Reading Hosea While We Wait

“Now I make known to you, brethren, the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast the word which I preached to you, unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared…” (1 Corinthians 15:1-5).

“Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.”

“He was buried.”

“He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.”

These days leading up to our Lord’s Day remembrance of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, consider reading the prophet Hosea.[1] In the heart of that prophecy is a statement of faith about the third day:

“Come, let us return to the Lord.
For He has torn us, but He will heal us;
He has wounded us, but He will bandage us.
He will revive us after two days;
He will raise us up on the third day,
That we may live before Him.
So let us know, let us press on to know the Lord.
His going forth is as certain as the dawn;
And He will come to us like the rain,
Like the spring rain watering the earth” (6:1-3).[2]

On the cross Jesus suffered in our place as the sinless substitution. He received the fullness of God’s righteous wrath against our violation of the glorious God’s Law.[3] For followers of Jesus, though, the cross also becomes a pattern of our lives in this world (Matthew 16:24//Mark 8:34//Luke 9:23; Galatians 2:20; 5:24; 6:14). This in no way replaces or eclipses Christ’s atoning work in His death, but displays that atonement in a life humble before God and at war with sin.

With Hosea 6:1-3 as the center, consider a prayerful read-through of the prophet these moments leading up to Resurrection Day.

As you read of the spiritual harlotry of God’s old covenant people (the point of the illustration of Hosea’s own marriage), repent of your own unfaithfulness. What do you place above God in your life? What gets more time, passion, priority, thought, etc., than He does? In what areas of your life are you willfully in rebellion against His Word (to rebel against His Word is to regard Him as less than the supreme authority of your life)? I would add that this doesn’t just mean outward behavior, but inward attitudes and thought-strongholds. What lies are you believing and/or feeling that contradict His Word? Are you ignorant of His Word because of personal neglect and/or isolation from the gathering of the saints in the Word?

Harlotry and unfaithfulness are themes used in the prophets to describe God’s people’s neglect of their covenant Husband and their replacing Him with infinitely lesser things. We still do this today. We worship, obey, love, fear, and exalt countless things (including ourselves) other than the One Who alone is worthy.

When reading of these themes in Hosea, take up your cross and prayerfully repent of the areas of idolatrous harlotry in your life. Crucify these idols. Give thanks to God that Jesus paid the price for your unfaithfulness on the cross by His wrath-absorbing death.

“I know Ephraim, and Israel is not hidden from Me;
For now, O Ephraim, you have played the harlot,
Israel has defiled itself…

…a spirit of harlotry is within them,
And they do not know the Lord” (Hosea 5:3,4).

When you read of the wrath of God, take it seriously. If you don’t know His wrath, you don’t know Him. If you don’t acknowledge His wrath against violations of His Law, you don’t understand the cross, the Gospel, Jesus, or the Scriptures at all. Some believers love studying the names of God. They enjoy praying, singing, and claiming those names. Hosea gives us names and descriptions of God in His right wrath against our lawlessness.

“On them I will pour out My wrath like water” (5:10).

“I am like a moth to Ephraim
And like rottenness to the house of Judah” (5:12).[4]

“I will be like a lion to Ephraim
And like a young lion to the house of Judah.
I, even I, will tear to pieces and go away,
I will carry away, and there will be none to deliver” (5:14).

His wrath is just. It is deserved. It is eternal, for He does not cease to be holy, righteous, and pure – all that is does not perfectly reflect those glorious and beautiful attributes is a blasphemous slander of Him. He is wrathful against all that is not Him, for He alone is perfection, beauty, right, good, purity, true love. He is infinitely and eternally passionate for all He is in His absolute perfection.

All He is, we are not in our rebellion, self-centeredness, self-will, lawlessness, and sin. We deserve wrath. We deserve to be drowned in it, eaten away by it, destroyed.

Christ did that in our place. When you read of His wrath against sin, give thanks for Jesus. “…God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. And not only this, but we also exult in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through Whom we have now received the reconciliation” (Romans 5:8-11). Unless you live in the texts that drip with His wrath, you cannot adequately worship Him through the texts that describe the rescue from that wrath.

Read of wrath, confessing, “I deserve this.”

The same is true for God’s removal, His hiding, His forsaking:

“They will go with their flocks and herds
To seek the Lord, but they will not find Him;
He has withdrawn from them…

…I will go away and return to My place
Until they acknowledge their guilt and seek My face;
In their affliction they will earnestly seek Me” (Hosea 5:6,15).

Jesus took the forsakenness we deserve in our place (Matthew 27:46//Mark 15:34). For believers in Christ, we are filled with the presence of God the Holy Spirit. We are never forsaken or alone.

“When Ephraim saw his sickness,
And Judah his wound,
Then Ephraim went to Assyria
And sent to King Jareb.
But he is unable to heal you,
Or to cure you of your wound” (5:13).[5]

Repent of exalting other help, assistance, or strength from sources other than the Lord. This doesn’t mean that we neglect earthly means. We should see them as instruments of God’s power and grace, though. Our prayerlessness reveals our true beliefs. When I trust earthly means more than I trust the Lord, it is revealed by the fact that I make no appeals to the Lord for help through these means. Repent of seeking help from the “great king” (which takes many forms in our lives) instead of God.

