Hosea
Messengers - The Minor Prophets • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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· 1 viewGod hates our sin, but he loves us. In fact, God hates our sin because he loves us.
Notes
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Good morning beloved. In any church, there are some people who are avid readers of the Bible, there are some that are more casual, and some who are picky. They pick the books in the Bible that they like and read those over and over, but ignore the parts they don’t like.
I’m not sure what your familiarity with the minor prophets in the Old Testament is, but I would venture a guess that there are a number of you who haven’t spent much time with them. And I get it. Within these 12 books, we see repeated passages warning people of God’s terrible wrath on them. Many Christians today, especially those unfamiliar with the whole Bible and how it works together, see these judgments and the expressions about God’s wrath as incompatible with God’s love, which we focus on strongly.
How do we reconcile verses like:
2 The Lord is a jealous and avenging God; the Lord takes vengeance and is filled with wrath. The Lord takes vengeance on his foes and vents his wrath against his enemies.
and
27 “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,
How do hold the tension between
11 God is a righteous judge, a God who displays his wrath every day.
and
16 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
This interplay between God’s judgment and wrath and his love for people is crucial for us to understand. It’s crucial because we can’t ignore the parts of Scripture that we don’t like.
16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
It’s also crucial because too many churches have erred on how they presented and handled this tension. Some of you may have grown up in churches or in a culture where Christians used the wrath of God and his punishment of sins to generate fear, believing that if people were afraid of God’s punishment, they would turn back to God in repentance.
And in western Christianity, that approach failed horribly because it set the church up as a place where people felt more afraid than loved. Those churches forgot that Jesus says they will know me by your love. How many people have been turned away from Jesus because of that approach?
And how do we answer people who ask us the questions of how can a loving God send people to hell? We HAVE to wrestle with this concept.
So we are going to do a deep dive into this interplay between God’s justice and God’s love. For the next 12 weeks, we are going to go through the 12 books of the Minor Prophets, starting with Hosea and ending with Malachi, because these books highlight this tension and show us that our God is both perfectly just and eternally loving.
Let’s start by giving a little context to these writings, so we can understand the world they are written in.
Go through timeline slide
Notes:
Minor Prophets - called that because of the length of their book.
Right around 930 BC, Israel split into two kingdoms: Israel in the North and Judah in the south. About 200 years later, in 722 BC, Israel would be taken over by Assyria and in 586 Judah would be taken over by Babylon, leading to a massive exile of both kingdoms.
Most of the minor prophets are warning people that this is going to happen, why it’s happening, a call to repent so that it might be avoided and how they can continue to hope through the middle of it all.
Today, we start with the first of our Messengers: Hosea
Hosea is a fascinating book in that it has parts that are poetry, reminiscent of the Psalms, parts that are narrative and parts that are Hosea’s proclamations to Israel from God. God also uses Hosea to act out his message for Israel in a unique way,
HOSEA’S STORY
Hosea starts with a story about him hearing God give some unique commands as part of his judgment over the northern Kingdom, Israel.
First, God commands him to marry a promiscuous woman (or a prostitute) and second, to have kids with her. Whether or not this historically happened, or whether it was a parable Hosea used to illustrate his point or whether she became a prostitute later and he retroactively gave her this designation is debated among scholars. But let’s take it at face value so that we can see the point Hosea is trying to make.
God commands him to marry this prostitute because their relationship will be a mirror of Israel’s relationship with God.
So Hosea marries Gomer and has three kids with her and, according to God’s instructions, each kid gets a unique name.
Most of us know that the name we are given can have a profound effect upon us and so parents have to take care about what names they choose.
Some people name their children because they like the way the name sounds. Some, after someone significant in their lives. Some people value uniqueness so they give their kids unique name. Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has famously named his kids, Poppy Honey Rosie, Daisy Boo Pamela, Petal Blossom Rainbow, Buddy Bear Maurice, and River Rocket Blue Dallas.
In ancient Israel, children were often given names that had circumstantial meaning: Samuel’s name means “asked of God” because Hannah prayed and asked God for him.
Abraham’s name means great father because God made him a “father of many nations”
Jesus’ name means God saves because God saves humanity through him.
God commands Hosea firstborn child to be named Jezreel which means God scatters because God was about to punish Israel for it’s sins and scatter her through exiling her.
Hosea was commanded to name his second child Lo-Ruhamah which means “ not loved,” because God was no longer going to show love to Israel.
Hosea was also commanded to name his third child “Lo-Ammi” which means “not my people” because God was going to cut them off relationally.
Soon, Gomer left Hosea and her kids and shacked up with another man. But this new relationship was one built on money, not love. Our cultural equivalent is that Gomer returned to prostitution and moved in with her pimp.
But make no mistake. While many women turn to prostitution as a last resort, or they are forced into it, Gomer wanted it. She liked it. In the story in Hosea, God never portrayed as a victim, but as a willing participant. She left her stable home and chose to go back that life.
At this point, we may wonder at the justice in this story. Why would God command Hosea to saddle these kids with these horrible names? Why command him to marry someone who he knew would break his heart, cheat on him and leave him?
