There's this haunting line in Hosea 2:6 that richly rewards deep meditation and honest reflection. The Lord's talking about how he intends to restore and renew Israel to
relationship with himself, and he says, "In that day, you will call me 'my
husband' and you will no longer call me 'my master.'" I call it haunting, in particular, because
the Hebrew word for "master" that's used there is "ba'al,"
which simply means "lord," or "master," but has gone down
in infamy because it's also the name for "Ba'al," the pagan deity who
has competed for the hearts of YHWH's people, since the somewhere around the
Book of Judges onward. It gets even more
haunting when you notice that the very the next verse uses the word
"ba'al" to refer specifically to that foreign god: "I will
remove the names of the Ba'als from your lips and their names will no longer be
invoked."
Here's what I think
it all means: there is a way of relating to God that is, for lack of a better
phrase, "ba'alistic": seeing him as a distant, detached, impersonal
"Force to be Reckoned with," who has to be cajoled and manipulated
and bargained with if you want to get anything out of him, but who, if he is suitably cajoled and manipulated and bargained with, is beholden to "pony
up" and give you what you're asking for.
If and when we relate to God like this--like a sycophantic slave to an
imperious Master--we are calling him, in effect, "our Ba'al." And as far as Hosea is concerned, this is not
at all how God is, or how he wants to relate to us, and to come to him as
though he were just another "Ba'al," is the most heartbreaking kind
of idolatry.
It's heartbreaking, especially,
because relationship he wants with us is one where he loves us and cares for
us and communes with us, in the way a spouse loves and cares for and communes
with his beloved. But this kind of
relationship just can't thrive if we have a "ba'alistic" view of God,
anymore than a marriage can thrive if one partner is always trying to appease
the other, or manipulate them into giving them what they want.
It's important to note that it was Israel herself--the People of God--who had this distorted picture of their relationship with him; they were the ones calling him "ba'ali." Could it be that it's actually those who have been doing life together with the God longest who are at greatest risk of slipping into this kind of "ba'alism"? I'm not sure, but at the very least Hosea 2:6 challenges me to take careful stock of my own
relationship with God: in the way I relate to him, do I call him "ba'ali"
(my master), out of duty and drudgery? Or do I call him
"Ishi" (my betrothed) in delighted abandon? Because it's the later that God desires for
us, and its in the later that we really find him.
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