My Real Life Hosea Story – Craig S. Keener
Most people know me as a New Testament scholar. To keep my reading of Scripture balanced, however, I do most of my devotions from the Old Testament. Indeed, I have encountered God especially deeply in prophetic books such as Hosea and Jeremiah, where God laments over his people who have wandered far from him. God intended for his people to have an intimate relationship with him, a covenant relationship that the Bible compares with marriage. In Hosea, we hear God’s broken heart, his longing for his covenant people, who were so often unfaithful to him. And they actually turned against him, the very one who helped them (Hos. 13:9). God later lamented through the prophet Jeremiah, “My people have committed two wrongs: They abandoned me, the spring of flowing waters, and have dug out for themselves water pits—broken water pits that cannot hold water” (Jer. 2:13). Yet God, even in his anger, remained faithful to Israel. In his jealous love, God declared that he would strip them of w
