Hosea 5:15 I will go and return to my place, till they acknowledge their offence, and seek my face: in their affliction they will seek my early.
All of us know what it is do things the hard way. Maybe you have worked on a math problem for fifteen minutes before- wham- it occurs to you that you know the answer. It was easier than you were making it out to be. Maybe you have had a hammer in your hand trying to fix something. You had been going at it for a good twenty minutes when someone came up, pushed it with their pinky, and fixed the entire problem. There is nothing wrong with determination as long as it is not stubbornness. The difference between stubbornness and determination is who it is who owns the trait. If I own the trait, it is stubbornness, but if God owns it, then it is determination.
Having said all that, we need to remember that being hard-headed keeps you in the dark. That is where Israel was. God says in Hosea 5:15, “I will go and return to my place, till they acknowledge their offense, and seek my face: in their affliction they will seek me early.” God is saying, “I’m out of here. I’m gone until they acknowledge their wrong. Once they have suffered the penalty of the wrong, they will seek me right away.” In chapter 4 God had said, “Yet let no man strive, nor reprove another,” and in verse 17 He said that Israel was “joined to idols: let him alone.” God seems to be saying, “Just let them go their own way. They are not going to listen.”
In short, Israel was hard-headed, and because they were hard-headed they did not understand and they did not know. When we think about what we know, we are talking about an attitude. So many times don’t know things because we don’t want to know. In Hosea 4:6 God says, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge.” They didn’t know because they didn’t want to know. Israel, like us, knew what they wanted to know.
There is an extent to which all of us know whatever it is that we want to know. Many times we feign ignorance in order to excuse ourselves from doing the right things. Today, you have two factors: intellect and attitude. Sometimes we are trying to fix attitude by addressing intellect. That is not the answer. It is not that either intellect or attitude is unimportant. It is just that so many things that I do not understand are the result of not listening to God. In that situation God says, “I’m out of here. I’m not talking to them right now because I have warned, talked, and instructed, yet they will not listen. They just need to acknowledge their offence, and when they get in trouble they will seek My face right away.”
Intellect and attitude are important, but one is affected by the other. How much I understand primarily comes back to my attitude, not to my intellect. Those who have a heart to know God will understand what they need to understand.
I need to remember how important it is for me to have a willingness to know what God would have me know. When I have a submissive spirit towards God and a heart to go for broke when I know the truth, I’ll know more than I think I do. When it comes to the truth, being hard-headed keeps you in the dark.