The hard way home
Part 3 of a series of 3
Hosea 14:1-9
The story is told of a man who was travelling in the wilder parts of Ireland. Eventually decided to return home to Dublin, but on the way, seemed to get lost. In due course he came across a likely looking local, and asked for directions. After much scratching over their head, the helpful local said (and I won’t attempt the Irish accent) ’what if I wanted to go to Dublin, I wouldn’t start from here!’.
Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been looking at the message of Hosea. Hosea was a prophet who was sent by God to speak to the nation of Israel about three thousand years ago. Hosea was instructed by God to marry a prostitute, as a particularly shocking visual aid. The purpose of the visual aid was to get through to the people the corruption of their relationship with God, their nation and their living. We thought a bit about how desperately broken hearted God must have been to have resort to such a shocking visual aid to get his message across. Last week, we thought about the unbroken love of God, which continued to love his people despite their promiscuity, despite their unfaithfulness to him.
Of course, God’s visual aid had a purpose. His love had a purpose. And the purpose of God in sending Hosea, and in instructing Hosea to live out of this dramatic visual aid, was to bring his people back to him. God’s purpose was the return of his people to the covenant relationship with him. This is where we come to our reading from Hosea Ch14. It begins with the words ’Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God’. God’s desire is for his people to return to their relationship with him.
Now you will remember that the nation of Israel, God’s people, were in a particularly bad moral and spiritual situation. The covenant relationship with God had become corrupted. The worship of the nation had become corrupted. The clergy were corrupted. And national life in every sense had become corrupted. And so, returning home to God from the situation of corruption in which this nation of Israel stood at that time was going to be hard work. In a slight paraphrase of our Irishman, if I wanted to get home to God, I wouldn’t have started from there. Returning to God from the situation of corruption in which the nation of Israel found itself was going to be a hard way home.
Nevertheless, although the way home was going to be hard, it was not going to be impossible.
Recognise the facts
The first step on the hard way home requires that the people recognise the facts. It requires that the people of God acknowledge their sinfulness, their unfaithfulness, and their promiscuity. It requires that the people of God recognise that their covenant relationship with God has become corrupted, and their national and personal lives have become corrupted. In ch14.1, God’s people are called to return to the Lord, because ’your sin has made you stumble and fall’. There is no point hiding the facts, concealing the truth. Their unfaithfulness has caused them to fall from their relationship with God. Having acknowledged their unfaithfulness, the next step in recognising the facts is for the people to acknowledge their own inadequacy. In ch14.3, the people are required to acknowledge that the schemes that they had tried to put together could never protect them. The people are required to acknowledge that the alliances that that they had tried to make with Assyria could not save them. The people are required to acknowledge that military might is inadequate. The people needed to acknowledge that the corrupted and pagan gods that they had been following could not truly be their God. The people are required to acknowledge that the efforts of their own hands could not restore their relationship with God.
Return to God
The second step on the hard way home requires that the people of God return to God. 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’. And this is the keynote of our reading from chapter 14 today. ‘ 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 returning back to, and a going back from. It requires a going back to God, but it also requires a going back from all that had separated the people from God. It required that all that has separated the people from God, all their iniquity, all their unfaithfulness, needed to be taken away from them. In order to do this, having recognise the facts of their unfaithfulness, they needed they needed to return to God to confess the facts to him. And we see this clearly in14: 2, where Hosea exhorts the people to return to the Lord and confess their sins and asked his forgiveness. You see it is not enough for the people to acknowledge and recognise the facts. But it is necessary to confess them to God. For only then can he deal with them. As a sense of this in ch5: 15, where God says that ‘ he will return to his place, until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face’. The confession of sins is part of the return to God.
