Transcript Hosea and Micah

Love me, or else?
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Richard Bauckham, PhD
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“Believe this:”
A……
B……
C……
“Do this:”
A……
B……
C……

“Signed…..
Judah
931 BC
Prophets
Israel
Rehoboam
Jeroboam
Abijah
Nadab
900 BC
Asa*
Baasha
850 BC
Jehoshaphat*
800 BC
Jehoram*, Ahaziah,
Queen Athaliah,
Joash*
Elisha Jehoahaz,
Jehoash,
Jonah
Amos Jeroboam II
750 BC
Amaziah, Uzziah, Ahaz
Hosea Zechariah,
Shallum,
Micah
Menahem,
Isaiah
Pekahiah
722 BC
Hezekiah*
Isaiah
Elijah Zimri, Omri, Ahab,
Ahaziah, Joram
Pekah, Hoshea
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“The LORD says, ‘Wine, both old and new, is robbing
my people of their senses! They ask for revelations from
a piece of wood! A stick tells them what they want to
know! They have left me. Like a woman who becomes a
prostitute, they have given themselves to other gods. At
sacred places on the mountaintops they offer sacrifices,
and on the hills they burn incense under tall, spreading
trees, because the shade is so pleasant! As a result, your
daughters serve as prostitutes, and your daughters-inlaw commit adultery. Yet I will not punish them for this,
because you yourselves go off with temple prostitutes,
and together with them you offer pagan sacrifices. As the
proverb says, 'A people without sense will be ruined.’
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“The people of Israel are under the spell
of idols. Let them go their own way.
After drinking much wine, they delight
in their prostitution, preferring disgrace
to honor. They will be carried away as by
the wind, and they will be ashamed of
their pagan sacrifices.” (Hosea 4:11-19)
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“When the Lord first began speaking to
Israel through Hosea, he said to him, ‘Go
marry a prostitute who will bear
illegitimate children conceived through
prostitution.
This will illustrate how Israel has acted like
a prostitute by turning against the Lord
and worshiping other gods.’” (Hosea 1:2)
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“My children, plead with your mother--though she is no longer a wife to me, and I
am no longer her husband. Plead with her to
stop her adultery and prostitution…She said,
‘I will go to my lovers – they give me food
and water, wool and linen, olive oil and
wine. So I am going to fence her in with
thorn bushes and build a wall to block her
way.”
She would never acknowledge that I am the
one who gave her the grain, the wine, the
olive oil, and all the silver and gold that she
used in the worship of Baal.” (Hosea 2:2,8)
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“So I am going to take her into the desert
again; there I will win her back with
words of love. I will give back to her the
vineyards she had and make Trouble
Valley a door of hope. She will respond to
me there as she did when she was young,
when she came from Egypt.” (Hosea 2:1415)
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“The LORD said to me, ‘Go again and
show your love for a woman who is
committing adultery with a lover. You
must love her just as I still love the people
of Israel, even though they turn to other
gods and like to take offerings of raisins to
idols.’ So I paid fifteen pieces of silver and
seven bushels of barley to buy her.”
(Hosea 3:1-2)
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“They take their sheep and cattle to offer as
sacrifices to the LORD, but it does them no good.”
(Hosea 5:6)
“The LORD says, ‘Sound the alarm! Enemies are
swooping down on my land like eagles! My people
have broken the covenant I made with them and
have rebelled against my teaching. Even though
they call me their God and claim that they are my
people and that they know me, they have rejected
what is good. Because of this their enemies will
pursue them.” (Hosea 8:1-3)
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“They are doomed! They have left me and
rebelled against me. They will be
destroyed. I wanted to save them, but their
worship of me was false. They have not
prayed to me sincerely, but instead they
throw themselves down and wail as the
heathen do. When they pray for grain and
wine, they gash themselves like pagans.
