This post by christinecoltman was originally published at GRACE PLACE
Hosea is an utterly unique book. In fact, it has always been one of my favourite books of the Bible. That might make me a bit weird, as I know it’s a slightly unusual book, but I’m hoping that by the end of tonight you’ll see why I love it so much, and more importantly, I hope you’ll see that God loves us so much.
So, from what Hollie taught us last time, we know that Hosea was called to suffer in his own marriage the tragedy that God was suffering in his covenant marriage to his people Israel.
God said to Hosea in chapter 1, ‘I want you to be my prophet, but before you pronounce any word of judgement upon my wife Israel, I’m going to show you what it’s like to be married to a harlot; a prostitute.’ He said, essentially, ’Before you become a prophet, you have to come to understand me, and you can’t do that until you have the person you love most in the world absolutely betray you. You have to go through what I’m going through. So go, marry Gomer, the prostitute down in the red light district.’
Hosea, amazingly, obeys, and he and Gomer have three children together, and these children are given symbolic names of judgement, as Hollie told us last month:
1. First, we have Jezreel, meaning ‘Punishment’
2. Then Lo-ruhamah, meaning ‘Not Loved’
3. And finally Lo-ammi, which means, most heartbreakingly of all, ‘Not mine’.
Their names show that cheating on the Lord our God always results in judgement, and the name of the final child – ‘Not mine’ – seems to say that there will come a day when Israel will have gone too far, and there will be no reparation.
But the amazing thing about chapter 1 is that it ends with a word of recovery. God promises that although his anger is fierce, and while he may replace pity with wrath for a season, his last word is not divorce. His last word is ‘my people’, telling us that, somehow, he will bring about reconciliation with his unfaithful wife, and have her back pure again.
So, that was chapter 1 in a nutshell, and tonight we are going to focus on chapter 2, but also bring in chapter 3, which is key to the story of Hosea and Gomer.
There are four points I’d like us to consider tonight as we look at our passage (is that controversial – should it just be three?!):
Firstly, that:
– Our relationship with God is like a marriage
Secondly:
– Our relationship with God is like a bad marriage
Thirdly:
– How God healed his marriage and what it cost him
And finally:
– What that restored marriage will look like
So firstly – our relationship with God is like a marriage.
Now, who is familiar with the image of God as our Good Shepherd?
What about God our King?
God our Heavenly Father?
In Hosea, God wants to, not shatter, but enlarge these images of him. We know that to Hosea he said, ‘Just as you Hosea are married, so am I to my people’, and what he’s saying is that we can’t understand our relationship with him purely as King, Shepherd or Father – because as important as those images all are, they just don’t exhaust all that God is to us, because in a way they don’t go deep enough to tell us everything about what God wants and seeks in a relationship with us.
Tim Keller says:
‘God wants a relationship with us that is so intensely, personally intimate, and at the same time so binding and enduring that he says ‘You can’t understand me or my love for you unless you understand me as your bridegroom.’
God is saying, ‘You don’t really know what our relationship is really about unless you also see me as your husband – because no other relationship is quite as personal.’
Because marriage is a relationship of priority, isn’t it? If you are married then that relationship needs to be the number one relationship in your life. For a good marriage, your spouse needs to be your ultimate priority; they can’t just be an add-on.
Marriage is also a relationship of intimacy. You have complete knowledge of one another. The relationship is so intimate that you can’t know your spouse formally, or from afar.
And both of these things apply to our relationship with God. Isaiah 54 v 5 says, ‘The Lord your Maker is your husband.’ All the things we think about when we think of a good marriage apply to our relationship with God, times a thousand! He loves us as a husband; as a bridegroom, and I’ve taken a moment to get us to think about this as it should help really bring the next section of Hosea alive for us.
So, let’s look at the first half of chapter 2, considering our second idea that our relationship with God is like a bad marriage.
Hosea is speaking to Gomer here, but the words are also God’s words to his people Israel, and that’s the main angle we will be looking at it from tonight. As we read, I want you to hear less the voice of an angry God, and more a heartbroken husband:
Read Hosea 2 v 1-13
What happens in these verses seems shocking because Israel and her idolatry is shocking in the eyes of the Lord. His love is wounded with every sin that we make, and you can hear his pain at the hurt Israel has caused him, after all he had done for her.
