Hosea Names the Misleaders

Having sketched the overview of Israel's failure in the opening chapters, using an embodied comparison to adultery through Hosea and Gomer, the prophecy turns in chapters 4 and 5 toward additional explanation of what has gone wrong and how it has gone wrong.  The opening chapters highlighted the bloodthirstiness of the regime and its desire for power to be maintained through military might.  The wealthy families and courtiers lusted after luxuries, demonstrating their sense of upward mobility and class-consciousness.

What has been the centrifugal effect of the ways of this ruling elite?  How did their immorality trickle down to the people?

There is no faithfulness or loyalty,
and no knowledge of God in the land.
Swearing, lying, and murder,
and stealing and adultery break out;
bloodshed follows bloodshed.

The broader society displayed the ways of the rulers.  The commandments are broken:  swearing and lying, murder, stealing, and adultery.  The cycle of violence spirals out of control, as an unbroken chain of bloodshed following bloodshed.  Such behavior results from the people having no knowledge of God.  But why do they lack any knowledge?

My contention is with you, O Priest.

The priests have failed to fulfill their calling.  They have gone after wealth, power, and comfort.  They have allowed or even promoted the practices of worshiping other gods.  They have no faithfulness and loyalty to God, and it is no surprise that faithfulness and loyalty are lacking from the land.  Priests and prophets have rejected the teachings of the Torah.  They have rejected God's ways, which provide a clear path by which to walk, a light to the feet.  Now both priests and prophets will stumble.  God has rejected them.

Hosea says that the priests and prophets "feed on the sins of my people; they are greedy for their iniquity."  How can they feed on the sins of the people?  Why would they want more sinning?  If the sins are idolatrous worship, the priests and prophets may have a financial interest in the idolatrous worship.  Later in the chapter it discusses temple prostitution, to ritual sexual acts with prostitutes according to the religions of the land.  Priests may be connected to this religious pimping.  They may also get funds from the sale of idols.  As Isaiah said, the idolatry is part and parcel of robbing the poor.  Do they charge fees to do priestly duties or deliver private prophetic oracles?  Down to the days of Jesus, such practices made the temple into "a den of thieves."  Hosea speaks of getting a prophecy from a piece of wood or a divining rod.  It would be no surprise that people who ask for such guidance would have to "grease the palms" of the diviners.  And why should we limit our questions to the realm of religion?  Could the priests be organizing other criminal activity?  Is there an underground economy in which they have found a way to profit "on the side?"   

Perhaps another form of their "gain" has to do with encouraging the perception of a gulf between them and the common people (thanks to Dr. Annie Tinsley for helping me think through this one).  As noted above, the elites promoted their status by conspicuous consumption of imported goods, feeding class-consciousness of their own superiority.  Priests also elevate themselves by allowing the debasement of the common people.  In our day, I sometimes describe a certain ecclesial persona:  the "Imperial Pastor," who encourages the image of being above the sins of the commoners, closer to God than most people, more "spiritual" in speech and behavior.  Such a pastor may directly or indirectly claim to be a "covering" over the congregation, elevated in a hierarchy such that the lowly parishioners depend on the pastor for protection from evil.  That does not sound much like a "kingdom of priests" to me.

I am not attempting to diminish the importance of a good leader to bless and benefit the people whom the leader is called to serve.  But it is not by some mystical power or spiritual aura.  It is, as Hosea said, by doing the leader's job of teaching and guiding people in the ways of God.  Hosea says the priests left the people without knowledge of God.  This is not unlike the Imperial Pastor, who cares little whether the people can know God for themselves, but relishes being the expert and the dispenser of spiritual nuggets of wisdom. 

My people are destroyed by a lack of knowledge.

