Hosea 4:6

"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I also will forget thy children."

Harper was of the opinion that "I will reject thee" in this passage indicates that "Hosea had at one time recognized the Northern priesthood as legitimate,"[16] but this is by no means a necessary deduction. The rejection of knowledge on the part of the priests (a past event when Hosea spoke) had already resulted in God's rejection of them, but the rejection here will be total and final. They had been tolerated, even in their state of illegitimacy, for a long while; but now their rejection will be terminal, final, and complete. They shall be exterminated, along with the apostate nation which they have led into ruin.

"Thou shalt be no priest to me ..." It is a mistake to understand this as reference merely to the priesthood which was pagan. It is the nation which is addressed here: "My people ... thou ... thou shalt be no priest to me." The spirit and intention of Exodus 19:6 dominate this verse. It is the nation of Israel as a nation of priests unto God.

"Seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God ..." is necessarily a reference to the nation, and absolutely not to the pagan priesthood which had never had any knowledge of the law of God, except in the corrupted elements of it which they had mingled with their paganism.

"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge ..." Educators and public leaders like to quote this verse, but all too frequently they are unaware of what is meant by knowledge in this passage. It is not scientific, secular, or technical knowledge that is meant, but religious knowledge, the knowledge of God through his revealed will, the Bible; and even more than this is meant; it means conformity to the will of God. H. G. Wells said that, "Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe,"[17] but only a fool today believes that secular education alone can stave off catastrophe. Will Durant found the great hope of humanity (as he viewed it) envisioned in a society where, "Every child would be schooled until his twentieth year, and should find free access to the universities, libraries, and museums that harbor and offer the intellectual and artistic treasures of the race!"[18] It is the knowledge and worship of God alone that can lead either men or nations into the good life, In the light of all that we have learned in this present century, "How inadequate now seems the proud motto of Francis Bacon, `Knowledge is power'"?[19] "Catastrophe overtakes a civilization not because it lacks intelligence, but because it lacks integrity."[20]

Why does integrity, or morality, depend upon the knowledge and worship of God in the fullest sense of those words? Simply because the naive notion that if men know right they will do it is a fool's nightmare. Only the true religion of God can endow moral and ethical behavior with cosmic significance. "There are no significant examples, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion."[21] Will Durant held to the opinion that our own liberal society in the United States would be able to achieve what no other ever did, that is, maintain morality and integrity without regard to true religion; hence his inclusion of the phrase "before our time" in the passage quoted. The events of the first decade following his statement, however, have already demonstrated the fantastic dimensions of his error. Without a widespread reawakening of the national conscience and a wholesale return to the teachings of the Word of God, our own beloved America is already launched upon a collision course with disaster. These remarkable chapters in Hosea have an urgent relevance to our entire generation.

It should not be thought that Israel's "forgetting" God's law was merely an innocent slip of the memory. No! They had consciously rejected, ignored, and eventually forgotten that which they had neither desire nor intention to remember.

"Law of thy God" is a clear and positive reference to the Decalogue and related commandments which formed a basic part of the holy Covenant between God and Israel. The word here is "Torah," and, despite the efforts of Mauchline and others to read this as teachings delivered to people by their priests, the technical and specific meaning of the term is apparent. In a word, it is a reference to the Pentateuch. A book like Hosea could not possibly have been written except in the shadow of the first five books of the Old Testament.

"I also will forget thy children ..." This is generally misinterpreted to refer to the children of the pagan priesthood; but that renegade and reprobate institution hardly appears here at all, except in the catalogue of their sins about to be enumerated. It is the nation of Israel, particularly the northern kingdom, that is here prophesied to suffer the penalty of God's forgetting their children. As Keil wisely observed:

"It is not the priests who are addressed here, but the whole nation of the ten tribes which adhered to the image-worship set up by Jeroboam, with its illegal priesthood (1 Kings 12:26-33), in spite of all threats and judgments...and who would not desist from this sin of Jeroboam. The Lord would therefore reject it (the nation) from being priest, would deprive it of the privilege of being a priestly nation (Exodus 19:6), would strip it of its priestly rank, and make it like the heathen.[22]