I had a dream when I was about 13 years old. I was standing at the end of a roller rink, and a bunch of giant nutcrackers (yes, the wooden men dressed in red with a hinged jaw that you think of at Christmas) were roller-skating towards me and turning in front of me. They were all about two stories tall, and they were repeating the same words at the same time: “Listen to the prophets of Hosea and Isaiah.”

I thought it was as bizarre then as you probably do now. I had no idea what the point of the roller rink or the nutcrackers were; maybe they were just to get the attention of a thirteen-year-old. But not only was the message something I couldn’t forget, it was also something I didn’t actually know – I had no idea at the time that Hosea and Isaiah were prophets. I hadn’t read much of the Bible by then, so I looked into it and found out that sure enough, they were prophets. And then I realized that they weren’t even mentioned in chronological order…Isaiah comes before Hosea in the Bible. So why did Hosea come first in the dream?

Over the course of the next decade, I would read Hosea and Isaiah sporadically to try to decode the dream, but I could never understand the point. This, of course, led to frustration, so each time I would give up and forget about it for a while, remember it a year or two later…rinse and repeat.

Then it happened again. 

Ten years after the first, I had a second dream. I don’t remember too many of the details of it, but I remember there were two white donut boxes being opened in front of me, and on them were written “Hosea” and “Isaiah.” 

Rejuvenated in my determination to figure this out, I went through and studied all of Hosea in one night. The problem was, it wasn’t really anything I didn’t know before. So, frustrated again, I never got through Isaiah because I’d read it before too and was discouraged that I wouldn’t find anything of significance to the dreams. Once in a while I’d go back and try to understand but nothing mindblowing ever took place.

The dreams seemed to be “a nut I couldn’t crack,” if you will.

A year or two ago, out of the blue I woke up with the dreams on my mind again. So I prayed that God would help me understand what He had been trying to show me for all those years, and with a vigor and determination I’d never before possessed, I did not leave my couch that day until I had read through both Hosea and Isaiah. I’m not sure when the realization struck, but in full answer to my prayer, I began to understand the purpose of the dreams, and why the words were written on donut boxes: the message is sweet.

I read through Hosea first. For those who don’t know, Hosea is the story about a guy that God told to go marry a prostitute, to show him the love God had for His people that kept turning away from Him. They got married and had children, and the girl would keep leaving and going back to her “profession.” Every time, she would end up destitute on the streets, and every time he’d bring her back. He would give her clothes and a roof over her head, feed her, love her, and treat her like she never left (of course, this wasn’t without some serious difficulty and painstaking effort on his part, along with some anger and frustration and pain, which is totally warranted), and she would leave again and cheat on him. Over, and over, and over again this would happen… and Hosea always took her back. Ultimately, the book ends with God showing that this is exactly what His people do to Him when they turn their back on Him, live according to how they feel instead of what is right, love other things more than they love Him, and look for peace and joy and love in all the wrong places. The whole experiment was a way to show God’s people how He loves them, and a way for God to call them back to Him from wherever they’ve gone and whatever they’ve put their hope and trust in. 

In Hosea, God’s people do come back– but in the process, they bring sacrifices and their “good works” and all these things to try to earn their place. It’s like a wife repeatedly cheating on her husband with every man in the town (like Hosea’s wife), and each time, coming back with a juicy ribeye to say sorry – it’s a band-aid on a fault line. When God responds, He shows them there is nothing they can do to undo what they’ve done. They can’t repair a broken relationship with good deeds and gifts, only to go back and do the same evil things over and over again. He wants them to come back and stay back…He wants them to love Him, because He loves them – He wants them to realize the gravity of what they’ve done and be truly sorry for it. He wants them to be faithful to Him. God is not looking to be appeased, He’s looking for relationship. He wants them to flourish and live wonderful, happy lives with Him, but the only way that can happen is by being connected with Him…because He is the only provider of peace, joy, and love. In Him, they have all they need…and outside of Him they have nothing.

The message of Hosea is: God has already done all that is necessary to save us. We can’t save ourselves. Nothing we do is good enough to atone for all the bad we’ve done, but God will love us and protect us and save us if we just come back and repent for the things that have broken His heart.

Hosea is a call to repentance.

Isaiah starts out with explaining the condition of the nation of Israel. They’re the chosen people of God, but they’re wallowing in sin and selfishness–they’re the harlot of Hosea. So Isaiah is going about his business of calling them out on it and saying “y’all need to do better”… when in Chapter 6, he sees a vision of God’s glory and holiness and perfection. Isaiah is absolutely undone by this when he sees himself in comparison. He sees his own depravity in contrast to the holiness of God and repents, knowing nothing he can ever do can earn his own righteousness. Humbled, he goes back as a missionary and a prophet to God’s people. Not to judge them or to criticize them like before, but to be used by God to convert them so they can be saved. God sends him to preach the Gospel.

