God’s
Not Like That
October
5, 2021
I’ve been reading
the book of Hosea. I’m reading it because the daily lectionary I use, The
Book of Common Worship, Daily Prayer of the Presbyterian Church (USA) and
the Cumberland Presbyterian Church has been taking me through that prophetic Old
Testament book lately.[1]
For a long time I have known Hosea as one of the great eighth century BCE
Hebrew prophets. I have also known that unlike other eighth century prophets,
including Isaiah, Amos, and Micah, Hosea’s beef with the two Hebrew kingdoms of
his time wasn’t so much that the rulers and the wealthy oppressed the poor and
the vulnerable for their own benefit as that the people abandoned worship of
the Hebrew god Yahweh and instead worshipped other gods, especially the
Canaanite got Baal.[2]
Still, something about Hosea’s understanding of God has surprised and troubled
me as I have read that book anew. As I read Hosea I say to myself over and over
again, “God’s not like that!” That God isn’t like that is what I want to
discuss here.
Hosea’s
foundational thesis is that God is going to punish Israel and Judah, the two
Hebrew kingdoms of the day, because they had turned from Yahweh worship and
were worshipping other gods instead. These verses tell us what Hosea is all
about. Hosea here presents these words as coming from Yahweh:
Woe to them, for
they have strayed from me!
Destruction to them, for they have
rebelled against me.
I would redeem
them,
but they speak lies against me.
They do not cry
to me from the heart,
but they wail upon their beds;
they gash
themselves for grain and wine;
they rebel against me.
It was I who
trained and strengthened their arms,
yet they plot evil against me.
They turn to that
which does not profit,
they have become like a defective
bow;
their officials
shall fall by the sword
because of the rage of their
tongues.
So much for their
babbling in the land of Egypt. Hosea 7:13-16.[3]
In sum, Yahweh is going to punish,
even destroy the kingdoms of Israel and Judah because they have been looking
for help from worldly empires not from him and primarily because they worship
gods other than him.
Hosea’s god is
not the God I know and worship. Hosea’s god is so human in ways that I think of
as worldly not divine. Hosea believes the god Yahweh will lash out at the
people in destructive ways because, essentially, they have hurt his pride. This
god expresses the very human emotion of jealousy. He says, “OK. You worship
other gods than me? Well, I’m jealous, and I’m going to smite you but good! You’re
going to get it because you haven’t given me the worship I deserve, the worship
I crave and demand.” I can’t help but think, “How petty! How terribly human
this god is.” Hosea’s god is God reduced to some of the worst traits of us
humans. People have hurt his pride, and he’s going to make them pay.[4]
Now, I don’t want
to be too hard on Hosea here. He lived and worked entirely within the religious,
cultural, historical, and political circumstances of his time and place. In his
time the two Hebrew kingdoms of Israel and Judah, both located in what today is
the modern state of Israel, were situated between two powerful and aggressive
empires, Egypt to the west and Assyria to the east. Those empires threatened
the existence of both Hebrew kingdoms as they clashed with each other for
regional dominance. The situation of the two Hebrew kingdoms was precarious at
best, and you didn’t have to be a divinely inspired prophet to see that they
might very well be conquered and destroyed by one of those foreign empires or
the other. We know, and the people who included Hosea in their sacred scripture
knew, that both Hebrew kingdoms would in fact be destroyed by empires from the
east, Israel by Assyria in 722 BCE and Judah by Babylon in 586 BCE. Hosea foresaw
destruction, and destruction happened. That’s probably why the book of Hosea is
in the Hebrew Bible. Hosea turned out to be right at least about the historical
fate of the Hebrew kingdoms.
Now add to those
facts the ancient belief that everything that happens on earth to individual
people and to nations is God’s doing. That belief was essentially universal in
the ancient world. So if Israel and Judah were going to be destroyed, it had to
be God who was going to destroy them. And if God was going to destroy them, God
had to have some reason for doing it. Hosea imagined that God was going to do
it because the people of both Hebrew kingdoms had stopped worshipping Yahweh,
their traditional god, and had started to worship other gods instead. It appears
that Hosea believed that what he saw as idol worship was the people’s greatest
sin. It seems to have made perfect sense to him that the god Yahweh would be
angry about the people’s idolatry and would inflict great suffering on them as
a result.
That God was like
that made sense to Hosea. It makes no sense whatsoever to me. There are three
reasons why it doesn’t that I want to discuss here. The first is that I simply
cannot believe that God directly causes everything that happens on earth. I
therefore do not believe that the destruction of the Hebrew kingdoms in the
eighth and sixth centuries BCE was God’s doing. Hosea could lay everything he
saw happening at God’s feet and say “You did it.” I can’t. Yes, there were
horrible things that happened in Hosea’s world that he most everyone else
pinned on God. There were famines, disease, oppression, exploitation, and wars.
There were lots of wars. People just assumed that war was what kings did. See 2
Samuel 11:1. War is always a shameful disaster. Still, the armies of the
ancient world had nothing like the battlefield technology we have today that
makes killing so much easier and more efficient. Nonetheless, ancient wars
caused plenty of death and destruction. Hosea and his contemporaries believed
that God was really the one who caused all that suffering.
