It is generally thought that Isaiah of Jerusalem founded the Yahwistic messianic tradition. It was he who...
It is generally thought that Isaiah of Jerusalem founded the Yahwistic messianic tradition. It was he who first began to speak of the Messiah and the messianic Kingdom. Yet sometimes, when reading the prophetic books, one cannot help thinking that the image, if not of the Messiah Himself, then of the messianic Kingdom, of a world transformed by the breath of God, was occasionally revealed or partly revealed even to those who lived before Isaiah. Hosea sees the world in this way as well. It is beautiful not merely in its ordinary earthly beauty, although the mountains and valleys of Israel are indeed breathtakingly beautiful, but also in a transformed beauty, the beauty with which the world begins to shine when it is washed not only by rain but also by that breath of God without which there is not and cannot be a Kingdom.
It is also significant that Hosea speaks of this transformed Israel in connection with the time when the Assyrians will disappear. He happened to witness the end of the Northern Kingdom, which he had foreseen, and he certainly understood what the Assyrian invasion threatened for Judah. Hosea also understood that flourishing would not come before the people had passed through the trial of faith that this invasion would become. Like his younger contemporary Isaiah, he understood perfectly well that the people’s spiritual state at the time left them practically no chance of a miracle or of any intervention by God in what was taking place.
Yet unlike the Kingdom of Israel, Judah was not destroyed by the Assyrians, although it was devastated. Jerusalem, besieged by the Assyrian army, was saved only by a miracle, and this occurred after Hosea’s death. So was the prophet mistaken? Hardly. If a prophet were merely a predictor of the future, one could speak of an error. But that is not so: a prophet does not predict the future. He merely states the current spiritual condition of the people that he encounters and assesses that condition not in his own name, but on behalf of God, who reveals to him what He thinks of what is happening.
The future can always be changed. When the Assyrian army stood at the gates of Jerusalem, the whole city prayed, fasted, and repented of its sins. God answered such repentance with a miracle, and the Assyrians went away empty-handed. Yet everything could have happened differently if the inhabitants had behaved differently in the face of the mortal danger that then hung over the city.
An important spiritual principle is at work here: God’s plan will be fulfilled in any event, but the forms and ways in which it is fulfilled are determined by God with account taken of the choices people make, and therefore they can change as events unfold. Nevertheless, the new and transformed world that Hosea saw will certainly come. The only question is how much time it will take and how much effort it will require.
