Hosea

• preached hope and forgiveness through repentance rather than sacrifice

97:4.5Hosea fol­lowed Amos and his doc­trine of a uni­ver­sal God of jus­tice by the res­ur­rec­tion of the Mo­saic con­cept of a God of love. Hosea preached for­give­ness through re­pen­tance, not by sac­ri­fice. He pro­claimed a gospel of lov­ing-kind­ness and di­vine mercy, say­ing: “I will be­troth you to me for­ever; yes, I will be­troth you to me in righ­teous­ness and judg­ment and in lov­ing-kind­ness and in mer­cies. I will even be­troth you to me in faith­ful­ness.” “I will love them freely, for my anger is turned away.”

97:4.6Hosea faith­fully con­tin­ued the moral warn­ings of Amos, say­ing of God, “It is my de­sire that I chas­tise them.” But the Is­raelites re­garded it as cru­elty bor­der­ing on trea­son when he said: “I will say to those who were not my peo­ple, ‘you are my peo­ple’; and they will say, ‘you are our God.’” He con­tin­ued to preach re­pen­tance and for­give­ness, say­ing, “I will heal their back­slid­ing; I will love them freely, for my anger is turned away.” Al­ways Hosea pro­claimed hope and for­give­ness. The bur­den of his mes­sage ever was: “I will have mercy upon my peo­ple. They shall know no God but me, for there is no sav­ior be­side me.”

• secret writing began Old Testament

97:9.20New life ap­peared as Je­hoash and his son Jer­oboam de­liv­ered Is­rael from its en­e­mies. But by this time there ruled in Samaria a gang­ster-no­bil­ity whose depre­da­tions ri­valed those of the Da­vidic dy­nasty of olden days. State and church went along hand in hand. The at­tempt to sup­press free­dom of speech led Eli­jah, Amos, and Hosea to be­gin their se­cret writ­ing, and this was the real be­gin­ning of the Jew­ish and Chris­tian Bibles.

• Father spoke through

155:6.2You have come out from among those of your fel­lows who choose to re­main sat­is­fied with a re­li­gion of mind, who crave se­cu­rity and pre­fer con­for­mity. You have elected to ex­change your feel­ings of au­thor­i­ta­tive cer­tainty for the as­sur­ances of the spirit of ad­ven­tur­ous and pro­gres­sive faith. You have dared to protest against the gru­el­ing bond­age of in­sti­tu­tional re­li­gion and to re­ject the au­thor­ity of the tra­di­tions of rec­ord which are now re­garded as the word of God. Our Fa­ther did in­deed speak through Moses, Eli­jah, Isa­iah, Amos, and Hosea, but he did not cease to min­is­ter words of truth to the world when these proph­ets of old made an end of their ut­ter­ances. My Fa­ther is no re­specter of races or gen­er­a­tions in that the word of truth is vouch­safed one age and with­held from an­other. Com­mit not the folly of call­ing that di­vine which is wholly hu­man, and fail not to dis­cern the words of truth which come not through the tra­di­tional or­a­cles of sup­posed in­spi­ra­tion.