I love what Spurgeon writes about this final Chapter in Hosea – He says, ‘Throughout the book of Hosea there has been thunder: sometimes a low rumbling, as of a distant tempest, sometimes peal on peal, as of a storm immediately overhead. And now the tempest has gathered all its force. Here it culminates. You expect the bolt of heaven to destroy. But instead there is a silver shower of mercy! God does not say, "O Israel, depart accursed!" But instead, in dulcet tones he cries, "O Israel, return to the Lord your God." In the midst of wrath he remembers mercy.
You remember that last week we looked at the punishment that was heading Israel’s way, about how they were to be scattered and taken back into exile. But now the language changes and forgiveness is on it’s way. After all the pronouncements of judgement against Israel, Hosea concludes with a message of hope and blessing. This became the vision of Israel. It is also the hope of all humanity, fulfilled in the person and work of Jesus Christ.
Read Hosea 14
Verse 2 ‘Forgive all our sins and receive us graciously’.
Oops – wrong leg!
In February 1995 a man called William King joked with the nursing staff at the University Community Hospital in Tampa, Florida, as they wheeled him down to theatre, and he was joking about whether or not they knew which of his legs was being amputated. The 51 year old had been suffering from a diabetes related disease, which meant he had to have his right leg amputated just below the knee.
Tragically, the surgeon made a terrible mistake and when Mr King woke up from the anaesthetic he found that he still had his gangrenous right foot, but his healthy one was gone. Eventually he had the diseased leg amputated as well. And the hospital paid him $900,000 dollars in compensation, and the surgeon agreed to pay him a further $250,000.
The newspaper report claims that the hospital has now introduced a policy of writing with a thick black marker the word ‘NO’ on patients limbs which are not being amputated.
But it was quite a mistake to make. What’s the biggest mistake you have ever made in your life? We all make mistakes and when we do we have to live with the consequences. If that had been you, do you think that you would have been able to forgive that surgeon? Is there anyone who has wronged you, who has done something against you, who has done something to offend or hurt you, that you still need to forgive? What will it take for that to happen – for you to forgive what they have done?
Transformed Terrorist
David Hamilton was a loyalist terrorist who became a Christian while he was serving an 11 year prison sentence in Northern Ireland. Shortly after his conversion he discovered that his wife was living with another man. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he then found out that during an argument this man had hit his 3 year old son in the face, breaking his nose and leaving him with a stutter.
Now that obviously put his new found faith under a little bit of pressure and he swore to God that if that man ever ended up in jail with him – he would give up being a Christian and kill him. Three years later the opportunity came. One day he was getting some hot water for a cup of tea when he saw the man in a cell across the landing – and David knew his chance would come. A few days later he was cutting the grass when he saw the man walking toward him, accompanied by a prison guard. ‘Punched any babies lately’ he asked, ‘it was an accident’, said the man. ‘I don’t believe you’, he said, ‘I’m going to kill you’.
An inmate who was gardening with David couldn’t believe what he had heard. ‘You’re a Christian, and you just said you’re going to kill that man’! ‘You don’t know what he did to my baby boy’ said David.
Over the next few weeks David watched and waited for the right time to make his move. He psyched himself up and organised a plan to distract the guards in the prison yard. And then the time finally came for him to put his plan into action.
He was pacing up and down in his cell, waiting for the door to be opened, when God spoke to him clearly, ‘David, forgive him’. ‘I’ll forgive him after I’ve killed him’ David thought and kept on pacing up and down. But the words came again, ‘David, forgive him’. So this time he thought, ‘Ok, I won’t kill him, but I’m going to beat him up badly. It’s only right. It’s what he deserves’. But all he could hear echoing inside his head were the words, ‘David, forgive him’.
And so his anger turned toward God – he stopped pacing up and down, looked up and shouted, ‘forgive him – but look what he did to my son!’ It was then that God spoke to him again, ‘Look what they did to my Son’. David fell to his knees and wept and asked God to forgive him for the bitter feelings and the resentment that he had held onto. And he got up from his knees a different man.
And he says, ‘I went out into the yard where I saw him standing under the shelter. He was afraid. I walked towards him and stopped just a few feet from him. I could see the fear in his eyes. I could have killed him in an instant. But instead I said, ‘I am now a Christian, God has forgiven me and I forgive you’.
‘Forgive all our sins and receive us graciously’.
It’s his job
When the German poet Heinrich Heine, lay on his death bead in 1856, the priest came to see him and said ‘ God will forgive you’. And Heinrich replied, ‘Yes God will forgive me, that’s his job’.
Is it? Is it his job, his duty, his obligation. I wonder.
Now everyone of us here this morning is here because we have experienced God’s forgiveness in our lives, or at least I hope so. Forgiveness for those times we’ve wandered, forgiveness for those sins we’ve committed, forgiveness for the times we’ve turned our back on him and done things our way – rather than His way. And we know what God’s forgiveness is like – we know the healing and the wholeness and the restoration that it brings. If you don’t then come and speak to me afterwards.
