagine someone or something else is going to give us true happiness.
I’d like to draw more specific conclusions, to talk about how we as American Christians may be running after idols and leaving behind our dear Lord whose love knows no bounds, who went to the Cross for us, and who calls us to follow him there. I’d like to name those idols, those false gods of our time. But for now I’m going to be like Hosea who only pointed in the direction that phony “lord” came from, the direction of false promises and fake news of prosperity. And, like Hosea, I will simply let God say that, whatever we might expect from other lords, our true Lord will give us that which is truly good.
In fact, in the last verse of his book, Hosea recognized that it would be only the truly wise of his people who understood the pictures he painted, the stories he told. “Let those who are wise understand these things. Let those with discernment listen carefully.” It will take wisdom to see our own unfaithfulness in Hosea’s book. It will take discernment to listen to the prayer of confession Hosea gave Israel and speak our own words of confession. But as Hosea concludes:
The paths of the Lord are true and right,
and righteous people live by walking in them.
But in those paths sinners stumble and fall.
People are stumbling, Christians are stumbling, all around us. May God give you and me the wisdom and the words to turn back and return to Him and walk the true path, the path which follows our Lord Jesus to the Cross. That is the path that leads to the kingdom of God, whose blessings are richer than any other can offer and whose love knows no bounds.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2020 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] The Prophets: An Introduction, vol. I (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 60.