Hosea can be confusing

These past couple of weeks have been pretty eventful and crazy but my learning and understanding of the Old Testament has not stopped. For example this week we started reading about the minor prophets like Hosea, Obidiah, Joel, and Amos. I say minor because they are small books not because they aren't as great as Isaiah or any other prophet. Anyways as I started reading Hosea I got real confused because it said Hosea was commanded by the Lord to marry a prostitute...I thought that's weird. I mean of course the Lord loves every one of His children but it still seemed odd that He commanded a prophet to knowing marry someone who hadn't repented to marry and continue doing the thing she had been doing. After reading in the institute manual I learned that it could be possible that all that Hosea was commanded to do was just a metaphor. A metaphor where Hosea is the Lord and his wife is Israel. I came to understand through this that I don't always understand everything I read in the scriptures and to not always take them at face value (sometimes). Anyways just something to think about during the last couple hours of Easter.

I just want to take a moment to bare my personal testimony that Christ our Savior lives and that just as he resurrected on the 3rd day we too will resurrect and live again with those we love if we follow His example.

"Jeremiah was a bullfrog...and a prophet!"

These past couple of weeks I have been jumping around in the books of Jeremiah and Lamentations (also written by Jeremiah if you didn't know). I am not sure I ever really knew what Lamentations was all about. Of course I know what it means to lament but I didn't know who wrote it, why they were sad, and why it is even in the bible at all. These last couple of weeks I found out that Jeremiah was a great prophet who performed many miracles, prophesied many important things, Jeremiah was also the sad one who wrote Lamentations, and Lamentations was written because Jerusalem had fallen and Jeremiah was sad  about all of his friends who had been killed or taken into bondage. This part of the bible also ties really good into the Book of Mormon. The start of the Book of Mormon starts with Lehi taking his family, eventually getting the brass plates (old testament), and escaping from Jerusalem before it fell and moving to the Americas. If anyone is following along with my blog you know that I am reading my scriptures in Spanish and am finding it a whole lot easier to understand them. I've really come to understand the different situations of each prophet in their own timeline. Here is Jeremiah who tried to tell the people to repent of their sins and turn to God but whom just about all rejected him. He then goes on and writes a whole book about how sad he is because the people didn't listen to him and how hopeless he felt for the state of Zion at the time. He lived in the most crucial scariest times in just about all of Jewish history up until then. He had the difficult charge to warn the people about it and get rejected.