The priests are failing to teach and guide.  Many of them also ignore this learning for themselves.  The priesthood and the role of prophet have become one more path to wealth and prosperity among the elite rather than a service to the people.  So the whole nation is going astray, worshiping anything and everything, anywhere and everywhere, doing whatever seems pleasing, whether drunken orgies or empty sacrifices, ritual sexual acts or building altars to false gods.  And the priests and prophets are the ones on whom this sin rests.  They have been a snare, a net, a pit, to catch up the people and cause them to stumble.  The judgment will come to them. 

Hosea's Story Hammers Home the Main Idea

The prophet Hosea's story is filled with tragedy, betrayal, steadfast love, and hope.  It is a story readers find themselves caught up in.  Foreshadowing Jesus' parable of the lost sheep, Hosea goes to unexpected lengths to find and recover his wife.  He demonstrates a love deep and wide enough to keep seeking and drawing her back even with repeated unfaithfulness.  It is a story we could retell about a husband or a wife in our day, but the social stigma assigned to sex workers in Gomer's time and in our time entrenches this particular set of circumstances with moral and emotional power.  Readers seeking to know God find ourselves opened to a kind of wonderment about whether our God's love might pursue us as far into degradation as we might go.  Whether we paint it as personal immorality or becoming caught in the deadly structures of evil in the world, Gomer's path into the abyss strikes the reader as an extreme devolution of a life.

It is also a story that gets too uncomfortable for the straightlaced and proper church people.  What kind of fool takes a prostitute for his wife?  Who would expect a prostitute to become a life partner and a mother?  We don't know what demons pursue Gomer into self-destructive behavior.  We don't know if there is a hidden history of abuse in her family of origin.  We don't know if her "friends" conspired to get her alone and vulnerable, then rape her, destroying her trust in human relationships.  We don't know if her desire for excitement and risk kept her from settling into habits of a good life and created a downward spiral and cycle she could not seem to escape.  And "respectable" people may not want to know those things.  They are satisfied to know what she is:  a "whore," which they believe is what she will always be.  They don't really like to think about this story because it implies that people who made such terrible choices, choices they never made, might be as valuable to God as respectable people are.  It implies God might be a fool like Hosea.  It implies that some fool God or preacher might expect them to be in the same church with someone like Gomer.

This powerful story, punctuated by the allegorical naming of the children, dominates the opening chapters of Hosea's prophecy.  This narration of a family's struggles, this brief narrative, stands in as an embodied sign of the grand narrative of God's calling to Israel, and through Israel to all creation.  It speaks of a certain circumstance within that grand narrative.  It tells of a certain plot turning within the life of God.  That particular moment in the grand narrative addresses a particular situation in the history of Israel.

Thus intermixed with the narrative of Hosea, Gomer, and their children are clues to the particular crisis of God's people.  The first such clue appears in the opening statement.  It addresses when Hosea prophesied.  It was during the reign of Jereboam II.  The verses which follow, naming the firstborn son Jezreel, expand on this problem.  Jereboam II, of the dynasty of Jehu, is from a bloody, violent dynasty, and what went around with Jehu will now come around with Jehu's descendents.   Just as Jehu gained power through double regicide in Jezreel, Jezreel will be the sign of his dynasty's downfall.

Jehu committed regicide against the son of Ahab and Jezebel, then led a revolt that included assassination of all the living relatives of Ahab's Omride clan.  Jezebel was killed by her courtiers.  Jehu showed signs of trying to bring Israel back to God's purposes, but neither he nor his descendents eliminated the syncretistic worship of the Northern Kingdom.  Moreover, having also killed the king of Judah and severed the cooperative relationship with the Southern Kingdom, Jehu forged an alliance with Assyria, offering tribute, as a way to play the balance of power game against Syria and Judah.  The reigning dynasty was built on violence, ambition for royal power, and strategic military alliances.  It was far from the kind of social existence God intended for humanity.  Israel was no emblem of Yahweh.