As a prophet of God, Hosea’s role was to communicate to the people what God was saying. Often, God had the prophets do dramatic things to help get the message across.
So what was the message? Because they had broken their covenant with God - because they had stopped following his ways, stopped acknowledging him or relating to him, God was going to punish Israel and cut them off.
How did they break the covenant with God? Hosea has four charges against Israel:
1. Idol worship of Baal
1. Idol worship of Baal
13 I will punish her for the days she burned incense to the Baals; she decked herself with rings and jewelry, and went after her lovers, but me she forgot,” declares the Lord.
God equates idolatry with adultery, which is the whole point of the illustration. Just as Gomer committed adultery against Hosea, so had Israel committed adultery by participating in idolatry against God.
2. Immoral Living
2. Immoral Living
1 Hear the word of the Lord, you Israelites, because the Lord has a charge to bring against you who live in the land: “There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgment of God in the land. 2 There is only cursing, lying and murder, stealing and adultery; they break all bounds, and bloodshed follows bloodshed.
God has a standard of morality and living for his people, both in the OT and for us today. They broke that standard. As Joey says to Chandler in Friends “they are so far over the line, the line is a dot to them.”
3. A corrupt religious system
3. A corrupt religious system
7 The more priests there were, the more they sinned against me; they exchanged their glorious God for something disgraceful. 8 They feed on the sins of my people and relish their wickedness.
The role of the priest is to help people remain faithful to God. But these priests took advantage of the immoral landscape to profit themselves. They served themselves, not God.
4. Turning and trusting foreign nations for help, instead of turning to God
4. Turning and trusting foreign nations for help, instead of turning to God
11 “Ephraim is like a dove, easily deceived and senseless— now calling to Egypt, now turning to Assyria.
Like many other nations, Israel was trying to find its security through political alliances instead of trusting in God. They were “returning to Egypt” (returning to being enslaved) by aligning with Assyria, who would eventually take them captive and exile them out of Israel.
And yet, despite their sins, the book of Hosea highlights how much God still loves his people.
Hosea is called by God to go find Gomer and bring her home. So Hosea tracks her down, pays the money out to get her back and reconciles with his wife. Despite her sins, God still loves Israel. Right after God commands Hosea to give his kids those awful names that would remind Israel of how much God hates their sin, God also says…
10 “Yet the Israelites will be like the sand on the seashore, which cannot be measured or counted. In the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ they will be called ‘children of the living God.’ 11 The people of Judah and the people of Israel will come together; they will appoint one leader and will come up out of the land, for great will be the day of Jezreel. 1 “Say of your brothers, ‘My people,’ and of your sisters, ‘My loved one.’
Here, God counters each name for Hosea’s kids - those that are scattered are brought together, those who were cut off are restored as God’s people and those whom God says are not loved, God then calls them his loved ones.
Even more, God shows his love to Israel by reminding them of his tender care of them.
1 “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. 2 But the more they were called, the more they went away from me. They sacrificed to the Baals and they burned incense to images. 3 It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arms; but they did not realize it was I who healed them. 4 I led them with cords of human kindness, with ties of love. To them I was like one who lifts a little child to the cheek, and I bent down to feed them.
And near the end of the book, God says about Israel
4 “I will heal their waywardness and love them freely, for my anger has turned away from them.
The point of Hosea writings is to highlight that despite Israel’s many sins, God is still faithful to her. That even though God hates sin, he still loves us.
Church, pay attention to this: Put down your phones and zero in on this truth: Despite all of your sins, God still loves you. He is for you, not against you. God is both a just judge and a loving husband to his bride and father to his children.
And that’s such good news for you and I because when we look at this story, we have to realize that we are just like Gomer. We are the ones who aren’t always faithful to God. We are the ones that have cheated on him with the idols of this world - money, sex, power, prestige, and self-centered immoral living. Even though we have known his goodness, we still falter.
But we are not destroyed because of our sin. Just as Hosea bought Gomer back when she had prostituted herself out after marrying him, Jesus bought us back through his death on the cross. He paid the price for us, so that we could come home to him.
One of my favourite scriptures - one of the verses that has been the most impactful in my life - is
8 If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. 9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.
God has given us a mechanism to get our hearts right with him again through the practice of confession and repentance. Throughout Hosea, God calls his people to repent.
6 But you must return to your God; maintain love and justice, and wait for your God always.
We can always come back to God, no matter how far we have drifted because although God hates our sin, he loves us. Our God is faithful to us, even when we have not been faithful to him.
So, as we move into our time of worship and then communion, I invite you to examine yourself and see if there is anything that you would like to bring in repentance to God. I wonder how many of us don’t confess and repent from our sins because we believe that God is disappointed in us. We believe that we knew better, and yet we still failed.
Church, you don’t have to fear God’s disappointment in you because he loves you. What God wants is for you to come back to him - to confess and repent of whatever it is that is keeping you from him. Just like he does through Hosea’s writings to Israel, he is calling you to return to him, not out of fear, but out of love. Our God is faithful. He is faithful to forgive us of all our sins through Jesus and he is faithfully waiting for you and I to come home.
Pray.