How to accept God’s corrections and disciplines
We may be innocent but abused because God is using us for good
The context of who God is becomes the problem of dealing with the smote option that God can deploy. We interpret God’s correction to us over time as punishment. That’s immaterial. We may be innocent and used by God because he needs our sacrifice to orchestrate the gathering and salvation of more people, not fewer. This give-and-take with God is not a gentle, genial intimacy. It’s love, dear friends.
Saturday of the Third Week of Lent
Hosea 6:1-6
Luke 18:9-14
The Old Testament prophets had no problem with their experience of God’s seeming brutality in the face of evil. “He struck us . . ,” Hosea reports. His acceptance that God is willing to smite the evil man or an entire nation wasn’t considered untethered violence or unbridled revenge in those ancient days. God reacted as he did, as my grandmother used to say, to knock some sense into people.
Our ancestors, though, were not correct to assign “smoting” as the result of evil done by some poor slob. Innocent folks get “smoked” (a more modern term) all the time. God tried to explain that to them.
For it is love that I desire, not sacrifice, and knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.
He’s referring of course to our actions in response to our miseries — when we try to fix our sin by sacrificing and burning up our treasures. “Love,” he asks, instead. Besides, only one could sacrifice properly, and Jesus did that, once and for all. God is not saying we don’t have to “be” sacrificed. All of us will suffer for God. He doesn’t want us to whip our backs for penance. Whippings are for other things.
We moderns and many ancients mistakenly ascribe the Old Testament God as an old, angry, authoritative God. Jesus fixed that, many Christians will argue. Wars, absurd evils, plagues, and so on cauterized civilizations to God’s presence. He had to be mean. Not so today. Jesus offers a different solution.
The fantasy continues by saying that God’s kind side showed up in Jesus for the first time 2,000 years ago. Jesus quashed the whole smiting/smote/smoked thing. He did toss a table or two and verbally bit off the head of Peter that one time, but by and large, Jesus reframed God as a kindler, gentler authority figure.
Sorry, but that’s not a true interpretation or conceptualization of God.
It’s improper framing of the persons of the Trinity, for one thing. Jesus succumbed to every evil as a weapon to defeat death, not to be complicit or to appease. He and the Holy Spirit can be found throughout the Old Testament texts, right in the middle of emotive, smoting activities. God’s persons have always been united in the interventionary actions with creation. The sacrificial courage of Jesus was not a new kindness. Kindness was always the nature of the Trinity. Kindness is a symptom of an unbelievable love, not a redirected nature of God.
Secondly, evil’s voracious gnaw upon humanity isn’t punishment, per se. It is certainly the consequence of our cooperation and foolishness with the seven deadly sins. The devil’s delights are allowed by God for reasons inexplicable to us. That’s been true since Adam and Eve’s naivete fell prey to a more clever being — a raunchy, ravaging mind.
What is different about the wars, absurd evils, and plagues of Hosea’s time and what we experience today? We see entire populations wiped out. Caste systems are still firmly in place. Autocratic, psychotic leaders pop up in every corner of the globe. We’ve got bigger bombs, manufactured pandemics, and legal murders of pre-born babies. Lots of good things are happening, but creeps, thieves, and seething poopheads abound.
God’s mercies develop today similarly to those of ancient millennia. Prayerful nations have experienced miraculous recoveries and considerate rulers throughout humanity’s entire history. Damaged cities, burned neighborhoods, and ravaged shores draw compassionate souls to assist and repair lives and possessions. God’s the same then as today.
We’re different. The Father places the gift of faith in our hearts. We open it. Jesus changes our DNA through reception of the Eucharist. Our entire being is transformed when the Holy Spirit indwells in us. The story of the universe shifts with our communion as would-be saints, active in creation, cooperators with God.
However, there is a significant difference between reparations and recoveries then and now. While the Old Testament writers attributed mercy to God, today’s journalists, writers, and media professionals fail to honor God’s intervention as significant to anything. Thankfully, the individuals involved in restorative efforts often look heavenward for their calls and motivations. Even athletes will point to God, but is any observer involved in honoring persons of the Trinity? Yet, more people outside the providers of information know the truth than we might realize or think.
Christians’ sacrificial mimicry of Jesus’ mission has, for all intents and purposes, reinvented the morals and constitutions of the entire world. That’s the reality of OT and NT shifts. Jesus suffered, beaten to a pulp, as a playbook for our lives.
