We continue our series When Two Become One this morning. Thank you for joining us. Our hope is that this strengthens the marriages of our church and our community.
A number of men have been complaining that this series has been a little too hurtful to them. They asked that it might be balanced a little more toward the wives. While I may not make everyone happy in a marriage series, I am here to announce that we will be placing a "sports ticker" along the bottom of the screens behind me so the men can follow the scores during the worship services!
More seriously, keep your Bibles open Ephesians and put a bookmark there. Find the Old Testament book of Hosea with me if you will.
There are three to four powerful metaphors throughout the Bible to describe our relationship with God. Often, God is seen as a great King who rules over us. At other times, He is a Shepherd, who guides us, His sheep. Still other times, He is a Father loving His children. But in a startling picture, Hosea tells us God is not only our Shepherd and our King; He is also our Husband.
You’ll never understand God if you ONLY approach Him as your King, your Shepherd, or even your Father. It’s not until you see Him as your Husband that you can understand how intimate and personal your relationship with God truly is. And it’s not until you see yourself as the unfaithful spouse that you can really grasp your marriage.
Today’s Secondary Scripture (Page 893 in your pew Bibles)
And the Lord said to me, “Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisins.” 2 So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and a homer and a lethech of barley. 3 And I said to her, “You must dwell as mine for many days. You shall not play the whore, or belong to another man; so will I also be to you.” 4 For the children of Israel shall dwell many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or pillar, without ephod or household gods. 5 Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God, and David their king, and they shall come in fear to the Lord and to his goodness in the latter days” (Hosea 3:1–5).
“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. 28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body” (Ephesians 5:25-30).
In order to understand your friend’s marriage, your parent’s marriage, or even your marriage, you need to understand the source of marriage.
1. Your Relationship with God is a Marriage
“And the Lord said to me, “Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods…” (Hosea 3:1).
The word “And” at the beginning of verse 1 gives you a clue that you’re stepping in “mid-stream” in the middle of an ongoing story. Hosea’s marriage is the backdrop to a larger story. Hosea’s marriage to his wife, Gomer, acts like a walking/talking parable. God says in effect, “What you see in Hosea’s marriage to Gomer is what you’ll see in My (God’s) marriage to My people.”
Now, this entire small neglected book is dripping with passion.
1.1 A Secondary Marriage
And throughout its pages, you’ll see God using the marriage between Hosea and Gomer as a picture of His marriage with His children. And Paul picks right up on this theme in Ephesians: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (Ephesians 5:25-27).
It’s evident when Ephesians discusses the marriage between a husband and a wife, there is another marriage running in the background. In a similar way, there is another marriage running behind all the talk of husbands and wives in Ephesians.
1.2 Tracing
Do you remember tracing an image back in school? You took a very thin piece of paper and laid it over top of a second piece of paper. This paper underneath would have an image you wanted to trace. All of marriage is that same way. There’s a marriage above that you want to trace here below.
This morning I want to focus on the unseen marriage in the minutes to come. It’s not until you see the marriage above that you’ll understand what marriages below are to look like. Because when we truly see through our marriages below to this other marriage above, the heavenly marriage, then when we’ll see our marriages so much more clearer afterward. When we see the marriage above, we’ll see the pattern and the design of marriage.
1.3 Hosea
Now, we know very little about the prophet, Hosea. We are told his father’s name and only the briefest of details concerning his marriage and their children. We learn that God commands Hosea with these words: “When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, “Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord” (Hosea 1:2). Hosea did as he was commanded when he married Gomer.
Hosea is in your Bible, so you’ll focus not so much on marriages below but on the marriage above. Ephesians confirms this as well.
1.3 Your Marriage is a PRIORITY
God says in effect, “You can’t understand Me or My love for you until you understand Me as your Bridegroom. It’s not enough just to understand Me as your King, your Shepherd, and your Father. You don’t really know what our relationship is about unless you also see me as your Husband.”