In the continuation of Jehu's dynasty, Jereboam II's reign was long and prosperous, under the protection of Assyria.  His father, Jehoash, invaded Jerusalem and stole the Temple vessels and palace treasures, carrying them to Samaria, not exactly a sign of respect for the heritage of God's people.  Jereboam II's Assyrian protection from his neighbors to the north (Syria) and south (Judah) allowed the economy to prosper through trade.  This obsession with luxurious goods of trade shows up in 2:5, where the association with the Assyrian empire becomes tied to ready supplies of wool and flax, oil and wine.  Since Israel also exported olive oil and wine, the demand for imported oils and wines must have been focused among the wealthy looking for exotic and premium goods.  Further down in the same chapter, God reminds Israel that it is divine provision that gives them grain, oil, and wine.  The coming judgment will take away the imported flax and wool, signs of how they have become so enamored with the ways, the power, and the gods of the Assyrians.  Bedecked with gold and silver, they pursued the Assyrian imperial blessing, and turned away from God and their own people.

In this context of self-satisfied prosperity, of believing it is Assyria who blesses them, Hosea names his other two children.  A daughter receives the name "No Pity," and a son receives the name "Not My People."  These words deny any love remains.  These names break the covenant.  As Hosea's story continues, Gomer who has gone away becomes a sign of the eventual dispersement of the people into the nations, the extended and diasporic exile of the Northern Kingdom.  From this disappearance, this utter dissolution, God will come after Israel, as Hosea went to find Gomer who was lost to him and their children.  And Hosea promises that the children's names will change:  the daughter will be called "Pitied" and the son, "My People," even "Children of the Living God."

This prophetic family's story breaks open a view of what is happening in Israel in a certain moment in time.  This dynasty, reaching its greatest wealth under Jereboam II, is also reaching its greatest unfaithfulness to God.  They may be blind to how they have sought after other gods, but Hosea is driving home the main idea through this story.  A few of the specifics get hinted at in the opening chapters.  As the prophetic oracle continues, Hosea will make it plain where and why Israel has gone wrong and become unfaithful.

Isaiah and Economic Justice 11: All People and Nations Standing Before a Just God

Isaiah 10:5-7, 11-15, 33-34

Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger—
     the club in their hands is my fury!
Against a godless nation I send him,
     and against the people of my wrath I command him,
to take spoil and seize plunder,
     and to tread them down like the mire of the streets.
But this is not what he intends,
     nor does he have this in mind;
but it is in his heart to destroy,
     and to cut off nations not a few.

"Shall I not do to Jerusalem and her idols
     what I have done to Samaria and her images?”

     When the Lord has finished all his work on Mount Zion and on Jerusalem, he will punish the arrogant boasting of the king of Assyria and his haughty pride. For he says:

“By the strength of my hand I have done it,
     and by my wisdom, for I have understanding;
I have removed the boundaries of peoples,
     and have plundered their treasures;
     like a bull I have brought down those who sat on thrones.
My hand has found, like a nest,
     the wealth of the peoples;
and as one gathers eggs that have been forsaken,
     so I have gathered all the earth;
and there was none that moved a wing,
     or opened its mouth, or chirped.”

Shall the ax vaunt itself over the one who wields it,
     or the saw magnify itself against the one who handles it?
As if a rod should raise the one who lifts it up,
     or as if a staff should lift the one who is not wood!

Look, the Sovereign, the Lord of hosts,
     will lop the boughs with terrifying power;
the tallest trees will be cut down,
     and the lofty will be brought low.
He will hack down the thickets of the forest with an ax,
     and Lebanon with its majestic trees will fall.

The Assyrian imperialism and its widespread destruction of cities, villages, farms, and people, raises theological questions for the Isaiah and the people.  First, the Assyrians are not examples of obedience to Yahweh.  They see the gods of other peoples, including Judah, as idols, as weak deities who will fall before their divine mission.  They pursue greed through conquest.  Assyria and its leaders are also guilty of economic injustice.  Why would God allow Assyria to succeed while judging the sins of Judah and Israel?