Receive God’s healing touch
The third step on the hard way home is to receive God’s healing touch. In God’s amazing love to his people, he is utterly faithful. And when his people return to him, he faithfully and freely forgives them, and restores them to new life and new relationships. He lays his healing hands upon them. It is freely given. A life lived without God causes damage in all sorts of ways. God faithfully promises to heal that damage. In ch14.4, God says that he ‘ will heal their faithlessness’ RSV. In ch6.1, 2, there is this wonderful picture of God healing, binding up the wounds, reviving his people, and raising them up, just like fresh rain reviving the dried up earth. And that healing touch of God comes at great cost to him. It is dearly bought. We thought about this heavy cost to God last week. You will remember at the beginning of the book, the nation was compared to a prostitute. Hosea was told to marry a prostitute to bring the shocking message right into peoples faces. And there were problems in this relationship, and it appears that she went off. In chapter 3, we read how Hosea was commanded to go and buy her back. And this buying back was symbolic of the cost that God was prepared to bear because of his father heart of love. At the beginning book of Hosea, we saw how the nation was compared to a promiscuous woman, to a prostitute. And despite the shame of unfaithfulness, in chapter 2 there is a wonderful description of the love of the father heart of God to this prostitute, this promiscuous woman.
Receive God’s blessing
The fourth step on the hard way home is to receive God’s blessing. In the parable of the prodigal son, when the errant child returns, his father doesn’t just pat him on the head and set him straight to work. Absolutely not. He throws a party. He bestows every blessing on his returning son. And it is just so with God. Just look at ch14 vv5-7. There is great freshness in their blessings. Words like dew, flowers, fragrance, beauty, speak of a refreshed relationship with God. The people ‘will return and live beneath God’s shadow’. They will be rooted like poplar trees. This speaks to me of a blessing of great security of a secure relationship. And then there is the great blessing of new life and vigour. The spreading shoots of new trees, the flourishing garden, the productive vineyard. A prosperous relationship. God’s blessings are not half-hearted. God’s blessings are not meanly given. God’s generosity knows no bounds.
Restore the nation’s life
And the final step on the hard way home, having received God’s blessing, was to allow God’s healing touch and blessings to work in the lives of God’s people to enable the restoration of the nation’s life. The fruitfulness and abundance of God’s blessing needs to grow in the nations life and the people’s lives. This is wonderfully put in Ch10.12. God says to his people ‘ plough new ground for yourselves, plant righteousness and reap their blessings that your devotion to me will produce…. and I will come and pour out blessings upon you’. GNB. The RSV talks about breaking up the fallow ground and reaping the fruit of steadfast love. As we thought about at the beginning of this look at the book of Hosea, there is much to be restored. The corrupted covenant with God requires to be restored. The corrupted relationship with God requires to be restored. The corrupted worship of God requires to be restored. The corrupted life of the nation and its people requires to be restored.
Now, this restoration of the life of the people was not going to be easy. It is a hard way home. Because the people were starting from a place where you would not want to start. And the situation that they were in had resulted in a number of natural consequences. There were consequences of their disobedience. And these consequences had to be gone through on the hard way home. So the restoration of the life of the people, the restoration of God’s people and their covenant at their worship and then nation was not going to be an easy affair. It was to be a hard way home. There would be a time when the nation was in exile. There would be a time when the nations leaders would be removed. There would be a time when the temple was destroyed.
There is also a cost to be borne in restoring the nations life. The passage talks about breaking up or ploughing fallow ground. Ground that is fallow is uncultivated. It soon becomes hard and compacted. It soon becomes weedy. And it takes hard work and extra effort to return it to cultivation. God doesn’t wave a magic wand over his people’s lives, and suddenly it all perfect and wonderful. It requires effort on the part of his people to be restored. It requires effort on the part of his people to restore their relationship with him. It requires work, as any relationship does. It requires effort on the part of his people to bring back proper worship to his temple. It requires effort on the part of his people to change their corrupted ways of living. There is a cost to restoration.
But though the way home would be hard, there would come a time when the nation would return from exile. There would come a time when the covenant relationship with God would be restored. There would come a time of renewed worship. There would come a time of revitalised national and personal life.
Lets recap. There is a way home to God. It’s not an easy way home. And you wouldn’t want to start from where God’s people were where Hosea spoke to them. Nevertheless, there is a way home. A hard way home.
It’s a way home that requires that God’s people recognise the facts. It’s a way home that requires that God’s people return to him and confess their own faithfulness to him. But as they do that, they are able to receive God’s healing touch and God’s abundant blessing. And they are able to move on and work for the restoration of their lives as a nation and as individuals.
