Dan Herold | Hosea 3:1-5 | September 11, 2016
What’s the most disgusting, filthy, gut-wrenching thing you have ever experienced? I’m not talking about getting a little sweaty and dirty while working outside. I’m talking absolutely intolerable, stomach churning, gross.
I can think of a few. If you’ve ever had a freezer stop working and you didn’t notice it for a while it can end up being pretty disgusting. Having kids opens your eyes to the wide range of gross things even a small human body is capable of. Every now and then you might drive by a particularly nasty pile of roadkill. But, this past week I got to add a new experience to the list of gross things I have gotten to deal with. This past week our dog Daisy learned about skunks. She learned that if you mess with them they do something really nasty. Then Daisy learned that when you mess with a skunk you have to have a bath at midnight and your owners aren’t very happy about it. Daisy also learned that smell of raw onions mixed with burning rubber doesn’t go away too easily, but instead it sticks around as a nice reminder of what happens when a dog tries to play with a skunk.
Believe me…when we realized what happened it was very tempting to just send Daisy back outside and leave her there. In fact, we almost did. But eventually we looked up remedies online, worked up our courage, changed clothes, and went to attempt to help the poor puppy. Daisy typically hates getting baths, but you could tell in her eyes that she knew we were helping her. So, even when she wanted to fight back when she was getting rinsed off with the garden hose in the driveway at midnight she took it because it was what she needed.
If you’ve ever smelled fresh skunk smell it’s something else. It’s not something you eagerly want to go and spend some time breathing in. But, when your dog gets sprayed by a skunk you can dig deep and find the motivation you need to go and deal with it.
That’s kind of how our relationship with God works. We are the dogs who weren’t very smart and went and played with skunks and get their stink all over us. It would have been a lot easier for God to just send us back outside and leave us to deal with it on our own…but that’s not what he did. God loved us enough to help us. In our Old Testament lesson this morning God gave us a very vivid lesson about how he helps us.
In that lesson God used the prophet Hosea to demonstrate his love for sinners. He had Hosea take as a wife someone we would think to be disgusting, a prostitute, and yet Hosea loved her dearly. That is how God loves us. Even though we can be disgusting sinful people, God loves us. God loves the unlovable. He loves us with persistence and without conditions.
To get the full picture of what’s going on in Hosea 3 we have to look back to Hosea 1. There we are told that,
“The word of The Lord came to Hosea son of Beeri during the reigns of Uzzaiah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah kings of Judah, and Jeroboam son of Jehoash king of Israel.”
So that gives us a little bit of the setting. Hosea was a prophet of The Lord shortly before the Northern Kingdom was taken into exile by Assyria due to their idolatry.
Now, these are the first words we have recorded which The Lord spoke to Hosea,
“Go take to yourself an adulterous wife and children of unfaithfulness, because the land is guilty of the vilest adultery in departing from The Lord.”
So, in effect God came to Hosea and said, “I’ve got a job for you.” And that job was to serve as a living object lesson for the people of Israel. An object lesson that would confront them with their own sin and also demonstrate God’s grace.
The lesson didn’t end with Hosea’s wife though–it also carried on to his children. The Lord told him to name his first son Jezreel because Israel was about to suffer a crippling military defeat in the valley of Jezreel. After that Hosea had a daughter whom the LORD told him to name Lo-Ruhamah, which in Hebrew means, “there is no mercy.” And then Hosea and his wife Gomer had a third child, a son, and The Lord told them to name this child Lo-Ammi, which means, “you are not mine.” God’s message to the Israelites was very clear. They had taken for themselves a foreign bride, a false god, and the product of their relationship with this false god was military defeat, being cut off from God’s mercy, and being disowned by the one true God.
Now, I don’t know about you, but if I were Hosea I’d have a hard time dealing with all that. First of all, God tells you to marry someone known for adultery and then he says to name your children things like, “there is no mercy” and “you are not mine.” It must have been incredibly difficult for Hosea to do that, but he remained faithful. He loved those in his life that would seem unlovable and in doing so he demonstrated how God loves the unlovable.
So now let’s jump forward to today’s Old Testament reading in Hosea 3. There we hear that Hosea’s wife, the adulterous woman to whom Hosea had remained faithful, has again gone back to her adulterous ways. God tells Hosea,
“Go, show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another and is an adulteress. Love her as the Lord loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods and love the sacred raisin cakes.”
So this wife, who had in effect been rescued from her sinful lifestyle and had been shown love and faithfulness by the prophet Hosea, has now slipped back into her sinful ways.