So God is holy, perfect in love, righteous, all-powerful…but the people of the world He created have rejected Him and are headed straight for destruction. Here we see the problem – how do you save a group of people who have willingly chosen a path that leads to death, and now don’t have the power or the ability in themselves to turn back? God knew from the beginning exactly what He would do– give them the choice of a second path that leads them back to Him…a second chance to recognize that they’ve chosen the wrong way, and an opportunity to choose again. But here’s the thing – God, the Husband of these people, paves that path with His own blood.

This is the point in Isaiah where that promise is foretold–God tells Isaiah of Emmanuel (God with us), that Savior, Jesus – in striking detail that would be fulfilled down to the tiniest detail – SEVEN HUNDRED years in advance of when it actually happened exactly as it was predicted. “For He will save His people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:21) He does just that…the rest of Isaiah contains promises of God to fight for His people, to protect them, to redeem them, to deliver them from their own sins and bring them into the land of eternity that He had meant for them from the beginning, before they made those choices that lead to death. 

Isaiah is a transcript of the Gospel from start to finish.

The prophecies of the Bible have so far been fulfilled exactly as predicted. The life of Jesus Christ alone, as documented in the New Testament, fulfilled between 300 and 570 separate prophecies in the Old Testament exactly as predicted, down to the minutest element. The odds of one man fulfilling just 48 of these prophecies exactly as predicted, all factors considered: one in ten to the 157th power. (That’s 10 with 157 zeroes afterwards.) A human mind could never fabricate a story including every detail fulfilling all these prophecies…we are STILL realizing new connections in the New Testament that connect to the Old Testament. Nothing but an infinite mind could come up with a storyline to fulfill all of those things…and then repeat it in 4 different ways that all agree with each other as spoken in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Besides that, the rise and fall of kingdoms in history were also predicted in Daniel, and have all been fulfilled exactly as foretold (Look up the movie Kingdoms in Time on Amazon Prime for a good documentary covering all of that.)

The Bible is true. Jesus Christ came, just as predicted. He died, just as predicted. He rose from the dead, just as predicted. And He’s coming back again…just as predicted.

There’s only one major event left– the return of Christ to save His people and end this horrible, gut-wrenchingly painful world. There are prophecies foretelling that, too, and every day it seems like more things are happening that fulfill the predicted events leading up to it. There aren’t many road-signs left. There are wars, rumors of world wars, pestilences (diseases), famines, nations are rising against nations, ethnicities against ethnicities (race wars), there are earthquakes in various places, people are hating others and everyone is getting offended, lawlessness is abounding and the love of many is growing cold…all of this is listed almost verbatim in Matthew 24:6-14. The Euphrates River is drying up (Revelation 16:12), rivers are literally turning blood red (Revelation 16:4). There is almost no morality left (Isaiah 59:14), people are calling evil good and good evil (Isaiah 5:20), and it seems like in some places the thoughts of people’s hearts are “only evil continually,” just like how the earth was before the Flood when God had to do something about it (Genesis 6:5). (Click here for more Prophecy News headlines.)

Some of the first words of Jesus in the Bible are these: “The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of Heaven is at hand. Repent (Hosea), and believe the Gospel (Isaiah).” Mark 1:15.

NOW is the time. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been a Christian for your whole life or if you’re just now thinking about saying your first prayer ever, the call is the same. If you want to be saved, He will save you. But we all need to repent. We need to repent of trying to save ourselves, repent of thinking whatever we’re doing is “good enough” in any way to undo the horrible things we’ve done and the selfishness in our hearts. We, the people of this world, are liars, fornicators, blasphemers, thieves, idolaters and worse…all things that are against God’s character of love – and there is nothing we can do in our own power to blot those things out of our past, or remove the sinful tendencies from our own hearts. As Romans 3:23 says, “We ALL have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” There is no other way to truly leave our past behind and be saved from our sins. But HE can do it for us. By having faith in Jesus Christ to draw us and change us, giving up on resisting that drawing, and finally surrendering to the God who is trying to save us until our dying breath, we allow Him to make it as though we never sinned at all. He helps us be better, do better, and love better. He gives us entirely new hearts, new lives, and promises us a hope of eternity that can never be taken in the process. In other words–we need to respond to His love, do what He asks us to do, and believe that despite whatever we see or feel, His Word is true and what He says, He will do. And that includes turning a dirty, defiled, selfish, proud, hateful, godless people into a beautiful, selfless, holy, glorious testimony of His love, if they are willing.

“Today if you will hear His voice, do not harden your hearts.” Hebrews 3:15

“The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Repent, and believe the Gospel.” Mark 1:15