So this is the message of Hosea. We started with the awful desperate situation of corruption and unfaithfulness. We thought about the way in which God’s heart was broken by his people’s lack of love for him and their corrupted lives. And we saw how God was driven to desperate measures to get his messages through them, as he sent home Hosea to marry a prostitute as a shocking visual aid.
And then last week we thought about the unbroken love of God. The crazy love of God that chooses to continue loving his people despite their unfaithfulness and corruption.
And today we have thought about the way in which the brokenness of the relationship between God and his people can be made whole.
Application
But now we have to ask the question, ‘what is the relevance of this to me, to us as God’s people here, to us as a nation?’.
In the first week, we gave a great deal of thought to the corruption in our nation, and in our church, and in our own lives. Corruption in which our relationships with God, our spirituality, and the very details of our lives have become corrupted. That can be very depressing, and indeed it is. It is a desperate situation.
But last week, we got to grips with the fact that despite all that we do to break God’s heart, his love for us is unbroken. Despite all that we do to break God’s heart, He chooses to open his arms wise to us and accept us back.
There is a way home for us. All that is required of us is that we return to him.
And is God’s people here this applies to us on several levels. It applies to us as individuals. For within each one of us there are parts of our lives, parts of our relationship with God which are corrupted. And we need to recognise the facts of that. And may be in the course of our study of Hosea there will have been things that we have touched upon which have. Struck a chord with you. So we each individually need to recognise those facts. We can then returned to God and confess them. We can receive his healing touch and his marvellous blessings. Then we can get to work and begin the process of restoring our lives.
This also applies to us as God’s Church as God’s people. For within each congregation of God’s people there are parts of our corporate lives which are corrupted. Few weeks ago, Mark touched on the problems of worship. And this is an area where all is not well at the moment. But there may be other areas of our church family life in which all is not well. And as God’s people here we must recognise the facts. We must humbly returned to God and confess where things are wrong. For only then can we receive his healing touch, only then can we receive his blessing. And of course we can then begin to work to restore our corporate life together.
But the message of Hosea also applies to our nation. For within our nation there is much that is corrupted.
Our Christian heritage has become corrupted. We live in a situation where people do not know and understand their Christian heritage. We live in a nation which has consumerised a relationship with God. Our society thinks about a relationship with God as one in which we dictate the terms. So our nations personal relationships with God have become corrupted. We live in a world where worship has become corrupted. Our society and nation worships its prosperity, its possessions, itself. Or else it pursues alternative spirituality, reviving old religions, and inventing new ones. It mixes them all up to give a warm cosy comforting spirituality. Our nation has a worship which has become corrupted. We also have a nation in which our church and our clergy and our spiritual leaders have become corrupted. They have failed to see the signs of the times and speak against them. They have become infected by the liberalism of our society. And our people are corrupted. Their lives are a mess of conflicted values, unreasonable expectations, selfishness and sadness. We live in a society where people have everything and frequently nothing. We live in a society where it’s living has become corrupted.
What a mess! But God’s love for us as a nation is unbroken despite all that we do to break his heart. The question is what can I do about it?
What is needed for our nation to return home to God is for it to recognise the facts. But our nation cannot recognise the facts of its sinfulness and corruption unless somebody tells them. What is needed to our nation is to return back to God. But our nation cannot return back to God without someone to lead them. What is needed is for a nation to receive God’s healing touch and forgiveness. But our nation cannot receive from a God to which it has never been introduced.
It seems like an impossible situation. It seems as though there may be no hope. And maybe that was the situation three thousand years ago in the nation of Israel. An apparently impossible situation. A situation of apparently no hope. But God sent one man. God sent Hosea. God sent Hosea to be visual aid and to bring Gods message to his people.
So there is a way home. It may well be a hard way home, for our nation is in a poor situation. But just as every journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, so the journey along the hard way home for our nation begins with a single step. It begins with a single step of faithfulness from each one of God’s people.
In other words, the hard way home to God for our nation begins with a single step of faithfulness set is taken by you or taken by me.
Are we willing to take it?
Part 3 of a series
The preacher and the prostitute Hosea 1:1-11
God must be crazy Hosea 11:1-9
The hard way home Hosea 14:1-9
