Hosea 4:6: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou has rejected knowledge, I will reject you, thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.”
I consider these little studies a personal journey and not really teachings. I opened my Bible this morning seeking a Word from God. Sometimes I wish God would speak to me as openly and clearly as He does for others, but that is not my story. The only way I know how to hear from God is through His Word. No doubt He speaks to others through other means, but in my case I have to spend hours in His Word to find out what He is saying to me. This morning I needed to hear from God and I found myself in the Book of Hosea of all things.
“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” I read one commentator who said that if someone considers themselves His people they should know better. I like to think I am His people and I guess I should know better. I should know to just trust and rest in His lovingkindness which I am afraid I do not regularly practice. This follows with the fact that His people rejected knowledge. Am I really rejecting the knowledge of his lovingkindness by not trusting in it? Why can I not rest in his loving kindness? I feel like I am being destroyed and yet deep in my heart, I know better, I know He is in control and that He does love me.
Well that is basically all I get from a literal interpretation, which really doesn’t help much. I did get the feeling that there was a little more to the word people which led me to dig a little deeper into these words. The word for people is amam. Amam comes from a root found in most Semitic languages which carries the idea of hidden or concealed. In the Hebrew root the word has a double Mem, one open and one closed. God’s people are those who are intimate with his revealed and hidden knowledge. Yet, they are destroyed for a lack of that knowledge. I don’t know about you but that sounds a little contradictory to me. But soft, the word knowledge here comes from the root word yadah which in various Semitic languages is rooted in the idea of intimacy. So what God is saying is that His people may have His revealed and hidden knowledge, but they are destroyed because they lack intimacy with Him.
The word lack is balah which is a wearing down or a gradually withdrawal. So we could render this as “My people who have the revealed and hidden knowledge of me are destroyed by their gradual withdrawal from an intimacy with Me.” I have spent my life studying the Word of God and I am intimate with it, but if I withdraw from my intimacy with God, I will face destruction. The word destroyed is an unusual word to use here. It is nidemu which could come from the root word damam or damah. What we have here is a play on the two words which has the idea of being silenced, made still or defeated. The Nun at the beginning of the word puts it in a niphal form which is most likely why the translators use the word destroy but within this context it could more easily mean being in such defeat that you are unable to speak a word or to even move. Boy that really hits home. That is exactly why I needed a word from the Lord this morning because I just feel so defeated that I can not even move into any action.
Will that puts me in the position of the old Jewish prayer: “Lord, we know the problem, show us the solution.” The solution lies in the next word. The next word is sort of a clue or hint. It is the word rejected. First God says that His people lack knowledge and then He says that they reject the knowledge. That is a clue that there is something embedded in this word to give us a better understanding. The word for reject is ma’as which means to melt away. It is the picture of a candle as it melts down to just a blob of wax until the fire goes out. You see the problem is that we are not so much rejecting our intimacy with God as we are just letting the firmness of that intimacy gradually melt down until the fire goes out.
Still we have just the problem, but not the solution. The solution lies in how this word ma’as (reject) is spelled. The word is spelled with a Mem which represents drowning in worry and sorrow. The next letter is an Aleph which shows ambivalence toward God. The final letter is a Samek which tells us that we are depending too much upon a person or thing. There it is, by being too dependent upon the arm of the flesh we become ambivalent toward God and start to drown in the worries and cares of this world.
The letters in the word balah (lack) whispers something even more important and profound to us. The first letter of this word is a Beth which, in its shadow form, tells us that we are feeling spiritual superior to others. The next letter, Lamed, is warning us that we are trying too hard on our own. The final letter, the Hei, reveals that these feelings of spiritual superiority and working too hard in the flesh leads us to self-deception and self-pity. By feeling spiritually superior to others, being a workaholic, and feeling sorry for ourselves and deceiving ourselves into believing that we are doing God’s will, we will slowly melt away from our intimacy with Him.
So now we move to 5:15: where God says, “I will go and return to my place till they acknowledge their offence and seek my face, in their affliction they will seek me early.” It is then when with all this self-dependency and dependency upon the arm of the flesh that when the resulting affliction comes, we then seek God and acknowledge our offence. In such an action we then return to the path of intimacy.
Sometimes I would like heaven to just open up and for a Word from God to come booming out. But then again, I do have to admit that God and I had a really nice time together in His Word this morning and maybe spending a few hours in His Word to get a message from Him is not so bad after all.
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