Minor Prophets 1: Hosea
You Can Read and Understand...the Minor Prophets • Sermon • Submitted • Presented • 15:40
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You Can Read and Understand Hosea
Hosea 6:1–3
Sermon Outline
2. In the first three chapters of Hosea, the prophet marries and redeems unfaithful Gomer, a living illustration of God’s faithfulness to his unfaithful bride, Israel.
1. The rest of Hosea reflects this Law-and-Gospel message of God punishing his unfaithful people but then promising to gather them home again.
Come, Let Us Return to the Lord, for He Will Heal the Mess We’ve Made of Our Lives.
Sermon
Come, let us return to the Lord; for he has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him. Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord; his going out is sure as the dawn; he will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth. (Hos 6:1–3)
2.
I’ve been told that adults enjoy children’s sermons more than the real sermon. If that’s true, both adults and children should like Hosea. Children’s sermons are often based around an object. Something from daily life is used by the pastor to illustrate a truth from God’s Word. That’s how the first three chapters of Hosea are organized.
Hosea was a prophet to the Northern Kingdom of Israel in the 700s BC. Israel had separated from the Southern Kingdom of Judah a couple of centuries earlier. Solomon’s son Rehoboam, the new king, had decided to raise taxes on the people and put them to even harder forced labor than his father had. Well, Israel said phooey on you and split off, establishing a whole new country in the north with a new king, Jeroboam, and two new temples. Golden calves were placed in each of the new temples and worshiped as Yahweh, the Lord.
Maybe Israel had reason to separate, but having a king who was not descended from David and worshiping an idol in the name of Yahweh was insulting to God in every possible way. So God and his prophets were never happy with Israel. For that matter, Judah wasn’t much better, and God and the prophets weren’t too happy with Judah either.
But Israel really won the prize for wickedness. Yahweh, the Lord, likened his relationship with Israel to a marriage. When God chose Abraham and made his covenant with him, Yahweh promised to be God to him and his descendants, promised to bless his people, give them a homeland, and provide for their needs forever. All Abraham and his descendants had to do was have no other gods but Yahweh and be faithful to him.
The story of God’s people is the story of them being unfaithful to this covenant, getting in trouble, and calling on God to forgive them and save them. Which God does over and over and over. But even God has limits to his patience.
Hosea begins with God telling the prophet to marry the prostitute Gomer and have children by her. Hosea obeys the Lord, and the unhappy couple have three children. They give these children symbolic names: Jezreel, meaning “God scatters”; Lo-Ruhamah, meaning “Unloved”; and Lo-Ammi, meaning “Not My People.”
How would you like to be a kid with one of those names? Anyway, after bearing Hosea’s children, Gomer leaves him and once again takes up the life of a prostitute and somehow becomes a slave. God tells Hosea to go find her and buy her back. So he does, after which he’s hopeful she’ll remain faithful.
A pastor should use his family for sermon illustrations only when the illustrations are entirely loving and complimentary. So imagine how embarrassing and humiliating it must have been for Gomer and her children to be Hosea’s living sermon illustrations! Maybe that had something to do with her leaving.
So what does Hosea’s living sermon illustration show us? Well, each character represents someone. Hosea represents Yahweh, who took Israel to be his faithful bride. Gomer represents Israel, who has been blessed and well provided for but is unfaithful to Yahweh and runs after other gods. That’s spiritual adultery. The children are the Israelite descendants who follow the example of Gomer and who neither know Yahweh nor follow his ways. Hence they end up scattered, unloved, and not God’s people.
But Hosea, like Yahweh, can’t just let his bride go and be lost forever. So he goes and finds her in her humiliated down-and-out condition. He brings her home and lovingly hopes she will now be faithful to him at last. That’s what Hosea does, and that’s what the Lord has done with Israel over and over.
That’s what God does with us as well. God loves us; he adopts us into his family through Holy Baptism; he blesses us with everything we need for this life and the next; he clothes us with the righteousness of his Son, Jesus Christ; he feeds us with Word and Sacrament. And what do we often do? We thumb our noses at God, go wandering away from his holy family, and go chasing after the idols and temptations of this world.
