“And the LORD said to Moses: “You are going to rest with your ancestors, and these people will soon prostitute themselves to the foreign gods of the land they are entering. They will forsake me and break the covenant I made with them.”
Deuteronomy 31:16 (NIV)
On Sunday we will begin a risky venture.
We will begin a series in the Minor Prophets which will expose us to some of the ugliest passages in the Bible.
The Minor Prophets are a collection of the writings of 12 prophets, and have always been placed in a group of writings called the Twelve.
We will begin this week in Hosea 1 and as the Lord enables us we will continue in this section of Scripture until we reach the end of Malachi.
I called it ugly, not because of the writing, for much the writing is beautiful, nor because of the picture of God that emerges, for God is revealed in His glory.
I called it ugly because this section of Scripture gives us the true picture of the ugliness that is in God’s people.
This section of Scripture holds a full length x-ray vision mirror up to the people of God.
We tend to become righteous in our own sight, as the years go by.
Somehow, we lose sight of the truth that not only did we require mercy and grace to become a Christian we when we first called on our Lord for salvation but we require God’s mercy and grace on a daily basis to live in a Christ honouring way. When our Lord told us to “go and learn what it means that God desires mercy not sacrifice”, He was quoting from Hosea, and if we truly want to go and learn, then a good beginning would be to go to Hosea and discover the message of Hosea.
Or we could just become Pharisees, self righteous, judgmental, whitewashing the outside, and bringing destruction on ourselves and our families - sounds like the recent church history of Ontario.
Hosea uses the ugliest family situation possible to teach us about our need for mercy, and he uses words like adulterous, promiscuous and prostitution.
In Deuteronomy 31 God compares the actions of His people to prostitution - what an ugly Word!
God knew what His people would do, they would turn to other gods, selling their intimacy to other gods for whatever they can get from them - “prostitute themselves”.
The Hebrew word used in our verse in Deuteronomy has been used in Ge 38, Lev 19, Lev 20, Nu 25, and Deut 22 in regards to physical prostitution or sexual immorality.
In our verse it is used in a spiritual sense and has been used that way in
Ex 34, Lev 17, Lev 19, Lev 20 and Nu 15.
Ex 34, Lev 17, Lev 19, Lev 20 and Nu 15.
We can surely conclude from this usage that God is drawing from one of the ugliest aspects of physical intimacy between humans, as a way of teaching us how ugly we are to Him when we love and serve other than God.
This venture we are embarking on is risky for who wants to see ugly in themselves.
Our natural tendency is to change our mirror, and compare our self to others around us instead of measuring our self against God's Word.
May God move in our midst through His Word spoken through the Twelve.
May we learn what it means that God desires mercy!
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