But is forgiveness simply his job, his duty, his obligation. Can we do what we want and live as we please and rightfully expect God to forgive us – because that’s what he is supposed to do. Or is there more to it than that.
Verse 4 of Hosea 14 says ‘I will love them freely’ – John 3:16 ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only son’, John writes, ‘God is love’. And you know, God’s unconditional love is unquestionable – that he loves you, and loves me, and loves the greatest of sinners is beyond doubt. But can the same really be said about his forgiveness?
Here is a nation of people steeped in idolatry. Last week we saw them kissing the golden calf. They are guilty of faithlessness and deceit and spiritual adultery. There’s lying, there’s murder, there’s bloodshed. I’ve said before that they were a people who in every way mirrored the one Paul describes in Romans 1 - a society that had been given over to sin and God’s judgement.
‘They suppress the truth by their wickedness, they degrade their bodies with one another, they exchanged the truth for a lie, woman exchanged natural relations for unnatural ones, men became inflamed with lust for one another and committed indecent acts with other men. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant, boastful. And if all that wasn’t bad enough, they invent ways of doing evil, they disobey their parents, they are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. They not only do all these things, but they also approve of those who practice them.’
Hosea Chapter 4:7 says that these people were "exchanging God’s glory for something that was disgraceful..."
Is it really God’s job, his duty, his obligation to forgive these people? Does he have a choice?
I have to say that God does not grudgingly offer forgiveness to sinful people. He wants to forgive he really does. But there is a big difference between forgiving sin and condoning it. To forgive sin with no requirements attached would be to condone it and God never condones sin. In fact he wants to do a whole lot more than just forgive sin; He wants to change the sinner. And that begins with repentance.
God’s love is unconditional – but his forgiveness isn’t. In order to receive God’s forgiveness there first has to be genuine repentance. And I just want to say three things this morning about God’s forgiveness which seem evident from this chapter, chapter 14, the last chapter of Hosea.
Repentance begins with recognition
In verse 1 God says to the people ‘Your sins have been your downfall’ - now that’s nothing new – God’s been telling them that for the last 13 chapters. The trouble was up until this point the people hadn’t recognised the fact. They thought they were ok, they thought they were doing well. Remember they thought that God was blessing them because they were so prosperous. They didn’t see the sin that they were committing. They didn’t recognise the fact that they were being sinful.
You see it had crept up on them gradually. They didn’t go to bed one night as saints and wake up the next morning as hardened, backsliding, adulterous sinners. It came gradually. Little by little, bit by bit. And that’s how sin gets us. A little compromise here, a little compromise there, and over time we get drawn into a world of sin, and waywardness and backsliding and we don’t even notice it happen.
One of my main worries about the western church is not just the fact that sin is tolerated in it’s midst, but that in many churches it’s not even recognised. What was it again Paul said, ‘They not only do these things, but they also approve of those who practice them.’
‘We’re modern day Christians’, ‘we’re 21st century believers’, ‘This is the modern church’, the ‘enlightened church’, ‘the up-to date church’. But what they’re really saying is, ‘we sleep with our partners like the world does and we think it’s ok. We go out and socialise and get drunk like the world does and we think it’s ok. We gamble and we lie and we cheat and we deceive like the world does and we think it’s ok. We are sexually immoral like the world – and it’s ok because we are modern, we are civilised, we are educated Christians and we no longer live in the dark ages and conform to the rules of a book written over 2000 years ago.
Have you heard that kind of talk? What they are saying is that they do not recognise that what they are doing, and what they are saying, and how they are living is sinful. And what I am saying this morning is that without recognition there can be no repentance. And without repentance there can be no forgiveness.
The other Sunday I was watching Gene Robinson (the openly gay bishop from New Hampshire) on a news programme. And the presenter was questioning him about his homosexual stance and the effect it was having on the church and the opposition he was encountering. And Gene Robinson said, and I quote ‘the bible is not big enough to contain the Christian faith. God didn’t stop revealing God’s-self when the Canon of Scripture was closed...Jesus said, ’There is more that I would teach you but you cannot bear it right now. I will send the Holy Spirit who will lead you into all truth.’ And he goes on to say ‘I think we’ve seen the Holy Spirit leading us in terms of the full inclusion of people of colour, and of women...and now God is leading us into the full inclusion of gay, lesbian and transgender people."
You see - the bible doesn’t fit his life, or his theology, doesn’t fit the way he wants to live, or the person he wants to be, so he’s pushed it to one side. He doesn’t recognise himself as a sinner and because the word of God says the opposite – he’s thrown the Scriptures away.
And now he’s preaching a false message, a false gospel, and he’s leading people to hell. Remember what the apostle Paul writes to the Galatian Church, ‘I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! 9As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!
