Sermon – Advent continues -The Inescapable Love of God
Scripture: Hosea 11:1-12 “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and I called my son out of Egypt. But the more I called to him, the farther he moved from me, offering sacrifices to the images of Baal, and burning incense to idols. I myself taught Israel how to walk, leading him along by the hand. But he doesn’t know or even care that it was I who took care of him. I led Israel along with my ropes of kindness and love. I lifted the yoke from his neck, and I myself stooped to feed him. “But since my people refuse to return to me, they will return to Egypt and will be forced to serve Assyria. War will swirl through their cities; their enemies will crash through their gates. They will destroy them, trapping them in their own evil plans. For my people are determined to desert me. They call me the Most High, but they don’t truly honor me. “Oh, how can I give you up, Israel? How can I let you go? How can I destroy you like Admah or demolish you like Zeboiim?
My heart is torn within me, and my compassion overflows. No, I will not unleash my fierce anger. I will not completely destroy Israel, for I am God and not a mere mortal. I am the Holy One living among you, and I will not come to destroy. For someday the people will follow me. I, the Lord, will roar like a lion. And when I roar, my people will return trembling from the west.
11 Like a flock of birds, they will come from Egypt. Trembling like doves, they will return from Assyria. And I will bring them home again,” says the Lord.”
Introduction: The Book of Hosea is a story of The Inescapable Love of God. The story could have been the preacher and the prostitute. As I thought about the messed-up life of Hosea this week, I thought about the Jerry Springer show and the kind of programs he used to air. It has been years since I have watch an episode, but the kind of topics on his show always a big “Surprise” to somebody. Somebody was Cheating.” Listen at some of the captions from his show: “Angela will tell her longtime boyfriend that she’s been cheating on him and now she’s pregnant! Despite all this, she’s confident he’ll stay with her.” “Give Back My Lover — Willie claims to love his fiancé, but he has some bad news for her. He’s been cheating… and now his mistress is pregnant!” “Shocking Confessions! — Carl broke up with her fiancé because she wanted to date his sister!” “Prostitution Sex Scandals — Lisa has secretly been working as an escort to help pay for her wedding. She likes her new job and she’s here today to tell her fiancé all about it!” “Baby Come Back To Me — Becky dumped her husband for his best friend, Josh!! Now she’s secretly seeing her husband again!” Well, you get the idea. Actually, I was surprised to see how closely the topics of all those shows paralleled the story of Hosea. Gomer would have fit right into the Jerry Springer setting. The show could have been called: “The Prophet who Married A Prostitute.” The byline would go something like this: “Gomer cheats on Hosea and three of his children belong to three other men.” After selling herself to everyone in town, Gomer ends up as a slave. Her husband, Hosea, eventually buys her back. He claims that he knew she would be unfaithful to him in the beginning, but God told him to marry her. Then God told him to buy her out of slavery and love her again.”
The book of Hosea is the most shocking book in the Old Testament. Few people can imagine what it would be like to be married to a woman like Gomer. She had no inner moral compass — no restraints. You could never trust her. You would know that she was always looking for some excitement. You would see her invite the attentions of other men and then deny it vehemently. The ability to make a commitment would never be a part of her character. She would disappear for days at a time, and you would not know where she was. She would cruelly mock you and you would be the laughingstock of the town. She was full of moral wickedness.
It has happened to other people besides Hosea, but Hosea went into the relationship with his eyes wide open. He knew what kind of woman she was, but God had asked him to marry her; and he willingly did so, despite the enormous pain it would bring into his life. Sometimes God gave a prophet like Hosea words to speak to the people of Israel and Judah. He would give them words warning of impending judgment so they could be spared by giving up their sin and following God again. At other times he would give them words of love to win back the affections of his people. He would remind them of all his love had done for them and tell them how much he wanted them to come back home to him. But sometimes words failed, and God had to resort to a different kind of communication. He would give the prophet a message to act out. The prophet’s actions would be a living drama playing out the message of God in a dramatic way.
