"Tight lines" is a blessing fishermen offer each other, a wish for lines taut with the weight of good fish. May God grant that the lines written here be taut with His blessings.
Wednesday, 28 July 2010 | |||
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Painful Love | |||
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"This is going to hurt me more than it hurts you." Bill Cosby got a lot of laughs pointing out how ridiculous that sounds to a child about to be spanked. Yet any parent knows there is a bit of truth in the old cliche. To demonstrate love by inflicting needed punishment on a disobedient or rebellious child is a painful experience for a parent. In our text this week from Hosea 11:1-11, the prophet allows us to hear God espousing very human emotion in response to Israel's disobedience and rebellion. Throughout Hosea, the northern kingdom of Israel is constantly identified as "Ephraim." Ephraim of course was only one of the ten tribes of the north and was in fact just one of the two tribes which sprang from Joseph. Yet Ephraim played the predominant role in the north. Jeroboam, the first northern king, was from Ephraim, as were Joshua and Samuel. In Ephraim's territory lay the important northern sacred sites of Bethel, Shiloh and in later expansion, Shechem. So "Ephraim" becomes Hosea's familiar and intimate name for the whole northern kingdom. In verse 3 Hosea pictures God remembering that He "taught Ephraim to walk," with the familiar image of a parent bending over and holding a little child up by his arms as he learns to take steps. And it's the name Ephraim in God's mouth when in verse 8 He suddenly turns from his determination to punish His people to an equal or stronger determination that, in spite of all their sins, "How can I give you up, Ephraim?" God is pictured as a parent in the midst of punishment suddenly overcome by tender emotion and love for the disobedient child. "My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused." There was an old man in our Nebraska congregation who had the name Ephraim. We all called him "Eph." A dedicated student of the Bible, Eph loved these verses where God is expressing His tender love for Ephraim, especially the verse about God teaching Ephraim to walk. A similar tenderness for Ephraim is also found in Jeremiah 31:20. I think these verses where God spoke tenderly of Eph's namesake became for the old man a sign of God's tender love toward Eph himself. Reading those verses he could recall ninety years of God's compassionate and gentle guidance of his own life. My hope is that as we read these verses this week we will also recall God's sometimes tough but always at the same time tender love toward us. Even when we are determined to turn away from God, He is still reaching for us, still full of compassion, still calling us to return. Verses 10 and 11 nicely picture the mixture of ferocity and tenderness in God's love with an image of a lion roaring for its children to come back. The lion roars, but then the children return "trembling like birds from Egypt, like doves from Assyria." May you and I experience both God's ferocity drawing us back from our self-destructive ways and His tenderness welcoming us home into His presence. | |||
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I am the pastor of Valley Covenant Church in Eugene, Oregon. I love to flyfish and hike along the beautiful rivers in our area. I welcome your comments as I share sermon work in progress and occasional other thoughts.
Thank you for visiting this blog. I invite you also to visit my web page.
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