A Glass, Darkly*

I was reading Hosea this morning, had opened my Bible randomly and so I figured, why not? I'll read here. I love Hosea because of it's portrayal of God as a heartsick lover, trying to win back his wife. Of course, there's the bloody introduction to the book where God angrily declares what He will do to this unfaithful wife. I put the book down, because I didn't really feel like reading through another Old Testament rant. But for some reason, I felt the urge to go on...and as this rant proceeds, it begins to soften, until God is talking about how He will woo this woman back. God turns out to be quite the romantic (if you doubt me, you haven't read Song of Solomon). I sat back for a moment considering. Here was the portrayal, a very human portrayal of a wounded lover going through the varying stages of heartbreak, the anger, the betrayal, and then the determination to win back the betrayer.

Perhaps I'm not the shiniest needle in the pack not to have picked this up before because so many people are always saying, "Context, context, you have to take it in context," but perhaps I've been applying cultural context to everything but God's words. In many cases, it seems like the writers were inspired...but they were still humans, they still had to place this within words that they understood and that the people around them understood. It was as if God's words were filtered through that dim glass Paul talks about. It doesn't diminish what the words say, but I think it requires extra work to dig through the cultural trappings. There is a lot of mercy in the OT, but there's also a lot of brutality, and even this epiphany won't answer a lot of my questions, but it's giving me a new look into how the words I'm reading might be interpreted. Tough words for people living in a tough world; but a way of mercy winds through it all. But I'm a few millenia late and it seems I'll have to dig.

Jesus' words are so timeless and I think this may provide a clue as to why that is. In the OT, He had to speak through humans. In the New Testament, He tore torn away that filter between the divine and the human, and so we have God's words, unencumbered by a human translator who barely had a grasp on the language. We get the words of someone with the brilliance to speak a message that fit within a cultural context, and yet is timeless.