My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me. And since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children.
Hosea 4:6 (ESV)
We will sometimes have short Facebook messages every now and again to sometimes comment on each other's Facebook status postings. Being a pastor, I'll usually post a lot of things that are religious and spritual in nature.
One evening I received a message from my friend and he commented as a old friend would about
My most recent postings about living a Believers life, and he said something that stopped me in my tracks mentally. Here's what he wrote;
I like the positive God-centered posts that you put up, but I wanted to share a small thought with you that always comforts me when I am depressed or feel lost. I like the idea that when I talk (pray) with God, the Almighty takes the time away from running the entire universe just to listen to me. What an awesome and comforting though, huh?
Like with writing these blogs, and the work I do as a campus pastor it's a daily struggle for me, as it is for any of us, to know my faith and articulate it. Life is complicated and, as a result, our lives become complicated. Speaking as a person with disabilties to other persons with disabilties there are complications enough in just trying to live a daily life.
What my friend said was that he was amazed that God could love us enough that He could create and sustain this whole universe and still care for the needs of one person.
In this thought is the overwhelming idea of Gods grace and mercy, and His sovereignty.
What my friend gave to me was something I once knew but had forgotten. A simple but concrete thought with deep implications. My busy, self absorbed life had caused me to forget.
The prophet Hosea had a similar problem when he was called to speak to Israel about forgetting God. They forgot God and His Word as a nation, and they seemed complacent about it. They began to forget even the simple things about God, the things written about Him in the Law.
When the simple facts are forgotten the complicated ones are forgotten eventually as well with, unforeseen, consequences . Israel lost its right in the priesthood. They lost the right to bring sanctification to the world on the behalf of God. They lost the right to speak for God. They ignored even the basics.
To be fair to my friend, I'm sure he didn't mean to impart a dark thought, such as Hosea threatened the wrath of God. I was just immediatly struck by how our faith is built on simple thoughts of God. My friends words were meant as comfort. Oddly enough, so were Hosea's words. He meant to call a nation back to Gods way of doing things, Gods way of remembering who He was. Hosea just went further than my friend did to warn us of the consequences of forgetting. Once we start to foget then he we often easier for us to keep forgetting because it's easier to go our own way than someone else's.
The simple thoughts are forgotten in our time as they were in the prophet Hosea's time.
The thoughts of prophets are often simple.
God's Law begins with this simple thought: "in the Beginning God..." .
No other religion starts the same way or has the same thought. It is a thought that runs though the whole of scripture. The whole of scripture is a letter to all of us and says "remember me? God?"
Unfortunately sometimes we don't remember the things we should. Thank my old friend, for reminding me.
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