Living His Word

Hosea 4:6 ERV: My people are destroyed because they have no knowledge. You priests have refused to learn, so I will refuse to let you be priests for me. You have forgotten the law of your God, so I will forget your children.

Hosea was a prophet who was called by God to symbolically illustrate the message he was called to give the people of the northern Kingdom of Israel. Since these people were living lives of spiritual adultery by worshipping other gods, Hosea was called to illustrate that fact by marrying a prostitute who subsequently committed adultery. The goal was to give the people some knowledge about their true spiritual state; the goal was to warn them that they were being destroyed (by the Assyrians) for lack of this knowledge.

The knowledge Hosea references in his prophecy is not the everyday knowledge of ordinary life, or scientific knowledge, or aesthetic knowledge, or any other form of knowledge that is oriented to the things of this world. The knowledge Hosea is speaking of is the knowledge of the transcendent God and His Will. It is religious knowledge or spiritual knowledge. It is the kind of knowledge that can only come about by faith in something God has revealed. The people had this revelation in the form of Moses and the prophets, but they chose not to have faith in it. Hosea’s job was to give them even more revelation--that they were being destroyed for their lack of the kind of knowledge that comes from true faith in God’s revelation.

Hosea’s message is not limited to his time and place. It is a universal message for all time and all places. Lack of spiritual knowledge can destroy your life, both now and for all eternity. Ignoring God’s revelation is to ignore the most important thing one could ever know. It is to ignore the most fundamental state of affairs in life--the fact that we stand in relationship to God, the fact that we are creatures of an Almighty God to whom we are subject and by whom we are held accountable.

It is for good reason, therefore, that Proverbs says that “Knowledge begins with fear and respect for the LORD” (Proverbs 1:7). Every other form of knowledge is, in the final analysis, blind without the true Knowledge of God.

Above all, then, get knowledge. In our day, that knowledge can be acquired primarily and authoritatively from the Bible.