John Piper puts it very bluntly:
‘In God’s eyes everyone is either faithfully married to God or is a prostitute. There are no religious singles. The reason for that is that he made us, all of us here, for himself. And if we give our hearts to another and get our kicks from somewhere else then we have become a harlot in God’s eyes.’
Shocking, but makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? We either belong to our husband or we do not; we are either married to him or someone else – and this is exactly what Israel has done here – given her heart to another.
We are going to look at three key verses in this section, and in these three verses we see the tragedy of Israel summed up. We are going to look at:
– Her attitude: V5 God wants to be Israel’s husband but she goes after other lovers
– Her actions: V8 She gets all her food and material from her husband, but she thinks she’s getting them from her lover Baal
– The upshot: V13 God will punish that kind of idolatry
1. So firstly, her attitude (second half of v5):
‘She said, ‘I’ll run after other lovers and sell myself to them for food and water, for clothing of food and linen, and for olive oil and drinks.’
Why did she ‘run after other lovers’?
Well, it was because she needs provision and she just didn’t think that God could give her what she needed. She thought of God as an impotent lover. She thought God couldn’t take care of her – maybe because she thought he wasn’t kind or not powerful enough.
What is your weakness when you think of God? Sometimes in my sinfulness I think he just couldn’t love me enough to want to help me, so I’d better look to another solution. I forget how much he loves me. And this is the central problem of Israel – she had forgotten what God is like.
Because God had already shown himself to his people as the most wonderful lover of all. He’d provided for them every step of the way and blessed them from the beginning – from Abraham all the way to the Promised Land. Israel was formed as a nation with a covenant relationship with God. She was a holy nation, set apart for God. The covenant at Mount Sinai was the marriage covenant that bound God to his people, and his people to him. He provided for all their needs – food and water in the desert, a land flowing with milk and honey, but she has forgotten all of this. She has forgotten her first husband. She has run off with someone else and broken her marriage vows with Baal, and a thousand other idols in all shapes and forms. She has forgotten her identity.
How often do we do this? Do we live each day as children of God? Or do we look just like the rest of the world, turning to God only when we hit a problem we just can’t ‘solve’ ourselves? Is God the one and only person we turn to to meet our needs?
2. So, we have seen that Israel is forgetting her past blessings in v5, but she is also misunderstanding her present blessings in v8:
‘She doesn’t realise that it was I who gave her everything she has – the grain, the new wine, the olive oil; I even gave her silver and gold. But she gave all my gifts to Baal.’
Can you hear the sadness, the disappointment in God’s voice here? His people have ignored him, taken all his gracious loving gifts, and then given them as little trinkets to Baal. It’s like a husband wrapping up a diamond necklace for his beloved wife and putting it under the Christmas tree. But when she opens it, she thinks it is a gift from her lover.
Do we do this too? To what or whom do we attribute our blessings?
All too often I can think I’ve earned something through ‘my’ hard work, my education; attributed blessings to our good society, or our skilled health professionals? We can sing God’s praise on a Sunday and then be functional atheists for the rest of the week, can’t we? We can act to all extents and purposes as if God does not exist on a daily basis, when God is there, behind the scenes, graciously providing for all our needs when we will not even acknowledge him. And how often do I then take the blessings that have come from God and uses them to honour my version of Baal? ‘Thanks for all this money God, I’m going to spend it on me, my skincare regime, my house or… (fill in the blanks)’.
We can see here that Israel does not actually want God. She just wants his stuff. She is like a woman who marries a man for his wealth. Then when another man comes along promising more wealth, she becomes his lover. When that wealth goes, she returns to her husband.
Whom does she love? She loves herself.
3. And thirdly, let’s look at the outcome of all this in V13: God’s just indignation.
‘I will punish her for all those times when she burned incense to her images of Baal, when she put on her earrings and jewels and went out to look for her lovers but forgot all about me.’
Israel doesn’t really know the God who loved and cared for her. He is a casual lover to her. When she was rich because he’d showered her with good things, she gave all the praise and gifts to Baal. And when she was poor, and God stood with his arms open to help, she walked straight past him to crawl into bed with someone who was no lover at all.
