From Pastor's Wife To Prostitute: And Back Series

It seemed like a life time ago and when he thought about it it was a different life. She had been so beautiful on their wedding day. She was a radiant young bride and he was an aspiring man of God. They had their entire lives ahead of them and they had such great dreams and hopes for their marriage.

But the fairytale marriage soon turned into a horror story and the dream became a nightmare. It wasn’t long into their marriage that she took her first lover, the result was a son. That affair was followed by another and another. And the first son was followed by a daughter and then another son. It truly was a slippery slope that she was playing on and finally she just left him. Well you know how news travels especially bad news. He began to hear how she was seen on street corners and on the rougher side of town. It didn’t take too long for the entire community to know that the preachers wife was now a prostitute. How could it have possibly happened. What would you have done? Good question right? But what would you have done?

Probably not what this young preacher did. He went and found her pimp and paid him to release her, he bought her back.

That’s quite a story preacher, how’d you think that one up. I read it, in the bible, honest. The prophet Hosea tells his own story in the first three chapters of the book that bears his name and then he uses that true but heartbreaking story to illustrate the love that God has for his people, a people who had left their God and committed spiritual adultery by worshipping and following other Gods. As one commentator so aptly put it, “What we see in Hosea are the first few swirls as the kingdom of Israel goes down the drain.”

The book of Hosea is the 28th book of the bible and was written by. . . you guessed it Hosea, who was a prophet to the Northern Kingdom of Israel. The book was written around 715 BC around the time the Northern Kingdom fell to Assyria.

Why was it written? The Reason it was written was to show Israel’s unfaithfulness and God’s grace.

As Hosea’s ultimate love for Gomer illustrates God’s love for Israel we see in the final analysis God’s love for the world through Jesus Christ. And so the book of Hosea begins as he documents his personal grief and tragedy. An unfaithful wife who gives him three children, each the result of an adulterous affair. The same wife who leaves him and eventually becomes a prostitute. It chronicles Hosea’s redemption of Gomer and his forgiveness of her. It then show’s this as a lesson for Israel but finally reveals the truth of Jesus Christ’s salvation for each one of us.

Hosea 1:2 When the Lord first began speaking to Israel through Hosea, he said to him, “Go and marry a prostitute, so some of her children will be born to you from other men. This will illustrate the way my people have been untrue to me, openly committing adultery against the Lord by worshiping other gods.”

1) Gomer Was Chosen

Now I don’t know about you, but my first question is why did God tell Hosea to marry a prostitute, wouldn’t seem to me to be the ideal requirement for the wife of a prophet. Well I don’t think that is what God told Hosea. I think that what God said was “Marry Gomer” plain and simple. In twenty twenty hind sight, Hosea sees God telling him to marry this woman who became a harlot.

Gomer was special because she had been chosen to be Hosea’s wife. Even though she was to commit adultery and leave her husband’s house to become a prostitute she was special because God had the vision and foresight to see beyond what she was and to see what she could become.

In that very same thought I believe that every person on this earth has been chosen to become a child of God. Every man, woman and child who walks talks and breathes has been hand-picked by God to become a Christian. I believe that today. I believe that Saddam Hussein , Charles Manson, and Osama Bin Laden have been chosen to be sons of God. And hold onto your seats because I even believe that Paul Martin has been chosen to be a son of God.

Now you may believe that or you may not believe that. But I believe that man is God’s masterpiece and that God has chosen man to illustrate his glory, his graciousness and his grace. Now after saying that let me say this, we have all been chosen but we all have the option of accepting or rejecting the call of God on our lives. He has reached out to us but we have to accept the grace that he offers. To put it in the vernacular the ball is our court.