The God of Hosea
Hosea 1:7
Intro
By the discipline of cruel events, God taught Hosea much concerning the nature and character of Israel’s God. Because of Hosea’s faith and obedience to God, he was granted insight into the deep spiritual need of his generation and was endowed with a divine message for that hour and for the present.
Hosea was the prophet of the decline, death, and fall of northern Israel. The worship of God had given way to mere ritual. It was a time of moral degeneracy and spiritual adultery. With their lips the people worshipped God, and with their harts they loved idols. Flagrant immorality, irreverence for the sacred, unfaithfulness, thievery, and drunkenness were the order of the day.
When God wants a specific task performed, he chooses an instrument appropriate to the task. God found in the prophet Hosea a man for the hour. God told him, “God, take to yourself and adulterous wife and children of unfaithfulness” (Hosea 1:2). Hosea was obedient to this command.
The record of the prophet’s experience in chapters 1 and 3 has been exposed to a wide variety of interpretations. Some take the passage simply to be a literary device to illustrate a great truth. However, most Old Testament scholars believe that Hosea was directed to marry a woman given to idolatry that was often associated with immorality. At first she was an unchaste woman only in a spiritual sense. She bore to her husband three children, to whom symbolic names were given. Eventually idolatry brought forth its natural fruit, and Hosea’s wife became an unchaste woman in a very real sense. Whether she then deserted her husband or was divorced by him is not definitely stated. At any rate, in obedience to the divine command, Hosea recovered his unfaithful wife and restored her to his home.
The first of Hosea’s children was named Jezreel, symbolizing the overthrow of the dynasty of Israel’s ruling king. The second was names Lo-ruhamah, announcing that God would have no mercy on Israel. The third was named Lo-ammi, symbolizing the utter destruction of Israel. These names have prophetic significance for conditions existing in Israel as Hosea saw them. This period of preparation was not to be completed until the events of chapter 3 had transpired.
As time went by, Hosea began to notice things that caused him to wonder and worry about Gomer. He had known from the very first that she had tendencies toward idolatry. Perhaps he had hoped to win Gomer to Israel’s religion. Before too long, Hosea realized his effort was resulting in failure. The names that were given to the second and third children indicated that the prophet recognized he was not their father.
The Bible does not describe the moment of Gomer’s departure form the household of Hosea. It is impossible to know whether Hosea cast her out of whether she departed on her own accord. Most scholars believe that Gomer departed of her own free will and became a sacred prostitute in one of the pagan temples of Baal. It is impossible for one to imagine the grief, disappointment, and shame that Hosea must have experienced during these days when the wife of his youth was “beloved of her friends.”
It was while Hosea was groping for a solution to his family problems that insight into the episode began to dawn on his consciousness. He was not the only one who had suffered. He began to see that his experience with Gomer was part of a picture of what had been happening to God and Israel for along time.
God had taken the initiative in establishing a union with Israel. He had delivered them out of Egypt. He had led them into the land that he had designated to be their home. He had shown tender love for Israel and had expected a pure, undivided affection from them. The bond between them was a close and tender as the bond of wedlock.
Israel had been unfaithful to her Maker and spiritual Husband. Israel had sought others lovers and found them in the Canaanite worship of Baal. God had been forsaken by the people on whom he had showered the abundance of his divine love. Consequently, the people were guilty of spiritual adultery. Out of his personal experience, Hosea begins to understand how the unfaithfulness of Israel affected the heart of God.
In spite of Gomer’s infidelity and shameful ways of living, Hosea discovered in hs heart a continuing love for her and came to interpret this love as the clear command of God to win back his wife to better ways. We read how Hosea went to the slave market, to which Gomer had descended, and purchased her in order that he might redeem her from the depths of infamy into which she had fallen. He dealt with Gomer as he knew God wanted to deal with Israel.
It was a stern and painful education that taught Hosea to understand the relationship between the Lord and Israel. By his personal experience of what infidelity meant, Hosea entered into a new sympathy with the God of Israel who had experienced the same things at the hands of his people. Dr. H. Wheeler Robinson says that Hosea was thus equipped to preach the love of God, for his “power was in his wound.”
An examination of the book of Hosea reveals at once how deeply the messages it contains are colored by the experienced of his marriage. In this experience, Hosea learned certain great truths that we desperately need to heed today. So I want to give you four things that I believe Hosea learned, that we also may apply them to ourselves.
I. Hosea discovered that God is love
a. Hosea had been called the first prophet of grace, Israel’s first evangelist
b. God is no impassive observer of the trials and troubles of his people
c. Hosea’s message throbbed with an awareness of the loving kindness of God.
II. Hosea came to a new understanding of the nature of sin
a. Hosea saw sin as spiritual adultery
b. Sin crushes the loving heard of God
c. Sin also brings suffering to the guilty
i. Hosea 3:4
“For the children of Israel shall abide many days without a king, and without a prince, and without a sacrifice, and without an image, and without an ephod, and without teraphim.”
d. Israel must go into exile, not because of God’s punishment or justice, but because f his redemptive purposes.
i. God does not merely punish sin, but seeks to bring about the defeat of sin.
III. Hosea came to a new understanding of God’s basic requirements
a. Hosea’s concept of what god required form his people can be summed up in the term faithfulness
b. Hosea’s understanding of the love of God caused him to appreciate the demands of love for utter loyalty.
c. This can be clearly seen in God’s eager desire for the restoration of the marriage relationship.
i. Hosea 2:20
“I will even betroth three unto me in faithfulness: and thou shalt know the Lord.”
IV. Hosea understood and explained the necessity of repentance
a. Hosea was told to reclaim Gomer, which he did by purchase
i. He did not restore her immediately to the position she had occupied formerly as his wife, but rather kept her on probation for an indefinite period of time.
ii. Her discipline consisted of certain deprivations.
b. Hosea saw that in the presence of defiant wrongdoing, justice and punishment ar the highest expressions of love.
c. There must be a complete interchange of attitude if Israel is to experience the richest blessings of God’s love.
Closing
Hosea speaks to our present generation and tries to convince us that our God is a God of love who suffers because of our unfaithfulness and lack of loyalty. He challenges us to respond to God’s love with love that expresses itself in devotion and loyal service.