Isaiah declares that Assyria's time will come.  They also stand under the judgment of God.  In the meantime, God allows the cycle of violence and greed to work itself out, sowing and reaping destruction.  Assyria does not march across the continent with an understanding of its conquest as the judgment of Yahweh.  For Assyria, it is the demonstration of the greatness of their generals and armies.  Thanks to their own greatness, Assyrian leaders believe they will grasp and carry away the wealth of the nations.  They will plunder all the treasures of the continent and claim it for themselves.  This is the very same sinfulness of the leaders and elite of Judah, expanded to an even more violent dominance and an even more vast landscape.  But God is not "blessing" Assyria.  Assyria will quickly sow the seeds of its own destruction.

Second, in the process of Assyrian conquest, the widows and orphans, the weak and the vulnerable, will also suffer, as stated in chapter nine.  Here in chapter ten, Isaiah offers more insight into this theological problem about the suffering of innocents.  Assyria, while serving as an instrument of judgment, does not act in accord with the will of God.  Imperialistic war, violence, plunder, killing and maiming--these are not the ways of God.  They are the ways of sin.  God is not endorsing violence, but allowing sin to work out its terrible consequences.  Violence comes into the world, not by the will of God, but by the freedom to be greedy, self-aggrandizing, possessive, and hateful that God has allowed to humanity.  This same violence led to the organized use of power to execute the sinless one, Jesus.  God is not pleased to see this violence, but God is willing to endure the violence to which humanity finds itself in bondage.  The struggle of righteousness and justice is to push back the powers formed in violence in the name of those formed in peace and justice.

So Assyria will have its day of judgment as well.  As Dr. King said, “Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate.”  That is what seeking economic justice is about.  Someone has to have the sense to say enough is enough in exploiting workers and the poor.  Someone has to stop the destruction, stand in the gap, speak truth to power, lift as we climb.  That is why the prophecies of the Old Testament are always conditional.  There is another way that leads to peace.  Jesus wept over Jerusalem's failure to find that way.  But if the unjust structures stand, the road will lead to a downward spiral of violence.  Pray that the Lord will send workers into the harvest, workers who know the good news of the way of Jesus.

Isaiah and Economic Justice 8: Watch Out for Immanuel

Isaiah 7:14-17, 23

Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign.  Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel.  He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good.  For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted.  The Lord will bring on you and on your people and on your ancestral house such days as have not come since the day that Ephraim departed from Judah—the king of Assyria. . . . On that day every place where there used to be a thousand vines, worth a thousand shekels of silver, will become briers and thorns.

Isaiah 8:5-8

The Lord spoke to me again:  Because this people has refused the waters of Shiloah that flow gently, and melt in fear before Rezin and the son of Remaliah; therefore, the Lord is bringing up against it the mighty flood waters of the River, the king of Assyria and all his glory; it will rise above all its channels and overflow all its banks; it will sweep on into Judah as a flood, and, pouring over, it will reach up to the neck; and its outspread wings will fill the breadth of your land, O Immanuel.

Isaiah 8:9-10

Band together, you peoples, and be dismayed;
     listen, all you far countries;
gird yourselves and be dismayed;
     gird yourselves and be dismayed!
Take counsel together, but it shall be brought to naught;
     speak a word, but it will not stand,
     for God is with us.

Isaiah 8:13-14

But the Lord of hosts, him you shall regard as holy; let him be your fear, and let him be your dread.  He will become a sanctuary, a stone one strikes against; for both houses of Israel he will become a rock one stumbles over—a trap and a snare for the inhabitants of Jerusalem.

Isaiah 8:17-18

I will wait for the Lord, who is hiding his face from the house of Jacob, and I will hope in him.  See, I and the children whom the Lord has given me are signs and portents in Israel from the Lord of hosts, who dwells on Mount Zion.


Chapters 7 and 8 revolve around the fear of impending war and the sign of Immanuel.  All the way back to the canon of scripture, Christians have read the Immanuel saying in 7:14 as a promise of the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.  There are many intertextual reasons to read it that way, and I would not want to disagree with that reading.

