But let no man bring a charge,
let no man accuse another,
for your people are like those
who bring charges against a priest.
5 You stumble day and night,
and the prophets stumble with you.
So I will destroy your mother--
6 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 also will ignore your children. Hosea4:4-6
Verse 6 ("my people are destroyed from lack of knowledge") is often misquoted... most people use it to mean that people are destroyed because they have not been enlightened, because the knowledge didn't get to them, because they "missed out." But this is not what the context implies: They lack knowledge because they are arrogant and unteachable.
Arrogance and being unteachable are serious blunders.
Israel is very guilty of this:
- They want to accuse and blame each other. ("It's not me!")
- They are arrogant (normally a priest would be considered above reproach) and so it would be mischievous to bring a charge against a priest - but they are willing to to point fingers at priests when they are by no means any better. In a modern context we might say "You're like a drunk spectator telling the Referee how to ref the match!"
- They stumble in the day and the night
- It turns out that their prophets aren't particularly wise either.
- They lack knowledge and they reject it.
These failures have serious repercussions:
God warns that their mother (Israel) will be destroyed, that they will be rejected as His priests, and that their children will be ignored.
We need to learn to be humbly teachable.
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Theo Groeneveld theo@emmanuel.org.za
You can see past EmmDevs at http://emmdev.blogspot.com/
