Day 201

Hosea 1:1-2:23, Romans 6:1-14, Psalm 87:1-7

The start of Hosea just seems very odd as God tells him to get himself an unfaithful wife. (Quick detail, Hosea came just after Amos but still prophesying to Israel in the north). So what is this about an unfaithful wife? This was actually to be Hosea’s message.

If you think about everything that we have read so far, all the times that the people have come to God and gone away from God again, how many times they have failed to listen to God’s message. So Amos came, and they didn’t listen to him. That was a message of justice and injustice, a message of anger. Hosea though brings a message of love and how Israel has been unfaithful. It is a horrible feeling to know that you have let someone down who loves you and Hosea is telling the people that they have been unfaithful to God and let him down. His own wife is the example of it (although it does seem a bit unfair on Hosea).

The New Testament brings us a very important point. Although what Paul is saying at the outset of chapter 6 seems so obvious (you can’t carry on sinning deliberately just cause Jesus has sorted it for you), a lot of people did get caught up in the idea that this was how it worked. They took the view that if we were forgiven then we could just carry on sinning. No! Paul reminds the Romans that that is definitely not the case. What we should actually strive to achieve is death to sin completely, trying to get sin out of our lives as much as possible, and being alive with Christ.

Now that is being faithful to God.