So, God has to show his bride a mirror. Idolatry is the senseless act of refusing God’s goodness, and God won’t let us get away with this. There is a bitter lesson that must be learnt because, as Tim Chester says, ‘Sin is not simply breaking God’s law. It is breaking God’s heart.’
Because we cannot understand the impact of our wrongdoing on our God until we understand this image of God as our husband. When a King sees a citizen breaking a rule, that makes him angry. When a shepherd sees a sheep straying, well….hey, it’s a sheep – that’s what sheep do, right? When a father sees a child disobeying him that makes him angry. When the person you love most in your life is putting themselves in the arms of another lover, that’s different, and God says, ‘Until you understand that pain, you don’t understand the impact of your wrongdoing and your coldness upon me.’
So, God will give terrible things to Israel now, in place of his blessings. Terrible, strange gifts of thirst and nakedness (v3). He will send Israel back to the wilderness he took her from. But it’s important to understand that God gives these opposite ‘gifts’, not out of hatred, but out of love – so that his people, his bride, might repent and come back to him. These are terrible things that he promises here, but idolatry and its consequences are worse. God always seeks the best for his people and that best is himself. His seemingly harsh gifts to Israel here, and sometimes to us, are actually gifts of divine love when their aim is to bring us back to God, our true loving husband who desperately wants us back.
Can you think of a time in your life when this was true for you? I certainly can. When I turned my back on God to do what I wanted and found darkness all around me. It scared me and I found myself turning back to him, and I know now that that darkness was God’s mercy, for without it I would have continued in my sin. Because God will not bless our idolatry. He will strip us of our idols so we pursue him. And he wants us to pursue him for himself. He wants real love, not people who pursue him for his blessings. When all is stripped away, when our comfort is gone, it is often then that we can discover the greatest blessing of being satisfied in God, and his incredible love for us.
Because the amazing thing about this section of Hosea (we still have two more to go tonight by the way, so keep sipping that caffeine!) is that God will not go back on the marriage vows he has shared with his people. He is too passionate about us! God is betrayed by our sin. But where you or I might respond to betrayal with resentment or spite or anger, God responds with mercy. And so, we move to chapter three, which pastor James Boyce described as: ‘The greatest chapter in the Bible’.
Are you ready?
Sit up, buckle up, and maybe get those tissues out…
Read Hosea chapter 3.
So, we’ve thought about how our relationship with God is like a marriage, and also how our relationship with God is like a bad marriage. Let us now get to the exciting part: how God healed his marriage, and what it cost him.
For as John Piper says,
‘Whenever God is treated as less than a husband, he mightily shows that he is more than a husband.’
And, my goodness, we are going to see this here.
Now, you might be surprised to hear that this is the last time Gomer turns up in the story. From then on in, God speaks to Israel directly (as we will see in our upcoming studies together) – but Gomer’s final section here is absolutely key to understanding God’s love for his people; his bride.
So, verse 1 – what has happened?
We know that after having the three children (who may or may not have all been Hosea’s), Gomer has immediately left Hosea to move in with a lover. Then she moved in with another lover. Eventually it got worse and worse and in chapter two we have seen that she has become a prostitute. I mean, how much further could she fall?
Well, further, because here in chapter 3, we see that she’s for sale. We can tell from verse one that she’s still with a lover and it’s very possible that he is the one who has put her up for sale. Either Gomer’s fallen into debt and is being sold into slavery, or it could be that her current ‘lover’ is a pimp and Gomer had lost her marketability, so he was cutting his losses.
But it’s bad. It’s as far down as a person could fall. It’s as broken and as miserable as a marriage can be.
So, Hosea is free now, right? Now he can get a divorce. Gomer has ended the marriage; she’s not just playing around – she has quit, she’s gone. So, he’s out?
Wrong.
God would not give up Israel and therefore he aims to show Hosea what it’s like not to give up on his wife either. Hosea is to buy her back.
Verses 2-3 are just so poignant; they bring tears to my eyes every time. Gomer is being sold as a slave. Now we know from historical records that there is a very good chance that this was a public auction – Gomer was likely being auctioned off in public marketplace. She would have been stripped virtually naked, or naked, because the bidders had to see what they were getting. Just imagine the scene.
