You stumble day and night, and the prophets stumble with you . . . my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also reject you as my priests. (The words of the prophet Hosea. Hosea 4:5-6.)
It is a recurring, undeniable theme of the prophets found in the pages of Scripture: they stood on the outside of the established, institutional religion, rebuking and, as a result, rejected by the professional, career-minded priests and prophets of their day.
Another theme is just how different and un-prophet (is that a word?) they were.
Take Hosea, for example.
Hosea was married to an adulteress. He tells us in the opening pages of his prophecy that God told him to marry this promiscuous woman.1
What? How do we explain this?
Either God instructed Hosea to marry a promiscuous woman, or perhaps, more likely, Hosea understood that God was at work even through the disastrous circumstances that accompanied his marriage.
Either way, we must point out that it is not the norm for God’s prophets to be married to adulterers.
More than that, God does something in the life and ministry of Hosea that is completely out of character: God breaks his own law. Not only does the seventh commandment outlaw adultery, but under God’s law given to Israel, adultery was punishable by death.2
God not only ignored his own law regarding putting adulterers to death, but after his adulteress wife leaves him for another man, God instructs Hosea to remarry her, saying, “Go show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another man, and is an adulteress.”3
Hosea does what God asks: “So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and about a homer and a lethek of barley.”4
That she is loved by another man, and Hosea pays a purchase price for her points to the likelihood that Gomer has become a concubine (think harem) in another man’s house. It is interesting that prior to this incident, Hosea pleads with his children to rebuke their mother for her unfaithfulness. Meanwhile, Gomer says, “I will go after my lovers, who give me my food and my water, my wool and my linen, my olive oil, and my drink.”5
Gomer left Hosea seeking a Sugar Daddy.
God’s law, recorded in Scripture, is clear. Once a wife left her husband and married another man, the law forbade her from remarrying her first husband. “That would be detestable in the eyes of the Lord” are the words used to describe this second union of husband and wife.6
What can we say about this? How can we explain God's willingness to break his own law? The answer is found in what the New Testament describes as the “Royal Law,” or the law of love. Jesus applied that law to the woman caught in adultery. It’s also highly probable that what he wrote in the sand, before answering her accuser’s question about following the law and stoning her, were the words of Deuteronomy which instructed both the man and woman committing adultery to be put to death.
This background helps us to understand the theme of Hosea’s prophecy - Israel’s institutionalized religious leaders lacked a true knowledge of God!
We’ll finish up with this tomorrow, but for now, let me simply say that the “knowledge of God” is not the same as knowing the laws, rules, doctrines, or facts. It’s much deeper. And this is why in both “Bible Days,” as well as today, prophets and others called by God are excluded, persecuted, and rejected by the institutional elite in so many of our denominations and churches.
In Christ,
Dan
Hosea 1:2.
Deuteronomy 22:22.
Hosea 3:1.
Hosea 3:2.
Hosea 2:5.
Deuteronomy 24:4.
Song of Gomer by Michael Card
https://youtu.be/3hUMUY2Ht6g