However, when we overlay the Christological interpretation of Isaiah with sugary sweet images of a sanitized and quiet baby Jesus ("no crying he makes"), we are likely to forget that there are multiple levels of meaning in a text.  Attentive reading of chapters 7 and 8 within the whole range of the opening chapters of Isaiah ought to stir up more than the "Aaaaawwwww" that a newborn baby elicits from us.

First of all, before the coming of Jesus and the theological interpretation of his life by the church, people who read these chapters did not apply them to Christmas.  There was no Christmas during those half a dozen centuries.  I do not doubt that the text can take on Messianic significance, but Jesus' behavior and words depicted in the Gospels ought to make clear to readers that there was a great variety of opinion concerning just what the Messiah would be, how the Messiah would come, and what the Messiah would do.

Second, the identity of the sign of Immanuel in these passages remains ambiguous.  One vector of interpretation can move toward a figure who by God's power would restore justice.  These sayings about the child seem to indicate a delay.  This is what the early Christians saw in this text as a Christological foreshadowing.  Yet the abundance of meaning in the text is striking.  It goes on to indicate that God will send a leader to deal with the rumors of war between Syria, Israel, and Judah.  It seems to be saying that the King of Assyria is this leader.  God with us can mean the devastating invasion of the Assyrian army.

It is not a prosperity gospel text.  It says that when God is with us, the result can be the destruction and disappearance of massive wealth, to be replaced by weeds: briers and thorns.  This judgment is not only for Judah, but also for Israel, Syria, and all the nations.  Continuing in their injustice, their warmaking, their pillaging of one another, their greed--these ways will lead to their destruction.  They can scheme, plan, gird up, and pronounce, but God is with us and nothing they do will stand.


God is with us, but we are apparently mistaken if we expect that God's presence entitles us to blessings.  God may turn away from us in disgust at our unjust, uncaring use of possessions.  As Jeremiah says, just because the Temple is in Jerusalem does not mean that corrupt people are protected by some sort of high-tech force field.  The God who is with us is the one we ought to dread when we have trampled the poor, put their spoils in our houses, taken their dwellings, and built idols of opulence.

Getting back to the Christological and Messianic reading of the text, we have to remember that Jesus' birth was not in the Mayo Clinic Obstetrics wing.  It was in a cattle barn.  He started out in a refugee family, living among people as an immigrant.  The king tried to kill him before he could grow up.  And even when he had grown up into his Messianic calling, the people in power quickly figured out that he was not what they wanted as a Messiah.  He had too much critical to say about oppression.  He wanted people with excess to realize that it did not belong to them, but to the poor.  He talked about instating the Jubilee practices.  So all the Gospels tell us that very early in his ministry, the powerful began to plot to kill him.

What I'm getting at is that God with us was not good news to Herod.  It was not good news to the rich young man.  It was not good news to scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, and Herodians.  It was not good news to Rome.  Zaccheus saw and understood this good news.  So did Matthew, Peter, and Mary.  But when the council, the rulers, the wealthy, the powerful, the clergy, politicians, and the high and mighty got their national guard and army to arrest and execute him, the ones who saw hope in the sign of Immanuel had to have patience and wait to see what would come.

So if you hear Immanuel is going to be in town, you'd best watch out.

The Land of the House of Omri--Part 1
Psalm 146
I Kings 16

In the official inscriptions of the ancient kingdom of Assyria, archaeologists have discovered a phrase that names a character from the Old Testament. That phrase refers to a kingdom, and it calls that kingdom “the house of Omri.” Who was Omri—O-M-R-I--Omri? Did Omri have a famous family?

