The Lord speaks as a husband who has been left by an
adulterous wife. The baals were
fertility gods. Baal worship was
lewdness and debauchery. Baal was
supposed to watch the worship of his subjects and then, act likewise with his
consort to provide rains for the earth in order that the ground would give of
its increase. Israel, from time to time,
played the harlot with baal worship and ascribed the abundance of the crops to
this god who was no god rather than Yahweh who was her husband. It might not be the entire nation that had
gone astray but only a portion. The fact
that it was tolerated at all is sin among God's people. Where are we tolerating false worship in the
church today? Often we allow superstition
to enter the house of God and we bear responsibility for that tolerance. The passage ends with Yahweh deciding not to
divorce Israel, His covenant is everlasting, but to woo her and bring her into
the wilderness to speak tenderly to her.
His love is never ending and the wilderness is the place of isolation
together.
Jesus speak in parables to describe the kingdom of
heaven. The first two parables tell us
that the kingdom of God is the most important thing, the most valuable thing,
and in order to possess it we must see and realize its value, being willing to
sacrifice everything else for it. We
can't have the kingdom of God and something else. We have promised the kingdom "and"
for a long season in the church, seeing it as an addition to what else we have,
freeing us to pursue those things because we have an irrevocable claim to the
kingdom of God because we once said, "Jesus is Lord." Does that theology fit with those first two
parables? The final parable tells us
that universalism isn't possible, that there is a judgment in the end and that
some won't enter the kingdom.
James teaches what Isaiah learned one day in the
temple. When the seraphim showed up in
the temple that day Isaiah realized the gap between the holiness of God and
himself and he recognized that he was a man of unclean lips living among a
people of unclean lips. The seraphim
seared Isaiah's lips with a burning coal from the altar of incense, which
represented the prayers of the nation going up to God. James says the tongue is still the problem
and is there any doubt he is right? Let
us pray with David, "Let the words of my mouth and the
meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. " To this formula, James simply adds the works
of our lives which are to speak loudly of our commitment to the kingdom of
heaven.
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