Destroyed for Lack of Knowledge

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I also will forget thy children (Hosea 4:6).

The situation reads like an apocalyptic horror story.

No one trusts anyone else. Everyone is out for their own advantage. Kill or be killed. Rampant theft. Pervasive adultery. Blood in the streets. Even the land itself is in mourning.

While some may think this would refer to parts of America or other parts of the world today, this is the description of Israelite society 750 years before Jesus as provided by the prophet Hosea (Hosea 4:1-3).

Hosea presents a picture of a society unhinged from moral bearings, having cast off all restraint. He presents God’s case against the people, and does so powerfully; God’s impending judgment of the people is just. Nevertheless, we are left to ask: what went so wrong? What led to such disastrous conditions in Israel?

The controversy God has with the people is that there is no truth or goodness in the land (Hosea 4:1); this is directly associated with the real cause of the problem: there is no knowledge of God in the land (Hosea 4:1). As God says through Hosea: my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge (Hosea 4:6)!

How could this be? There were temples to YHWH in Dan and Bethel; if you asked the “Israelite in the street” about religion, he would tell you that YHWH was the God of Israel, and how He delivered His people out of Egypt and gave them the land of Israel. So how could it be that the people did not have sufficient knowledge of God?

The answer would be apparent if you continued to question the average “Israelite on the street.” He would likely tell you that the golden calves in those temples in Dan and Bethel were representations of YHWH, and that Baal, Asherah, and other gods really existed and were the gods of the people around them. The average “Israelite on the street” would prove to be the average person of the ancient Near East with the usual worldview and beliefs of the average person of the ancient Near East; this was not at all what God was looking for in His people (cf. Deuteronomy 13:1-18)!

Israel had some cultural memories of who God is but was not taught directly and/or effectively from the Law about the nature and essence of that God and the conduct He expected from them. The blame for this begins with the priests and Levites who were instructed to teach the people about God and the Law (Deuteronomy 31:9-13). They were perfectly positioned to do so since they were intermediaries, standing between God and the people; nevertheless, from the beginning of the northern Kingdom of Israel, priests came from all sorts of places God had not authorized, and were likely under political pressure to modify what had been declared to suit the purposes of the king (1 Kings 12:31). In a mostly illiterate society, if the Law is not constantly read to the people, they will not be able to know it; thus we have the judgment pronounced by Hosea. The people do not have the true knowledge they should have, and it will lead to their destruction!

But the people themselves are not blameless; even if the priests were not reading the Law, they should have encouraged one another in the knowledge of YHWH as the One True God, the Creator, their Deliverer (cf. Romans 1:18-20); instead, they went out and engaged in the same idolatrous practices as the people around them (cf. Hosea 4:8-14). Ignorance was inexcusable; even if the Levites and the priests were not speaking the true word of YHWH, God provided Israel with prophets like Amos and Hosea who did speak the true word of YHWH. These prophets went unheeded; the people preferred the prophets with nicer messages and who did not condemn them.

The ultimate consequences were severe; within a generation, the northern Kingdom of Israel would fall to Assyria; most of the people would be exiled and absorbed into the population of Mesopotamia. Most of the priests and Levites of the north would not stand before God and minister to Him, and all because they had forgotten about YHWH. Their punishment is just: since they acted and believed little differently from the rest of the peoples of the ancient Near East, they were absorbed into the ancient Near Eastern world and would have little inheritance in the promises of the God of Israel.

We can make many parallels with the modern day. Sure, there are plenty of people who will profess to believe in God and His Son Jesus Christ, and even claim that He was raised from the dead. But if you press the average “man on the street” when it comes to his understanding of God, it becomes clear rather quickly that most are little different from their secular neighbors. Their behaviors and attitudes differ little from everyone else; they look at things in the way most good postmodern 21st century Americans would, not the way Jesus does. And those behavior patterns tell the story: there is little knowledge of God in the land, despite all the bluster and appearance to the contrary. Understanding of who God is and what He expects from mankind is as superficial today as it was 2750 years ago!

Blame can be laid at the feet of many perceived religious authorities; too many proclaim Enlightenment modernism or post-Enlightenment postmodernism, nationalism, or other worldly philosophies in the name of Christ to their own hurt as well as ours (cf. Colossians 2:1-10). Too many preachers proclaim a moralistic therapeutic Deist god, and not the God revealed in the pages of the Bible. We can be assured that God’s judgment upon them will be just and decisive; as many such organizations decline in membership and relevancy, they are experiencing something somewhat similar to Israel, for they are becoming fully what they aspired to in their preaching and ideology. They are being good 21st century Americans, not Christians. How many people have been destroyed because of such things?

But, in the end, ignorance is no excuse, especially today. Most everyone can read; everyone can easily get their hands on God’s message to mankind. Nevertheless, even though people have plenty of reason to believe in God, they go off and engage in the same behavior as the nations around them. They blindly follow after cultural and societal norms to their own destruction.

People whom God wishes were saved are being destroyed for lack of knowledge; there is insufficient knowledge of God in the land. Let us not fall prey to the superficiality of faith in our culture and go down the same dead ends as those who came before us; let us learn of God as revealed in Jesus Christ and follow after Him!

Ethan R. Longhenry

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