What rebels they are!” (Hosea 7:13,14)
“My people are destroyed from lack of
knowledge. Because you have rejected
knowledge, I also reject you as my priests”
(Hosea 4:6 – NIV)
 “There is no faithfulness, no kindness, no
knowledge of God in your land…
 My people are being destroyed because they
don’t know me. It is all your fault, you priests,
for you yourselves refuse to know me…The
more priests there are, the more they sin against
me. They have exchanged the glory of God for
the disgrace of idols.” (Hosea 4:1,6,7 – NLT)
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“The people say, ‘Let’s return to the LORD! He has
hurt us, but he will be sure to heal us; he has
wounded us, but he will bandage our wounds, won’t
he? In two or three days he will revive us, and we will
live in his presence. Let us try to know the LORD. He
will come to us as surely as the day dawns, as surely
as the spring rains fall upon the earth.’ But the LORD
says, ‘Israel and Judah, what am I going to do with
you? Your love for me disappears as quickly as
morning mist; it is like dew, that vanishes early in the
day. That is why I have sent my prophets to you with
my message of judgment and destruction. What I
want from you is plain and clear:
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I want your constant love, not your
animal sacrifices. I would rather have my
people know me than burn offerings to
me. (Hosea 6:1-6)
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“On Zion, God’s sacred hill, there will be
nothing harmful or evil. The land will be as full
of knowledge of the LORD as the seas are full of
water.” (Isaiah 11:9)
“How precious, O God, is your constant love!
We find protection under the shadow of your
wings. We feast on the abundant food you
provide; you let us drink from the river of your
goodness. You are the source of all life, and
because of your light we see the light. Continue
to love those who know you and to do good to
those who are righteous.” (Psalm 36:7-10)
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“And eternal life means to know you, the
only true God, and to know Jesus Christ,
whom you sent. I have shown your glory on
earth; I have finished the work you gave me
to do…I have made you known…”(John
17:3-6)
“We know that the Son of God has come and
has given us understanding,
so that we know the true God. We live in
union with the true God---in union with his
Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and
this is eternal life.” (1 John 5:20)
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“I reckon everything as complete loss for the
sake of what is so much more valuable, the
knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord. For his
sake I have thrown everything away; I
consider it all as mere garbage, so that I may
gain Christ and be completely united with
him.” (Philippians 3:8,9 – GN)
“I have not stopped giving thanks to God for
you. I remember you in my prayers and ask
the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious
Father, to give you the Spirit, who will make
you wise and reveal God to you, so that you
will know him.” (Ephesians 1:16,17 – GN)
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“When the Judgment Day comes, many
will say to me, 'Lord, Lord! In your name
we spoke God's message, by your name
we drove out many demons and
performed many miracles!' Then I will
say to them,
‘Go away. I never knew you.‘” (Matthew
7:22-23)
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“When you were born, no one cut your umbilical cord or
washed you or rubbed you with salt or wrapped you in
cloths. No one took enough pity on you to do any of these
things for you. When you were born, no one loved you.
You were thrown out in an open field. Then I passed by
and saw you squirming in your own blood. You were
covered with blood, but I wouldn't let you die. I made you
grow like a healthy plant. You grew strong and tall and
became a young woman. Your breasts were well-formed,
and your hair had grown, but you were naked. As I passed
by again, I saw that the time had come for you to fall in
love. I covered your naked body with my coat and
promised to love you. Yes, I made a marriage covenant
with you, and you became mine. This is what the Sovereign
LORD says.” (Ezekiel 16:4-8 – GN)
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“Husbands, love your wives just as Christ
loved the church and gave his life for
it….Men ought to love their wives just as
they love their own bodies…As the
scripture says, ‘For this reason a man will
leave his father and mother and unite with
his wife, and the two will become one.’
There is a deep secret truth revealed in this
scripture, which I understand as applying
to Christ and the church.” (Ephesians 5:2532 – GN)
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“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. The
first heaven and the first earth disappeared, and
the sea vanished. And I saw the Holy City, the
new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven
from God, prepared and ready, like a bride
dressed to meet her husband. I heard a loud
voice speaking from the throne: ‘Now God’s
home is with people! He will live with them,
and they shall be his people. God himself will be
with them, and he will be their God. He will
wipe away all tears from their eyes...They will
see his face.’” (Revelation 21:1-4; 22:4)
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“In the history of the Western Church
since the era of Constantine, God as sternmoral-sentencing Judge eclipsed God as
loving Story-teller, who weaves a
transformative tapestry of faith, hope and
love through the ages.”