If you’re married, then your marriage comes before any other human relationship. Your spouse cannot be secondary. Your spouse comes before any other human. Your wife, your husband, isn’t an “add-on.” Husbands … never can your marriage be a moment where you say, “Oh, yea … I forgot I’m married.” God says in effect, “Just as with a marriage, I’m your husband. You have to understand our relationship as a marriage.” He’s trying to say, “I’m the ultimate priority.” My relationship with you must be the ultimate priority in your life.
1.4 Your Marriage Is Your Most INTIMATE Relationship
According to the most recent US Census, 28% of US households have only one person living under the roof. And that number has been climbing for decades. In an article entitled “The Hidden Costs of Living Alone,” the writers say more and more people don’t want to fight over the thermostat, or they don’t want to have to negotiate what you eat or what you watch on TV. While the cost of living alone is more, the freedom it offers is enticing for many. What the article is telling us is that marriage is the most intimate human relationship in a couple of ways.
No one knows you like your husband or your wife. No one. No one knows your physically, emotionally, financially, and intimately like your spouse. So God says, “I want a relationship that is like a marriage,” what He is saying is this: “You can’t know Me from a distance. You cannot even know Me formally. I have to be in every nook and cranny of your life, every centimeter, every inch of your life. I must be here, there, & everywhere. There can’t be any part you hold back from Me.”
1.5 Your Marriage Has LIFE-CHANGING Power
Now, this really follows after the first two items – if your marriage is a priority and your marriage is the most intimate of all human relationships, then your marriage has life-changing power. Let me show you how this.
If you were to say to me, “Scott, you are so incredibly patient.” But my wife and I both would say, “How I have fooled you!” You cannot fool your spouse. But if your spouse were to say, “You are so incredibly patient,” then these words are on a whole different level. The Hollywood mogul who’s famous on social media but his wife or her husband cannot stand her/him is a hollow life. When people respect you but don’t you, that’s a shallow life. But when the people closest to you respect you, then you have an emotionally whole life. It’s because of the radical intimate nature of your relationship, your spouse’s words have incredible power. If the whole world thinks you’re terrible, but your husband thinks you are great, then you feel great. Your spouse has that kind of power. Your spouse can reprogram your self-worth based on his/her word.
1.6 Marriage Above
Remember, it’s not until you see the marriage above that you’ll understand what marriages below are to look like. Your marriages below teach you that you cannot treat your spouse as, “Oh yea, I forgot about you…” or “you’re just an add-on to my life…” … then your marriage above cannot be, “Oh yea, I forgot about you…” or “you’re just an add-on to my life.” Just as your spouse is the ultimate human priority you have on earth, God should be the ultimate priority above all.” God says in effect, “The most incredible moments, in the most incredible marriages in the history of the world, are just small hints of My love for you. If you grasp My delight in you and the kind of love I have for you, that will be the most life-changing powerful relationship in your life.”
1. Your Relationship with God is a Marriage
2. Your Relationship with God is a Really Bad Marriage
“And the Lord said to me, ‘Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods…’” (Hosea 3:1).
God commands Hosea to marry a woman who is unfaithful. Specifically, He is to marry a prostitute. Not only is she unfaithful to Hosea, but she’s repeatedly unfaithful in the most obvious, in-your-face kind of ways.
2.1 A Really Bad Marriage
This is a really bad marriage. In Hosea 2:5, God calls Gomer (Hosea’s wife) a name we all recoil upon hearing. Truly, the story of Hosea is painfully graphic. Take, for example, Hosea 2:2, where you obtain this cringe-worthy picture:
“Plead with your mother, plead—
for she is not my wife,
and I am not her husband—
that she put away her whoring from her face,
and her adultery from between her breasts;
3 lest I strip her naked
and make her as in the day she was born,
and make her like a wilderness,
and make her like a parched land,
and kill her with thirst” (Hoses 2:2-3).
The picture of children pleading with their mother and being aware of their mother’s transgressions is cringe-worthy. Nobody wants to see a scene where the children are pleading with their mother to be faithful to their father. The Bible calls her a “whore,” or a prostitute, depending on your translation. It’s a name that I’m uncomfortable saying, and you’re uncomfortable hearing.
