TRAMPLING ON THE HESED OF GOD

My final visit to John Bright's Kingdom of God reveals his words found on pages 73 & 74 where he observes the state of Israel resulting in the judgment of God. Somewhere in the picture of Israel is, at some stage, the evangelical church of this generation and no less represented by the Episcopalian Diocese of Sydney. Bright's words are provided to help the reader imagine the state of things today:

No less menacing than the international situation was the internal decay of Israel. The book of Hosea is the best possible commentary upon it, and it deserves a whole chapter. For Hosea lived through the collapse, and it tore at his heart. He pictures graphically the political vacuum, the mad plotting for power, the collapse of law and order, civil anarchy in which life is no longer safe (e.g., 4:1-2; 7:1-7; 8:4; 10:3). Even worse, the heart has gone clean out of religious faith, and there is complete moral decay. The priests are timeservers who utter no moral rebuke but who are, through the practices they countenance and abet, themselves the corrupters of religion (4:8-9; 5:1; 6:9-10). Instruction of the true religion has lapsed, and with it all knowledge of the God of Israel; the land is permeated with the poison of paganism. Parents set for their children examples of immorality which the children only outstrip (4:6, 11-14). No more revolting or truer picture than this could be drawn of what the breakdown of religion really means. Nor did this sick nation know any way to cure itself save by political maneuvering (5:13). Yet even here was its bankruptcy evident. They trimmed their foreign policy to every political wind that blew, and they were always wrong - because they were morally wrong. Israel is a half baked cake (7:8); "a silly dove without any sense" (7:11), fluttering and cooing this way and that in a panic; a worn-out roué who will not wake up to the fact that he is growing old (7:9). Israel is done for!

Clearly there could be no peace between Hosea and such a nation as that! But Hosea's attack differed somewhat from that of Amos. Although it moved from the same theology, it was delivered at a different point. Hosea has less to say of idle luxury and unethical behavior - although he is well enough aware of these things. After all, he spoke not to national prosperity but to national collapse, and his message was shaped by his own peculiar temperament. The target of his attack was idolatry, Baal worship, apostasy. This is the seat of the disease, the sin in which all sin consists, the poison in the body politic. It is this that has separated Israel from her God, and is the cause of all her calamity. An apostate nation cannot be the people of God.

Most interesting of all is the formulation Hosea gave to the covenant bond which bound Israel to her God. It is a formulation which became classic, and which was taken up by many a subsequent prophet - particularly Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The covenant is a wedlock; in it God "married" Israel and made her his "wife." To worship other gods as Israel has done is plain "adultery," and, if no sincere reconciliation is effected, the end of it will be "divorce" - national ruin. God demands of his people hesed, that utter loyalty which is the only proper response to God's hesed, his covenant favour. No amount of protestations of loyalty through the external forms of religion can play substitute for it:


For it is hesed that pleases me, and not sacrifice;
And the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings(6:6)

Rather than imposing upon God a corrupt form of creative process (evolution); rather than trusting in the corrupt interpretation of God's direct utterances by weak willed men, wouldn't it be desirable for the Church today to respond to the love of God with faith or loyalty to the nature and word of God?

Learn a lesson from an adulterous Israel.

Sam Drucker