Don’t Forget to Remember
“They forgot their Maker.”
Hosea 8:14 (ESV)
Recently I’ve been studying the Old Testament book of Hosea in preparation for teaching an upcoming summer women’s Bible study. “Books of the prophets are the books least understood and most avoided. Prophets have strange names, do strange things, and communicate in strange ways,” writes author Nancy Guthrie.
Hosea’s short book certainly fits Guthrie’s description. Hosea is one of the twelve Minor Prophets found at the end of the Old Testament. He is known as the Prophet of the Sorrowing Heart primarily because he faced both national and personal tragedy as both his marriage and the Northern Kingdom of Israel crumbled.
Early in Hosea’s prophetic ministry, the LORD issued a shocking command and told him to “go and take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom.” (Hosea 1:2 ESV) Most of us are shocked that the God of holiness who demands holiness from His people would issue such a command. Hosea was probably shocked too even though God told him the “why” behind his unusual request: Israel commits great whoredom in forsaking the Lord (1:2). The word whoredom is used approximately 14 times in the ESV translation of Hosea’s book. Pastor Tim Keller describes Gomer as “a sex addict.” Hosea’s marriage is to serve as a visual reminder that Israel has forsaken God.
Hosea’s first chapter is best summarized with the words of Princess Diana who in in her 1995 BBC interview with Martin Bashar quipped, “Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” No doubt there were certainly more than three in Hosea’s marriage to Gomer.
Outwardly Israel is enjoying peace, power, and prosperity, but inwardly they are experiencing spiritual poverty. Their moral and spiritual decline is characterized by corrupt leadership, injustice; immorality, and idolatry. Filled & full, Israel forgot God (Hosea 8:14). Israel failed to remember Moses’ warnings from Deuteronomy 8: “don’t forget the Lord.” Their material prosperity spawned spiritual poverty and followed the cycle of forgetting God. It begins with prosperity, and morphs into pride, internal strife, and moral decline. Outward success always carries the risk of inward failure and material plenty can mask spiritual poverty.
In 1863, halfway through the Civil War President Abraham Lincoln wrote:
“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth & power as no other nation has ever grown, but we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand that preserved us in peace and multiplied, enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated by our own unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God who made us.”
Israel failed to remember and forgot what God had done for them. So have we as a nation. Lincoln’s words have never been truer. We have outward prosperity and power, but inward rot evidenced in cultural chaos, lawlessness, injustice, riots, pride, and national division. Jesus was right: “A kingdom divided against itself will never stand” (Matthew 12:25).
The book of Hosea has been called a book for the backslider. Hosea watched with growing grief as he saw his nation’s prosperity eating away at its moral and spiritual integrity. Bigger is not necessarily better; it may be fatal. “Withering is a slow process, barely perceptible at first either to the one who is being withered or to those who look on,” writes Donald Grey Barnhouse.
Theologian D.A. Carson agrees writing: “People don’t drift toward holiness. Apart from grace driven effort, people do not gravitate toward godliness, prayer, obedience to scripture, faith & delight in the Lord. We drift toward compromise & call it tolerance; toward disobedience & call it freedom; toward superstition & call it faith. We cherish the undiscipline of lost self-control & call it relaxation; We slouch toward prayerlessness & delude ourselves into thinking we have escaped legalism. We slide toward godlessness & convince ourselves that we have been liberated.”
In 722 BC the Northern Kingdom of Israel was conquered by Assyria and exiled out of their land. The nation never recovered. Israel forgot their Maker. Philosopher George Santayana once wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We need to heed Hosea’s words and remember, repent, and return to the God who has given our country so much. National repentance begins with individual repentance.
Remember, return, repent!