God told Isaiah to remove his clothes, except for a loin cloth, and walk around as a living picture of the horrors of war and exile. God asked Ezekiel to lay on his side and eat a starvation diet which he would cook over dried animal dung — depicting the horrors of war inflicted on the people, which would come if they did not repent of their sins. He asked Amos to hold up a plumb line to show the people how out of balance their lives were. There were many of these prophetic plays which took place, but none were as painful as when God asked Hosea to marry Gomer. Why did God ask him to do something like this? It was an ongoing drama of God’s marriage to unfaithful Israel. As people saw Gomer, a woman with no moral sense, becoming more vulgar and diseased every year, they remembered that she was the prophet’s wife and he had married her knowing that she would be unfaithful. They would ultimately get the message that there was a parallel between Hosea’s relationship to Gomer and God’s relationship to them. They were to be married to God, but they were unfaithful to him and loved many other gods. What was the message of this drama? It was threefold. The first message from the life of Hosea is:
1. God’s love is unreasonable. Who can explain love? If love always made sense, it would not be love. It does not always respond to logic. The thing that God had asked Hosea to do did not make sense. But then, God’s love for Israel did not make sense either. The question of the book is not why God would ask Hosea to marry Gomer, but why God would marry Israel. Why would God commit himself to a group of people he knew would not be faithful to him? It doesn’t make sense. If God was going to make a commitment to a nation, why wouldn’t he choose a nation he knew would be faithful? Why wouldn’t he choose people who would be grateful for his love and thankful for his blessings? Why wouldn’t he select those who would be inclined to follow his laws and appreciate the wisdom of his ways?
According to our way of thinking, God’s love is unreasonable. We would choose to love someone who loved us. We would look for someone we thought would be faithful to us. But God chose the cast of the Jerry Springer show. Listen to this outrageous verse from the Bible in 2Timothy 2:13), which says, “If we are unfaithful, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny who he is.” That’s unreasonable! When God enters a covenant of love with us, the covenant does not depend on our faithfulness, but on the faithfulness of God who is love.
We keep thinking that God only loves good people, but God loves sinners. He pursues them like he asked Hosea to pursue Gomer. With a painfilled heart, God goes looking for them. He is betrayed but he longs for them. When they become enslaved by their sins, he redeems them back. The Bible describes our human predicament in Romans 3:10-12, by saying, “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” The race is portrayed in the life of Gomer! But despite that, God did something completely irrational — he loved us and sought for a way to redeem us out of our slavery to sin. The Bible says, “For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect” (1 Peter 1:18-19). That is why the Bible can say, “You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20).
Songwriter Steven Curtis Chapman said it well: “In The Gospel, we discover we are far worse off than we thought, and far more loved than we ever dreamed.” There is a natural, logical kind of loving that loves lovely things and lovely people. That’s logical. But there is another kind of loving that doesn’t look for value in what it loves, but that creates value in what it loves. It doesn’t make sense, but God loves dirty, ragged sinners, and you can’t separate him from them. But a second message that the life of Hosea teaches us is:
2. God’s love is tough love. Hosea never minimized the nature of the wrong Gomer had done to him. The pain was real and raw. His love had been betrayed. He did not gloss over the situation. He took it seriously. And when Gomer insisted on being unfaithful to him, he let her go. He understood that it was to her own detriment. He knew what was ahead of her. She no longer wanted anything to do with him, so she would no longer have his help. She was on her own. It was what she wanted, but she could not see the mistreatment she would suffer. She would be used and abused. She would be called names by those who were supposed to love her. She would be beaten and treated like an animal. There would be many things that Hosea could not protect her from since she had run away from him. She would learn the lessons of life the hard way, and live out the consequences of her poor choices. As Hosea would later write about people like her: “They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind” (Hosea 8:7).
