The Gospel of Hosea, Ch. 5: Trapped into Spiritual Polygamy

The Gospel of Hosea, Ch. 5: Trapped into Spiritual Polygamy. 

“Israel no longer knows (‘yada’) Me, they don’t pay heed to Me, and they wouldn’t even recognize Me if they saw Me. Their evil deeds block the way for them to return to Me, their God, because they are possessed by a spirit of prostitution.” (Hosea 5:4).

In Hosea 5, Yahweh continues His scathing judgments against Israel, especially against the nation’s leaders, priests, and royal families. Yahweh is furious that the so-called spiritual leaders in Israel have led the people into a snare, a trap, like a net spread out to capture prey. Why is God so angry against His chosen people? What are they doing that deserves God’s raging condemnation? The bottom line was simple trust. Unfortunately, Israel’s leaders became experts at combining Yahweh-worship with Baal-worship. In Canaanite religion, Baal was thought to be the weather god who controlled the rainfall, agricultural success, the fruitfulness of the crops, and thus survival itself. The Israelites knew about their history with Yahweh and how they owed Him complete allegiance, but they forgot about Israel’s history of dependence on Yahweh for daily provisions. The Israelites thought, practically speaking, that they would rather hedge their bets, they didn’t want to depend completely and solely on Yahweh if in fact Baal would help them flourish as well. They wanted to cover all their bases, just in case Yahweh might let them down regarding their daily needs. So Baal, which means lord or master, became blended with Yahweh, the small “l” lord being equal to the capital “L” Lord, the small “m” worshipped along with the capital “M” in their daily lives. These blurred distinctions resulted in divided loyalties, to the extent that during their worship the Israelites would often address Yahweh as “my Baal.” If there’s one thing that Yahweh has made abundantly clear since Day One, it’s that He will not stand for divided loyalties in His believers, period, end of sentence. Yahweh is a demanding God who expects faithfulness in His lovers. “I am Yahweh, that is my Name; I will not yield my glory to another, nor my renown to idols.” (Is. 42:8).

The Lord is a Jealous Lover. “Do not worship any other god, for the Lord Yahweh, whose name is The Jealous One, is a jealous God.”  (Ex. 34:14). In Biblical history, God has consistently thought of Himself as married to His Chosen People. God looked at the people of Israel as His spouse ever since they agreed to the spiritual marriage covenant at Mt Sinai. Prophets such as Hosea in the Jewish Scriptures loved to refer to God as a husband or a bridegroom to the chosen people. They loved to speak the truth that He considered Himself married to His people. God used the metaphor of marriage, evidently, because that is the closest earthly union, the most intimate and meaningful, that provides a way of communicating the love God has for His followers and the intimate relationship He wants with each of us. He is intolerant of rivals in His love for us, because He knows we will only be blessed and fulfilled, we will only flourish, when we have an exclusive spiritual marriage to Him. With this mind, God is a holy, righteous and jealous husband. Here are various thoughts about God’s jealousy:

1. “God’s jealousy is an angered love that stays love.” Tim Keller;
2. “God’s jealousy is God continually seeking to protect His own honor.” Wayne Grudem;
3. “God’s jealousy is that passionate energy by which He is provoked and stirred to take action against whatever or whoever stands in the way of His enjoyment of what He loves and desires.” Sam Storms;
4. “God’s jealousy is a praiseworthy zeal on God’s part to preserve something supremely precious.” J. I. Packer;
5. “God’s jealousy comes from a holy indignation at having His honor and power scorned by unfaithfulness. God is the only Being for whom jealous passion for His own glory is a supreme act of love.” John Piper;
6. “The intensity of God’s anger at threats to His relationship with us is directly proportionate to the depths of His love. God’s jealous pursuit of His own glory and fame is the most loving thing He could ever do for you.” Sam Storms;
7. “The jealousy of Yahweh is His profoundly intense drive within to protect the interests of His own glory.” Ray Ortlund;
8. “The whole history of the human race is a record of the wars of the Lord against idolatry.” Charles Spurgeon.

