Day 27—Friday, April 4, 2025

Hosea 6:1

Come, let us return to the Lord. For he has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up.

To what extent are our wounds of our own making, and to what extent of God’s? Surely, we cannot attribute wrongs against us to God; that would make God the author of sin. But to deny God’s control over our world would be to deny his sovereignty. It’s a conundrum no one has been able to sort out fully, for millennia.

But for now, we get to see wounds. In the time of Hosea, he northern kingdom of Israel, half of God’s people, were about to be deported and disappear from history due to a long period of misrule and bad decisions. In his time, God’s good will or punishment on Israel and Judah was seen as a national judgment, as political units made up of God’s people. God doesn’t play that way anymore; identification of a particular political unit as God’s own is generally recognized today as a form of idolatry. Yet, we see our friends get laid off; friends get deported; the services we depend on become worse; inflation increases and our country’s credit declines. In Hosea’s time, the people could blame God, since he chose their rulers and the ruled by divine right. For us, however, we chose our rulers. We are merely getting what we want.

I think this is a particular situation that cries out for us to think through what it shows us, because that will help us know what is next. Are poor choices God’s choices, even when we made them? It seems to me that God is the God of creation, and foolish or bad choices are the result of the lack of wisdom or virtue; a lack of something is a kind of nothingness. Because God is the God of creation and being, he cannot be there when there is nothing. But we, as human beings, can choose nothingness. But we can’t be healed until we choose to build something—to be part of something that exists, that is, because it is real and positive, a place or a thing that God chooses.

When God chooses, he acts to create it in all of his Trinitarian fulness, giving his choice not just existence but also form and life. I hope this Lenten season that the nothingness that we can see around us is healed, as Hosea foresaw, and in the Easter season, we see the germination of a return to fulness of life. Paul tells us to hope; we can hope, can’t we?

-Mike Lockaby