The House You're Building

Hosea chapter 4 &5 If you want to study along with me, before reading my devotional, read chapters 4 and 5 of Hosea.  Try to summarize in your own words what each chapter is about.  Write down your questions, see if you can answer those after you read my thoughts by cross referencing other verses, reading a commentary, or reading the first three chapters of Hosea.  Our verse to look at closely today: Listen to the word of the Lord, O sons of Israel, for the Lord has a case against the inhabitants of the land, because there is no faithfulness or kindness or knowledge of God in the land.  There is swearing, deception, murder, stealing, and adultery.  They employ violence, so that bloodshed follows bloodshed.  Therefore the land mourns, and everyone who lives in it languishes along with the beasts of the field and the birds of the sky, and also the fish of the sea disappear.  My people are destroyed by lack of knowledge   Hosea 4:...

I'm starting a study of the minor prophets and hope to share with you some of what I'm gleaning. Hope you are blessed by it! For their mother has played the whore; she who conceived them has acted shamefully. For she said, ‘I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.’ Therefore I will hedge up her way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, so that she cannot find her paths. She shall pursue her lovers but not overtake them, and she shall seek them but shall not find them. Then she shall say, ‘I will go and return to my first husband, for it was better for me then than now.’ (Hosea 2:5-7 ESV) Have you ever heard someone say that when God closes a door He opens a window?  Usually that statement is shared a friend  is explaining that if God didn't allow that, He has something different in mind.  Often we assume that when God prevents something from happening He has something...