Dysfunctional Family Dysfunctional Faith

1. Dysfunctional FamilyDysfunctional Faith Hosea 1.1 – 2.1

2. Prophetic Object Lessons • Ezekiel • ‘Now, son of man, take a clay tablet, put it in front of you and draw the city of Jerusalem on it. Then lay siege to it: Erect siege works against it, build a ramp up to it, set up camps against it and put battering rams around it. Then take an iron pan, place it as an iron wall between you and the city and turn your face toward it. It will be under siege, and you shall besiege it. This will be a sign to the house of Israel. Then lie on your left side and put the sin of the house of Israel upon yourself. You are to bear their sin for the number of days you lie on your side. I have assigned you the same number of days as the years of their sin.

3. Prophetic Object Lessons • Ezekiel • So for 390 days you will bear the sin of the house of Israel. After you have finished this, lie down again, this time on your right side, and bear the sin of the house of Judah. I have assigned you 40 days, a day for each year. Turn your face toward the siege of Jerusalem and with bared arm prophesy against her. I will tie you up with ropes so that you cannot turn from one side to the other until you have finished the days of your siege’ (Ezekiel 4.1-8).

4. Prophetic Object Lessons • Isaiah • at that time the LORD spoke through Isaiah son of Amoz. He said to him, ‘Take off the sackcloth from your body and the sandals from your feet.’ And he did so, going around stripped and barefoot. Then the LORD said, ‘Just as my servant Isaiah has gone stripped and barefoot for three years, as a sign and portent against Egypt and Cush, so the king of Assyria will lead away stripped and barefoot the Egyptian captives and Cushite exiles, young and old, with buttocks bared—to Egypt’s shame’ (Isa. 20.2-4).

5. Prophetic Object Lessons • Jeremiah • “‘You must not marry and have sons or daughters in this place’” (Jeremiah 16.2) • Hosea • “‘Go, take to yourself an adulterous wife and children of unfaithfulness, because the land is guilty of the vilest adultery in departing from the LORD’” (Hos 1.2b-c).

6. A Prostitute? • “That she is called metaphorically … ‘prostituting woman’ in 1:2 cannot be taken as a literal statement of her profession or practice. She is merely an Israelite—all of whom are ‘prostitutes’ … To marry any Israelite woman was to marry a ‘prostituting woman,’ so rife was the religious promiscuity of Hosea’s day” (Stuart 1987: 11-12, 27).

7. A Prostitute? • “At least five or six year would have been required for all the events described in 1:2-9. The marriage and the three pregnancies, at least one of which followed a weaning—which in ancient times was at age two or three” (Stuart 1987: 25).

8. Naming Children • Jacob lay with Rachel also, and he loved Rachel more than Leah. And he worked for Laban another seven years. When the LORD saw that Leah was not loved, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren. Leah became pregnant and gave birth to a son. She named him Reuben [Look! A son], for she said, ‘It is because the LORD has seen my misery. Surely my husband will love me now.’ She conceived again, and when she gave birth to a son she said, ‘Because the LORD heard that I am not loved, he gave me this one too.’ So she named him Simeon. …

9. Naming Children Again she conceived, and when she gave birth to a son she said, ‘Now at last my husband will become attached to me, because I have borne him three sons.’ So he was named Levi. She conceived again, and when she gave birth to a son she said, ‘This time I will praise the LORD.’ So she named him Judah. Then she stopped having children (Genesis 29.30-35).

10. Jezreel • This is not punishment for Jehu’s zeal in the slaughter at Jezreel; rather it is punishment for not learning the lesson of Jezreel. Jehu himself had been the agent of God’s fury and personally had seen how terribly it fell upon an apostate dynasty. But he and his household went on to repeat the apostasy of the Omrides and their predecessors (2 Kgs 10:31; 13:1). God visited the bloodshed of Jezreel on the house of Jehu because, in the final analysis, his dynasty’s rule was little better than that of Jeroboam I or Ahab and Jezebel (Garrett 1997: 57).

11. Lo-Ruhamah • God said, “‘Call her Lo-Ruhamah, for I will no longer show love to the house of Israel, that I should at all forgive them” (Hosea 1.6b-c). • “‘Yet I will show love to the house of Judah; and I will save them—not by bow, sword or battle, or by horses and horsemen, but by the LORD their God’” (Hosea 1.7).

12. Lo-Ammi • “With the naming of the child ‘Not my people,’ God declares the covenant between himself and Israel to be null and void. The line ‘You are not my people, and I am not your God’ reverses the familiar covenant language of Exod 6:7 and Lev 26:12. God is rejecting Israel and abandoning her people” (Garrett 1997: 70). • However, “This does not mean that Yahweh is done with Israel, but now he deals with them as the enforcer of the covenant’s curses of those who break it, and as the God who having betrayed by his ‘bride’ must find a way beyond ‘marriage’ to overcome their unfaithfulness” (Mays 1969: 30).

13. Glimmer of Hope • ‘Yet the Israelites will be like the sand on the seashore, which cannot be measured or counted. In the place where it was said to them, “You are not my people,” they will be called “sons of the living God.” The people of Judah and the people of Israel will be reunited, and they will appoint one leader and will come up out of the land, for great will be the day of Jezreel. Say of your brothers, “My people,” and of your sisters, “My loved one”’ (Hosea 1.10 – 2.1).

14. Projecting into the New Testament

15. Hosea :: New Testament • “Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Peter 2.10). • “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise” (Gal 3.28-29).