“I have written for him the great things of My law, But they were
considered a strange thing.”
In the book of Hosea, God speaks through His prophet telling
the people of the Northern Kingdom the consequences of their sins and iniquity. Sins such as worshiping idols as gods, one consequence
of which is that they will never attain innocence. Or going to Assyria or Egypt for help,
instead of turning to God, as a result they will be abused by these
nations. And by leaving their God, they
abandon His protection. These are a few
in the list of sins and consequences.
What we learn from this passage is how God Himself feels about His
Holy Word. He is telling us here He
wrote it. He says it includes great
things for our discovery. And in it He
provides the way to living free from the grip of sin and evil of our own doing,
individually and collectively as a nation.
Charles Spurgeon says “This volume is the writing of the
living God: each fetter was penned with an Almighty finger; each word in it
dropped from the everlasting lips, each sentence was dictated by the Holy
Spirit. If this be the Word of God, what
will become of some of you who have not read it for the last month? Most people
treat the Bible very politely . . . When they get home, they lay it up in a
drawer till next Sunday morning; then it comes out again for a little bit of a
treat and goes to chapel; that is all the poor Bible gets in the way of an
airing. That is your style of entertaining this heavenly messenger. There is
dust enough on some of your Bibles to write “damnation” with your fingers. The Bible speaks of great things, and of
great things only. There is nothing in this Bible which is unimportant. Every
verse in it has a solemn meaning, and if we have not found it out yet, we hope
yet to do it.”
For those individuals that have not surrendered to Christ
and therefore do not have the Holy Spirit living in them, the Word of God can
seem strange. It can feel anywhere from
oppressive to silly.
For those of us who have surrendered to Christ, we should
all have a steady diet of feeding on the Word of God every day. We should get to the point that if we miss
out on reading for the day, we feel a hungering emptiness like we have missed a
meal. We pray to God, He is speaking to
us through His Word. Set a goal to read
through the Bible at whatever pace suits your lifestyle. Mark in your Bible where you discover great
things. Make notes. When you finish, start over again. Use your Bible so much that it falls apart
and you must buy another. Mix it up the
next time around. Try the NASB version,
then NKJ, then ESV. There will be things
you do not understand, but keep on reading and praying.
“[It is] the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings
[is] to search out a matter.”
Proverbs 25:2
May you grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and
Savior Jesus Christ.
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