The bidding starts, and it’s not too hard to imagine that Gomer had her eyes closed, because it’s just about the only way she could shield herself just a little bit from the moment of her greatest degradation.
And she hears the men’s voices – ‘5 shekels’, ‘8 shekels’, and suddenly she begins to realise that one of the voices is her husband. And she’s thinking, ‘What is he doing here, after all I’ve done’. The bidding continues – the price gets higher – and Hosea beats the highest bidder by some sheaves of barley.
When we stop and think what God asked Hosea to do here, maybe the love of God for us in all of our wretchedness will begin to come clear. Gomer had been unfaithful all along. She had never stopped being a harlot. And God says not just ‘Go back to her Hosea’, but, ‘Buy her back, in front of everyone, at a public auction’. And if what God was asking doesn’t just seem emotionally impossible, to boot, Hosea can’t afford it. The reason we know that is because he didn’t pay the whole thing in cash – he can come up with half of it in cash and then he’s got to get barley for the rest. He is stumping up everything he has to get his wife back – the wife who never loved him in the first place.
And having paid that huge price, Hosea would have come up in front of everyone, and he would have covered her nakedness with his cloak and he would have led her away home.
Now she must have been saying, ‘Why would he still want me. For revenge? So that now he can do what he wants with me?’
But no – look at v3. Hosea speaks tenderly to her. He says firstly, ‘I want to dwell with you’. He doesn’t want her as a slave, but as his wife. He wants to have a life with her again.
‘But’, he says, ‘For a set period of time you will have sex with no man including me. But then I will indeed be yours.’ He wants to rebuild their lives but there is going to be a period of hard work where they go back through everything that has happened, but he says, ‘then I will indeed be yours.’ Not just ‘you will be mine’, but ‘I will be yours’.
Derek Kidner says: ‘What was Hosea doing here? Well, there were the disloyal habits, years in the making, that had to be broken, and there were the painful realities in the personal relationship that had to be unhurriedly explored together.’
There’s no naive sentimental, ‘Oh God will make everything ok’ going on here. Hosea is continuing to pay a huge price. He’s already paid the financial pride; he’s almost definitely paid an enormous social cultural price (society would have been saying, ‘What her? A prostitute as your wife? Again?’). But most of all, he’s paying the price emotionally. He’s going to do what we would call today ‘deep emotional work’. He’s been hurt, so he can’t just climb back into bed with her; but he will pay the price – the toll of hard work – so that they can have that chance at happiness together.
And even though we are not told by the text what happens, the fact that the story has been passed down as the story of God’s love relationship with Israel, probably means that finally Gomer finally found rest in her husband’s love. Beats any Jane Austen romance, doesn’t it?
Now for God to ask all of this of Hosea is simply astonishing. But the reason that God could expect that impossible, emotional ask from Hosea is because of what God said he intended to do for us, his people.
But you might be asking – but where does God do this – where does God come into the marketplace and pay an enormous price to get his wife back?
Let’s look back at the text, at verses 4 and 5. They are quite cryptic – King David is mentioned – but David is dead though, right? (remember Hollie’s great timeline?). But the Saviour King that Hosea is referring to is a descendant of David – the new David whom God had promised would rescue God’s people and reign over them in peace and justice. Do you remember who this is?
It is Jesus Christ, the King who would come to die. In Jesus, God entered the marketplace and bought us, clothed us, and covered our nakedness with his righteousness. On the cross Jesus died and paid the price to buy us away from our unfaithfulness, and make a way for our marriage with him to be restored.
Now we are asked to empathise with Hosea in this chapter, aren’t we? I mean, imagine marrying someone you know will abuse your love and betray you. And then imagine being asked, as Hosea is here, to forgive her betrayal. And then having to stand up in front of everyone you know, and pay all you have to buy her back, without any indication that she will ever be repentant.
We are invited to share Hosea’s pain, for it is our God’s pain. But the point is that it is not what we experience. We are not the patient, faithful, wronged lover who pays the ultimate price for his bride. We are Gomer. The way Gomer treated Hosea is the way we treat God. When I daily put other things above God; when I ‘forget’ to trust him; when I do not own him publicly as my God, after all he has done for me: I am Gomer. And what is God’s response?
