"I have written to him the great things of my law, but they were counted as a strange thing." Hosea 8:12
There is a grief in this verse that is almost unbearable to sit with. It is the grief of a God who wrote, and was not read. A God who spoke, and was not heard. A God who opened His heart across the pages of Scripture and handed it to His people only to watch them fold it away, set it aside, and turn their attention to everything else the world had to offer.
"I have written," says God. Not suggested. Not hinted. Not whispered in obscurity. Written. Clearly. Lovingly. Urgently. And yet, to the people He wrote it for, it had become a strange thing foreign, irrelevant, distant, like a letter from someone they had once known but could no longer quite remember.
This was the indictment of Israel in the days of Hosea. But any honest soul who holds a Bible in his hand and rarely opens it must feel the weight of those words landing squarely on his own conscience. For the tragedy that God diagnosed in ancient Israel is alive and flourishing in the church of the twenty-first century. Bibles are more accessible today than at any point in human history printed, downloaded, streamed, and searchable at the tap of a finger. And yet, for many who call themselves children of God, the Word remains largely unread, its depths unplumbed, its treasures untouched. We carry it to church. We set it on the nightstand. We post its verses on our walls. But we do not eat it. We do not drink it. We do not live inside it. And so, like Israel, we count the great things of God's law as a strange thing.
Consider what it means that God called these things great. He did not write trivial things. He did not fill the Scriptures with idle words or careless observations. Every commandment, every promise, every prophecy, every warning, every revelation of His character was carefully given great things, worthy of the deepest attention and the most devoted study. In the Word of God lies the answer to every question the human soul has ever asked. Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? How do I live? How do I love? How do I overcome? How do I face death without terror? Every answer is there, waiting, like buried treasure that will not dig itself up but richly rewards every soul that takes the trouble to go searching. And yet, millions walk through life in confusion, in bondage, in fear not because God withheld the light, but because they would not open the Book.
To neglect the Bible is to neglect God Himself. This must be clearly understood. The Scripture is not merely a religious textbook or a collection of ancient wisdom. It is the living, breathing, active self-disclosure of the Almighty. "All scripture is given by inspiration of God" God-breathed, carrying within its pages the very life of the One who spoke it into existence. To push the Bible aside is therefore not an academic decision it is a relational one. It is the equivalent of a child ignoring every letter a loving parent has ever written. It is the posture of someone who has decided, in effect, that they have no great need of what God has to say. And from that posture flows every manner of spiritual disaster.
For a man cannot know God deeply whom he does not hear regularly. Faith, the Scripture says, comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. Devotion that is not rooted in the Word is merely emotion warm today, cold tomorrow, shifting with every wind of circumstance and feeling. The Christian who does not feed on Scripture is a soldier without a weapon, a traveller without a map, a sailor without a compass, setting out across treacherous waters with nothing but his own instinct to guide him. And human instinct, untransformed by the renewing of the mind through God's Word, is a desperately unreliable guide. It bends toward comfort, leans toward compromise, and whispers that everything is fine long after everything has gone terribly wrong.
There is also a consequence that Hosea makes plain when the Word becomes strange, the world rushes in to fill the vacuum. Israel, having neglected the law of God, did not remain neutral. They ran to altars. They chased idols. They formed ungodly alliances with the nations around them. A soul that does not feast on the Word will always find something else to feed on, and the world spreads a wide and poisoned table. The entertainment, the philosophies, the voices of culture they are loud, relentless, and endlessly available. They do not wait to be sought. They press themselves upon the unguarded heart. But the Word of God requires a decision, a discipline, a deliberate turning away from noise toward the still, nourishing truth of Heaven. And every day that decision is postponed, the voice of the world grows louder and the voice of Scripture grows, to the unexercised ear, stranger still.
What must be recovered is what the Psalmist possessed when he cried, "O how love I thy law! It is my meditation all the day." Not the dutiful reading of a man fulfilling an obligation, but the passionate pursuit of a soul that has tasted and knows there is nothing sweeter. The Bible is not a burden to be borne — it is bread to be eaten, water to be drunk, light to be walked in, a sword to be wielded, a lamp to the feet on the darkest road, a mirror that shows a man what he truly is and what by the grace of God he is becoming. To neglect it is not merely to miss a blessing. It is to starve the inner man, to walk blind in a world full of snares, and to grieve a God who took the pains of eternity to write.
He wrote it for you. Every page, every line, every promise sealed in the blood of His Son. He wrote it so that you would not be lost, not be deceived, not be destroyed. He wrote it so that you would know Him not about Him, but Him in the intimacy that only His Word can produce in a willing and hungry heart.
Do not let it remain, in your life, a strange thing.
Open it. Read it. Believe it. Obey it. And discover that the God who wrote it is still very much alive and still very much speaking.
"Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart." — Jeremiah 15:16
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