Is God Ignoring Our Nation?
Hosea 4
Pastor Jim Luthy
Is God ignoring our nation? The evidence might make us wonder if the God of all creation has forgotten us.
I offer our environment as evidence. We in the church like to call it creation, giving God glory for it, but also leaving him responsible for it as well. We don’t tend to care much about it, even though God has given us dominion over it. Those who do care tend to turn creation into something to be worshipped itself, worshipping created things rather than the Creator.
The tension between consumption and conservation is at an extreme high, mostly because our land is not healthy. In the Northwest, we are in the midst of an incredible drought, pitting the livelihood of farmers against the survival of a sucker fish. Our recent heat wave claimed several lives, including a well known professional football player. With energy supplies giving in, the debate over whether to drill for oil in pristine areas of Alaska is also heating up.
Our current environmental crisis is not simply an idealogical issue. It is not just a political issue or a social issue. If we understand that God created man and told him "to work it and take care of it," then we might also understand that when the environment is out of whack it serves as an indicator of spiritual disconnectedness. It is like the engine light on your car, warning you that something is wrong. And when that light comes on, we go to an authoritative source, like the car dealer, to ascertain what the problem might be.
For us, I think the answer can be found in Hosea. Hear the word of the Lord, you Israelites, because the Lord has a charge to bring against you who live in the land: "There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgent of God in the land. There is only cursing, lying and murder, stealing and adultery; they break all bounds, and bloodshed follows bloodshed. Because of this, the land mourns (can you say Klamath Basin?), and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field (buffalo?) and the birds of the air (spotted owls?) and the fish of the sea (salmon?) are dying. (Hosea 4:1-2)
The God who does not change brought word through Hosea that the land of Israel was suffering because there was no faithfulness, no love, and no acknowledgment of God in the land. Instead there was violence, much like what we see on the evening news. And as this unfaithfulness continued, the land began to suffer.
I want to tell you that this is the same God who presides over our nation today. He doesn’t change. Could it be that our current tensions over the environment would be much better addressed spiritually than politically? Our nation’s greatest need is not more regulations and more money but a return to God in faithfulness, and in love, and in worship—acknowledging him as Lord over all creation. Most of the blame that occurs in our environmental debate seems to be directed either at the large corporations or the environmental activists. But let’s not be too quick to point fingers at those who are not in the church.
After Hosea’s charge against the land, he issued a charge against the prophets and priests of Israel. He began by saying, "Let no man bring a charge, let no man accuse another." In other words, nobody could come and point fingers as though he or she were innocent. He continued, "for your people are like those who bring charges against a priest. You stumble day and night, and the prophets stumble with you.
Hosea’s charge was that the people themselves were stumbling in unfaith-fulness, but wanted to point the fingers at the priests. The prophets who were supposed to represent God’s position before the people, were stumbling along with them. So were the priests innocent? No. The more the priests increased, the more they sinned against me; they exchanged their Glory for something disgraceful. They feed on the sins of my people and relish their wickedness.
Hosea took a shot at everyone—the people, the prophets, the priests--all were named in God’s charge against Israel. And as we consider the warning light being illuminated in our environment, we ought to listen carefully to God’s charge against us. Tom Clegg, in his book Lost in America, points out some startling realities about the condition of today’s church.
The belief system of a huge number of churchgoers is dangerously at odds with the faith of the first church led by Jesus’ apostles and recorded in the New Testament: For example, what would you call a person who believes in astrology, reincarnation, and the possibility of communicating with the dead? If your first thought is ‘New Ager’ you missed an important group. According to a Gallup survey, these are just some of the beliefs held by people who call themselves Christians.
Gallup’s survey reveals a shocking fact: an awful lot of people who call themselves Christians haven’t a clue what Christianity is all about. They’ve adopted what University of California scholar Wade Clark Roof calls a ‘salad bar’ approach to their faith: just pick and choose the spiritual beliefs you like, add a dash of God, and consider yourself a Christian. That’s the American Christian of the new millenium.
Sociologist Robert Bellah predicted this development almost twenty years ago in his bestseller Habits of the Heart. He identified the tendency of many Christians to modify and dilute biblical ideas so that Jesus is seen as a friend who helps us on the road to happiness and self-fulfillment.
