Hosea - a love story
What would you do?
- You marry a woman and she turns out to be a prostitute and adulterer and your children are not your own?
- You set up a partnership with another enterprise or school or club and then find that behind your back they have been doing deals with another to your detriment?
- Your son, rather than coming to you for advice, puts a photo of his friend’s Dad on his desktop and seeks his counsel, treating him like his father?
This is the story of Hosea – a message of God’s love, a love story
- A man who spoke prophecies over the nation of Israel about 2,700 years ago.
- A country which changes kings and leaders every few years (more often than we change cars).
- A country which, despite a rich heritage of God’s love and provision, persists in giving honour to another, any other.
- Hosea preaches with passion and poetry, sometimes not easy to follow.
- Amazingly he also acts it out by marrying a woman who betrays him but who he welcomes back – thus providing a living example of his message.
Through the prophecies of Hosea, and captured in chapter 11, are four stages of God’s love for Israel and for us – us in the UK, in Yorkshire, in the Vineyard and for us as individuals.
- God loves
- God watches as we turn away
- God judges and disciplines
- God loves and restores
This the BIG story of the bible, 3000 years ago and today
God loves
The whole BIG story starts, as all good stories do, at the beginning.
Gen 3:9: The Lord called to the man, “Where are you?”
A winsome, almost romantic picture of God as friend, someone who loves, coming looking for man
This is a much different picture of God to almost any other – any other religion sees God as a testing, catching you out, fearful, vengeful god.
The people waving condemnatory placards send entirely the wrong message.
And most influentially, we can’t believe, deep within the quiet moments in our minds, that God could actually notice us, nevermind actually love us.
But the truth is, as the bible says in many places, (for example Psalm 106:1),
“Gives thanks to the Lord, for he is good, his love endures forever”.
2. God watches as we turn away
There is such sadness in this, sadness as Adam and Eve leave the garden of Eden, sadness as Hosea observes his wife throw her favours after others, sadness as God watches us turn away from him to seek comfort elsewhere. Giving worth to anything, anyone else but not God. The people of Israel in Hosea’s time were just like us, let’s have a bit of what we fancy, if it feels good, do it.
And this is hard for our society to understand too. Although we have this gut feeling that we are doing the wrong thing, that there is a God shaped gap in our life, we are told by everything out there, “do what you like. So long as it doesn’t hurt another person, if it feels good do it. Who says this is right or that is wrong? Why do I have to do or believe what anyone says?”
It filters through to our basic thinking:
E.g. speeding – we say, the road was clear, dry, safe to go faster. At that point we are shifting the decision on right or wrong from an authority to ourselves. This is what people are trained to do all the time.
Paul captures it in a letter he wrote to one of the early communities of faith,
“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”. Romans 3:23
Trouble is, when we live our lives like that, chasing after the shadows that are other gods, we only live a small part of the life we are given. We miss the greater part, the Father’s day by day involvement in the very life he gave us.
3. God judges and disciplines
What is the way back?
God looks and sadly sees that we have turned away, and your friends and family and workmates have turned away, and his anger subsides and his compassion wells up and he makes a way back for us by the discipline of Jesus’ death and resurrection.
Hosea gives a living example of this, he marries a prostitute and after she returns to her prostitution, he still welcomes her back and forgives her.
It is obvious that we can’t earn our way back; earn acceptance, forgiveness. Anyone who has tried to be good for 24 hours knows that they are not going to make it. But we do try: by working harder, by giving more money, by attending more meetings, by praying fervently. And it won’t work.
But God does make a way to forgive us and welcome us back home. We just need to turn toward him, he does the rest.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16
But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive in Christ … it is by grace you have been saved. Ephesians 2:4-5
4. God loves and restores
The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love. Psalm 145:8
The ending of Hosea 11 says, “I will settle them in their homes.”
God’s love for you has made a way for you to come home.
God’s love for you has made a way for your family to come home.
God’s love for you has made a way for your neighbour to come home.
God’s love for you has made a way for your work colleague to come home.
God’s love for you has made a way for your friend to come home.
That phrase reminds me of Jesus’ promise just before he is murdered where he tells the disciples, “I am going to prepare a place for you”.
This is how the Kingdom of God is being brought into being. As people learn of God’s love, as we return to him, as he restores us, as he settles us in our home, the Kingdom comes – on earth as it is in heaven.
o You can stop knowing best
o You can stop being competent
o You can stop shopping
o You can stop pursuing sex
o You can stop numbing the pain with alcohol or drugs
o You can stop climbing the ladder
o You can stop working so hard
o You can stop trying
o You can turn to him – for the first time or for the hundredth time
And nothing can come between you and God
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God.
Romans 8:38,39
David Flowers, 10/05/2008