"Maggots and Lions" (Hosea 5)

            See if you can identify this early ‘80’s pop song from some of the lyrics.

They say there's a heaven for those who will wait
Some say it's better but I say it ain't
I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints
The sinners are much more fun

You know that only the good die young

            Anybody know this song, this Billy Joel song?  Did Billy Joel have it right? Are the sinners much more fun?  People who don’t go to church might suppose every Sunday pastors like me get red-faced mad as we slobber and sweat, railing against the evils of sin!  Pulpit-pounding isn’t really my style, nor is the hurling of threats about hell-fire.

            However, sin is real.  We must tackle this reality head-on and holistically.  Baptists often make the mistake of putting all focus on individual sins.  It is important for you and for me to address our individual sins because they cut us off from God.  Sin causes a rupture in the relationship and God gets angry and we are broken.  In our need to confess our individual sins and repent of them, we need to also be mindful of systemic sins that disproportionately affect the poor and exacerbate systemic racism and other social evils.  Individuals sin, congregations sin, communities sin, and nations sin.  We need to confess because we have our own part in all these areas.

            This might begin to feel real if we can somehow shift from the sense that we are people sitting in church listening the pastor drone on – if we can shift from that to the idea that God is speaking to our hearts, then this word may grab hold.  “Listen to the word of the Lord, O people of Israel” Hosea says, “For the Lord has an indictment” against us (4:1).  When I read Hosea and see mention of Israel or Judah or Ephraim, I imagine that if Hosea were giving a similar message today, he would say, “Listen to the word of the Lord, O church, because He has an indictment against you.”  We are a worshiping community as they were.  Our sins aren’t similar to theirs, but we sin just as much and can be cut-off from God as they were.

            What strikes me in my reading of Hosea 5 is two contrasts.  First, verse 7, “Israel’s pride testifies against him.”  Israel was puffed with a sense of self-importance.  The leaders believed they could exploit the poor, form alliances with pagans, worship God and then worship others gods, and do it all without harm to themselves.  They saw themselves as untouchable.  They went through the appropriate rituals in worship.  Why would God care if they went to a shrine of another, false god?  God did care. 

            God cares about what we say, what we do, what we think.  Remember, by the time we’re in Hosea 5, God has already indicted Israel.  He’s already said, “There is no faithfulness or loyalty, and no knowledge of God in the land” (4:1b).  We need not worry too much about specifically why God said that about Israel.  Here’s what should concern us.  What rebellions might we be committing that would cause God to say of us, ‘there is no faithfulness or loyalty, and no knowledge of God in that church,’ or ‘there is no faithfulness or loyalty, and no knowledge of God in that nation’?  What a terrible thought!  Sin becomes so prevalent that God, in disgust, shakes His divine fisted hands and shouts “there is no knowledge of God”!

            As a key piece of evidence supporting this divine indictment, God says, “Israel’s pride testifies against him.”  Might that be said of me, or of us collectively?  Is the sin that threatens to rip apart my relationship with God my pride?  Do I think so much of myself that I don’t really feel I need God, not that much anyway?  Is pride a factor in your life that stops you from humbly bowing before God in confession and prayer? 

            Hosea declares in 5:7 that the prideful life leads to Israel producing illegitimate children.  What comes from pride is something ungodly, something profane.  Galatians 5 says when we are filled with God’s spirit, what comes is God’s fruit, “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”  These are the “children” of the Spirit-filled life.  The prideful life is only concerned for the self, not others, and thus produces “children” with no inheritance in God.  And of course by ‘children,’ I mean what comes out of our lives. 

            Remember, I said, I noted two contrasts as I mulled over Hosea 5.  The first is if we lived by faith instead of pride. 

            It seemed to be a quiet week at HillSong, yet on Thursday, something quite amazing took place.  Four members of the church gathered Thursday evening for prayer.  We prayed about everything.  This has been going on all summer, Thursday night prayer times and it was beautiful. 

            One of the verses used to guide us into prayer comes from 1 Samuel chapter 12, verse 23.  God had promised to be the ruler of this new nation, Israel.  However, the people said they didn’t want God as their king.  They pestered their prophet, Samuel, to give them a human king like every nation had.  Samuel warned them of how disastrous this could be, but they were prideful.  So God told Samuel to go ahead and let the people learn the lesson the hard way.  And they did, over and over, up to the days of Hosea, hundreds of years after Samuel, right before exile would come – utter calamity. 