Let that stand as a stark warning to anyone who dares throw the scriptures away because they don’t fit with their theology, or philosphy, or lifestyle. Whether that be Gene Robinson or Todd Bentley – makes no difference.
Gene Robinson went on to say "I’ve come to know that this God of love...loves me as a gay man." Does God love Gene Robinson – yes he does. Does he forgive Gene Robinson – no he doesn’t because he does not recognise his own sin and therefore is unrepentant. No recognition, no repentance, no repentance no forgiveness.
Can I just say to you that this book (the Bible) is the bench mark for the whole of life. If this book says that something you are doing, something that you are saying, or the way that you are living is sinful – don’t just throw it away, don’t disregard it. Recognise and accept it as truth and repent of your sin.
‘Search me O God and see if there is any wicked way in me’. I might not see it, I might not
recognise – but you do.
Israel eventually did and in verses 2 and 3 they begin to voice that recognition. Forgive our sin, Assyria cannot save us, we will never again say ‘our gods’ to what our hands have made. They began to recognise just how far they were from God, recognise their sin, and they begin to repent.
Repentance involves a ‘turning away’ and a ‘turning to’
Point number 2 – once you have recognised your sin there needs to come a turning away, a change of direction. A Sunday School teacher once asked a class what was meant by the word "repentance." A little boy put up his hand and said, "It is being sorry for your sins." A little girl said, "It’s more than that - it is being sorry enough to quit."
Repentance isn’t just a case of feeling sorry. It isn’t just a case of having a little bit of remorse or regret for the sin in our lives. The word ‘repent’ is translated from the Greek word ‘metanpia’ which means ‘to have a change of heart, to turn back, to have a complete change of orientation. To use a military term, it is to do a complete about turn.
And Israel was heading in the completely wrong direction. They were way off course. Their sinful lives, and their idolatrous ways were leading them further and further away from God. And God says to them, ‘Stop, turn around, your going the wrong way, your heading in the wrong direction’.
Verse 1 says, ‘Return O Israel to the Lord your God.’ Verse 2, ‘Take words with you and return to the Lord’.
In fact, this is a repeated cry of Hosea. We see it time and again through the book. Ch6: 1 he says’ come let us return to the Lord’. Ch10: 12 he says ‘ it is the time to seek the Lord’. Ch12 ‘You must return to your God’. And here in chapter 14. ‘Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God’.
If you return to something, you are turning back to it. You are going back. And going back requires two things. It requires a turning to, and a turning from. It requires a turning to God, but it also requires a turning away from all that had separated the people from God. It meant that the people had to turn away from all their iniquity, all their unfaithfulness, all their idolatry.
Having recognised their unfaithfulness, they needed to do an about turn – and return to God to confess their sin to him. And that’s what Hosea encourages the people to do in verse 2, to return to the Lord and confess their sins and ask his forgiveness. You see it is not enough for the people to just acknowledge and recognise their sin. When God reveals something in your life that shouldn’t be there, you have to turn away from it, and when you turn away from your sin you are turning toward God, and you need to confess your sin to God. The confession of sins is part of the return, part of the about turn, part of repentance.
And God’s promise is certain that ‘If we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.’
Repentance leads to forgiveness and a fruitful future
Final point. True repentance leads to forgiveness and a fruitful future. Just look what God promises a repentant Israel in verse 4 onwards. Once they had recognised and confessed their sin God is not slow to respond. He speaks of healing, of love and of turning away His anger from them. His grace, mercy and love are not slow in responding to the repentance of people. Where once (9.15) God said He would no longer love them because of their continuance in sin and rebellion, now He will freely love them – because they have turned from their wicked ways and turned to Him in repentance and faith.
And because of his repentance Hosea declares about Israel and us, "he will blossom like a lily. Like a cedar of Lebanon he will send down roots; his young shoots will grow. His splendour will be like an olive tree, his fragrance like a cedar of Lebanon. Men will dwell again in his shade. He will flourish like the grain. He will blossom like a vine, and his fame will be like the wine from Lebanon…your fruitfulness comes from me."
That’s a picture of a living, thriving, forgiven church. Can you envision a church like that? Can you envision a place where men and women go to be rooted and established in love, to grow, to have splendor, and to emit the fragrance of life? A place where people find cool shade from the heat of life? A place where people flourish and blossom and bear the fruit for which they were created? Do you want to see that here at Orchard? That is a God-given vision!
Verse 14, ‘Who is wise? He will realize these things. Who is discerning? He will understand them. The ways of the Lord are right; the righteous walk in them, but the rebellious stumble in them.’ (Hosea 14:9)
The realization of the vision is for the wise and discerning who turn their hearts to God. To those who take words with them and return to God saying ‘Forgive all our sins and receive us graciously, that we may offer the fruit of our lips.’