To lay down his life for us. To take our sin, our unfaithfulness, onto himself, and clothe us gently with his righteousness. To welcome us back into the marriage and his presence. To give us chance after chance to follow him and restore our relationship, knowing that he has secured our eternity with him with his blood. He loves us against all the odds, redeems us, regardless of the price, and restores us fully.
Now it cost Homer to redeem Gomer, didn’t it? It cost him a very great deal.
And it cost God a good deal more to redeem us. 1 Peter 1 v 18-19 says:
‘For you know God paid a ransom to save you from [your] empty life…and it was not paid with mere gold or silver….it was paid with the precious blood of Christ.’
Hosea’s actions are a living illustration of God’s equally real love for his people. A God who would not give up on us and who would make a way for his people to return to him.
Now you’ve done so well, and we only have one last chunk of text to look at – and it’s a good one! John Piper described it as: ‘One of the tenderest and most beautiful love songs in all of the Bible, sung by God to his wife.’
So, let’s read chapter 2 v 14-23, and take a look at our fourth and final point – what this restored marriage looks like.
Israel has betrayed God, broken his heart, and he knows the great price he will have to pay for his wayward bride. So, what does he say to her as a result of all this verse 14?
‘I will allure her and speak tenderly to her.’
Can you get your head around this? I’ve been studying this passage for months and I’m still struggling. I disobey, disown and distrust God – and he wants to allure me? He wants to lead me to a quiet place, to be with me, to bare his own heart, and speak words of love to me?
If you think, like me, that you’re not worth that to Almighty God, then think again.
Hosea didn’t buy Gomer back to force him to pay for what she’d done to him. He genuinely wanted a perfectly restored, loving relationship with her. And amazingly, that’s what God wants with us too – he has bought us back with Jesus, and here we see what our marriage can look like, it all its beauty.
Let’s consider it with three points, and in your minds, I’d like you to insert your name where it says ‘her’:
– He wants to woo her tenderly v14
– He wants to start over with her v15
– He wants to create a renewed home of hope and safety for her v18
– He wants to restore her v23
So firstly – he wants to woo her. Excuse the old-fashioned word, but I think it’s beautiful.
We are all guilty of harlotry towards God, aren’t we? We are guilty of our hearts running after other lovers – whether it’s money, ambition, sex, or even good things that we make into ‘god’ things, like family, or our jobs. But God has not given up on us. He wants to be with us. In the literal Hebrew v14 reads – ‘I want to speak to her heart inciting and alluring things’. It’s like when you’re just falling in love on those very exciting first few dates when you can’t see anything but each other and everything seems too wonderful to be true.
John Piper says:
‘God wants to talk that way with you, and do not use this as an excuse: ‘I am too ugly. I am too dirty. I have been too unfaithful; he could never get near to me’. Because there is no doubt who God is talking to in verse 14. It is a wife of harlotry who has sold herself to another lover. So, you have no excuse. God will speak tenderly to you, no matter what you’ve done, or and aim to do.’
Verse 14 verse is for you, no matter what your past is or what your current situation is. The God of all Creation is speaking to your heart, which he wants, very dearly to be his own.
Remember the name Lo-ammi, which meant, ‘Not mine’? God has lifted that curse and is saying that we can once more be very much, his.
Secondly, verse 15, he wants to start over with her. Now the Valley of Achor may seem an odd reference here – but if you did the study buddy notes, or know the book of Joshua very well, then you’ll know that Achor was the very first place that Israel committed harlotry. They came across the Jordan River when they were entering the promised land and God mightily gave them Jericho, but said the plunder was to be for him alone. One man, Achan, ignored God, clutched to himself the booty that was to be God’s, and said ‘I want this money, I don’t want God’, as a result and Israel got smashed in their next battle for this sin. It was a terrible place of betrayal, wrath and judgement.
