The Knowledge of God

“My people are destroyed from lack of knowledge. ‘Because you have rejected knowledge, I also reject you as my priests; because you have ignored the law of your God, I also will ignore your children’. The more the priests increased, the more they sinned against me; they exchanged their glorious God for something disgraceful. They feed on the sins of my people and relish their wickedness. And it will be: Like people, like priests. I will punish both of them for their ways and repay them for their deeds.” – Hosea 4:6-9

What is the one thing which has the ability to destroy God’s people? There might many answers to this question. There are lots of sins which can tear God’s church apart: gossip, bitterness, anger, etc. But most of the sins we might think of are fairly normal in the course of church life. After all, each of us is on a journey of sanctification, a journey of leaving our sinful habits behind and becoming like Jesus. As long as there are new Christians being saved and coming into the church, these “common” sins will always be around. A mature church knows how to handle these sins and help others recover from them. However, some things are very hard to recover from. There is one sure way to destroy a church - take away their knowledge of God.

You can’t worship what you don’t know. You can’t follow what you don’t understand. You can’t become like what you have never heard. That’s what happened in ancient Israel. The leaders – the prophets and priests - stopped proclaiming the law of God. As people forgot who God was and what God had done for them, they naturally gravitated towards the wicked ways (of worship and ethics) of the pagans around them.

When scripture stops being the focus of God’s people, we are setting ourselves up for failure. I am so grateful to belong to a church where our pastor intentionally preaches through passages of scripture and explains them to our people. This is a treasure we should not hold lightly. The Bible is like a mirror which shows us who we are and who we need to become. Imagine in real life what we would look like after a couple of days of not looking in the mirror! Just as we would eventually become physically unkempt, we would become spiritually unkempt without the Bible.

As mentioned above, much of the responsibility for this emphasis depends on our leaders. True spiritual leaders proclaim an accurate picture of God and then exhort the people to align their lives according to His ways. But the exact opposite was happening in Israel. Notice the phrase, “Like people, like priest.” God’s leaders were following the ways of the people. How sad. The passage says, “They feed on the sins my people.” This possibly alludes to the fact that when people would bring a sin offering, the priests would sacrifice a part of it and then eat the rest. The bottom line: the more people sinned, the more they got to eat. So for them, sin became a means to more food.

 

In closing, I fear that the greatest tragedy of this generation might be that spiritual leaders in America be tempted to preach philosophy, psychology, and five steps to a better this or that, rather than proclaim God’s message, God’s character, God’s ways and God’s purposes. Why? Because that’s what people want. We would rather have our sin coddled than convicted. We would rather feel good than become good. It is a sad day when pastors chose against preaching the Bible and begin preaching something else because it will allow them to keep their jobs, or “grow their church”, or make them more popular, etc.

Pray that God will make us and keep us people of His word.