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Now, it would have been real easy, I’m sure, for Hosea to call it quits. He could have said she got more than she deserved and he would have been right! Gomer did nothing to earn Hosea’s trust and then even though she had his trust she betrayed it! Faced with the same situation it would be difficult for any of us take her back. Just think, if you had gone out of your way and put yourself on the line to show kindness to someone and then they burned you, it would be tough to show them kindness again, wouldn’t it? But that’s just what God tells Hosea to do because that is just what God does! He loves the unlovable with persistence.
God says to go and show her love again and that is what Hosea does. Even though she went astray and turned back to her old ways Hosea loves her again. In the same way God says that he still loves the Israelites. Even though they turn on God time and again he still loves them. Even though the Israelites turn to other gods and love those sacred raisin cakes that were left as offerings on the altars of Baal, God still loves them–and God still loves us.
It’s easy to point fingers at all the wrongdoers in this lesson. It’s easy to look down on the Israelites who worshiped false gods. It’s even easier to look at Gomer, the adulterous woman, with disgust. But think for a second, which person in these verses most closely represents us? Hosea represents God and his persistent and unconditional love for the unlovable. We are like Gomer! We turn our backs on God, we take for-granted all the undeserved love God shows us, and even after we are rescued from our sinful ways we want to go back to them.
So, before we point fingers at others or look at them with disgust we need to look at ourselves and recognize that we also are wretched, awful sinners. We have betrayed God, we have turned to false gods, and we in no way deserve forgiveness. But thankfully, God doesn’t treat us as we deserve
Not only is God persistent in his love of the unlovable, but he also loves without any conditions. He demonstrated how persistent his love is by telling Hosea to go and show love to Gomer again, and he also demonstrated that there are no conditions in how Hosea took his wife back.
After God tells Hosea to take his wife back Hosea writes,
“So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and a homer and a lethek of barley.”
Gomer didn’t have to do anything herself to be taken back. In the next verse there are some instructions for her after she has been taken back, but Hosea bought her back totally on his own. In the same way God bought us back with no help from us. There were no conditions for us to meet in order for God to take us back, but he did so entirely of his own free will because he loves us without conditions. There are instructions for how we ought to live once we have been bought back, but those aren’t conditions for us to meet in order to earn our way back into God’s good graces.
After Hosea paid the price to buy his wife back he said to her,
“You are to live with me many days; you must not be a prostitute or be intimate with any man, and I will live with you.’ For the Israelites will live many days without a king or prince, without sacrifice or sacred stones, without ephod and idol. Afterward the Israelites will return and seek The Lord their God and David their king. They will come trembling to The Lord and to his blessing in the last days.”
The way in which Hosea reconciled with his wife foreshadowed what was to come for the nation of Israel. A time was coming when Israel would be cut off from all the idols they had turned to and instead they would cling to The Lord just as Gomer was now cut off from all other men and would live with her husband Hosea.
This is pointing forward to the time when the nation of Israel would be taken into captivity, first by Assyria and then by Babylon. There, in foreign lands, they would be cut off from the idols they had begun to worship. And then, without any condition, God would buy them back and allow them to return to the promised land. And there for a time they seek The Lord again.
The same thing is true for us. Sometimes we need our own form of exile to be reminded who our God really is. Sometimes we need to see the earthly idols in whom we put our misplaced trust be destroyed in order to remind us of our true Lord who loves us without condition. Even though we turn on him time and time again he still loves us and welcomes us back just like a shepherd joyfully welcomes home his lost sheep. It would be understandable if God would be angry with us or if that shepherd would be angry at the sheep that made him go out and search for it, but he isn’t! He loves us persistently and unconditionally!
That is a truth we all hold dear to our hearts. The wonderful love of our Savior who washed away all our sins and bought us back with no strings attached is the most comforting thing in the world. There’s nothing that can match the feeling you get when you know you’ve sinned and then hear that your sins are forgiven and your Savior still loves you. But, if you take something away from Hosea’s object lesson remember how important it is to share that message.
It means the world to you so keep it close to your heart at all times, but there are people in this world that are literally dying to know about their Savior’s healing love. They are dying from the terminal illness of sin and the only cure is the message of God’s persistent and unconditional love. And this example that Hosea lived out of how God’s love works is exactly what you need to hear when you feel that you have done so much wrong that it could never be fixed. It’s the message you need to hear when you feel that no one could love you. God can and he does! Even if you stumble and fall on your face, God still loves you and will take you back. He loves you in ways we can’t even fully understand. He loves with persistence and without condition. That is a message of comfort to keep close to your heart, but also share it! Share it with the world that so desperately needs to hear it.
Amen.