June 17

Hosea and the amazing love story

There are few pains in life that exceed adultery. Over the years I have had several couples in my office talking about unfaithfulness and it is heart wrenching to see the pain in the eyes of the betrayed spouse.
Today our reading is about a prophet who was called by God to intentionally enter into this pain. God is asking Hosea to become a living parable. And in essence what God is saying is that both God and Hosea are going to love someone who will reject them. They are going to spend their time, energy, money and their lives giving love to someone who is going to be unfaithful. Hosea must experience this heartache of rejection so that he will understand how the heart of God breaks when we reject his love.

A few highlights or lowlights of our reading.
1. By the third child Hosea realizes that Gomer is sleeping with other men because he names his child .. “not my people.” This is something right off the latest Jerry Springer show. Who is the real father of my child?
2. As Gomer leaves the home she ends up with a pimp that doesn’t even care for her. Yet in chapter two Hosea goes and gives grain, new wine and oil behind the scenes, just to take care of her. God does the same with us. Even when we walk away from him he supplies us with air to breath and food on our tables.
3. Go and show love to your wife again ... this is a command and not a feeling. So Hosea goes and purchases Gomer off the auction block of slavery and rather than punish her, scold her, or seek revenge, he brings her back as his wife.
4. We are never told the end of the story. This is to help us focus on always showing God’s love regardless of the outcome.
5. Why such extreme measures in this story? Because God’s love is so far beyond our language and our human experience that he must create this wild situation. God’s love is completely different than human love. His ability to forgive is so much greater than human forgiveness and the only way to communicate the depth of his love is to use such an intense analogy.

If we don’t say WOW after this story we will never get it.

Take a moment and thank God for purchasing us off the slave market of sin and treating us so graciously even though we have committed adultery against him.