A Jealous God of Truth. “I will be jealous for my holy Name.” (Ezek. 39:25). It follows, then, that He would be a perfect stickler for the truth. All the earthly idols that claim devotion are unworthy, so God stands on the truth of His worthiness. Anything else, and He wouldn’t be true to Himself. God is divinely impatient with untruth, He doesn’t abide it, He meets it straight on. He doesn’t want His people to be lured into any kind of untruth, into the belief that He is merely one option among many. That is a falsehood. His singular glory is the absolute fact of the universe. There is only one true God, and He refuses to share His glory with gods and idols, because that would be an utterly false thing to do.  God righteously harps on the truth, and He refuses to be misrepresented by false gods or empty idols. He is jealous that He be honored exclusively, because that is the truth of the matter. He fights untruth through divine jealousy. He will forever reject a tainting of His sacred Name, because He is a warrior for the truth. God’s Name has been truthfully honored and worshiped for eternity in the heavens.

A Jealous God of Love. “The Lord be exalted, who delights in the well-being of His servant, and desires his servant’s prosperity.” (Ps. 35:27). He wants what is best for us. He wants to see us flourish. His jealousy seems to spring into action when His people, all people, are distracted from trusting Him exclusively. If He didn’t love us, He wouldn’t be jealous over our unfaithfulness, over things that lead us astray into self-destruction. God is true to His nature of love when He expresses His jealousy for us. What does one expect from a loving God, that He would simply shrug His shoulders and let “fate’ have its way? God considers Himself married to His people, bound by a covenant of love that is founded upon faithfulness. When there is idolatry of any kind, He becomes a jealous husband who intervenes and reminds us of His love for us. He is the jilted partner who woos the spouse back to Him, who mercifully seeks out the unfaithful partner and welcomes her back. Unlike human jealousy, God’s divine jealousy is pure and righteous and rooted in love.  When something gets in the way of the believer’s spiritual prosperity, or an unbeliever’s salvation, look out. Our God of love is a jealous God.

A Jealous God of Passion. “You must not worship any other god, because Yahweh, whose Name is Impassioned, is an impassioned God.” (Exodus 34:14, Tanakh). God’s chosen people believe that He has demonstrated zeal down through biblical history, that He has a strong personality marked by conviction and holy passion. On the one hand, it seems almost silly to assign human emotion to the glorious God. On the other hand, God-made-flesh certainly revealed passion and zeal and what could be called emotion. We see the Father through the Son, so it seems emotion is not foreign to the character of the Lord God. Maybe all our imperfect, fallen emotions find their righteous origin in God the Creator. God certainly doesn’t have His emotional ups and downs like us. He of course isn’t moody in a human way, because He is the Rock, steady and stable through eternity. That’s what separated Yahweh from the gods of the ancient day, who were believed to be unpredictable and inconsistent. People lived their lives trying to figure out how to keep their gods happy. One never knew what to expect from those gods, whether the gods of Canaan, Egypt and Rome, or the more contemporary idols of technology, career and entertainment. To help us along the way, God let us read His mind somewhat by giving us Scripture and Jesus, the Word-made-flesh. God has a passion for truth and a zeal for love. That is His nature, and He will always be true to Himself. God’s essence as demonstrated by Yahweh in the OT and Jesus in the NT is eternally full of grace and truth, and passionately so.

“Take care, then, not to forget the covenant that the Lord your God concluded with you… For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, an impassioned and jealous God.” (Deut. 4:23-24).

The Spirit of Infidelity is Everywhere in Israel. Hosea introduces this chapter in verse 1 by mentioning the snare that has been placed in Mizpah and the net that has been spread on Mt. Tabor. The leaders in Israel have trapped their people in Baal-worship by blending it with Yahweh-worship, and these two famous holy sites in Israel were given as examples of what can happen to sacred places that can be so easily transformed into cursed places when worship is done thoughtlessly or carelessly. Both Mizpah and Tabor were considered “high places” in Israel, which is why Baal worshippers took them over as if that made them closer to their god. Hosea perhaps mentioned these two sites in particular because Mizpah is at one end of Israel, and Mt. Tabor is at the exact opposite end of Israel. So Hosea is telling the people that spiritual unfaithfulness has completely filled every corner of Israel, and spiritual corruption is everywhere he looks.