            Samuel’s prayer shows unbelievable faith.  He already knows the people have rejected his counsel, but he says in 12:23, “Far be it from me that I should sin against the Lord by ceasing to pray for you.”  Thank you Todd Baker for calling my attention to this passage on Thursday.  Samuel considered himself a sinner if he ever stopped praying for this people who had long since stopped listening to him.  I never conceived of it this way: failure to pray is a sin!  This is the contrast – Israel’s pride verse Samuel’s great faith.    The second contrast comes in what we think we know of God and in what is said beginning in Hosea 5:12.  “Therefore” the verse begins.  Verse 11 ended with the people “determined to go after vanity.”  Vanity, pride – Ephraim was living for Ephraim and assumed God was also excited for the benefit of Ephraim.  We could substitute ourselves for ‘Ephraim’ whenever we put ourselves at the center of the universe instead of God, whether ‘ourselves’ refers to me, or the church, or the country. 

            We sin, then God indicts us.  God uses our pride as evidence that we have rejected Him and exalted ourselves above others.  We have failed to love and failed to pray and failed to help the poor.  Next comes the verdict.

            God says, “I am like maggots to Ephraim and rottenness to the house of Judah.”  Ugh!  Maggots?  God is like Maggots?  It’s right there in Hosea 5:12.  Facing a verse like that, we can quickly flip over to Psalm 23 or Isaiah 55.  Those are comforting inspiring passages that don’t mention maggots.  We can turn there quickly.  Or we can stop and wonder.  Why would God say, “I am like maggots causing sickness and rot to my people?”

            Might God paint this grotesque picture because God wants us to fully understand what sin does inside us, in our bodies, in our hearts, and in our communities?  In order to root it out, God inflicts us with sickness.  If God doesn’t do this to get our attention, eventually the sin will destroy us.  God may use stark imagery to get the point across, that He hates sin and will discipline us for it, but it is for our good.  Thank God He is like maggots, signaling us that because of sin, something is wrong.  Something needs to change.

            God says in verse 14, I will be like a lion to Ephraim.  Sin doesn’t just corrode us.  It rips us apart.  “I will tear,” says the Lord.  We don’t need to be any descriptive.  Anyone who’s seen a National Geographic program knows that when a lion tears, it isn’t pretty. 

            The first contrast we mentioned was between the convicting pride that reveals our sin and the extreme love and faith of prophets like Samuel who pray even for those already turned away from God.  Are we living by faith or by pride?  The second contrast is in the images God projects – maggots and lions – in his righteous anger over sin, and what those images lead to in the long run.  Decay?  Yes!  Ravaging?  Yes!  Sin is awful. I love Billy Joel’s music, but he got it wrong in that song.  It is not better to laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints.  The saints are sinners too – we all are.  But the saints realize the damage sin does.  That’ why they’re crying.  The guffaws of sinners who brag about their debaucher is the laughter of fools who only realize how far they are from God when it is too late. 

            After the decay and ravaging conjured by the image of God as maggots and lions comes restoration.  “I will return to my place,” says the Lord, “Until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face.  In their distress they will beg my favor” (5:15).  Next week, we’ll discover how hard repentance is.  It is not a simple, quick process.  But’s that next week.

            For now, God embeds an invitation in the middle of His angry rant.  “I will return … Until,” God says.  Until!  God hears our prayers.  Even when we are at our very worst, God hears our prayers.  The book of Judges testifies to this.  Jesus’ gracious response to the criminal on the cross who begged to be remembered testifies to this. 

            In the midst of one of history’s greatest evil, the European enslavement and trading of Africans, God heard the prayers of abolitionists like William Wilberforce.  When Hitler ordered the systematic execution of millions, God heard the prayers of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and so many others.  In Charleston, South Carolina, God has heard the prayers of the friends and relatives of those killed by Dylan Roof in 2015.  In each of these cases, awful things happened, but God was with the people.  God saw humanity through these crises.  Even when we as a species are at our very worst, God hears us. 

            That word, “until,” is God’s invitation.  The story doesn’t end with maggots and lions.  It ends in restoration.  We discover how joyful it is in God’s embrace, forgiven, made new.  This is beyond what’s in Hosea 5, but the prophet would want us to go beyond.  He didn’t want the story to end in Israel’s destruction.  He’d want our story to end in salvation. And it can.

            We learn the lesson – sin is real.  We turn from it.  We open our hearts to God.  We commit to the faithfulness Samuel and so many others modeled.  And we accept God’s invitation.  In humble confession we gratefully receive forgiveness.  That’s where I want to close: with the promise that God will hear your prayers.  No matter what’s going on in your life, God will receive you, pick you up, forgive you, and make you new.  When we are in Christ, this is where every message on sin leads.  God is a loving God.  The images of maggots and lions are part of the story, not to be ignored.  But the end is a father’s embrace and new life.

AMEN