Pastor Ryan Gaffney

Last week I talked about Revelation and how much easier it is to enjoy if you can just unlearn all the stuff that people say about it which makes no sense at all for a book written in the time and place it says it was written in for the people it says it was for.

This week, I want to make the case that Hosea is in very much the same situation.

Now of course Hosea does not have the same community surrounding it pushing a weird eschatological interpretation. It’s a lot more common for Hosea not to be talked about at all. But when it is, it is only the first three chapters, and they are talked about in a very particular way. Hosea marries the terrible horrible prostitute, and just utterly loves her into submission. Along the way he solves all her problems and all her character defects. Because he is just do incredibly loving. It’s fine. It’s like plain yogurt. It’s not offensive, but it’s not interesting either. One note, flat characters. A story in 1 act.

There is a reason we read it this way. Because we aren’t actually read it. Like it or not. When most of us open Hosea we aren’t experiencing the words there with a fresh eye, and we are instead reading Christian subcultural assumptions into the book. Redeeming Love by Francine Rivers is the most prominent example, where even if you haven;t read it, you probably know someone who has told you the plot (it’s that thing I said above but in like the 50s or whatever) and told you it is a retelling of Hosea. So you go in thinking “here’s the story of a man of God who is going to love a Prostitute”

This makes sense. Most of us are taught to read the Old Testament mostly with an eye for Christ metaphors. If you manage to find something that reminds you of Jesus in a book that’s not about Jesus, you win the Bible Study for that night. Well unconditional love certainly reminds us all of Jesus, so let’s go with that. And anyway that’s at least fine, plain something, if we didn’t do that, and we somehow read the book with fresh eyes, we wouldn’t walk away with much of anything at all. We would be confused. It would seem like dribble

See because. Hosea is not the story of a Man of God who loves a prostitute. Hosea opens, on a Man of God, married to someone he calls a prostitute (actually “whore” is a better rendering of the hebrew) who he doesn’t love, and doesn’t even particularly like. He has children he doesn’t like. He is bitter and angry and he is the narrator of this story By the way he also is the mouthpiece for God to his community. It’s surprising, it’s offensive, it’s explicit, it’s anything but boring. In the second chapter God brings this woman out in the wilderness and speaks tenderly to her. Questions arise in our mind about what her perspective would be in all of this, He returns to Hosea and Instructs him to love her. The actual verse in Hebrew reads like a direct refutation of Hosea’s perspective at the beginning of the book. Where Hosea said “God said God and take whore wife and have whore children” God says to Hosea(through Hosea’s mouth and against his apparent preferences) “Go again and love your wife though she is loved of another lover”

And Hosea says “So I bought her”

We try to make this sound nice, the redeeming love crowd. “Ohhhh he redeemed her, this is what Christ does for us, he pays for our sins” Kay. But… this is a human woman who is already married and apparently didn’t ask to get bought! Nothing about the story thus far indicates she was in any kind of debt or trouble with anyone but her husband. It’s a jarring thing. And the verse after explains they the two of them won’t be having sex anymore, so the vision of this like, perfect resolution to the story through an incredible act of self sacrificial buying just makes for a real stretch all to salvage a really mediocre Christophany.

Plus after that, Hosea goes on for 11 more chapters.

They never do those chapters in the RomCom adaptations.

Hosea goes on a rant, an angry, sometimes incoherent tirade against the people of the northern kingdom and their adultery against the Lord their God by going after other gods, some of whom are literal fertility Gods with temple prostitutes. His very personal and sensitive experience within his marriage is used as an illustration of a God who would love nothing more than to divorce and abandon the people who he wishes he never married. And yet all through the midst of it, in between Hosea’s unreliable narration, speaking about the justice of god and mixing metaphors as a little angry ragemonster, God shines a light, and refuses to let Hosea say “And God is through with you” and instead he says “I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and knowledge of god, rather than burnt offerings” He could have been speaking to Hosea with those words despite the fact that it was Hosea that said them. Hosea is angry that the people aren’t worshipping right. He is angry that his wife is not living up to his marital expectations (I don’t know if she literally committed adultery or not, or if she literally was a sex-worker, Hosea is an unreliable narrator) but God makes his prophet to say “Mercy” “Love” “Forgiveness”

