God's Desire

Introduction

Life is complicated, is it not, We all have bills to pay, jobs to do, people that we are responsible for, and sometimes, some people just want to give it all up and be a hermit somewhere, where the pressures of society no longer have to way on them. But really even those people who leave society behind for a more tranquil, simple existence, have complicated lives, have you ever watched those things on discovery channel about people who live above the North Pole, or wherever? Seriously those people who have fled society, and yet their lives are super complicated. They just traded one set of complications for another. And we often think about following God as complicated. especially if we look at the old Testament and see everything that God laid out for the people to do. It seems so complicated. But just like in our lives our lives are complicated because we need to meet a fairly simple set of needs: food, water, shelter, saftey, social belonging, and happiness. Those are fairly simple things, but our lives get complicated as we try to ensure all those things. Following God is simple as well, and the complications come from the pursuit of simply trying to follow God (read Chapter)

The People’s love lost

After Hosea calls for the repentance of Israel, God begins to speak through the prophet and he is not pleased because the people of Israel have not repented as Hosea called for them to do. In fact they have gone so far down the path of sin that God seemingly does not know what to do with them. in verse four he say What shall I do with you Ephraim and Judah. Expressing the frustration that God as the father of the people of Israel most certainly would have felt. That frustration that we have all felt when we have tried to lead people who do not want to be led.

When I was a youth pastor I often asked myself the question, what I am going to do with these teenagers? Some days they just did not want to be led, and for God expressing his dissatisfaction with Israel, he know longer keeps it to himself. God expresses his frustration with Israel to their faces.

What an affront to Israel to be told they were impossible to lead by God.

It is not all entirely bad though, because God says that Israels love is like a morning cloud. A morning cloud is certainly fleeting. Fog usually burns off pretty quickly as Israel’s love and devotion to God has done.

However there was a time in the morning when the fog hung, when the people of Israel did love and honor God. So it is not entirely hopeless. there is a possibility that the people of God might still have a memory of the days when they still loved God.

But God, as we have seen throughout our study of Hosea, has waited and waited, and for what? have his people come back?

No they haven’t so God is here expressing his anger about the situation. God is judging them, he is not going to wait for a weather change. He is judging them now.

God’s Desire

God’s Desire

But it is not exactly as if he is doing so without spelling out exactly what he wants from the Israelites, verse 6 spells it out very clearly, God says “ I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. God does not want a love that just rolls in like the morning fog. he says right here that God wants steadfast love, that is a love that does not go away when the wind picks up and blows it away.

Notice that God is not asking for a guaranteed ten percent of their income, or for them to give the first born of all their livestock. God is clearly asking for nothing external, despite the fact that external religion was very crucial to the Israelites.

The only thing that God is asking for is steadfast love and knowledge of him. The two things that despite their continued pageantry of ritual sacrifice, the Israelites had failed to do. They had failed to make their religion personal. Failed to understand that all the things that God had laid out for them were not there to punish them, or to make life hard for them, they were there so that they would be able to understand God’s love for them by seeing how seriously God took their worship.

It is the same reason that we take Communion so seriously here. Because it is communicating God’s love to us. It is retelling the story of Jesus’ death for our sins every time we participate in communion.

So God lays it out. Love of God and not sacrifice, knowledge of God not offerings.

It really is a simple formula and yet as we will see the Israelites messed it up

Israel’s Failure

So God goes on to describe what happened when Israel stopped loving God. He says they failed to live up to the covenant, by ignoring God’s commands. The first of which is having no other god’s but God, but Jehovah. So they failed that, just like Adam and Eve in the Garden had one rule don’t eat the fruit and failed on that relatively simple task, so to did the people of Israel fail to worship God. The description we get of what the people of Israel were like is terrible, a city of Evil doers, tracked with blood, murderous priests, the very ministers of God are called murderous and villainous.

It is no wonder that God says that Israel is defiled. Truly the situation in Israel is dire because they have strayed so far away from the true simplicity that God desired from them.

God has to act to defend his own name. God has to keep his people accountable, but that unfortunately will mean that judgment has to come. Because if God does not judge his people the situation will just keep getting worse and worse .

Conclusion

Conclusion

How easy it is for us to criticize the Israelites and say, God did not want anything complicated he wanted you to love him first and you failed, how stupid were you Israelites?

It is easy for us to say that before we stop to look at ourselves and see that to often we fail to do the simple thing at the center of our faith, we fail to steadfastly love God, and pursue the knowledge of God. We just go through our own rituals and think that it is enough. Going through ritual without actually doing the simple things at the center of our faith is worthless, in the same way that working a job that pays well, and not depositing the paycheck is worthless.

If we really believe in the power of God we have to make sure we do the simple thing and Love God, and pursue the knowledge of God first, before we worry about looking like what a Christian should look like.