A number of years ago a friend of mine was teaching a group of children the Ten Commandments in Vacation Bible School. In order to teach the Ten Commandments, she says, she was given a set of pictures. Each of the pictures illustrated the bad behavior forbidden by the Commandment; each picture showed the No-no behavior.
So of course for the commandment, "Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image," there was a picture of somebody in front of what looked like an Indian totem pole, raising his hands in prayer. Don’t do that. And for the commandment, "Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy," there was a picture of somebody else mowing the lawn with the church steeple in the background. She got quite interested when for the commandment, "Honor thy father and thy mother," there was a graphic picture of some pint-size Mike Tyson slugging his old gray mom right in the jaw. This stuff was really getting specific!
Well, my friend said she could hardly wait for the picture for the seventh commandment. What would these artists dare to show in order to illustrate for children what is meant when God says, "Thou shalt not commit adultery?" What a surprise she received, and what a relief, too, I guess, when the picture turned out to be a farmer, getting ready to take his milk pails to the dairy, but first watering down the milk! Adultery had become adulteration!
I see a little parable in that for the church. Just as the illustrators decided they would protect children from the harsh realities of so-called sex by changing adultery to adulteration, so also we have frequently decided that the church is no place for sex. You just don’t get into this in church; talk about salvation, talk about the Bible, talk about everything else, but stay with the safe sins. That seems to have been our pattern.
Frankly, I am not entirely sure why it is that we want to de-sex our faith. I am not quite sure why it is, but I do know that it’s been around along, long time. Some churches require that their ministers not marry, as if somehow admitting that you are a sexual creature disqualifies you from serving in the Lord’s name.
Some Christians like to make little remarks and little jokes and imply that there are three genders abroad in the land: men, women, and preachers. Well, lest there be any debate on that subject, and lest there be any concern about my qualifications to discern the word of God on this subject, let me report that there are two young people in my household, and that it has been about two thousand years since the last recorded virgin birth!
I want us this morning to see this: that sexual expression is and always has been a vitally important aspect of human life. It is addressed over and over again in the Bible; and if we are, as we like to say we are, a Bible-believing people, then that means we have to examine the whole Bible. We can’t leave anything out. And so with Hosea’s help, today we are going to struggle with this matter, "Struggling With the Pain of Faithlessness"
Now it is not really easy to pick out one single passage in the book to read and interpret; in fact I changed my mind about some of the verses I would read even after we printed the bulletin. Let me just share some portions of the book of Hosea with you, and work with you through what we know of Hosea’s marriage. I want you to hear what Hosea did about pain and about infidelity, and what he teaches us about God’s way of dealing with our sexuality.
The account begins with the prophet Hosea hearing an awesome command from his God, a command, I suspect, he could hardly believe, but there it was: Hosea 1: 2-3a
Marriage to an immoral woman by almost anybody’s standards, children who may or may not have been the prophet’s own children, but who carry names with those bullet messages in them. You remember about them from two weeks ago when I started this series.
And then, in poetry form the prophet’s cry of pain; or is it God’s cry of pain? You are never quite sure:
2: 2 He pronounces the divorce formula, he wants to get rid of her. Can you blame him?
But he cries out, “Plead with her, plead …” 2:3, he really wants to punish her for what she is doing.
It gets even more painful. This is what you have done to me by your faithlessness; this is what I feel and what I want to do: 2: 12-13. “I will punish her because she has forgotten me …”
But wait; we’re not finished yet. No, that is not all I will do; that is not the only way to handle the pain of faithlessness. 2:14-15. I can win her back; I can give and keep on giving and get her back.
But the story becomes even more intense. When Hosea’s heart begins to turn, he once again hears the call of God: what must he do with faithless Gomer? How is he to handle his own feelings? His first impulse was to throw Gomer out on the street, to get rid of the problem. But then something else came to him, something which he felt to be the call and the claim of the Lord:
Hosea 3:1-3, "Go, love such a woman… and so I bought her, I redeemed her … and called her to faithfulness." I said to her, “You will be mine and I will be yours.”
Hollywood has never topped a love story like this, and it has so very much to tell us about our humanity, and about our sexuality.
I
The very first thing it teaches us, the basic thing, is that God is involved in our sexuality. God cares what we do about sex. Created, male and female, we do not stand alone, we are under the will of God.
I need to share with you my bias. I need to tell you where I’m coming from. My conviction is, based on the Scriptures, that God’s will for human sexual expression is a lifelong covenant relationship between a man and a woman, in the bands of marriage. Yes, I know there are any number of other things that happen in real life. Yes, I know there are other popular options. And I know that some of us have believed this way but things have gone sour. Still I have to tell you that this is what the Scripture sanctions, this is what God intends: not trial marriages, not same sex quasi-marriages, not casual physical encounters, but lifelong covenant marriage. That’s the ideal, and I well know how difficult it has been for many of us to hold to it. Lots of things happen in real life. But that, nonetheless, is God’s dream for us.
Now, the tremendous insight that Hosea brings us is that if we are faithless in our sexuality, then we are faithless before God. If we are irresponsible with our sexuality, we are irresponsible with our God.
You hear it said from time to time that sex is after all just a biological urge, and that it doesn’t involve anybody but two consenting adults, so why get all heated up about it? You hear it claimed that a marriage license is nothing but a piece of paper, something that the state has declared an interest in, but that it has nothing to do with what men and women want to do with their bodies.
But the prophet Hosea hears God’s involvement. Hosea heard the clear and unequivocal command of God to go and take a wife, go marry Gomer the daughter of Diblaim. God is involved with our sexual behavior.
Folks, if I can put it candidly, we are not alone in the bedroom. When we are together as sexual beings, we are not alone; we are with the Lord. And when we handle this as God wants it handled, we are cooperating with Him in creation itself.