He extends that even to the narrator of this book. Even to the angry profit who wants to forgive less than he wants to do anything else. And God uses him. And this message goes out. And the Northern Kingdom misunderstands it. And it travels from the northern kingdom to the southern kingdom, where they interpret to mean they are better than the northerners. And it travels to Babylon. And it comes back from Babylon as a now treasured and familiar message of God’s surprising relationship to his people. And Jesus quotes it to the pharasees and says “Go and Learn what this means: I desire Mercy, not sacrifice, and the knowledge of god, rather than burnt offerings” And it’s been carried to us through all our contexts and narratives and interpretations

Hosea is not a one-note story about a really nice prophet. Hosea is a challenging, irreverent, ironic story full of suprises, and intrigue, and complex characters, with an even more complex God. It’s narrative structure is advanced. It’s moral, yeah, does end up arriving in pretty much the same place you would expect it to: Goodness is good. But on the way to that conclusion it engages in absolute art. It is, in my opinion, the best quality literature in all of scripture.

Other books may have Hosea beat for theological insight and clarity (certainly clarity) but nothing beats Hosea for pure poetic imagination.

Alright, enough of the videos for a minute, let’s do another one in my ongoing series where I make oft maligned books of the Bible palatable without watering them down or covering them in cheese.

This week: Revelation!

Revelation actually isn’t so much unloved (it’s actually quite well loved by a certain contingent) instead it’s avoided and derided by… well… reasonable people.

Kooky people (who are made in the image of god and are beloved neighbors to us all) have spent way too much time treating Revelation as a crossword puzzle and cross reverencing it with out of context quotes from Daniel, Ezekiel and Thessalonians, that they have constructed a Gordian knot of their own misinterpretations. Something that is admittedly well and truly complicated.

Everyone else, sees that knot that the kooks keep talking about, realizes they don’t understand it, and slowly backs away from revelation.

The ignorance about this book of scripture has gotten so mad that many people don’t even know the first thing about it. Literally, people commonly get the title wrong, which comes from the first word in the book. It’s “Revelation” singular not “Revelations” the latter implies that it’s a collection of spooky visions while the former is about revealing something, If you get to the back half of Revelation 1 verse 1you will learn what it is that is being revealed: Jesus Christ.

So the first step then to loving this book is to forget everything you thought someone else knew about it. Get out of your mind all the pre-trib, post-mil, preterist, Zionist nonsense! And let the book tell you what it is

”To the seven Churches In Asia”

Ahh! so what we have then, is an epistle. Comparable to the Epistles of Paul except this one is from John, to 2 different churches which are located in Asia Minor (modern day Turkey). I should mention that I have had the privilege of traveling to Turkey and visiting the ruins of many of thee churches that are quite well preserved, so if anyone was going to try to claim that these churches are some kind of symbolic representation of something else, they’re gonna have to explain where all these literal churches came from. Obviously people around the time this was written, thought it was for them. And crucially, they thought they should read it!

It this is a book that is meant to be read aloud and understood by people in late first century Turkey, then we can be sure the return of the Jews to Israel, and the fall of the soviet union are not important keys to unlocking it’s true meaning. And we can safely assume that the main force of the content here is not portends of things to come, but theological assurance of things that are. In this case: Christ is coming; terrible things that happen between now and then are not proof that Christ has abandoned us; everything we go through is going to end, and it is going to be worth it.

Ephesus, onw of these aforementioned 7 churches, seems really to have taken this message to heart, and rather than predicting the day or the hour of the fall of Rome, went ahead and loved the poor and served the sick and shook off persecution that would have had them take a mark before they could enter the agora to buy and sell to become an absolute capitol of the Christian world in the second century.

It is a complicated book. Absolutely. It is difficult to understand. Yes. But it can be understood without needing a masters degree in things that were made up about it in the 1980s. Many of the images and metaphors turn out to be very familiar concepts to a first century audience. The four horsemen for instance, are a enrapturing puzzle (no pun intended) if we take them to be characters that will arrive in some Religious SciFi scenario. But are considerably less baffling as regular old metaphorical horsemen.

What do you think is going to save you? You have those Parthenian with their mounted horsemen on the literal horizon. Do you think the war will fix it? All they’ll do is bring war. And that will burned crops, famine, disease, and finally death. You knew what you need to save you? Literally Jesus.

By the time all the unlearning is done, Revelation becomes literally the clearest impression we get in scripture of Christ in Glory. Christ on his Throne, Christ Victorious over all that troubles us. And that’s not me only focusing on the silver lining, it’s just me not taking a silver cloud and making it dark by trying to use paint-by-numbers on it and getting all confused.