A fire can cook food or burn it. Have you ever made pancakes? Have you ever forgotten to turn them over? Did you want to eat the unturned pancake? My first ventures with cooking pancakes did not go well. I burned some and left some with batter in the middle. No amount of syrup could correct my failure with my first pancakes.
Some scholars believe Hosea was a bi-vocational preacher and baker. Remember he used a measure of barley to pay the redemption price for his wife Gomer. In this passage, he speaks of an oven to describe the passions of the King of Israel and the princes. Adulterers, burning like an oven, with passion smoldering, blazed like a flame in the morning.
Hosea had dealt with the problem of burning infidelity in his own marriage, as his wife Gomer strayed from him. Now he watched the royal family of the northern kingdom of Israel choosing the same destructive path. Emulating their leaders, the people did not return to the Lord. They were an unturned pancake – unpalatable to their God. They went through life “half-baked.”
In my lifetime, the temperature of sin in our own culture has increased incrementally. Things that were reprehensible twenty years ago seem tame today. We are like the frog in the kettle when the temperature is being slowly raised. At any point, we could have jumped out of the water in the pot. But once the frog is boiled, it can no longer jump. If we wonder what time it is in our culture: it is time to jump out of the hot water. As Paul would later write: “Flee from immorality.” It is time to turn, or burn.
