The Gospel of Hosea, Ch. 8: Sound the Alarm!
The Gospel of Hosea, Ch. 8: Sound the Alarm!
“Put the shofar to your lips! A huge bird of prey is circling above the house of Yahweh, because My people have broken the covenant and rebelled against My Torah!” (Hosea 8:1).
Hosea didn’t exactly need to gradually warm up to his topic sentence here. He seemed to be out of breath from the first word in this chapter… Emergency! Emergency! 911! 911! Sound the alarm and blast out an urgent warning! God is sending His judgment upon us, and the enemy is like some hungry eagle or vulture. And we deserve it. We have brazenly broken our covenant with Him and have rejected His Torah, His divine Instructions! Head for the hills, for Assyria is going to swoop down and carry us off. God’s judgment has become inevitable because of our unfaithfulness to Him! We are very soon going to experience the consequences of our sinfulness!
Shofar (Ram’s Horn). The blowing of the shofar signifies the historical importance of Abraham’s faith on Mt. Moriah, on which a ram was caught in the thicket and sacrificed in place of beloved son Isaac. The Jewish identity and imagination were fed and nurtured on this story, and no doubt thought of Abraham and Isaac every time they heard the priest blast his shofar. The cow’s horn was forbidden, because the Jewish worship of the golden calf was a major, embarrassing blemish in their family history. There seem to be five scriptural reasons given in ancient Israel to blow the shofar: to alert the people to an impending emergency; to summon faithful worshippers to God’s presence; to sound a battle alarm at God’s command; to anoint a new king; and finally, for specific ceremonies when the shofar was centrally featured, such a Rosh Hashanah (the Feast of the Trumpets in Psalm 81), and the arrival of the Jubilee every 50th year, when all debts were forgiven and all slaves were freed. The ram’s horn was an ancient trumpet that was only used for special occasions, and never frivolously.
YHWH, or Yahweh, so basic, so mysterious, so elusive. At the Burning Bush, God gave to Moses His name of Yahweh, which is about as close to a personal name of God as we’re going to get. Scholars have been lining up to solve this puzzle of a name for centuries, and have been unsuccessful. It is obviously an archaic use of letters, because Yahweh is the “to be” verb in the future tense. There is no “am” in the Hebrew language, which leads many to claim that Yahweh means, “I will be what I will be.” But many others say that God was using that non-word in the poetic sense with “I AM,” because He is trying to communicate that He is outside of time, so must always speak in the present tense. So we can try to read Yahweh as, “I AM He who is,” “I AM the One who exists,” or “I AM the Existing One.” In other words, in this Name God declares the bedrock truth that upholds the universe… He exists! Yahweh is connected with the Hebrew verb “hayah,” to be, to become, to happen. Martin Buber thinks the verb could also partly mean “to be actively present.” So Buber, and many other Jewish scholars, think the Name could mean something like, “I will be there as I will be there,” or “I will be what I will be.” In other words, “I live an uncreated existence, and yet I will be ready, willing, able to be present in whatever situation you are in.” A personal Name, yet somehow impersonal. It is God’s self-revealed Name, alluding to His uncreated existence, His eternal Personhood, His quality of Being, His basic self-sufficiency and self-existence. It is perhaps somehow a spiritual version of an “act of being” verb. Yahweh, intimately relational, a keeper of covenants, unchangeably complete, infinite and everlasting. God is the LORD, He will not give His glory to another. Yahweh, set apart from everything else in His holiness. As one scholar put it, “The whole content of biblical history is a commentary on the meaning of this Name.”
Israel’s Covenant with Yahweh. (Hebrew, “berith“). The Covenant was an enduring, two-way promise of faithfulness and loyalty with both sides having their obligations; a solemn alliance establishing a binding relationship of blessing and accountability; an official pledge of mutual commitment. Our God is a covenant-keeping God, establishing five covenants in Scripture: with Noah after the Flood, promising never to destroy the earth again; with Abraham, promising his family to be the Chosen People that will occupy the Holy Land; with Moses, promising blessings and curses based on their marriage-like relationship with Yahweh; with David, promising the future Messiah would come through his family line; through Jesus and the promise of a New Covenant of salvation. The Hebrew word for faith (“pistis“), is actually a covenant word that involves both God’s faithfulness to His covenant promises and a person’s loyal trust in God as a response. One biblical scholar put it this way… “Pistis-faith embodies the entire spectrum of a faithful, trusting and loyal covenant relationship between God and His people, encompassing both belief and steadfast action.” The mystery is that, based on His heart of grace and favor, when people do not live up to their side of the covenant with God and are persistently rebellious, God chooses to live up to His side of the covenant regardless. Even with the human side of the promise being broken, God remains faithful to His promises, forever loyal because of his mercy.
Torah. The primary meaning of torah is teaching, instruction, God’s Law; the inspired Word; the Jewish Scripture; the Hebrew Bible, especially the Pentateuch in the Old Testament (Genesis-Deuteronomy). Torah is also considered the Covenant Charter between God and His chosen people. “The Bible is holiness in words. The words of the Bible are like dwellings made with rock. The Bible is the light of God given in the form of language. How is it conceivable that the Divine should be contained in such brittle vessels as consonants and vowels? It is as if God took these Hebrew words and breathed into them of His power, and the words became a live wire charged with His spirit. Just as it is impossible to conceive of God without the world, so is it impossible to conceive of His concern without the Bible. If God is alive, then the Bible is His voice. There is no other mirror in the world where His will and spiritual guidance is as unmistakably reflected.” (Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man, 1955).
“Still Israel calls out to Me… ‘My God, we know (‘yada’) you!” (Hosea 8:2). Actually, Yahweh responds, you don’t seem to know the first thing about Me. I am expecting intimate experiential knowledge of Me, and all I’m getting is distance learning and artificial intelligence. I am assuming your belief in Me is resulting in our life-changing relationship, and all of you continue to live as though I don’t even exist. You don’t seek my guidance for your nation’s leadership. You create alliances with pagan nations as if you need their protection instead of Mine. You make your own stupid gods and worship them as if they have spiritual substance. What are you thinking? How could you repeat one of the worst sins My people have ever committed by worshipping a silver Baal-bull, a golden calf? You know your calf-god will be torn to shreds, right? Your worthless idols will be broken into pieces, reduced to splinters, and will go up in flames.
“Since they sow the wind, they will reap the whirlwind.” (Hosea 8:7).Yes, this old Hebrew saying is true… Since you love planting things without substance, you will see nothing but trouble ahead. It’s a fact of life that we all will reap whatever we sow, God sees to that. So you will reap a storm of destruction because you sow seeds of emptiness. You plant meaningless wind-seeds and you will harvest a disastrous tornado. You earnestly broadcast your seeds to the wind by actively pursuing a life without substance, a life without Me, says Yahweh. So Hosea throws in a couple of zingers… Israel will be like a discarded piece of cheap pottery that is utterly worthless (8:8) Israel is like that species of wild donkey that is completely stubborn and known for refusing company with other animals and people, a solitary donkey that will end up refusing to stay with his Creator God (8:9).