What Happened To Hosea?

The prophet Hosea in the Bible is commanded by God to marry a woman he knows will cheat on him. He is commanded to do this because God wants Him to know what it is that God is going through in relation to His people, Israel. He wants Hosea to know His pain. Hosea's struggle with his wife Gomer becomes a kind of living testament to the character of God, and His struggle with the sinful Israel.

One way to look at this is to think of God actually 'speaking' in a voice to Hosea. No doubt people experience God's voice in this way. I do sometimes. Many of the prophets' encounters with God can be looked at no other way. But to the ancient Israelites, there were so many ways for God to speak.  For to the ancients, every act was an act of God. A lightning bolt struck a house, and that was God speaking. If you had a dream, this was a message from God and experience of another dimension to reality. An intense love for a person no doubt was seen as a message from God.

So another way to look at Hosea's experience with Gomer is like this: Homer fell in love with a woman who cheated on him constantly. He had felt in his love, no doubt, the hand of God. Now, however, everything has fallen apart. Some of the children's names may indicate that Hosea suspected that they were not his own (one is named Lo-Ammi which means 'not my people'). Eventually, Homer is reconciled to his wife. This moment brought great joy.

All along the way Hosea may have seen God's hand and Word within the very context of what he was doing. God's message might not have been direct or supernatural, but in the fabric of the whole experience of Gomer and her adultery. Hosea may have had a moment where he turned to God and ASKED God why he was brought to love for this woman who hurt him so. In that moment, perhaps he realized that this reality of pain-from-love is a key to understanding who God is, and what God wants. His later reconciliation with Gomer may have similarly been EXPERIENCED as a message bout God's love for His people.

Now either way is possible. It may be that everything Hosea did was directed to him by God through a voice  or vision. But the second account seems more true to me. God's influence on the world may be at times direct, but perhaps such events only take place when they can. God's general relationship with the world seems more subtle, and I suspect that this subtlety is not incidental. It probably speaks to something very important in the divine. I find it very interesting that in Hosea 2:16, God talks of His desire to 'allure' Israel. Alluring is one of the fundamental concepts in process theology. God moves the world by alluring it forward.

There are plenty of places in the Old Testament where God's control over the world seems absolute and controlling. But there are also many places where God's influence seems far different. There are places where God's plans are frustrated, and where God changes plans in response to human decision making. There are places where God regrets and frets, and seeks to make a respect for free will first and foremost in all He does. Usually the passages that suggest God's total and dominating omnipotence are used to interpret the others. But why can't I go the other direction? Why can't I take the second way of interpreting the Bible to be my primary lens, and seek a way to fit the others into it?