From Bondage to...

Ponderings from Being Still & Quiet with God's Word

I was planning to publish something else this week, but felt compelled to share some thoughts from my morning reading:

God is speaking throughout Hosea 11:

“When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.”

Hosea 11:1

Do you remember when God first called you out of bondage? God’s people had been in the bondage of Egypt for so long that they had no idea what real freedom looked like. Some just accepted their bondage as their lot in life. Bondage was their normal, and they simply weren’t looking for anything else. Others grieved their bondage, longed to be free, and plead for God to deliver them. Then God revealed his love by calling them out of Egypt.

“The more they were called, the more they went away; they kept sacrificing to the Baals and burning offerings to idols. Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk; I took them up by their arms, but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of kindness, with the bands of love, and I became to them as one who eases the yoke on their jaws, and I bent down to them and fed them.”

Hosea 11:2-4

How often do we leave the obvious bondage, accepting God’s grace and seeking to follow him while clinging to the ways of the world, engaging in culturally acceptable and encouraged practices even as they depart from God’s Word? It’s so easy to move from obvious bondage into a subtle form of bondage, confusing it for freedom. The Bible is the Word of God. God uses it to teach us to walk, to live, to engage one another, and to shape our marriages and our communities. He uses it to give us hope.

“For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we may have hope.”

Romans 15:4

Yet, we seem to continuously forget that it is through the Scripture that we find grace, hope, and love. Our short memory is evidenced in our willingness to set Biblical teachings and models aside in favor of our own more culturally acceptable models of relationships, leadership, business, finances, parenting, and even moral decisions. We are faithful until human reason, popular opinion, our fears, or our pride veers us in another direction. Through Scripture, God is kneeling before us to feed us (see Hosea 11:4 above); and as strong-willed children, we look away and insist on that which we find more familiar, comfortable, palatable, or popular.  

“They shall not return to the land of Egypt, but Assyria shall be their king, because they have refused to return to me. The sword shall rage against their cities, consume the bars of their gates, and devour them because of their own counsels. My people are bent on turning away from me, and though they call out to the Most High, he shall not raise them up at all.”

Hosea 11:5-7

What is clear in the rest of Hosea 11 (verses 8-12), is that the people of God do not cease to be his people, even while rejecting his instruction. His grace and love far exceed their reliance on their own counsel rather than on his Word. Disobedience will not lead someone who has accepted God’s grace through Jesus to lose his promise of eternal salvation.

However, no matter how much we call upon his name, God will not reward disobedience by intervening to stop us from trading one form of bondage for another in this life when we suppose that God and His Word need a little of whatever idol we’re adding to our faith. So, if it’s culturally preferred, not on some list of forbidden fruits filed between our ears, and we would hardly call it bondage, we eagerly intertwine it with our Biblical values, dismissing what God has given us in writing, and foregoing the best God has offered in favor of settling for our comfortable self-made substitute. We dim our own lights and wonder why we have lost our influence and why our society is so full of rage, fear, rebellion, depression, confusion, and frustration.

You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden.  

Matthew 5:14