When we get in trouble, when we crash and humiliate ourselves with the stupid messes we get ourselves into, God finds us, brings us home, cleans us up, and forgives us—and we promise to be faithful. Sometimes we are. Sometimes we aren’t. Like Israel, we tend to be slow learners.
1.
The rest of Hosea reads almost like a soliloquy of Yahweh arguing with himself. Over and over, he talks about how he took Israel to be his covenant people, his Bride. Then he lists her acts of unfaithfulness, one by one. He says what he’s going to do to punish her and how he’ll never have anything to do with her again. But in the next breath, he says he will find her, gather her with her fallen sister, Judah, and bring them home again, confident they will finally be faithful.
This is really a beautiful picture of Law and Gospel that are always at work in our relationship with God. On the one hand, we, like Israel, are lost and condemned because we have broken God’s laws. Hosea lists them: idolatry, cursing, lying, stealing, adultery, murder. The kings behave this way. The priests behave this way. The people behave this way. The whole lot of them have become totally corrupt.
If you were God, and this described your Bride, would you have anything to do with her? I doubt any of us would remain married to a woman like this. But God is also gracious—and hopeful and confident that his love and forgiveness will win back his Bride. And he says as much in Hosea. Through the prophet, God pleads with Israel:
Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God, for you have stumbled because of your iniquity. Take with you words and return to the Lord; say to him, “Take away all iniquity; accept what is good, and we will pay with bulls the vows of our lips. Assyria shall not save us; we will not ride on horses; and we will say no more, ‘Our God,’ to the work of our hands.” (Hos 14:1–3)
In other words, return to the Lord, announce your intent to do right from now on, and keep your promises and vows to God. Tell him you realize nothing can save you from your sins and enemies but him, and then await his answer. God’s answer comes swiftly in the next verse:
I will heal their apostasy; I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them. I will be like the dew to Israel; he shall blossom like the lily; he shall take root like the trees of Lebanon; his shoots shall spread out; his beauty shall be like the olive, and his fragrance like Lebanon. They shall return and dwell beneath my shadow; they shall flourish like the grain; they shall blossom like the vine; their fame shall be like the wine of Lebanon. (Hos 14:4–7)
That’s Gospel. That’s the Good News of God’s free and saving grace to anyone who turns to him and seeks it. But it comes at a high price to God. The blessings of redemption and restoration cost God the suffering and death of his Son, Jesus Christ. After Israel had been destroyed and taken captive by Assyria, and later Judah by Babylon, God heard the cries of his people. He forgave them and brought them home. But their forgiveness would be won by Jesus, who would die for them several hundred years in the future.
Everyone’s redemption and restoration are based on that same sacrifice. We look back to the redemption of Christ. Israel looked forward. But forgiveness and redemption and restoration are only possible for anyone because Jesus died and rose again to gain it for all of us.
The death and resurrection of Jesus for sinners is prefigured in Hosea:
Come, let us return to the Lord; for he has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him. (Hos 6:1–2)
This, of course, is prophecy in poetry. Literally, it describes the impending sufferings of Israel as it gets steamrolled and destroyed by Assyria. But prophetically it refers to Christ, who stands in the place of Israel and all of us. The holy Jesus was torn and struck down on behalf of his unholy people. He spent two days in the tomb, and on the third day, he was raised up from the dead. Why? That we may live before God.
There’s much more in Hosea to consider. I hope you’ll read the whole thing. If you keep just a few simple principles in mind, I think you’ll understand it. Almost everything seems to follow this simple pattern: God intends good things for us. We corrupt God’s intentions and get ourselves in trouble. But when we cry out to God and return to him, he redeems us.
Come, Let Us Return to the Lord, for He Will Heal the Mess We’ve Made of Our Lives.
We pray: God, help us always return to you that we might dwell beneath your shadow and flourish like the grain. In the name of Jesus. Amen.