Hope Renewed
Press the play button to watch the video above or press 'more' to read the transcript of the daily devotion below. Please read Hosea 11: 1-11 (use your own Bible or use the link above to access the in-App Bible).
Last week we witnessed a great solemnity in the secular-liturgical calendar of our age. Black Friday was once again celebrated by humans, whom God has made in His image, shoving their fellow image-bearers aside as they strove to grab the best bargain. At the same time across the world innumerable human lives were offered up as sacrifices to the gods of self-interest, hatred, tyranny, and tribe.
Looking at our world today compared to that of the Prophet Hosea, everything seems radically transformed. Yet at the same time the human heart is so unchanged. In the book of Hosea, the people God calls ‘my son’ put their faith in the gods of the nations. They choose the simple path of the gods of their age over the more inscrutable, upside-down ways of the God of Israel. Can we truly say that in our nation, our church, our own hearts, we are so much better than what Hosea decried?
Yet despite human idolatry and sin, there is hope. Advent is usually articulated as a season of waiting. Yet it must be a season of waiting in hope, just as the Israelites waited in hope for the Messiah. For the God we worship is one who is loving and good as Hosea tells us. He is a God who nurtured Israel like a mother; a God who in the midst of our sin and idolatry waits with compassion, ‘warm and tender’ (v.8) for humanity; a God who draws us with ‘bands of love’ (v.4).
Most of all there is hope because God is not like us: He is ‘God and no mortal’ (v.9). It is because He is God and without sin that He could take on our mortality and die to it for us, so that we mortals might be freed from our state of corruption and come to share in God’s life. With St Athanasius we affirm our hope that the ‘Son of God became man so that we might become god’. Advent invites us by God’s power to turn away from unfulfilling idols and turn fully to this hope.