1. The Snare of Mizpah. This territory of Israel in the hill country of Gilead is a famous sacred site where Jacob and Laban had reached a formal agreement of peace between them, a covenant of loyalty that has been named “The Mizpah Covenant.” (Genesis 31). The word Mizpah means “watchtower,” and it reflects their holy request of Yahweh to watch over them and their families in their absence from each other and help them keep the peace between them. Laban’s closing request was, “May Yahweh keep watch between you, Jacob, and me, Laban, when we are away from each other. God is witness between you and me.” So it’s ironic to Hosea that a blessed place dedicated to watching had become a cursed place dedicated to spiritual blindness. Mizpah had been transformed by the leaders from a place that welcomed peace to one that ensnared the people into a trap of deceit and turmoil.
2. The Net of Tabor. Mt. Tabor is a rather routine, dome-shaped mountain in the Jezreel Valley, about six miles from Nazareth and ten miles from the Sea of Galilee. Because the mount was settled on a very flat valley, it looked a lot higher than it actually was, the peak at 2,000 feet. So Mt. Tabor was a very familiar and much-used landmark through the history of Israel. Because of its strategic location, Tabor and Jezreel Valley, also known as Megiddo, was the sight of many battles. Mt. Tabor is perhaps most famous for the monumental victory of Deborah during the time of the Judges. “One day the prophet and judge Deborah sent for Barak and said to him, ‘This is what the Lord Yahweh, the God of Israel, commands you: Call out 10,000 warriors from the tribes of Naphtali and Zebulun at Mount Tabor. And I will call out Sisera, commander of the Canaanite king Jabin, along with all his chariots and warriors. There I will give you victory over him, says the Lord.” (Judges 4:6-7)… “When Sisera the commander of the Canaanites was told that Barak general of the Israelites had gone up to Mount Tabor, Sisera called out all his chariots, 900 chariots of iron, and all the men who were with him. And the prophetess Deborah said to Barak: ‘Up! For this is the day in which the Lord Yahweh has given Sisera into your hand. Does not the Lord go out before you?’ And the Lord routed Sisera and all his chariots and all his army… The torrent of River Kishon swept them away, the ancient torrent.” (Judges 4:12-16, 5:21-22). God sent a torrential rain to the battlefield area at the base of Mt. Tabor, which caused the main river to rise. This led to Sisera’s defeat, because the overrun river caused all 900 of those famous chariots and horses to get stuck in the mud. Sisera’s army panicked and was then routed by the more nimble Israelites. The fact that this historic sacred site in Israel was also used as a pagan shrine dedicated to Baal and sex-worship couldn’t go by unnoticed by Hosea. It appears that the name Tabor was based on the belief that a god of Baal named Tabor lived in one of the small caves at its peak. Perhaps Tabor’s spotty spiritual history has been redeemed, as it is considered the probable site of the Transfiguration of Christ. If anything could sanctify a cursed place, I would think that would do it.

“I know Ephraim (Israel) intimately, I know them through and through. But they no longer know (‘yada’) Me.”