“What shall I do with you, O Ephraim?
What shall I do with you, O Judah?
For your loyalty is like a morning cloud
And like the dew which goes away early” (6:4).

I am not as faithful as God deserves. In a world of distractions and idols, I wander and bow down on an hourly basis. No doubt, many more times than I’m even aware. There is One Whose name is Faithful (Revelation 19:11), and it’s not me. Repent of the wavering nature of your loyalty. Give thanks for Him Who is Faithful, and that, by faith, you are inseparably united to Him.

“Therefore I have hewn them in pieces by the prophets;
I have slain them by the words of My mouth” (6:5).

The word of God is meant to take us apart, undo us, dismantle us, strip away our pretensions, hypocrisies, masks, self-righteousness. Submit to that. It is ultimately the most ideal healing for our souls because it humbles us, and prepares us to receive more grace upon grace in Christ (James 4:6; 1 Peter 5:5).

“For I delight in loyalty rather than sacrifice,
And in the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings” (6:6).

Jesus wanted the religious to know this passage well (Matthew 9:13; 12:7). It’s far easier to do religious acts than to be inconvenienced by people needing help. It’s easier to revel in my self-righteousness than extend grace to those in need. It’s easy to negate the truth of the Gospel in my life by thinking I can do good things to outbalance the bad things I’ve done.

“But like Adam they have transgressed the covenant;
There they have dealt treacherously against Me” (6:7).

This is not just a behavior problem with us, but a sick root. We are born in Adam, and need to be reborn in the second, or last Adam (Romans 5:12-21; 1 Corinthians 15:22,45).[6]

“Gilead is a city of wrongdoers,
Tracked with bloody footprints.
And as raiders wait for a man,
So a band of priests murder on the way to Shechem;
Surely they have committed crime” (6:8,9)

You are violent. Jesus says you are a murderer (Matthew 5:21-26); James says the same thing (James 4:1-10). Confess your part in the brokenness of your relationships.

I hope you see what I’m trying to do. Read through all of Hosea, following the above examples and finding new areas in your life where repentance is needed.

Go back again and again to the promise of the third day (Hosea 6:1-3). That promise, like all the promises of the Bible, are yours in Christ (2 Corinthians 1:20). He satisfied the demands of divine justice in your place. You don’t do that. He, being innocent, defeated death (the penalty for sin) and rose victoriously over it. His life as a real human being was unique since it was lived in perfect obedience to God’s Law. He was the only perfectly holy, righteous, and obedient human being, and so alone merits all the promised blessings of God. They are ours only by faith-union with Him.

Read Hosea, confessing your sin and humbling yourself before God.

Read Hosea, seeing its pronouncements of just punishment not poured out on you, but on Christ in your place.

Read Hosea, and rejoice in the third day resurrection. It is yours because it was first Christ’s.

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[1] This is not in place of careful grammatical-historical-theological reading. We must do this to rightly understand the Scriptures. We must remember, though, that the Prophets spoke and wrote the way they did (inspired by God the Holy Spirit) to move the hearts of the covenant people. We must make room for liturgical, prayerful, worshipful reading that impacts our hearts. Study that improves the mind but doesn’t touch the pride of our hearts is incomplete. We need both.

[2] The use of the increasing numbers “two…third” is called a graded numerical sequence (sometimes referred to with the formula n, n+1). This pattern occurs several times in the Old Testament (Deuteronomy 17:6; Judges 5:30; 2 Kings 9:32; Job 5:19-22; 33:14-22,29; 40:5; Proverbs 6:16-19; 30:15-31; Ecclesiastes 11:2; Jeremiah 36:23; Amos 1:3,6,9,11,13; 2:1,4,6). It does not mean something different happens on the second and third days. It is a Hebrew poetic device for building or progressing the author’s thought. The focus is on the last number; the previous number is given to build into it.

[3] We usually associate the wrath Jesus bore with the Father, but the Triune God is undivided in His wrath against sin and lawlessness. In fact, the Son, being fully God, can be said to suffer His own righteous wrath against lawlessness, since He hates it (Hebrews 1:8,9) and cannot abide the lawless in His presence (Matthew 7:23).

[4] I took a class on Hosea in seminary under George Klein about 17 years ago. He observed how scandalous Hosea’s prophecy would have been to devout Jews; for God to call Himself “rottenness” is pretty edgy in light of the commandment to honor His name.

[5] “King Jareb” (מֶלֶךְ יָרֵב) matches no known historical figure. The translation “great king” is preferable (CSB, ESV, NLT).

[6] “In the beginning man was innocent of sin and was endowed by his Creator with freedom of choice. By his free choice man sinned against God and brought sin into the human race. Through the temptation of Satan man transgressed the command of God, and fell from his original innocence whereby his posterity inherit a nature and an environment inclined toward sin. Therefore, as soon as they are capable of moral action, they become transgressors and are under condemnation” (Baptist Faith & Message [2000], III).