Two Ways to Lose What You Were Given
Part 4 of a seven-part series on Hosea 4:6 and the knowledge of God
By Rev. Promise Ave | promiseave.org
There are two quite different ways to lose something you own. You can decide you no longer want it. You weigh it in your hand, judge it not worth keeping, and put it out with the rubbish. Or you can hold on to it the whole time and lose it anyway, by setting it down somewhere and never going back, until the day arrives when you have genuinely forgotten it was ever yours. The first is a decision. The second is a drift. From the inside they feel nothing alike, and yet they arrive at precisely the same place, which is that the thing is gone and you are without it. Hosea, with a care we usually read straight past, accuses the priests of both at once.
The previous post laid the blame where the prophet laid it, on the custodians who were charged to keep the knowledge of God and hand it on, and who quietly stopped doing so. But Hosea will not let the failure stay a vague dereliction. In a single line he names two separate things the priest did, two distinct verbs, and the gap between them is no piece of specialist trivia. It is the difference between two diseases of the soul that call for two different cures.
The verb of the verdict
The first word is מָאַס (ma’as, “to reject, to spurn”). It is a strong, deliberate term, and the lexicons line up its meanings like a row of slammed doors: to despise, to disdain, to refuse, to cast away as worthless. This is not the language of accident. It is the language of judgement. To מָאַס (ma’as, “to reject”) something is to hold it up, appraise it, and return a verdict against it. The same verb describes the moment Samuel told Saul, “thou hast rejected the word of the LORD,” a man hearing God’s clear instruction and consciously setting it aside for a course he preferred.
That is what the priests had done with the knowledge of God, the living acquaintance with Him we looked at earlier in this series. They had not merely mislaid it; they had examined it, the demands it made, the holiness it required, the comfort it cost them, and decided it was not worth the price. Picture a patient handed a clear diagnosis and the one remedy that would heal him, who reads the label, decides he knows better than the physician, and drops the bottle unopened into a drawer. The cure was offered. The cure was understood. The cure was refused. Nobody could say he was ignorant; he was something worse, which is unwilling. The tragedy of מָאַס (ma’as, “to reject”) is that it always happens in the full light of knowing.
The verb of the drift
The second word travels by an entirely different road. It is שָׁכַח (shakhach, “to forget, to ignore”), and we have to be careful with it, because the English “forget” sends us straight to the idea of memory, of a blank where a fact used to sit. The Hebrew is broader and quieter than that. The lexicons define it as becoming oblivious to something, and they add a telling phrase: from want of memory or attention. In the covenant writings it is almost always the second. To forget God, in this language, is rarely the loss of data about Him; more often it is the quiet withdrawal of attention, letting Him slide to the unwatched edges of a life while you could still, if anyone asked, recite a great deal about Him.
Moses had seen it coming generations earlier. Speaking to a people on the verge of comfort and plenty, he warned them, “beware that thou forget not the LORD thy God.” His fear was not that prosperity would wipe their memories but that it would crowd God quietly out of the centre, until He was remembered the way an old address is remembered, accurately and with no pull on the present. That is the שָׁכַח (shakhach, “to forget”) Hosea names, and he attaches it to תּוֹרַת אֱלֹהֶיךָ (torath eloheikha, “the law of thy God”), where תּוֹרָה (torah, “instruction, direction”) means far more than a rulebook; it is the whole steering guidance of God for a life. The priest had not misplaced the scroll; he had stopped letting it steer him.
There is a homely picture that catches it. A man learns a second language well in his youth, speaks it freely, dreams in it for a season. Then life moves him elsewhere, and he simply stops using it. No decision is ever made to abandon it. He never sits down and renounces it. But the words go unspoken month after month, year after year, until one day he reaches for a sentence and finds only silence where the fluency used to be. He did not throw the language away; he forgot it by never again turning toward it, and the loss is just as total as if he had.
This is the more deceptive of the two losses, precisely because it never feels like rebellion. No dramatic morning marks the day the praying thinned out or the Bible stayed shut, and the conscience keeps quiet because, after all, nothing was ever decided. The drift can carry a sincere person a very long way while leaving every belief formally intact.
The fence and the long grass
Set the two verbs side by side and the whole verse sharpens. One loss is active and the other passive, one a verdict and the other a default, one slams a door and the other simply stops opening it. Think of a path worn across a field. You can lose that path on purpose, by fencing it off and forbidding the crossing. Or you can lose it by never walking it again, so that nobody uproots it, yet the grass closes over it season by season until you cannot find where it ever ran. Two roads to one vanished path, and a traveller stranded all the same.
What makes the pairing so dangerous is that the two are not rivals but partners. A first small rejection makes the next stretch of neglect easy to excuse, and a long habit of neglect makes the next outright rejection feel like nothing more than common sense. The priest who had once decided the knowledge of God cost too much found it effortless, afterward, to let the instruction of God gather dust, and the dust in turn made the original verdict look wise. Reject and forget had become a single downward motion wearing two names.
You can watch both at work in any ordinary congregation. One person has quietly concluded that some costly teaching no longer applies and has shelved it with a verdict they would never announce aloud. Another still affirms every word of that teaching and could not tell you the last time it shaped a single decision. The first has rejected, the second has forgotten, and more often than not they are sitting in the same pew.
This is where the verse stops being about ancient priests and starts asking after us. The honest question is a diagnostic one. Have I looked at something I know to be true and filed a quiet verdict against it because living by it would cost me more than I want to pay? Or have I simply stopped walking a path I never consciously decided to leave, letting prayer, obedience, and attention to God green over from sheer disuse? The two need different medicine. A verdict has to be reversed, which is repentance in its oldest sense, a genuine change of mind that learns to prize again what it once dismissed. A drift has to be re-walked, which is the far less dramatic business of returning to the practice, putting one foot in front of the other along the old path until it opens again under daily use. Naming which one has hold of you is most of the cure, because the worst response to a drift is to feel guilty as though it were a verdict, and the worst response to a verdict is to treat it as a mood that will pass on its own.
Where this goes next
There is an unsettling turn still waiting in the verse. These two verbs do not stay on the priest’s side of the account. Before the sentence closes, both come back, and this time they are in the mouth of God: I will also reject, I will also forget. Read at speed, that sounds like a wounded party returning fire, paying a man back in his own coin, and it has troubled careful readers for centuries. Whether that is what it means, and what it would say about the character of God if it were, is the hardest question this single verse puts to us. It is exactly where the next post will go.
For the full word-by-word exegetical analysis of Hosea 4:6, including detailed treatment of every significant Hebrew word, see the complete study available on promiseave.org.
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