“Do Not Know!” Once again we find Hosea’s use of “yada,” a central idea throughout the book of Hosea. The Hebrew word “yada” is dropped 25 times in the book, and if we don’t understand what the Bible means by “know,” we are missing the heartbeat of our relationship with God. The Bible has a lot to say about the meaning of know, including the usual suspects: memory of a fact or event; possession of a technical skill; a perception of a piece of reality; an intuitive awareness; a mastery of a particular subject; an understanding of something; a personal familiarity with something. That’s all good. Nothing new there. But now the fun begins… The Hebraic-Christian understanding of “know” is not at all limited to an intellectual or mental knowledge. To know someone in the Biblical sense is to experience that person in a deeply intimate way. “Know” is a relationship word and involves knowledge that comes from personal experience. To know involves a deeply personal union with a truth or a person. In the Hebrew and Christian mind, we don’t really know something until it becomes a part of us, something that changes us in some way. To truly know something is to be able to live it out, to experience participation with that which is known. Knowing something involves a heartfelt focus, an intense investment. To know something is to care for it, to give oneself over to it.  To know someone in the Biblical sense is to literally participate in a profound relationship with that person, to establish an ongoing union with someone, to be personally invested to an intimate degree with a person. A spiritual relationship with God seems best understood in the context of “knowledge” in the biblical sense, a deep union involving spiritual relations between God and the believer. In the same way that Adam and Eve “knew” each other physically, God wants to “know” us spiritually, and for us to know Him at that same level. To walk with the Lord is to grow in our “knowledge” of Him, to experience spiritual relations with Him in an intimate way.  In fact, to know God in the way He want us to know Him means to have spiritual intercourse with Him, an ongoing spiritual union that involves, not physical “carnal knowledge,” but spiritual knowledge.

“Hear, O Israel! Yahweh is our God, Yahweh alone! And you shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” (Deuteronomy 6:4-5). 

Hosea’s Poetic Pictures of God’s Wrath. “I will pour my wrath out on them like a flood, like a waterfall!” (5:10). The Hebrew word for wrath suggests a rage that is overflowing with anger. And Hosea was evidently inspired in this passage to add as many colorful, graphic descriptions that he could think of to get a fuller picture of what his judgment will look like to the judged. Time and again Hosea used extreme physical ailments and malicious creatures to describe Israel’s spiritual corruption. Depending on the translation, Hosea describes God’s wrath as a pus-filled sore, a wool-consuming moth, a maggot in an infected wound, an ulcer, gangrene, ringworm, dry-rotted wood, a strong young lion that tears to pieces and carries away its victim. One would think that these rather dramatic warnings would hit home in the hearts of the Israelites, but they were to no avail.

Is There a Point of No Return? “You have dug a deep ditch… Their evil deeds block the way for them to return to Me, their God.” (5:2, 4). The Israelites seemed to gradually lose their faith in Yahweh as Baal was shrewdly blended into the worship mix. Have they completely lost their spiritual muscle-memory? Are they so far gone that “Yahweh has withdrawn Himself from them“? Was God’s doom pronounced on Israel written in permanent ink? Does their day of reckoning remove all hope for a turnaround at some point? According to Hosea’s conclusion in this passage, the answer to those concerns is that, regardless of the ditch’s depth, God’s love is deeper still. Yahweh will simply wait with His merciful patience until His people come to their senses and repent. God seems to allow the believer to wander away so they can return, like a troubled marriage that has a temporary parting of the ways because of “irreconcilable differences,” but then unite once again to settle their differences and learn from them. And like the prodigal son’s waiting father (Luke 15:20), God anticipates that Israel will be embraced by once again Him in faithful love. Because of God’s covenant, the chosen people will remain chosen. “I will go away for now and return to My place until they acknowledge their guilt and seek My face; in their affliction and distress they will eagerly seek Me.” (5:15).

Do We Put Our Worship in a Blender Like the Israelites? What is Our Baal-Blender 2.0? Each of us need to ask ourselves every day… Do I blend my God-worship with a contemporary version of Baal, a god I choose that distracts me from God? Maybe Power and Influence? or Money and Things? or Ego and Self? or Succes and Fame? or Sex and Pleasure? or Entertainment and Amusement? or Knowledge and Information? or Status and Image? or Social Media and Phone-Scrolling? Maybe we shouldn’t be too quick to ridicule or criticize Baal worshippers after all.

“I am the Lord your God… you shall have no other gods but Me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God…” (Exodus 20:2-5).