This religion of me and thee, as George Gallup, Jr. calls it, along with a hunger for experience over knowledge, has contributed to a tremendous diversity of beliefs, many of which are antithetical to biblical principles. These unhealthy attitudes have crept into the church, as evidenced by the following results of a survey of church lay leaders by researcher George Barna:
· only 53 percent believe that there are moral truths that are absolute
· 43 percent say there is no such thing as the Holy Spirit
· 33 percent believe that Jesus never had a physical resurrection
· 19 percent believe Jesus sinned while on earth.
God said through Hosea, "my people are destroyed from lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also reject you as my priests: because you have ignored the law of your God, I will also ignore your children."
Would you agree with me that, in general, the evidence is clear that we have rejected knowledge and have generally, in turn, been ignored by God? Granted, there is a remnant, as there was in Hosea’s day, who acknowledges God, loves him, and is faithful to him. I hope you are one of them. But in general, God is ignoring our nation because we have been ignorant of him.
Clegg continues:
Not only are the beliefs of Christians often at odds with the teaching of their churches, but also behavioral differences are often non-existent between the churched and the unchurched. This comparison suggests that whatever is happening inside the church is having zero effect on behavior in day-to-day living.
Sometimes behavior by those who profess Christ is actually worse than those who don’t. For example, despite increased concern about national morality, Christians continue to have a higher likelihood of getting divorced than do non-Christians. Even atheists are less likely to become divorced than are Christians.
Despite its Christian heritage, the United States leads every other nation in the industrialized world in the percentage of single-parent families (23%), abortion rate (22.9 per 1,000 women aged 15-44), sexually transmitted diseases (syphillis rate is 6.3 per 100,000 and gonorrhea rate is 149.5 per 100,000), teenage birth rate (42 per 1,000 girls aged 15-19), use of illegal drugs by students (44.9 % using in 1998), and the size of the prison population (327 per 100,000). Our rate of child poverty (20%) is likewise abysmal.
God’s message through Hosea noted, "And it will be: like people, like priests. I will punish both of them for their ways and repay them for their deeds." Plain and simple, if we sow as the people sow, we will reap what the people reap. Today, what our nation is reaping is the absence of God, primarily because the most recent generations have ignored God. So what we are seeing is more and more violence in a land that is producing less and less.
Clegg concludes,
Where is the church’s positive impact on individuals and society? At stake is the deadly assumption that business as usual is just fine. It’s even more deadly when churches arent even aware that they’ve made such an assumption. We impact one life here and another one there, and we wrongly assume that as other churches do likewise, we’re making forward progress.
The exact opposite is true. Churches are going out of business. Why? Because they refuse to change. They’re like the proverbial frog placed in a slowly warming pot of water. The frog gets cooked because it doesn’t notice and doesn’t respond to the changes around it.
Any church that doesn’t shift from "ministry as status quo" to ‘ministry as mission field’ will die or it becomes hopelessly irrelevant to the people its charter document—The Bible—calls it to love, serve, reach, and even die for.
It is my intention that Triumphant Life Church never becomes hopelessly irrelevant. The four living creatures in John’s vision of heaven declared in their worship that Jesus, the Lamb, has made us "to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God." Never let it be said of us, "like priests, like people." "Come out from them and be separate," says the Lord.
Hosea’s message gives a very clear starting point for you to restore faithfulness, love, and acknowledgment of God in our land--increase in knowledge. Never cease to be a learner. There is more to God than your mind has the capacity to hold, so you’ll never arrive. Read, study, listen. Do whatever it takes to increase your knowledge.
Understand, though, that increasing in knowledge has more to do with the heart than with the head. To "know" in this case has more to do with intimacy than intellect. It carries the same meaning as when a man "knows" a woman through sexual intercourse. We increase in intimate knowledge of God through both understanding and experience. We must read and study and pack the knowledge of God into our minds, but we must also pack the experience of God in our hearts. When we do the work of an evangelist, go on short-term missions, or obey God when it seems most difficult, we put ourselves on a path to experience his power and his grace. It is then that we "know" God. And when we’ve done that, he will be made known in our land, and our land will be healed.
God said to Solomon, "When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain…if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their land. Now my prayers will be open and my ears attentive to this place."
