The second chapter of Hosea hits the same notes as the first: Israel has prostituted herself to the nations around her, there will be consequences for her infidelity to the Lord, but the Lord will forgive her and bring her back to him. This time around, however, there are also Baals.
The book of Hosea begins with Hosea marrying a prostitute.
I can’t believe we’re already finished with Hebrews. I mean it; despite my familiarity with it, I somehow got it into my head that it had fourteen chapters. But sure enough, here’s the end, from the exhortations to good behavior to the last little bits of theology to the personal notes. It spans two pages in my Bible, and even before I turned the page, I could tell by the tone that the book was wrapping up. There was not going to be another chapter.
Hebrews chapter 11 has been a particularly compelling passage throughout my life. In college, my sophomore essay on faith investigated it in-depth, and I’ve read and re-read it countless times both before and after I wrote that essay. It’s encouraged me to investigate what merits my trust and to place my trust in the sources that merit it without hesitation. In the twelfth chapter, there are a few verses that have similarly stuck with me in life–which should come as no surprise to you, considering that the author’s primary topic here is my favorite food, discipline.
Look, I’m not going to tell you how to live your life. But given a choice between drinking my coffee and eating it, I’m taking my caffeine via chocolate bar every time. You’d be hard-pressed to find a better way to get your coffee fix than Chocolove’s Dark Chocolate Coffee Crunch.
I recently dreamed that my brother, two friends, and I were talking in my dorm room at college, except that it was a dorm room I’d never actually lived in, made up for the dream. “So I read your latest Chocolate Book post,” my brother told me. “And…are you still a Christian?” One of my friends came to my defense with a few words about faith which, while intended to put my questioning in a positive light, didn’t really have a whole lot to do with what I’d actually said. So I sat down on the side of my bed. “I think faith is–” I started to tell my brother, but I got choked up and had to give the definition through tears. “I think faith is admitting that you don’t know what you need to know, and you don’t know how to find out.”
The first part of today’s chapter reiterates the theme begun in the previous chapter: Christ’s sacrifice covers our sin once for all, a single act making restitution for humanity’s evils and failings. It does what repeated sacrifices of bulls and goats could not do. It pays for the misdeeds of the spirit, not merely those of the flesh. So, let’s get into the latter half of the chapter, where we will find things interesting and new.