Well, fame is a relative thing. About 3000 years ago in the hills of Samaria, Omri was pretty well known. He was the sixth king of the northern kingdom of Israel. He moved the capital of the kingdom from Tirzah to a new city he built called Samaria. He reigned for about twelve years and seems to have built some buildings. He was mediocre in his ability to maintain good relationships with neighboring kingdoms. He seems to have solidified one relationship with a strategic marriage for his son. Elsewhere he lost some cities to Syria and took some cities from Moab. And he got his name into the records of Assyria, a kingdom on the rise toward a becoming a great empire. His successors as King of Israel would ultimately have to face a reckoning with Assyria, and it would be their downfall.

But what I’ve just told you is much more than the book of 1 Kings bothers to tell us about Omri. Omri is one more in a series of rulers who are most memorable in the Bible for the way they went wrong. Of course, that is the overall story line of the entire period of kings in Israel and Judah. Some people began to demand a king. Samuel tried to stop them, and he warned them it would not be good for them. Against God’s true purpose for Israel, God let them have a king, and what follows is one sad example after another of why we need to understand what Psalm 146 is saying: “Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help. When their breath departs, they return to the earth; on that very day their plans will perish.”

Let’s think back across that history. God selected Saul, from the tribe of Benjamin, as the first king. He had the look of a leader. He showed an inclination toward godliness as was manifested when he joined up with the traveling prophets. He took up the task of leadership with confidence. Pretty soon he was fighting wars. The longer he stayed in office, the more he worried about who might be trying to take over his place as king. This concern seems to have pushed him toward depression and maybe even mental illness. He could not figure out that the best thing he had going for him was a friendship with young David. Instead, he let the waves of public opinion rock him back and forth. It’s a tragic story, but not an isolated incident of failure on the throne.

Saul was replaced by David after his death. Sometimes the Bible makes it seem that under David everything was great. But closer attention to the story shows us it was not. David’s leadership was tied up with his effective use of violence. God did not want him to build the temple because of his violent ways. Moreover, while he seems to have started out with the blessing of the people and of God, David quickly dissipated his political capital and his divine favor. He decided that being king put him above the law. He stole a man’s wife and killed the man. He did not maintain a harmonious household. The household disagreements poured over into political factions, and the land became divided and went into civil war. Although we see David repenting of sin and seeking to reconcile the divisions, even on his deathbed he plotted revenge.

His successor Solomon is praised for his wisdom, but where is the wisdom in having so many wives and concubines? He sounds more like a rich, powerful man out of control. Some of his marriages were for political alliances, and these brought the powerful influences of other kingdoms and other faiths into the land. Although Solomon is revered for building a temple to the God of Israel, he also built temples to the gods of the neighboring kingdoms. And the way he built so many fine buildings was by drafting the people to do forced labor for the kingdom. It was hard to raise your crops and keep your animals if you had to spend months away from home building fancy buildings for the king’s wives to live in or for the priests of foreign gods to practice their religion. People were angry by the time Solomon died.

One of the popular critics of Solomon’s policies, Jereboam, helped to split the kingdom into north and south, and he became king of the northern tribes. He went back to the wilderness precedent of erecting a golden calf as a symbol of the throne of god. He mixed up the gods of the land with the worship of the God of Israel. His was the first of many disastrous kingships in the northern kingdom. His son and successor, Nadab, was murdered on the battlefied by another northerner, Baasha, and then the whole family was rounded up and slaughtered. Baasha did not know how to stay out of fights, and he had plenty of trouble with his neighbors. When he died, his son Elah succeeded him. That’s where 1 Kings chapter 16 picks up.

I would hate to be Elah in the history books. The Bible gives us one fact about his life. While a war was going on somewhere else, he was back at home with half the army in the capital. And he was drinking himself stupid with his buddies. In that state of inebriation, he probably never knew what hit him. The commander of the troops in the capital came to the place where he was drunk and assassinated him. The kingdom went into chaos. Zimri, his assassin, proclaimed himself the new king. Then he did just like Elah’s father had done. He rounded up the whole family of Elah and executed them.

