God in the ER
“Name her Lo-ruhamah, for I will no longer have compassion on the house of Israel, that I would ever forgive them. . . And the Lord said, “Name him Lo-ammi, for you are not My people and I am not your God.” Hosea 1:6, 9 NASB
I am not your God – Hosea is a tragic book. It is trauma enough that Hosea is commanded to marry a woman with proclivities toward sexual promiscuity. It’s tragic that she bears children, separates, becomes a prostitute and disgraces Hosea’s attempts to redeem her. We can only imagine the shame Hosea must bear, and his children. But far too often we put these emotionally stressful consequences on hold because we treat the whole story as an object lesson about God’s love. If we’re apt to follow replacement theology, then a verse like this one proves our point: God leaves Israel behind because they have been so religiously promiscuous. Otherwise, we might read Hosea as the triumph of love and mercy over law and punishment. But most of the time we forget about God’s emotion in this story. We’re so anxious to find a place for our own rescue that we never really investigate God’s feelings. If we did, we might suddenly discover that Hosea is the story of God in the ER on life-support.
“What?! How can such a metaphor ever apply to God? It’s ludicrous. God doesn’t need anything. How can you imagine God in the ER?”
Let me explain. We start with this citation from Abraham Heschel: “To man, the anger of God incites the fear of pain; to God, the anger is pain.”[1]
The book of Hosea is the revelation of God’s pain—so deep that it questions, even attacks, God’s basic character. This pain hurts God’s identity. He is the God of Israel, but if Israel no longer wants a god, then Who is He? His anger, demanding that the children be named “no compassion!” and “not my people,” is an expression of that pain. But it is never an uncontrolled reaction. “The call of anger is a call to cancel anger. It is not an expression of irrational, sudden, and instinctive excitement, but a free and deliberate reaction of God’s justice to what is wrong and evil. For all its intensity, it may be averted by prayer. There is no divine anger for anger’s sake. Its meaning is, as already said, instrumental: to bring about repentance; its purpose and consummation is its own disappearance.”[2] Heschel explains divine anger in terms of love:
“Suspended mercy, or love withheld, is a term that attempts to describe what wrath may mean to God. It certainly fails to convey what His wrath means to man. Doom, destruction, agony, make us feel that mercilessness is much harsher than the mere absence of mercy. Once the fury of the events is unleashed, the innocent suffer as much as the wicked.”[3]
It takes a prophet for us to realize the harm caused to God, to evaluate wrath in terms of an identity crisis. Most of us could never imagine such a thing. We have been weaned on Tertullian and Augustine. We have no sympathy for God because we contracted the theological disease of impassibility early in our lives. But God can’t let such a misapplication of justice go on forever, so He calls forth men who can feel His distress.
“The prophet is a person who is inwardly transformed: his interior life is formed by the pathos of God, it is theomorphic. Sympathy, which takes place for the sake of the divine will, and in which a divine concern becomes a human passion, is fulfillment of transcendence.”[4]
“The prophetic sympathy is an act of will, an emotional identification of the human person with God.”[5]
Prophets work in humanity’s ER, attempting to rescue God from the consequence of human auto-immune disease. Perhaps we should listen to them more intently.
Topical Index: anger, mercy, not your God, sympathy, Hosea 1:6, 9
[1] Abraham Heschel, The Prophets: Two Volumes in One (Hendrickson Publishers, 1962), Vol. 2, p. 93.
[2] Ibid., p. 66.
[3] Ibid., p. 75.
[4] Ibid., p. 99.
[5] Ibid., p. 98.
