God's Problem (7 page)

This is not the kind, loving, caring, forgiving God of nursery rhymes and Sunday school booklets. God is a fierce animal who will rip his people to shreds for failing to worship him. Or as Hosea states in his most disturbing image of all:

The predicted fall of Israel came to pass soon after Hosea’s day (or possibly during the final years of his prophetic activity). Assyria was on the march and wanted very much to control the entire area that later became known as the Fertile Crescent. Israel had the geographical misfortune of lying just east of the Mediterranean in the land mass that led from Mesopotamia south to Egypt. Any world empire wanting to control the region needed control of Israel. Assyria’s armies marched against tiny Israel and overcame it, destroying the capital city of Samaria, killing the opposition, and, as indicated earlier, sending many of the people into exile.

This kind of military defeat might be read by a secular historian as a natural event that took place because of political currents and national ambition. Not so for a religious prophet like Hosea. For him, the reason the nation Israel had suffered so mightily was that it had displaced its faith in the God who had delivered it from Egypt and gone after other gods. The true God could not abide this false behavior, and so sent out the powerful troops from the north. The army was destroyed, the land decimated, and the people violently killed or exiled as a punishment for their sin.

Other Prophets, Same Refrain

The prophets Amos and Hosea were not alone in seeing the sufferings of the people of Israel as a punishment from God. In fact, this is a constant refrain of
all
the writing prophets, whether they were prophesying against the northern kingdom Israel or the southern kingdom Judah, and whether they were prophesying at the time of the Assyrian ascendancy in the eighth century or at the time of the
Babylonians in the sixth—or at any other time or place. Page after page of the prophets’ writings are filled with dire warnings about how God will inflict pain and suffering on his people for disobedience, whether through famine, drought, pestilence, economic hardship, and political upheavals, or, most commonly, through resounding military defeat. God brings disasters of all kinds, both to punish his people for their sin and to urge them to return to him. If they return, the pain will cease; if they don’t, it will get worse.

Rather than rehearse all the writings of all the prophets, here I shall briefly discuss the words of two of the most famous, Isaiah and Jeremiah, both of Jerusalem, so-called major prophets whose powerful rhetoric continues to make them moving reading two and a half millennia later.
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It is important to remember, however, that they, and all the prophets, were speaking to the people of their own day, instructing them in the word of the Lord, urging them to return to God, and reciting the dire fate awaiting them should they fail to do so. Both of these prophets had long ministries of about forty years; both of them prophesied not against the northern kingdom but against the south. But their essential message did not differ significantly from that of their colleagues to the north.
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God’s people had departed from his ways and fearful suffering was in store for them as a result. God, for them, was a God who punishes.

Consider the powerful lament of Isaiah’s opening chapter:

One can hardly read this without thinking of that fierce cartoon with the caption “Beatings will continue until morale improves.” That indeed is Isaiah’s message, in words reminiscent of Hosea:

The people of God have now become the enemy of God. And he will act accordingly:

In one of the most famous passages of the book, Isaiah recounts a vision he has had of God himself, “sitting on a throne, high and lofty” above the Temple (6:1–2). The prophet is commissioned by God to proclaim his message, a message that the people will reject. When he asks the Lord how long he is to make this proclamation, he receives bad news—it is until the whole land is destroyed: “Until cities lie waste without inhabitant and houses without people, and the land is utterly desolate; until the L
ORD
sends everyone far away and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land” (6:11–12). And what has Judah done that makes it worthy of such judgment? They have robbed the poor, not cared for the needy, not tended to the widows and the orphans in distress (10:2–3). God will therefore send another great power against them for destruction.

And yet, as we saw with Amos, Isaiah anticipates that God’s wrath will not burn forever. On the contrary, he will save a remnant of his people and start again:

More than a century later, a similar message was proclaimed by Jeremiah, another prophet of Judah who anticipated that God would destroy the nation for its misdeeds.
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A foreign power would march against it and bring terrible destruction: