2 "Rebuke your mother, rebuke her,for she is not my wife,
and I am not her husband.
Let her remove the adulterous look from her face
and the unfaithfulness from between her breasts.
3 Otherwise I will strip her naked
and make her as bare as on the day she was born;
I will make her like a desert,
turn her into a parched land,
and slay her with thirst.
4 I will not show my love to her children,
because they are the children of adultery.
5 Their mother has been unfaithful
and has conceived them in disgrace.
She said, 'I will go after my lovers,
who give me my food and my water,
my wool and my linen, my oil and my drink.'
6 Therefore I will block her path with thornbushes;
I will wall her in so that she cannot find her way.
7 She will chase after her lovers but not catch them;
she will look for them but not find them.
Then she will say,
'I will go back to my husband as at first,
for then I was better off than now.'
8 She has not acknowledged that I was the one
who gave her the grain, the new wine and oil,
who lavished on her the silver and gold—
which they used for Baal.
9 "Therefore I will take away my grain when it ripens,
and my new wine when it is ready.
I will take back my wool and my linen,
intended to cover her nakedness.
10 So now I will expose her lewdness
before the eyes of her lovers;
no one will take her out of my hands.
11 I will stop all her celebrations:
her yearly festivals, her New Moons,
her Sabbath days—all her appointed feasts.
12 I will ruin her vines and her fig trees,
which she said were her pay from her lovers;
I will make them a thicket,
and wild animals will devour them.
13 I will punish her for the days
she burned incense to the Baals;
she decked herself with rings and jewelry,
and went after her lovers,
but me she forgot,"
declares the LORD.
It made me afraid, listening to Pastor Edwin preach this segment of the bible.
Essentially, in a small nutshell, it talks of a prophecy of Israel - in all it's sinfulness and God trying so hard to reconcile Israel back to Him, he eventually decides to leave it's northern part to be conquered by the Assyrians. He represents this with Hosea, who He asks to marry Gomer, an adulterous woman. Hosea prophecises Israel's eventual demise and reconciliation through Gomer actions after marrying her.
What made me feel afraid was the punishment of Israel by God. Hosea described this so...terrifyingly in verse 3, "...I will make her like a desert, turn her into a parched land, and slay her with thirst."It got me reflecting on my life as I took the bus back home; not just today but last week too when Pastor Edwin introduced this notion of God's wrath against the continually sinful within Hosea 1. I thought too about the significance of God using constant failures, depressive moments and other sad events to reconcile us to Him.
I miss God.
Sometimes I wish the world that the Holy Spirit would take away my mental desires so I could go back to God. Being quiet and more reflective at times opens my mind to see things; to feel emotions that other are unable to experience or find weird, but yet I feel that it compounds the effect that mental corruption can have on me.
(I wonder if you're feeling lost already, haha. If you are, don't worry.)
I believe that God has a perfect plan for everyone wishing to know Him and seek Him. Thus I wonder sometimes why I feel the emotions that I do every morning or every night. It really feels, after today, that God is trying to point me back in the right directions- in my sins and in my faults, in all the ungodly things I've done and covered up with methods to make myself feel better. I feel like I'm, in Pastor Edwin's words, doing "mix and match" - trying to find mental explanations to my sins in order to find myself feel not so guilty when I sin.
Perhaps he's trying to push me to come back to Him; even at the extent of taking people I love away from me. Maybe he doesn't want me to be with them, in my sins.
Though somehow, I wish I could tell Him that he's forcing me more into silence and self-absorption once again. I wish He could take away the devil that laughs at me when I fall to it in sin. I wish the demons that harass me each day could be punished for picking on someone smaller than them.
I'm trying Lord, not to answer the door when the devil knocks. Though, I feel demons assisting it, unhinging the door, forcing me to see what knocks on it anyway. These demons are my sins, my slips of the tongue, my desires of the mind. I try hard with my own strength to resist the devil, by constructing more and more doors between me and it - although I always fail, and the devil forces me to look it in the eye anyway.
Save me Lord, not just me wallowing and languishing in my own sins, but also from your holy wrath. Pull me from toying with my own abyss, when the time is right - I beg thee.
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