Imagine... (Hosea 4)

Imagine there’s no heaven. It’s easy if you try. No hell below us, above us only sky. Imagine all the people, living for today … Imagine all the people, living life in peace … You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will be as one.

Imagine a world where there is no faithfulness, no love, where there is only cursing, lying, murder, stealing and adultery, where bloodshed follows bloodshed. Imagine a world where the people living in it are wasting away, where the beasts of the field and the birds of the air are dying.

John Lennon penned the well-known words of the first paragraph in 1971. Like Karl Marx before him, who saw religion as ‘the opium of the people’, he believed that if God and religion could be taken out of this world, it would be a much better place.

The words of the second paragraph were penned much earlier, over 2,500 years ago, by a Jewish prophet called Hosea; they come at the beginning of the 4th chapter of his book in the Bible. Actually, he does not tell us to imagine such a world - he tells us that this is the reality of the world that he was living in. What had gone so terribly wrong with it?

The answer is stark: There is no acknowledgment of God in the land (verse 1). Oh yes, there was plenty of religion (verses 12-13); for every society has its own religions or quasi-religions. Even in those which have sought to abolish religion or relegate it to the sidelines, there is always a philosophy which is pursued with a quasi-religious fervour, whether it be Communism, the deification of Kim Il Sung, or Western liberal democratic values.

John Lennon saw a better world with God and religion out of the equation. He was a child of his age. For I well remember the optimism of 1960s Britain, when the past was being forgotten and everything that was considered old-fashioned and out of date, physically and morally, was being pulled down. Advances in technology and in wealth were about to lead us into a new golden age - and God was nowhere in sight.

That all seems rather naive now; and 50 years later we are already demolishing many of the concrete monstrosities so proudly built in the 1960s. Since then our wealth has grown phenomenally and new technology has radically changed our lives. But has this made us fundamentally happier? And has it been able to solve the social and moral problems of our society?

When a society turns its back on the true God, the reality is very different from the one envisaged by John Lennon and the optimists of the 1960s. Hosea lived that reality and describes it to us in this chapter - it makes harrowing reading. Thankfully our societies in Western Europe have not yet descended to the level of Israel in Hosea’s time. Yet many of the things which he highlights find an echo in the problems which we are grappling with today: violence, corruption in public life, alcohol abuse, sexual issues such as teenage pregnancy, internet porn (of course, there was no internet in Hosea’s time) and pedophilia.

When we read the words of this chapter and see the judgments threatened by the Lord, what is our reaction? Indifference is not an option. Nor is a smug complacency - for if society is going rotten, where is the salt that the church should be? My own response is to get down on my knees and plead with the Lord for mercy; for if we had received from him what we deserved, we would have been destroyed long ago. But thankfully, he is a God full of mercy and compassion.