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Meeting God, Again - Hosea 1 Manuscript 1 Meeting God, Again - Hosea 1 Manuscript Isn’t it nice when things are convenient? Have you noticed that we’re about to get our 5th convenient store in Willow Street? It won’t be long that I’ll have a gas station on my way to church and on my way home from church! That’s convenient! Convenience is a key theme we’ll be talking about this morning. I would argue that convenience is a major driving force in our society. We want things to be easy and efficient! That’s not necessarily a bad thing… 20 years ago, during this time of year, I was starting my senior year in high school. If you would have told me back then that I would eventually have a computer in my pocket that has a high definition screen, listens to me when I speak, and is way more powerful than any personal computer from the year 2000, I would have laughed at you. Actually, some of you are thinking 20 years ago wasn’t that long ago… I read this week that our smart phones today are millions of times faster than the super computers NASA had in the 1960’s. In fact, listen to this quote… it comes from a recent article on zmescience.com: “The iPhone 6’s [computing power] is 32,600 times faster than the best Apollo era computers and could perform instructions 120,000,000 times faster. [That means that] an iPhone could be used to guide 120,000,000 Apollo era spacecraft to the moon, all at the same time.” Source: “Your ​ ​ ​ smartphone is millions of times more powerful than the Apollo 11 guidance computers” - zmescience.com ​ As of 2019, 81% of Americans actually own a smartphone. Why? Because they’re convenient. And as they keep improving and becoming more powerful, they’re becoming so complex that sometimes they become inconvenient! Amen? Source: pewresearch.org ​ 2 The thing is - and we all know this - our society is built on convenience. But the desire for convenience isn’t limited to our modern times. Over the next couple weeks, we’ll actually see how convenience impacted the nation of Israel, and how we are to respond to the message found in Hosea. So turn with me to Hosea, chapter 1… and while you get there, let’s pray Pray Before we dive in, let’s talk about who Hosea was and what was going on in the nation where he lived. Hosea was a prophet of Yahweh God who lived about 2,750 years ago in Israel. But Israel wasn’t like it is today… 200 years before Hosea lived, the nation of Israel split into two nations: [Divided Kingdom] The Northern Kingdom of Israel, and the Southern Kingdom ​ of Judah. [Hosea] Hosea lived in the North - and interestingly, he’s the only prophet that’s ​ ​ ​ actually from the northern kingdom. [2 Hosea] During Hosea’s time, this guy named Jeroboam II was the king of ​ ​ ​ Israel. He was one of Israel’s worst kings! Not because he didn’t know what he was doing, but because “He did evil in the eyes of the LORD” (2 Kings 14:24). There were previous kings before him that chose to follow other gods rather than Yahweh God, and Jeroboam II continued promoting and practicing their idolatry which eventually led Israel into destruction and chaos. Because of all this, Yahweh God chose to speak through the prophet Hosea to warn Israel of the punishment that was coming because of their unfaithfulness. We know that punishment eventually came in 722BC when the Assyrian army attacked Israel… 2 Kings 17:5-8 3 5 The king of Assyria invaded the entire land, marched against Samaria [Israel’s capital city] and laid siege to it for three years. 6 In the ninth year ​ of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria and deported the Israelites to Assyria. He settled them in Halah, in Gozan on the Habor River and in the towns of the Medes. 7 All this took place because the Israelites had sinned against the ​ LORD their God, who had brought them up out of Egypt from under the ​ power of Pharaoh king of Egypt. They worshiped other gods 8 and ​ followed the practices of the nations the LORD had driven out before them, as well as the practices that the kings of Israel had introduced. ​ This is why we have the book of Hosea. It records how Hosea was used by ​ God to warn the Israelites that their unfaithfulness would be their downfall. The Northern Kingdom of Israel chose to turn to other nations and their gods rather than relying on Yahweh God, and because of their unfaithfulness, Yahweh used the nation of Assyria to drive them out of the land that Yahweh had given them years ago. So, check out Hosea 1, starting at verse 2… 2 When the LORD began to speak through Hosea, the LORD said to him, “Go, marry a promiscuous woman and have children with her, for like an ​ ​ ​ adulterous wife this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the LORD.” ​ Wait a second… Did Yahweh God just tell Hosea to go and marry a prostitute? I think there’s enough evidence in the Hebrew text to say, yes.. He did. Now, let that sink in for a moment… Yahweh God just told Hosea to marry a prostitute! Now, I realize there are kids here… and maybe some are watching from home, so I don’t think I need to go into this too much… but I will say that this was a very common form of employment in the ancient world… So, in the famous words of Forrest Gump: “That’s all I have to say about that.” Hosea 1:3-5 4 3 So he married Gomer daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son. 4 Then the LORD said to Hosea, “Call him Jezreel, because I will soon punish the house of Jehu for the massacre at Jezreel, and I will put an end to the kingdom of Israel. 5 In that day I will break Israel’s bow in the Valley of Jezreel. Verses 4 and 5 are crucial for really understanding the gravity in which Hosea wrote and prophesied. So in order to understand what’s going on, we have to step back in time to just after Israel became a divided nation. At this point, Jeroboam I was the king of the new Northern Kingdom of Israel. Don’t confuse him with the other Jeroboam… this isn’t Jeroboam the 2nd’s dad or anything like that. There were several generations of kings between the two Jeroboam’s. [Jeroboam’s Dilemma] So being in the north, Jeroboam has a dilemma. ​ Jerusalem is in the South (the capital city of Judah). And (based on Deut. 12:13-14) everybody knew that Jews were to only offer sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem. But Jeroboam didn’t want his people going all the way to Jerusalem to worship because it might cause them to want to reunite as a nation. If they were to reunite, that would mean they would need to kill Jeroboam and then give the King of Judah, Rehoboam, their allegiance. So in order to avoid that, Jeroboam decided to build a couple temples of his own, complete with golden calves! Listen to what he says to the Israelite people: 1 Kings 12:28-30 28 After seeking advice, the king made two golden calves. He said to the people, “It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem. Here are your ​ ​ gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.” 29 One he set up in Bethel, and the other in Dan. 30 And this thing became a sin; the people came to worship the one at Bethel and went as far as Dan to worship the other. 5 He tells his people that it’s too much for them to go up to Jerusalem! It’s too inconvenient for you to make the trip! Here, let me build a couple convenient stores for you to worship in… During my time in Israel last summer, I visited one of these sites - the temple in Dan… [Slideshow] (I’ll talk about this for a little) ​ ● Our group is sitting on the temple steps ● Picture of the altar Again, Jeroboam built these temples so that he could persuade his people ​ with convenient worship so that he could make sure he’d remain king over Israel. In a way, the system Jeroboam established was very much like the Temple in Jerusalem. Jeroboam appointed priests… he instituted festivals that looked like the Jewish festivals… he had them offer sacrifices on an altar, just like the one in Jerusalem… but the major difference was that the Israelites were no longer ​ making sacrifices and offerings to Yahweh God. Instead, they chose to worship a false god because it was more convenient for them. I don’t think that means they didn’t take their spiritual life seriously. I think it means that they lost confidence in Yahweh God. After all, the nation just suffered a serious split… And being in the North, it’s as if they’ve been cut off from the presence of God (God’s presence is described as being in the Temple in Jerusalem - which is why they weren’t supposed to offer sacrifices anywhere else). So what I want you to see is that Jeroboam’s desire to keep the kingdom split was what motivated him to lead his nation into serving other gods.
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