"As They Called Them, So They Went From Them"

by L.B. Horne | Category: The Minor Prophets | Mar 1969

There is thunder in the air. All through the minor prophets there is a feeling of storm. Occasionally the clouds break and the sun shines with a promise of summer, and then they roll up again, heavy with failure, and ingratitude and hatred, to hide God's mercy and grace.

There are twelve prophets after Daniel. They are called the minor prophets, but the only "minor" thing is the quantity of their writing that has been preserved for us. Their messages are emotional and outspoken, the voice of God with a throb in it. They were speaking in a world that was disintegrating around them. Sometimes the cracks were hidden by social prosperity but the eye of God could see the trembling structure behind. They were crying out warnings in a desperate world that faced famine, disease and violence, a morally rotten world, and because their situation was like ours, their messages are particularly meaningful to us. Occasionally they wrote in riddles; some of their messages were concerned with contemporary events that have no immediate significance for us; and we find the intense, figurative language different from the matter of fact, earthbound prose of our daily reading, but there are things that God says through them that He says nowhere else with such emphasis. We must read them.

Hosea started to prophesy in the 8th century B.C. He was contemporary with Jonah, Amos and Joel, and probably Micah, and a little before Isaiah, Jeremiah and Obadiah. Malachi was the last of the Old Testament prophets and was probably preaching in the time of Nehemiah, about 430 B.C. The total span is about 300 years and the area in which the prophets lived was the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel and Judah. This three hundred years covers the fall of Samaria, the fall of Jerusalem, and the rebuilding of the temple and the city. In the same period Assyria crumbled, Nineveh fell, and the empire of Babylon was conquered by the Persians. A hundred years after Malachi, Alexander of Macedon was in Jerusalem. It was three hundred years of turbulence.

I would like to take you through the landmarks in the minor prophets, not as an exhaustive study but like a guide, noting some points of special interest that, to use a guidebook phrase, "must not be missed". I would like you to feel the passion of God's voice as He called to His people, called to their backs because they were going away from Him. I would like you to see the very ordinary men with the extraordinary messages who shared the task of standing up for God in the developing chaos:

"0 Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killeth the prophets, and stoneth them that are sent unto her! how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her own brood under her wings, and ye would not!" (Luke 13.34).

Hosea was the first, perhaps not in time but in the order in which the books were arranged. Amos may have been a few years before him and it is most probable that they knew of each other because Amos did not hide his light. Hosea was a native of the Northern kingdom. His story is an unhappy one. In obedience to God's call he married a wife named Gomer who had a reputation for immorality, Gomer bore three children before she left Hosea for other lovers. In chapter three Hosea recounts how he found her in slavery and bought her back to himself.

There are many questions that are raised by the story of Hosea. It seems strange that, God should have involved His servant in such an unsatisfactory relationship. Hosea is not alone in being asked to perform strange acts. Isaiah had to walk naked (Isaiah 20.2), and Ezekiel had to eat dung (Ezekiel 4.12). Hosea's experience was only a part of the involvement of God in history. It was not an isolated little parable, artificially staged for the benefit of others. Often God's servants suffer from the effects of moral corruption and spiritual blindness that poison the environment we live in, but they never suffer more than God suffered, or are as deeply involved in the catastrophe of sin as He is.

Hosea learned how sin spoiled the relationships of people, how it destroyed the joy of life. He learned the cost of loving somebody who was continually unfaithful, and the real, practical meaning of grace. His message has been described as "the gospel according to Hosea". Out of his experience, he talked with knowledge about "hesed", the steadfast love that is a moral bondage. He described God's relationship to His people in those terms (Hosea 2.12), and he asked that their relationship to Him should be of the same quality (Hosea 6.6). But all the grace and love was ignored and it only provides a background for a picture of sin. "When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called My son out of Egypt. as they called them, so they went from them" (Hosea 11.1). "But God, being rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us ... quickened us," as Paul says to the Ephesians, and grace does not rest easy, it moves out into the desert in search.

Hosea learned to carry the burden of the lost, of the unlovely and unholy. He bore the burden of Gomer's shame.

"Go yet, love a woman beloved of her friend and an adulteress, even as the LORD. loveth the children of Israel, though they turn unto other gods."

In Isaiah there is a passage of equal pathos.

"Bel boweth down, Nebo stoopeth;

their idols are upon the beasts, and upon the cattle:

the things that ye carried about are made a load,

a burden to the weary beast.

They stoop, they bow down together;

they could not deliver the burden,

but themselves are gone into captivity.

Hearken unto Me, 0 house of Jacob,

and all of the remnant of the house of Israel,

which have been borne by Me from the belly,

which have been carried from the womb:

and even to old age I am He,

and even to hoar hairs will I carry you" (Isaiah 46.1-4).

The burden of grace and forgiveness is not easy to carry. Hosea bore it. God bears it. But we carry grudges and prejudices and refuse to help people who hurt us and fail people who need us because they do not come to us and we will not go to them.

There is not, in all the Bible, a more wonderful statement of God's love than the message of Hosea. It is charged with emotion to the last chapter, where he pleads with Israel to say,

"Neither will we say any more to the work of our hands,

Ye are our gods:

For in Thee the fatherless findeth mercy.

I will heal their backsliding,

I will love them freely" (Hosea 14.3,4).

The experiences of Hosea lend power to his words as he speaks of the intense longings of God for His people to leave the petty interests and the involvement with the worship of material things for the experience of real life in the glory of His presence. We do not know whether the relationship between Gomer and Hosea survived, whether the faithless woman warmed to the grace of her true lover and responded to his forgiveness. We know how Israel failed to respond to the love of God and what the consequences were. We know how the loving kindness of God is directed to another people now, and the statement

"I am God, and not man; the Holy One in the midst of thee" (Hosea 11.9),

should be very meaningful to you and me. When God was in the midst of Israel, they turned away to little blocks of gold and carved granite, to hand-carved cedar figures with bulging eyes. Their gods failed them then as ours fail us now, security and comfort, fine houses, safe investments and status, success in business, social acceptance and scholastic achievement, all the little wooden gods of our age.

"And she shall follow after her lovers, but she shall not overtake them ... then shall she say,

"I will go and return to my first husband;

for then was it better with me than now!" (Hosea 2.7).

L.B. Horne | Mar 1969
The Minor Prophets