2.2 Axton Betz-Hamilton
Axton grew up on a farm in Indiana. She grew up and went to Purdue University. As a nine-year-old college student, she wanted to move off-campus, but the utility company asked for a $100 deposit because she had bad credit. She ordered her own credit report and discovered she had an abysmal credit rating of 380 and pages of fraudulent credit-card charges and collection-agency entries in her name. The first credit card was opened when she was eleven years old. She called her mom, distraught, “Mom, who would do this to me?” she sobbed. “No one is doing anything to you, Axton,” her mother replied. “They just got your information and used it. It’s not a personal attack.”
In time, the young lady earned a Ph.D. in human development and family studies. She chose to focus her dissertation on the impact identity theft had on children. “Like a prisoner who earns a law degree from behind bars, I [studied] identity theft while trying to save myself from its effects. If I couldn’t get away from it, I would run toward it. Perhaps I would find the perpetrator somewhere along the way.”
Her parents had been the victims of identity theft years before. They were so traumatized by the ordeal they kept their curtains closed and refused to open their door to anyone. It was August 2012, when Betz-Hamilton was 30, that her mom told her she had found a giant lump under her arm. A few days later, her mother’s diagnosis came — leukemia, and the illness was unrelenting. Six months later, her mother was dead.
But this is where the story takes a surprising turn.
Two weeks after her death, Axton got the call from her dad. He had found the credit card statement in a blue bin behind the house. The credit-card statement was his daughter’s name from 2001. He called his daughter, “What … were you thinking, running up a credit card over the limit back in 2001?” Axton was stunned.
The fact that this paperwork was in her name and in her own home led her to a startling realization. “My blood ran cold,” she says. “It was as if my body understood something that my mind hadn’t yet grasped.” She rushed back to her family’s property and soon was studying piles of paperwork her mother had hidden over the years. Seeing the evidence confirmed what her instincts had told her when she first got the call from her father. “Dad,” she told him. “Mom did this.”
Over the next five years, Betz-Hamilton found paperwork hidden in outbuildings on the farm, stuck in the bottom of purses, in old bags, in between the pages of books. She found pay stubs in her mom’s maiden name and rejection letters for a bank account in Wisconsin. Some of the strangest revelations came from her mom’s Facebook messages. In them, she realized her mom was creating a series of new identities. Her mother told people from high school that she didn’t have a child, that she had never married. She told friends in her hometown that her husband had abused her and that they had divorced. She was apparently having an affair with another man. Worst of all, she found that while her father had been giving her mother $11,000 a semester for her schooling, Pam had been pocketing most of it, leaving her with over $100,000 in school loans to pay. In the end, Betz-Hamilton found that her mom had defrauded her father, herself, and her father’s father to the tune of $500,000, but it’s still not clear what she spent it on. “Sometimes, I yell at her. And sometimes, I shake the box she’s in. We just don’t know who mom was. It’s hard to grieve for her.”
Hosea understands this all too well. He understands their embarrassment and shame from all these centuries later.
2.3
To be sure, while the Bible is referring to Hosea’s wife in these unflattering terms… we need to all be sure to understand that the wife in the book of Hosea is all of us. We are the “whores” in this story.
“But in God's eyes, everyone who forsakes the Lord is a whore. There are no religious singles in God's eyes. Everyone is either faithfully married to God or is a prostitute. God made you (not just Israel) for himself. If you get your kicks from somewhere else, you commit great harlotry against God.”
We are prostitutes, no matter our gender. We are the adulterous woman – males and females – every single one of us. The Bible’s diagnosis of every single one of us is that we have preferred any lover to God, our Husband.
2.4 God’s Embarrassment
The very thought that Scripture could call a woman this horrible name is downright embarrassing for many. But lest you “walkout” on the Bible, think of the embarrassment God is subjecting Himself to for a moment. When you see the person you love most in this life place herself or himself into the arms of another lover… only then can you understand the position God is in. God is saying, “Until you’ve been through a gut-wrenching experience of adultery, you can’t understand the impact of your wrongdoing and your coldness and toward me.” God says, “Until you understand the absolute devastation of having the person you most love betray you, be unfaithful to you, you don’t understand how I feel about your waywardness and about your sin.”