After this assassination and usurping of the throne, the people began to rally around popular leaders. The part of the army that had been off at war chose Omri to be the new king. Omri took the army off the battlefield and marched back to the capital. When Zimri, the assassin who was claiming to be king, saw the troops arrayed against him, he gave up hope. After being king for only seven days, he set fire to the palace and burned it and himself in it. So Omri claimed to be the new king.

But he could not fully claim it yet. Even though the army was backing him, about half the people of the northern kingdom were backing another fellow, Tibni, for king. Putting the dates from 1 Kings 16 together, it seems that for four years, two people claiming to be king were locked in a struggle for power. Finally, Omri’s party overcame Tibni’s party, and Tibni’s death let Omri reign unchallenged for the next eight years until his death. What inheritance did he leave the kingdom of Israel? He left them his successor, his son Ahab, who led the people down many wrong paths.

Omri came to power in the midst of war, in the wake of assassinations, and when the country was divided. I Kings says that half the people backed Omri and the other half backed Tibni. Omri and Tibni battled it out in an intractable struggle for four years. Then Omri got the undisputed title, and Tibni went to the grave.

This does not sound so unfamiliar to me. Half the country was for one leader, the other half for another. The controversy went on for four years, and finally one of them emerged the victor over the other. It sounds like the last six years of U. S. politics. This country’s voting populace is so evenly divided between two parties that every election ends up with a dispute over who won. And with the margin of victory so narrow, who knows what people are willing to do to sway a few votes. Some try to intimidate voters to keep them from going out to vote. Others use mailings or phone calls to lie about where and when the vote is taking place. Some throw out perfectly good ballots that could hurt their party’s cause. Others take election results to court. Many of us wonder whether the coming use of electronic voting machines will bring an end to having our vote count if the machines can be programmed to ignore our decisions and mark ballots for whomever pays the programmers the best price. We face uncertainty, conflict, and division. So did the people who ended up with Omri as their king.

It was that chaotic reign that the Assyrians recorded as their name for the northern kingdom of Israel. Even after Omri’s descendents lost the throne, the Assyrians called this kingdom “the house of Omri.” They did not call it the house of Jereboam. They did not call it the house of Baasha. They did not call it the house of Jehu, even though Jehu was the one who unseated and executed the family of Ahab, son of Omri. So forever in the archives of Assyrian history, the northern kingdom has been known for a king whose reign was built on chaos and civil conflict.

The Psalmist’s words are an important reminder for those of us who find ourselves living in the house of Omri today. Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help. As Samuel warned, and Jeremiah reminded, depending on armies and violence and putting one person in charge over everyone is a bad plan that is bound to fail. One person is not capable of exercising that much power. Armies and violence produce more armies and violence. Autocratic leaders become self-centered and self-serving. They help their friends while everyone else pays the price. They talk as if they are for the people when behind the scenes they are robbing them of their prosperity and their dignity.

In our day leaders are promoting the use of torture, putting the energy companies in charge of the energy policy, taking away the right of habeus corpus, allowing unlimited imprisonment without charges, imprisonment without the right to communicate with a lawyer, allowing wiretapping of citizens without probable cause or a warrant, spending billions on a war of aggression while leaving hundreds of thousands of hurricane victims to fend for themselves, creating education policies designed to shift billions of dollars to private companies. In these times of chaos and division, leaders can manipulate the system to the great disadvantage of the common people.

This is the world we have been living in. We have been living in the house of Omri. And do not be fooled. It has not changed overnight. One day of voting did not transform a troubled and broken system into the Kingdom of God. When Saul died and David took his place, the problems did not go away. Solomon may have tried to be a uniter and not a divider, but when his son took power, the country split and civil war ensued. One election did not remove the dangers and turn the U. S. into the land of eternal happiness. For generations after Omri’s reign, people still called the northern kingdom of Israel “the house of Omri.” And when they stopped calling it that, it was because the kingdom had been defeated, destroyed, and deported.

To be continued . . .