9:12
Now this verse offends us! Even if children are born, God would bereave them of them. This greatly offends our modern Western ears, but we need to read the second half as well. “Woe to them when I turn away from them!” This is a consequence of God turning away from them. Now why has God turned away? Because they repeatedly rejected God, they repeatedly turned away from Him! And what we do has consequences, but we also need to note that God portrays Himself as actively involved in the consequences. Sometimes we describe hell as being separated from God, and the atheist or secularist may consider this no bad thing! But if they think that, they think it only because they do not realise the full consequences of being separated from God.
9:13
This verse makes no more comforting reading. V13 reads differently in NIV and ESV, NIV mentioning Tyre, but ESV not. ESV has “like a young palm” instead of “like Tyre”. Anyway, Ephraim was planted in a pleasant place, everything should have been OK. But instead, because of her rebellion, she would only bring out her children to the slayer. Terrible judgement awaited her.
9:14-17
The misery continues, and continues to offend our western ears. Hosea calls on the Lord to give them “wombs that miscarry” and “breasts that are dry”, ie there will be no future generations. Gilgal became a place if idolatrous worship. So Israel would pay the price. We react in horror at this judgement, but we do better to react in horror at the continual rejection of God by Israel, and then look at the ongoing rejection of God’s ways by our own society. “They will be wanderers among the nations”, and this is surely what happened to Israel.
No comments:
Post a Comment