By Dennis Pollock
Speaking for God, the prophet Hosea wrote this to the people of Israel: “I have written for him the great things of my law, but they were considered a strange thing.” (Hosea 8:12). God is referring to His word and His laws, as given by Moses and the other writers of the Scriptures. In God’s eyes, these things in His word are great, wonderful, and meant to be a blessing to His people. But in the eyes of the Israelites, these same things, God’s words, laws, and moral pronouncements, were considered strange, weird, unattractive, and unacceptable.
This is a powerful insight, not just to the Israelites who lived in Hosea’s day, but to our current generation. If the Old Testament Scriptures were filled with great things, how much more does the New Testament, which reveals the everlasting gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, contain great and marvelous things.
One of the great things God has revealed in the holy Scriptures is that our Creator loves us. He looks upon us, with all our flaws and warts, and loves us intensely, to such a degree that John declared: “God is love.” He who knows us best loves us most.
The Ways of God
Second, God reveals His ways to us through the Bible. Throughout the history of the Earth, people have wondered what God was like. What are His likes and dislikes? What does He think of us, or does He think of us at all? What does He expect of us? Has He provided a life for us beyond the grave? Will we be held accountable for our sins and folly?
Without the Scriptures, these questions would forever remain a mystery. We could opine, we could guess, we could believe whatever we deemed reasonable, but there is no way any of us could know anything about God, for sure. But God inspired around 40 men to write the various books that make up the Bible, and through these books, from Genesis to Revelation, He has revealed much of Himself, as much as you or I will ever need to know in this life. No, we cannot possibly know all there is to know about God, but we can know enough – enough to be saved through Jesus Christ and live forever, enough to have all our sins forgiven, enough to receive the Holy Spirit and become a temple of God on this earth. Surely these are great things!
But there is another great thing that God has given and revealed in His word, and that is the morality of the Bible. The Bible is filled with morals, with pronouncements of things that are right and good, and things that are wrong and wicked. Some people might suppose that the Old Testament is the part of the Bible with all the morals, and the New Testament only speaks of grace and love. The New Testament does indeed speak of God’s love and grace, but do not be mistaken – morality is all over the New Testament. Jesus, Paul, Peter, John… all the Biblical writers and characters spoke of what God loves and what He hates. Paul writes:
Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like… those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. (Galatians 5:19-21)
Right & Wrong
From the mouth of Jesus and the pens of the apostles, we are told repeatedly what is right and wrong – what we should do and what we should avoid. This is significant because if it weren’t for these moral instructions, we would be on our own, determining what is good and what is bad. And since we would never agree, we would end up dismissing morality as an unattainable standard and would go around chanting: “different strokes for different folks.”
So, according to Hosea, God has inspired men to write a Book which contains “great things,” and they would surely include the plain declaration of our loving, and generous Heavenly Father, the glorious gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, by which we may be reconciled to this Father and receive eternal life, and the moral standards of our God which inform us how we must live. These are great things.
The problem is, according to Hosea, these great things are considered strange by many, things that people find nonsensical, irrelevant, and even offensive. And this was never truer than it is today. Our world has largely decided that the moral laws of the Scripture are meaningless. They mock God’s insistence that the only sex He recognizes as legitimate and righteous is sex between a man and a woman who are married – nothing else. According to the Holy Scriptures, single people are not allowed to sleep around; this is called fornication. Married couples are not allowed to sleep with anyone other than their spouse, which is called adultery.
The Only Way
Another one of God’s great things is the insistence that Jesus Christ is the only way to God. Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” (John 14:6). Peter says, “Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” John writes: “God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.” (1 John 5:11-12)
Is this concept of the exclusivity of Jesus a great thing or a strange thing? We evangelical Christians recognize that salvation through Jesus Christ is God’s work, and we call the atoning death of our Savior a great thing. Most secular folks would prefer not to think about this at all, but if they ever do think or talk about it, they consider it narrow, bigoted, far too exclusive, and not really a reasonable concept for us to even consider today. “We are much broader than that.” In other words, a strange thing.
There was a time in our nation when nearly all Americans acknowledged that the Bible was a reliable guide to life and morality. They may not have lived by it, they may not have embraced the Savior, but they at least acknowledged its legitimacy. Today, that is no longer true. The principles and morality of the Scriptures, and even God’s plan of salvation through Jesus that we find in the Bible are despised, rejected, or simply ignored. But there is a subset of Americans and people throughout the world who do not consider the teachings of the Bible a strange thing. We evangelicals embrace the Bible fully: its Savior, its teachings, and its morals, and we unashamedly recognize these as “great things.” And one day, perhaps in the not-so-distant future, we shall be proven right. The Bible was great after all.