Do you remember how the Book of Genesis describes it? "God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, ’Be fruitful and multiply’ God is present in our sexuality, God wants to bless our sexuality, and He cares what we do with it.
II
And that brings me to the second thing which we learn from the prophet Hosea’s experience.
As Hosea struggled with what to do about Gomer, his wife, he experienced tremendous pain. And from that pain we learn that sexual relationships which go outside the will of God are going to be painful. If we do not accept God’s plan for our sexuality, there is going to be a great big hurt.
Hear the pain and the poignancy in Hosea’s voice. He knows that his wife has been unfaithful. He knows that in her unsavory background there have been all sorts of lovers and one-night stands, but he loves her. He loves her and cannot let go of her. And yet the pain of knowing that she remains loose and uninhibited gets to him.
Quite naturally, he wants to punish her, he wants to push her aside, "She is not my wife, and I am not her husband … lead with her to put away her harlotry from her face and her adultery from between her breasts lest I strip her and make her like a wilderness." He is so deeply hurt and ashamed that he just feels like he has to lash out. I imagine some of us can identify with that anguished cry; some of us have felt that need to punish.
To me one of the most beautiful phrases in the Bible is the one which says that in marriage, in sexual union as willed by our God, a man and a woman become one flesh. One flesh: but if you tear apart that one flesh, it’s going to hurt. We think we can be casual and blasé and matter-of-fact about sexual expression, but let Hosea teach you the pain that gets angry and violent and destructive: "I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees … I will punish her." Let Gomer teach you the pain of faithlessness: that what looks like fun for tonight is going to be harsh in the cold gray light of the morning.
Learn from Hosea’s anguish: if you play fast and loose with your sexuality you hurt God, you hurt someone else, and you even hurt yourself.
III
If the story stopped there, however, we would have nothing more than a morality tale. If that were all there is to it, we would have nothing more profound than a noisy warning. But we have more, we have much more, and this is where Hosea becomes good news for us.
For what we learn from Hosea is that in and through all the pain of feeling violated, in and through all the mire and the muck of infidelity, there is still the possibility of forgiveness. This sin is not unforgivable. To sin sexually is not the end of everything. But hear that there is a cost involved.
The Lord said to me, "Go again, love a woman who is beloved of a paramour and is an adulteress … so I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and an omer and a lethech of barley. And I said to her, "Dwell as mine … you shall not play the harlot, or belong to another man; I will be with you."
Go and love her and pay the price and buy her back … dwell with me and I will be with you.
Friends, do you find this strange? Do you find it hard to believe that Hosea would love his Gomer so deeply that he would literally go and buy her out of prostitution? It’s strange, all right; it’s almost beyond human comprehension. But remember now, this is what God always does for us. He sees our sin, He sees that we have run after other Gods, and yet he pays a price to buy us back. The price is called the Cross.
The price is called God’s own suffering, and when Jesus died for all sin, He died for this sin as well as all others. Jesus paid it all, so that we might be forgiven of everything – of everything, including sexual sins. It hurts God, but He goes to the Cross to forgive everything.
This morning if you are into a relationship that is unhealthy, if you have been expressing your sexuality but it is not within the will of God, then the prophet Hosea has something for you. He would remind you that sooner or later there will be a terrible pain in that, that somebody is going to be deeply hurt, but he would also want you to hear the good news: that you are bought with a price, and you can be forgiven and made whole.
If you this morning are the victim of faithlessness – someone with whom you had that covenant, blessed by God and sanctioned by His spirit, but that someone became unfaithful, Hosea would say to you that, yes, God understands how much that hurts. He understands how you want to punish. But our God, our loving, merciful God, wants to encourage you not to strike back, not to lash out in anger. Our loving and forgiving and merciful God wants to encourage you to look at the Cross and know that however heavy the price you’ve had to pay, He too is paying it. And He’s doing it so that those who sin might be forgiven.
He was a young minister, full of promise, ready to change the world and get on with his work. He had such an incredible vision of what the world could be like if Christ were followed as Lord.
And then he fell in love. She was a ravishingly beautiful girl, the kind that most men, if they tell the truth at all, cannot avoid staring at. You sort of had to stand there and say to yourself over and over again, "Thou shalt not covet, thou shalt not covet … " Their romance went along in storybook fashion, and they made plans to be married … but …
But … one day he found out, in the crudest way possible, that this gorgeous creature had been the high school party girl, everybody’s party girl. Six partners, eight partners, maybe a dozen; she wasn’t even able to give an accurate count.
He was crushed. He felt betrayed. He felt used and lied to and worthless and dirty and … you name it. He told me that he didn’t know whether he could ever love her again, whether he could ever love another woman again. And the shame of it! He was going to serve God in his career, and he knew, he could never invite her to share that.
She was crushed too. She had thought that at last there was going to be an honorable relationship. She had hoped that he would never have to know. But some busybody had told the tale, and now she was destroyed. In fact she thought of taking her life. She would not even come into the chapel to talk with me. We sat out in her car in a rain-soaked parking lot for two hours, trying to work through all the pain, the pain she caused him, the pain she felt herself.
After several visits and counseling sessions one night I heard him saying to me, “I can’t get her out of my mind. It goes against everything I thought I believed in, but I am going to get together with her again. I’m going to ask her to come back.”
Slowly, painfully, with a whole lot of prayer and hours of counseling and untold buckets of tears, I’m sure, they made it work. And I will not soon forget the day they stood before me and with tears in their eyes responded to the ancient words of the marriage vow, "Will you keep you only unto him so long as you both shall live?"
For if you have been unfaithful, or have been the victim of faithlessness, and you will struggle with that with a crosscarrying Christ, the day will come when with Hosea you will sing, “I will heal their faithlessness, I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them.”