Compare that
ancient world to the late, lamented twentieth century. In that century two world
wars killed orders of magnitude more people than ancient war ever could. We
created nuclear weapons capable of ending all life on earth. Perhaps worst of
all the last century saw the horrors of Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union
and the Holocaust in which the Germans industrialized genocide. The twentieth
century saw the massive violence of Mao’s “Great leap forward” and the
unspeakable carnage of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. There are too many other
horrors from that century to mention here. I do not and cannot attribute any of
those things to God. A God who would do any of those things is not the God I
know. Any God who would do any of those things would not deserve to be
worshipped nor would that God deserve our love and devotion. I could never
worship such a God, and I never would.
Mercifully, I don’t
have to. I don’t have to, and neither do you whatever your faith, because our
world has for the most part outgrown that ancient attribution of everything
that happens to God. We Christians don’t have to because we know God in and
through Jesus Christ. In Jesus we know God to be a God of grace, forgiveness,
love, and compassion. In Jesus we know that God does not condemn. Rather God
stands in unshakable solidarity with us, with all people, and with all
creation. This God sustains us, forgives us, and wants nothing but good for
each and every person and for all of creation. The God we know and love never
would and never has inflicted destruction and suffering on anyone.[5]
Hosea’s God is not Jesus’ God. Hosea’s God is not my God. I hope that Hosea’s
God is not your God either.
Years ago I heard
of a woman from a progressive Christian church who went to seminary say that
what she had learned there was that her God was too small. For almost all of us
our God is too small. That’s the third reason why Hosea’s God is not my God.
Hosea’s God is far, far too small. Hosea’s God is far, far too human. Too
petty. Too jealous. Too bent on violence. Too concerned with himself rather
than with the welfare of all of God’s people. We humans so frequently make God
too small. In fact, we hardly ever understand God as anything other than too
small. We try to lock God up in some way so we can manage and even control God.
We lock God up in some ecclesial institution. Or in the Christian tradition. Or
in a book. When I hear people say they believe in the Bible I always think, “That’s
interesting. You believe in a book. I believe in God.” The fact that I am here
disagreeing with Hosea shows that I hardly take everything in the Bible as true
just because it’s in the Bible. Using the Bible to make God too small is one of
the primary ways in which Christians today misunderstand both the Bible and
God.
It is true that
we live and move and have our being in God. See Acts 17:28. It is also true,
however, that God is infinitely beyond our knowing. God must always remain
mystery. Not the kind of mystery of a whodunit novel where everything is
revealed at the end. No, not that, but ultimate, transcendent, unknowable
mystery that we nonetheless know. No, it makes no rational sense, but then
anything that makes God conform to our rational sense makes God too small.
Hosea makes God too small. God is not humanity writ large. Yes, Genesis
says that we are made in the image and
likeness of God. See Genesis 1:26-28. That truth however cannot mean that God
is merely human. It means that we share certain existential characteristics
like free will with God, nothing more. Yet anything as limited, finite, and
rationalistic as we humans are cannot be God. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109
CE) said God is that greater than which nothing can be imagined. That statement
may not ultimately work as a proof of God, but it does point to the truth that
God is greater than we can grasp with our finite human minds. No matter how
much we may try to minimize God so we can handle God, God is, must be, and
always will be infinitely larger than the little gods we so often try to turn
God into.
So no, brother
Hosea, God is not like that. God is not petty. God is not violent. God is not
nearly as human as you make God out to be. God is not small. Yes, God’s people
constantly turn from the true God to the smaller, more manageable gods we
create. Yet while our faithlessness may hurt God, it doesn’t mean that God is
jealous. It doesn’t mean that God is petty. When we fail God, God does not fail
us. God is not out to punish us. God is after all never violent, and any
violence we humans may attribute to God makes God small and more like us than
God really is. The God I know through Jesus Christ is not a God of violent
vengeance the way Hosea says God is. The God I know is a God of grace not
damnation. When we humans fail God as we so consistently do God doesn’t punish
us. God calls us back and welcomes us back no questions asked.[6]
So while I can understand as a matter of history why Hosea said what he said
about God, God is not like that. And for that great truth let all of God’s
people say, “Thanks be to God!”
[1]
Westminster/John Knox Press, Louisville, Kentucky, 1991.
[2] I
write god with a small g when referring to Yahweh, the tribal god of Israel,
before the Hebrews understood that there is only one God of all people.
[3]
The reference to people gashing themselves refers to practices of cults other
than the cult of Yahweh. The reference to “their babbling in the land of Egypt”
reflects Hosea’s complaint that the people turn to the foreign empires of
Assyria or Egypt for help rather than turn to their God Yahweh.
[4] Of
course I know that God is not male. I use the pronoun he when referring to
Yahweh as the tribal god of Israel. That god began in the people’s
consciousness as a war god, and he was definitely always he. I spell God with a
capital G when referring to the one true, universal God.
[5]
One of the many faults of the belief that God wrote or at least inspired the
Bible is that it makes saying the things I have just said here impossible.
Seeing the Bible that way makes ancient understandings and prejudices into
divine truth, which they clearly are not.
[6]
That’s the way the father in the parable of the prodigal son welcomes his son
back. See Luke 15:11-32.
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