In the second chapter of Hosea, God describes what he will do to his unfaithful people: “Therefore I will block her path with thornbushes; I will wall her in so that she cannot find her way. She will chase after her lovers but not catch them; she will look for them but not find them. Then she will say, ‘I will go back to my husband as at first, for then I was better off than now’” (Hosea 2:6-7). As with Gomer, many times we have to learn the hard way that God’s way is the best way. We waste our lives and our love on many other things until we have been abused long enough that we say, “I will go back to my God, for then I was better off than before.”
In school during the sixties, Many student had to learn the William Ernest Henley’s poem entitled “Invictus,” which praises the indomitable human spirit:
“Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole,I thank whatever gods may be, For my unconquerable soul....It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.”
That’s a fine poem. There is only one problem: it is not true. We are not the master of our own fate, nor the captain of our soul. There is another who claims that right, our creator God. Failing to recognize that God is the master of this world, the master of our fate and choosing to rebel against the true Captain of your soul, is to do so at your own peril. If you do so, God will give you your own way, but you will not like it. His love is a tough love. The third message that the book of Hosea is giving us is:
3. God’s love is unconditional. We often give up on people. Some even write others off, or count them as dead, when their love or trust has been betrayed. But God is different. In chapter three, Gomer’s sin has worn her out, and now she is stripped and being sold as a slave on an auction block. None of her former beauty remains. Perhaps she is diseased. It may be that she is being sold by a house of prostitution, or a slave owner who no longer finds her desirable. Gomer has become a liability. Whatever the case, Hosea does the unthinkable. He buys her for himself. The price was very low for a wealthy man, but expensive for a self-employed farming prophet, it was less than half an ounce of silver and a bushel of barley, a grain inferior to wheat. It was half the normal price a female slave would normally bring. Apparently, she was not worth much to anyone at this point, and they were just glad to get rid of her. In the beginning she was a beautiful woman. The name Gomer means “perfect,” possibly a reference to her appearance and desirability. But now her beauty is gone — ruined through hard living, and no one will have her except one man. Hosea will make her his wife again, a living symbol of God’s unconditional love for faithless Israel. The Lord said to Hosea, “Go, show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another and is an adulteress. Love her as the Lord loves the Israelites” (Hosea 3:1).
It would have been one thing for Hosea to excuse a foolish, even sinful mistake by his wife, but even after he confronted her she continued brazenly in her sin. She flaunted it. She mocked him and forgot everything he had ever done for her. But God told him to buy her back out of slavery. God asked him to do this because it is what God does. Hosea was acting like God. God’s love is unconditional. King David wrote in Psalm 139: “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?” (Psalm 139:7). The question is: why would we want to go away from God? Why would we want to run from him? The answer is that it is part of who we are. It is our nature to run from God, and it is God’s nature to pursue us — even when we are at our worst. You can never run so far that you outrun God’s love for you. No matter what you have done, no matter where you have been, he wants you and sees you as his beloved bride. God doesn’t throw us on the garbage heap when we fail.
The Advent season reminds us of the hope we have in a loving God, it leads us to the peace we experience in relationship with God. We have peace with God, peace within and peace with our fellowman. The third candle of advent is the candle of Love. God created us in his own image and likeness, giving us freewill to leave him or stay with Him, to serve him or to sin against him. Then God demonstrated His love for by what he did for us. God said in Hosea 11,”I myself taught Israel how to walk, leading him along by the hand. But he doesn’t know or even care that it was I who took care of him. I led Israel along with my ropes of kindness and love. I lifted the yoke from his neck, and I myself stooped to feed him.”
The Book of Hosea is a dramatic presentation of God’s unreasonable, unconditional, inescapable love for his people. We see ourselves as we are, prone to wander, prone to leave the God who loves us, yet God sees us for what we can become. The apostle Paul asks this amazing question in Romans 2:4, when he said, “Do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you toward repentance?”