But amazingly now God says that the Valley of Achor will become a door of hope. This place of wrath has become the place where God’s love will burn the brightest – but how can this be? Well does anyone remember our series on John, and the ‘I AM’ statements? Anyone remember John 10 when Jesus said, ‘I am the Door; whoever enters through me shall be saved?’ Jesus is the door of hope, and it is through God’s ultimate judgement, which fell on Jesus, that our relationship with him is restored. Through judgement, the door has been opened for us to come home, and the child’s name of Jezreel in chapter 1 (which if you remember, meant punishment?), has been revoked through Jesus’s sacrifice. The place of punishment has become a place of blessing.
This is what leads to our third point in verse 18, that this renewed marriage will lead to a renewed home of hope and safety. God is saying to Israel, ‘If my estranged wife will come home to me, she
will find paradise. There will be no weapons to hurt her, no false gods to trick her – the lions, the bears – she can pet them all. They are hers. She will lie down in safety. It will be so good; if she will just come home to me.’
The language of beasts, birds and creeping things recalls God’s gift of food in Genesis 1 v 30. Once again, God will create a land of plenty for his people. It depicts a return to of the harmony of Eden before the curse of Genesis 3. God will reverse the judgement of verse 9 where he took away Israel’s grain and water. Everything will be good and perfect once more.
This is what lies through the door of hope. Perfect peace in the arms of love. Everything in our cursed world put to rights. Does anyone know when we will experience this?
In the new heaven and earth that God has promised.
And what do we need to do to get there?
Return to our bridegroom, Jesus.
And that takes us to our final point. God wants to restore us. He wants to lift us out of the brokenness of our lives – and while we may not be in the red light district like Gomer, I can guarantee that for many of us, brokenness is everywhere. In our marriages, in our parenting, in our friendships – but most of all in our relationship with God.
So, do we actually deserve any of this blessing? Surely it’s for better ‘brides’ than us.
But as we’ve said already, God knows we have sold ourselves for a song, and yet he still stands here today wooing us back into his love. Doubt me? Read this passage again to yourself and try to keep doubting. Look at God buying you back in the marketplace of your shame – look at Jesus on the cross, dying for you. Then try and keep doubting.
This chapter started with drought and famine, didn’t it (v2-3)? But it ends with rain and wine and abundant blessing, because the door of hope has been opened up by the cross. Our exile could not come to an end until Jesus the lover lay in the place of judgment and took all of his beloved’s trouble and shame, and cried out ‘It is finished. Come home!’
So, what about us? Do we choose the wilderness or the marriage; the exile or the cross?
Because God’s voice is clear here. He says:
‘Let’s start again, the way it was at our engagement, when you believed in me and thought I was worth trusting; when you would follow me anywhere. Everything that happened in between then and now can be wiped away and there can be paradise between us again. I’ve always kept faithfulness with you and now it can be mutual. Just come home to me. I’ve wiped the slate clean – everything has been made new.’
Because there are three reversals here, aren’t they. Remember those appalling names given to Gomer’s children? Well now there are three new names for God’s people. ‘Punishment’ becomes ‘blessing’, ’not loved’ becomes ‘absolutely loved’ and ‘not my people’ becomes ‘forever my people’,
We live in the age of an open door and God has already opened that way. Our punishment became blessing the day God the Father looked upon the one he loved and said ‘no mercy’. He turned his face away from his own son and abandoned him, so that to you and me, wandering in the wilderness, he could say the words of v23: ‘You are my people’. And those words are far too costly to take lightly, and far too precious to refuse.
I don’t know about you, but I know I couldn’t love God unless he had loved me first. I know my heart. It is too corrupt, too selfish, to have ever let him in. But he worked a miracle in me, and is still working that miracle in me. And I want to push on because I can see, and sometimes even feel like I can almost touch this future depicted here, that is awaiting me. It is secure in Jesus. It is partly fulfilled now. And it is coming – unstoppable, and ever more sure. Because, as we have seen from tonight’s passage, nothing will stop God from being with his people. Not our wilful sin, not our stubborn hearts – he has overcome it all and made a way. And this is our future in him. Thank you God. Thank you that you loved us that much, that you have made the impossible, possible.
So, we’ve heard directly from God’s heart tonight. Take a moment to think how that makes you feel. Can you give him your all? Because he’s already given you his.