Here we are, mid-September, and at five chapters/week, we are almost finished with the prophets. Just the “Minor” prophets to go, 12 shorter books bringing God’s message, not necessarily about the future, but about the present. How shall we live today? What did God want the original recipients to know about him, and how did he want them to live?

Recall the divided kingdom: “Israel” – the northern 10 tribes, no good kings – and “Judah” – the southern 2 tribes, some good kings. Israel was scattered by the Assyrians as recorded in 2 Kings 17. Hosea is a prophet to “Israel,” the northern 10, the last prophet before the kingdom fell:

Hosea has been called the “death-bed prophet of Israel” because he was the last to prophesy before the northern kingdom fell to Assyria (about 722 B.C.). His ministry followed a golden age in the northern kingdom, with a peace and prosperity not seen since the days of Solomon. Unfortunately, with this prosperity came moral decay, and Israel forsook God to worship idols. – from the Introduction to Hosea in the ESV

And how did God use Hosea to communicate to Israel? Eugene Peterson explains in his introduction to Hosea in The Message Bible:

Hosea is the prophet of love, but not love as we imagine or fantasize it. He was a parable of God’s love for his people lived out as God revealed and enacted it—a lived parable. It is an astonishing story: a prophet commanded to marry a common whore and have children with her. It is an even more astonishing message: God loves us in just this way—goes after us at our worst, keeps after us until he gets us, and makes lovers of men and women who know nothing of real love. Once we absorb this story and the words that flow from it, we will know God far more accurately. And we will be well on our way to being cured of all the sentimentalized and neurotic distortions of love that incapacitate us from dealing with the God who loves us and loving the neighbors who don’t love us.

And there’s the message: “God…goes after us at our worst…Once we absorb this story…we will know God far more accurately…”

It begins:

The word of the LORD that came to Hosea, the son of Beeri, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash, king of Israel.

When the LORD first spoke through Hosea, the LORD said to Hosea, “Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the LORD.” So he went and took Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son. (Hosea 1.1 – 3, ESV)

And off we go.

This is how God showed his love for us: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about—not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they’ve done to our relationship with God. (1 John 4.8 – 10, MSG)

We love because he first loved us. (1 John 4.19, ESV)