Hosea 10 - You reap what you sow… so sow rightouesness
 12 Sow for yourselves righteousness,
      reap the fruit of unfailing love,
      and break up your unplowed ground;
      for it is time to seek the LORD,
      until he comes
      and showers righteousness on you.
This gets back to Ezekiel 18 - The Fruits of Righteousness. It lists a bunch of actions show a man to be righteous. However, we then went to Ezekiel 33 - Grace is by faith, not works, in the OT, which basically says that a man living in wickedness, who then lives out his remaining life in righteousness will go to Heaven; while a man who lives in righteousness, who then lives out his remaining life in wickedness will go to Hell. How do these points relate, and how does Hosea 10:21 bring them together?
Well, this gets back to man’s notion of justice versus God’s. Because God is righteous, He is just. So let us compare…
To mankind in the 21st century, a just god would be described as follows:
- Send to Hell a man who has performed mostly wickedness, even if he repents and lives righteously forever more, because repenting doesn’t undo his wicked deeds, and he should be punished for them
- Send to Heaven a philanthropist, even if he disavows his work, and says he wishes all were dead, and the kills himself, because on balance, he’s been a net benefit to mankind. And anyways, once he’s in front of God, he’ll realize his last error.
- But these first two points aside, some would say that a just god would prevent all evil, because being God means that He can do that, and is therefore responsible for any evil deed he could have prevented.
But these are not justice.
Justice itself makes the assumption that evil exists. Without evil, there is nothing to be just about. So, if there is no evil, then there is no justice, and justice is one of God’s most significant traits. And so, the reasoning goes for some, there is no god. Too bad for them. They just get so stuck in the contradictions of their own reasoning, and rather than see that their reasoning contradicts the very nature of humanity, they think themselves out of the kingdom of God.
I can save my son pain now, or I can save it later. I can send him to corner for his disobedience today, or let him go to jail for his disobedience when he grows up. I could have saved him pain today, but I didn’t. Why? To save him pain later… to be just with his life.
What if I could have prevented his initial disobedience however? Does my argument go out the window? What if I could have given him brain surgery that would have prevented him from making disobedient choices? Now, all I have to do is tell him only right things to do, and he will only do right things… but then I have an automaton, a mere extension of myself. I dare say my boy would cease to have any individuality at all. And if that is true “goodness” on my part, then what of my own father? He would have been the same with me, and I would merely be acting out what he programmed me for, acting only in his obedience as well. There would be no choice in the matter, and I would then pass that on to my son, and so on.
Some would say that the lack of evil is pure goodness, but I disagree. Goodness comes from what we do in the face of evil, and if God’s action is to prevent us from performing evil, then only God can be good. Then, there is no true goodness in us, because only God had the opportunity to act in the fact of evil. The rest would have been sheltered from it. Do you see what kind of world that would result in? It would be a world of neither good nor evil… no evil because God prevented it, and no good because evil would not have been a choice.
Could there be love in such a world? No, nor could there be lust, though there could be pleasure… pleasure where no one gets hurt, and no ability for us to judge our circumstances. We would simply be a world of animals, and yet we are clearly not that. People perceive good and evil, even if we disagree on what those are.
So here is the irony. The only way could ever know a God exists is for evil to exist in the world, yet man would say that the only way God could exist is if there is no evil in the world. That is why there are atheists (among other reasons), and why there are Christians (among other religions), because some people perceive God in this world of evil, and others cannot.
A paradox like this is evidence of one of several things:
- The notion of goodness is an illusion
- The notion of evil is an illusion
- Goodness can only exist it there is evil, and justice is more than a measuring stick of goodness vs. wickedness
I choose the latter, because my perception of goodness and evil belies the possibility of there being neither.
Justice to me is the ultimate goodness, not the absence of evil, because the absence of evil is not goodness, but nothingness. That is why God’s prime characteristic of righteousness is not goodness, but justice. Yes, God is good all the time… but He is just, and when I study God’s righteousness in scripture, it is the His own justice that God has chosen to bring out.
So, back to Hosea 10:12… God wants us to sow righteousness. That means to choose righteous being, not simply righteous doing. We reap what we sow, look at where our righteousness ultimately comes from… the ground that we sow? No, it comes from God, and it comes because of our willingness to sow. That is, out “doing” comes from our “being”. If righteousness came from doing, then the righteousness would be harvested from the ground, but it is not. Righteousness is showered upon us… upon those who have done the most good? No, but upon those who sow it. Simple.
Once you accept that God’s justice can only exist if the world has both good and evil within it, and that it is God’s justice that makes Him all good, then you can turn from the false meter of justice, which is based on the existence of evil in the world, and adopt instead a standard for how you act in the face of evil. Only then can you sow righteousness for yourself, which God will then shower upon you.