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Wayne Northey
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“The truth is I slipped by mere carelessness into
saying that the Enemy really loves the humans.
That, of course, is an impossibility. He is one
being, they are distinct from Him. Their good
cannot be His. All His talk about Love must be a
disguise for something else—He must have some
real motive for creating them and taking so
much trouble about them. The reason one comes
to talk as if He really had this impossible Love is
our utter failure to out that real motive. What
does He stand to make out of them? That is the
insoluble question.
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His throne depends on the secret. Members of His
faction have frequently admitted that if ever we came
to understand what He means by Love, the war would
be over and we should re-enter Heaven. And there lies
the great task. We know that He cannot really love:
nobody can: it doesn't make sense. If we could only
find out what He is really up to! Hypothesis after
hypothesis has been tried, and still we can't find out.
Yet we must never lose hope; more and more
complicated theories, fuller and fuller collections of
data, richer rewards for researchers who make
progress, more and more terrible punishments for
those who fail—all this, pursued and accelerated to the
very end of time, cannot, surely, fail to succeed.”
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“The people of Israel are as stubborn
as mules. How can I feed them like
lambs in a meadow? The people of
Israel are under the spell of idols.”
(Hosea 4:16,17 – GN)
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“I will attack the people of Israel and
Judah like a lion. I myself will tear them
to pieces and then leave them. When I
drag them off, no one will be able to save
them.
I will abandon my people until they have
suffered enough for their sins and come
looking for me. Perhaps in their suffering
they will try to find me.” (Hosea 5:14, 15)
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“When Israel was a child, I loved him as a son, and I
called my son out of Egypt. But the more I called to
him, the more he rebelled, offering sacrifices to the
images of Baal and burning incense to idols. It was I
who taught Israel how to walk, leading him along by
the hand. But he doesn’t know or even care that it was
I who took care of him. I led Israel along with my
ropes of kindness and love. I lifted the yoke from his
neck, and I myself stooped to feed him. But since my
people refuse to return to me, they will go back to
Egypt and will be forced to serve Assyria. War will
swirl through their cities; their enemies will crash
through their gates and destroy them, trapping them
in their own evil plans. For my people are determined
to desert me. They call me the Most High, but they
don’t truly honor me.
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“How, oh how, can I give you up,
Ephraim! How, oh how, can I hand you
over, Israel! How can I turn you into a
Sodom! How can I treat you like a
Gomorrah! My heart recoils within me,
all my compassion is kindled. I will not
give vent to my fierce anger -- I will not
destroy Ephraim again.” (Hosea 11: 1-9
Phillips)
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“The God that holds you over the pit of hell,
much as one holds a spider, or some
loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you,
and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath
towards to burns like fire; he looks upon you
as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into
the fire; he is or purer eyes than to bear to
have you in his sight; you are ten thousand
times more abominable in his eyes, than the
most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.”
– Jonathan Edwards
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“Tell them that as surely as I, the
Sovereign LORD, am the living God, I do
not enjoy seeing sinners die. I would
rather see them stop sinning and live.
Israel, stop the evil you are doing. Why
do you want to die?” (Ezekiel 33:11)
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“When Israel was a child, I loved him as a son, and I called
my son out of Egypt. But the more I called to him, the more
he rebelled, offering sacrifices to the images of Baal and
burning incense to idols. It was I who taught Israel how to
walk, leading him along by the hand. But he doesn’t know
or even care that it was I who took care of him. I led Israel
along with my ropes of kindness and love. I lifted the yoke
from his neck, and I myself stooped to feed him. But since
my people refuse to return to me, they will go back to
Egypt and will be forced to serve Assyria. War will swirl
through their cities; their enemies will crash through their
gates and destroy them, trapping them in their own evil
plans. For my people are determined to desert me. They
call me the Most High, but they don’t truly honor me. Oh,
how can I give you up, Israel? How can I let you go? How
can I destroy you like Admah and Zeboiim? My heart is
torn within me, and my compassion overflows. (Hosea
11:1-8 – NLT)