Hosea, part 1

I like to mix up the kind of lessons we have in my LIFE group at Conway’s First Baptist Church. (For those of you who aren’t hip to the lingo, LIFE groups are Sunday school groups.) We sometimes do topical studies. Other times we’ll use MasterWork from LifeWay and review a popular Christian book. And at other times we’ll also do more exegetical Bible books studies, too.

As we were getting ready to transition to a new series of lessons, I thought it might be a good time to do a book study on something from the Old Testament. I asked Shanda for her suggestions, and she thought the book of Hosea might be interesting. I searched my memory banks (limited as they are) and here’s what I remembered. (1) Hosea is that dude who has to marry some prostitute. That’s got to be interesting. (2) The book of Hosea has a lot of poetry in it and it might be good for our class to tackle something different. (3) Hosea uses lots of metaphors and I love metaphors. Based on that, I decided Hosea was the way to go. And I was starting to get excited about the lessons.

Then I started studying and read this from one commentator:

“Chapters 4-14 are among the most difficult in the entire Bible.”

Oh. I see. And then I read this:

“Hosea competes with Job for the distinction of containing more unintelligible passages than any other book.”

Oh my. I’m gonna get lost and drive my LIFE group into the ground. It’s going to come to a screeching halt and I’ll be fired as the teacher.

But I’m forging ahead anyway. We had our first lesson this past Sunday and I opened with the counseling case study that I posted here just two days ago. And I got many of the same responses in class that I’ve gotten here on the blog. It is interesting a couple of folks brought up Hosea, because here’s the deal – Mr. H. is Hosea. The book opens with this in just the second verse. “When the LORD first spoke to Hosea, He said this to him: ‘Go and marry a promiscuous wife and [have] children of promiscuity, for the whole land has been promiscuous by abandoning the LORD.’”

We don’t know for sure what this really means. Some have said that the whole story is allegory (it didn’t really happen). But even those who maintain this is a real historical narrative don’t agree on Gomer. Was she a prostitute? There were plenty of them around, even temple prostitutes from the leftover days of worshipping Baal. Or was she a woman who had an unfaithful and promiscuous character? I’m not sure it matters. Either way, Hosea knew he was in for trouble. He knew God was calling him to an impossible and heartbreaking life. God shows up and says, “Hosea. Guess what? Your life gets to be an object lesson. Go marry someone who will make you miserable.” (Well, that’s my version, anyway.)

And so it begins. Hosea marries Gomer and they have three children. (The object lessons commence as God instructs Hosea to give certain names to their children. You can check those out in verses 3-9.)

We are going to learn something about the nature and character of God through the life of Hosea. Here are a few questions we’ll face. (1) What happens to God when we are unfaithful to Him? How does He react and how does He feel? (2) What are the consequences of our unfaithfulness? How serious is it? (3) If we persist in our unfaithfulness, at what point will God give up on us?

I may get my walking papers as a teacher, but I’m looking forward to covering the rest of Hosea. I’ll try to post updates on our lessons here from time to time and I would love your comments.