Welcome to the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast.

Right now we're going through the entire Bible to understand it is one big cohesive story.

We're covering one book each day, and this one's about Hosea.

All my goodness.

Poor, poor, poor Hosea.

I mean, not poor on the one hand.

The guy got to interact with the God who made all things, and he's held out as having

this massive prophetic career, which is a great honor, but much like the other prophets

who we get some biographical data about here in the prophetic section of the Old Testament.

Being a prophet was a really rough draw in terms of personal comfort and basic human happiness.

You're pitted against all your fellow countrymen.

Your job is to be commissioned by God to say this whole thing is going off of a cliff.

He likes hearing that, and there's going to be a whole lot of suffering.

We see how much Jeremiah suffered.

We see how costly the execution of his prophetic duties was for Ezekiel, but maybe nobody

gets a rare deal than Hosea in the worldly sense at least, because God commissions him

to do something very, very personal and very difficult with his life as sort of again

that performance art style prophecy.

We saw that in Ezekiel, you'll recall as well, where God had Ezekiel go and do really

strange things and publicly lie on the ground and bind yourself up, and you got to eat

food, roast it over poop, and things like that.

Well, Ezekiel is not the only prophet who God commissions to do this visual aid performance

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