Jesus questioned the Father, just like we do. Nonetheless, “For you, Father, I’ll do what you will.” God’s determined intervention always serves a good purpose. It’s logical. God’s love answers every question about bad stuff happening.
Come, let us return to the LORD, it is he who has rent, but he will heal us; he has struck us, but he will bind our wounds. (Hosea 6:1)
Restraining a child, holding them until their rage subsides, is the standard way to begin our formation. The smack upside the head (stun guns and twisted wrists are more modern devices) should be rare, but that recourse has been exhibited by everyone policing maddened hordes. Proverbs, still valuable teaching for believers today, recognizes the immediacy of a physical, in-your-face correction.
A child is one thing. A full-grown, willful adult is another. The issue is more about stupidity than age.
Strike a scoffer, and the simple will learn prudence; reprove a man of understanding, and he will gain knowledge. (Proverbs 19:25)
Context, always a problem with modern-day logic and click-for-pay journalism, attends to most of our confusion regarding a weak, non-aggressive version of God. The context of Hosea’s reading in Chapter 6—the whole of his writing—is God’s love.
Aggression is a minor part of love’s behaviors, yet love commits us to know when to use a forceful hand. Hosea couches the love of God within a marriage metaphor. The breakup of the Jewish nation into the Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom of Judah ripped the marriage covenant apart. God loved both, but something had to be done.
In the larger picture of Hosea’s divorced, fractured holy nation, every correction from God that took place, back then, foretells the interaction of God in the modern Church. Christians are held under a covenant relationship with God that can expect corrective lightening bolts. The Israelite schism has been copied hundreds of times in our Christian institutions. God’s love for his people comes with whatever God has to do to stop the gates of hell from prevailing. That will include shake-ups, spills, and creativity we won’t understand.
God goes well beyond a former peculiar Chosen People. His oath, a promise worked out by Jesus’ birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension, is now spread across every living human being. God’s Spirit can now live in all who accept the Father’s gift of faith and follow together as Church. This new oath includes the same Old Testament features of expectations, order, and assumption of God’s will. Except we don’t travel to the temple to meet God. We are the temples, gathered together in worship.
We are courted by God and wrapped in his goodness because we see creation through faith. Those who submit to God move into a separate life from the world's manufactured glories. It’s not an easy walk. We seldom maintain intensity with God. We don’t remain in that romanticized, first love, embraced intimacy.
Much like Israel, we will cheat on God. We stray. We slowly object to our confines within his order of the universe. We are attracted to other frameworks, ideas, goals, and purposes for our life. Some of us divorce God altogether.
The context of who God is becomes the problem of dealing with the smote option that God can deploy. We interpret God’s correction to us over time as punishment. That’s immaterial. We may be innocent and used by God because he needs our sacrifice to orchestrate the gathering and salvation of more people, not fewer.
This give-and-take with God is not a gentle, genial intimacy. It’s love, dear friends.
The world is so danged attractive with its instant gratifications. Addictive gratifications, I might add. We can enjoy them, but know at any moment God will extract us from the temporary joys to complete his mission. If we’re willing cohorts of God, it’s better for both us and God to step lively and take the blows with eager anticipation. That sounds weird, but it makes sense if you squint into the future.
The first words of verse 1 in Hosea’s chapter 6 are our marching orders, the impetus in our part of the relationship with God. We must turn back.
Come, let us return to the LORD . . .
Proverbs and Hosea remind us that God will go to great lengths in his love for us: “ . . . it is he who has rent, but he will heal us; he has struck us, but he will bind our wounds.”
I suspect, from personal experience, that the smiting of God from his love is a ready tool in God’s toolbox. As we practice sin, the further problems we encounter are our own doing. We don’t realize God is intervening. We numb ourselves to his urgings as he constantly reaches for our hearts. That’s just half of it. In fact, we can be good as gold and God will use us, sacrifice us, and let us die for his glory using the same tool when we were incorrigable loons.
By not reacting with a disciplined mind — a recognition that God loves us enough to suffer our sinfulness on one hand and use us as bait on the other — we play God and put land mines in our off-the-course paths. We’ll get angry with ourselves instead of helping God.
We don’t need to do that.
God forgives us and will heal us. He will bind our wounds. God is not different from the God of Hosea. We are immersed in God’s Spirit, like the holy prophets. We are filled with God’s Word, like the apostles. Keep telling yourself that.
Though Jesus might flip over a table we park in his place of conversation and prayer with us, we can return to him. He wants us that badly.