God does everything possible to turn His bride back toward Him. God gives His bride the “cold shoulder”: “Ephraim is joined to idols; leave him alone” (Hosea 4:17). When the “cold shoulder” treatment doesn’t work, God turns to “tough love”: “For I will be like a lion to Ephraim, and like a young lion to the house of Judah. I, even I, will tear and go away; I will carry off, and no one shall rescue” (Hosea 5:14). And when neither the “cold shoulder” nor “tough love” illicit the response He’s looking for, God turns to “tender” toward His bride: “Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her” (Hosea 2:14).
Fix your mind on the embarrassment God has endured when His bride seeks the arms of another lover, another man. God has given His love to a partner who has a history. He’s done everything possible to win the affection of His people, alternating between the “cold shoulder” treatment. He speaks with “tender” compassion, and He’s even thrown in a dose of “tough love.”
2.5 We Learn Something about Ourselves
If a King sees a citizen break one of His laws, the King becomes angry. If a Father sees His child break one of the rules, He disciplines her. And if a Shepherd sees a sheep stray, He runs after Him. But when a Husband sees His wife in the arms of another, we begin to sense just how wrong we are … how sinful we are. How embarrassing is it that God’s love is spurned, and His chosen bride would rather put herself in the arms of another?
But not only do we learn something of ourselves, but we also learn something of our Husband…
1. Your Relationship with God is a Marriage
2. Your Relationship with God is a Really Bad Marriage
3. The Cost of Fixing Your Marriage
Listen to how He speaks to His wife later in chapter 11: “How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender” (Hosea 11:8).
This is an inside view … a window into the very heart of God.
Witness the embarrassing love He has for us. God asks Himself, “How can I give you up? How can I turn you over?” Feel the power of the Husband’s emotions for His adulterous wife. He is overwhelmed by His love. While our actions are worthy of divorce, He cannot walk away from us. Such is the love of God… such is the love of our Husband.
3.1 Love in Action
Watch His love in action in Hosea 3:2: “So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and a homer and a lethech of barley” (Hosea 3:2). So she’s probably up for sale in a public auction.
We know quite a bit about the selling of slaves in antiquity because much has been written about it. For example, the slaves were always sold naked. There is a Greek play in which a fat man is put up for sale. The bids are starting, and the men who are buying bid: “Ten cents!” “Fifteen cents!” “Twenty cents!” They begin to joke with one another. One man says, “Why do you bid twenty cents for that fat slave? As soon as he gets in your house, he’s going to eat up all your food.” The man who bid twenty cents justifies his bid, saying, “You don’t understand. I’ve got a squeaky mill; I’m going to cut him up and use him for grease.”
The bidding starts. Can you picture Gomer there? How pitiful she looks? How exposed she looks?
It’s not too hard to imagine that she probably would have had her eyes closed because it’s all too much for her to take in. Closing her eyes, it’s about the only thing she had left to shield herself even a little bit from the moment of her greatest humiliation. In the midst of this auction where she’s being sold on the auction block, she hears a familiar voice. “Five shekels,” “Eight shekels,” and suddenly she realizes the voice is her husband. Now a homer and a lethek of barley are nine bushels, which is another fifteen shekels, and so basically, she was bought for thirty shekels.
Thirty shekels is how much it costs to buy a slave in Israel in those days. You gather from this image that Hosea has exhausted all His resources and is having to add to his meager sum of money with barley. Hosea has gone to great cost to purchase his wife back again.
Let’s go full circle back to Ephesians once more: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (Ephesians 5:25-27).
This is a picture of God as a Husband for His people. God is saying, “I have a million reasons to divorce you. I have paid a financial price, but I have also paid a heavy emotional price.” You are Gomer. I am Gomer. God says, “Unless you understand I am a husband whose wife has left him, I am a father whose children have rejected him and who are destroying themselves before my very eyes, you will not understand my love, and you won’t understand how my heart works.”
