Be amazed at this, O heavens,
and shudder with sheer horror, says the LORD.
Two evils have my people done:
they have forsaken me, the source of living waters;
They have dug themselves cisterns,
broken cisterns, that hold no water.
“Because knowledge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven has been granted to you, but to them it has not been granted.
The Lord might have answered that prophets usually speak in parables, like the prophet Jeremiah who complained that the people dug broken sisterns that held no water. I'm sure their engineers would have quarreled with Jeremiah; their cisterns held water just fine! Obviously they missed the point.
Knowledge of the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven is not given to fools; and so they may be called leaky cisterns. No reasonable person gives holy things to dogs, even in pet-obsessed America; nor do they throw their pearls to swine. But fools do that sort of thing. As the wise man, "There's no cure for stupid."
Hosea saw it clearly as he toured the northern kingdom of Israel. They had cut themselves off from Jerusalem and the temple. Although they were more prosperous than Judah, and felt like they had better standing among the nations of the world, they had turned away from God. Like thousands of other cities and nations, they would disappear into the insatiable maul of history.
The Word of God endures forever and protect those who receive it with open hearts and minds, without prejudice for any persons, possessions, ideas, countries, ideals, or pets. Taking up the crosses which are given to us, receiving them with humble, penitential gratitude, we return with Him to Jerusalem.
