If you’re familiar with the story of Les Miserables, then you’ll know that the story begins with Jean Valjean, a convict on parole, coming to a town where the only person who’ll give him a room and a meal is the local bishop, Bp Myriel. The bishop welcomes him into his house, feeds him and gives him a warm bed for the night. However, the riches of the bishop’s house prove too much for Jean Valjean. He succumbs to temptation and steals the bishop’s silver cutlery. He’s soon apprehended, though, and when the gendarmes bring him back, the bishop is faced with a dilemma: should he tell the truth, that Jean Valjean has stolen the silver, in which case he’ll be thrown back into prison, or should he show him the mercy of the gospel and make out that it was given to him as a gift? The choice he has to make is between mercy and justice. He can’t have both. Well, as you probably know, he chooses mercy. He lies to the gendarmes. He says that the silver was a gift. In fact he insists that Jean Valjean takes not just the silver cutlery, but his silver candlesticks as well. But before Jean Valjean leaves, he’s told that this gift of love requires a response. From now on he must reform his life, from now on he must begin to live as a law-abiding citizen.
Was it all right for the bishop to lie? Was it OK for him to sacrifice justice for the sake of mercy?
The story of Hosea is the story of God’s struggle with those same opposing demands. Here we see God’s never ending love for his people balanced against his need to see justice done. Here we have an acted parable of God’s love for an unfaithful people.
Hosea brings to us a family that’s a miniature, a microcosm, of his world. And it’s a family with problems. It’s a family that’s designed to reflect God’s relationship with his people. God compares his situation not to that of an autocrat whose family dares not disobey, nor of a husband whose adoring wife and family are his delight and joy, but to that of a husband whose wife is having an affair and whose children are like strangers in his own house.
Here omnipotence doesn’t help. Here there are no instant solutions. In a marriage the solutions are never simple. Tame acceptance doesn’t help. Neither do strong-arm tactics. All the power in the world won’t help to heal a broken relationship - unless you’re willing to have a slave for a spouse, and a family ruled by fear. Neither will God exact obedience from his people against their will.
Now all this could be very theoretical and remote. But God brings his situation home to Hosea and his hearers in a concrete, though painful, way. He tells him to go and marry an unfaithful wife - because, he says, that’s exactly what I’ve done by pledging myself to all of you. Hosea is to live out a parable of God’s covenant with the people of Israel.
The story begins with Hosea marrying Gomer. To start with she’s just an ordinary Israelite woman. Although he’s told to take a wife of whoredom, this is a prophetic rather than an immediate description. To start with she’s just a wife like any other. But this is no ordinary marriage. Their first child is born soon after and God tells Hosea to call him Jezreel, as a sign that God is about to punish the house of Jehu for the massacre at Jezreel. Now we can’t go into all the history here, but suffice it to say that this is a reference to the time when Ahab and Jezebel were rulers in Israel, during the time of Elijah and Elisha. God told Elijah to anoint Jehu as Ahab’s successor because he was going to punish Ahab and Jezebel and their followers for their great wickedness. Jehu in fact was given the task of carrying out this judgement on Ahab’s descendants, but in the end he went too far. He obviously enjoyed wielding power a bit too much, because he proceeded to go on a bloodbath, destroying not only Ahab’s son, but also Ahaziah, the king of the Southern Kingdom who was with him. All this happened in Jezreel in the north of the land. Then a day or so later he killed Ahaziah’s relatives that he came across on his way to Samaria, as well as seventy young children who were Ahab’s descendants, whose heads he had brought to him in baskets. It seems this Jehu wasn’t much better than Ahab had been. And despite the fact that some of what he did was at God’s direction, in the end he failed to turn his people back to the true worship of God. So this is like a German politician today being told to call his son Auschwitz or a South African calling their son Soweto. God’s recalling to their minds the wickedness of Jehu, saying that he’ll punish the house of Jehu, just as the house of Ahab had been punished. And he says "in that day I will break Israel’s bow in the valley of Jezreel." That is, Israel will no longer be a military power, but perhaps more significantly, she’ll no longer be the instrument by which God acts in the region.
Gomer then conceives again. This time Hosea isn’t mentioned as the father, so we can probably conclude that her daughter is born as a result of her adultery. Again God gives Hosea a name for the child. She’s to be called "Unloved" or "Not Pitied", because God is no longer going to show love to the people of Israel or forgive them. The thing that up until then has marked them out as a special people is to be removed. No longer will they be the people that God cares for. No longer will they enjoy God’s forgiveness and forbearance.
But worse is to come. Gomer again conceives by another man, and bears a second son. This time Hosea is told to call him "Not-My-People". Not only have they forfeited God’s love and compassion, but they’ve also lost the right to be called God’s people. God has disowned them. Imagine how the people hearing this for the first time must have felt. They must have been chilling words for them to hear mustn’t they? I mean, what were they if they weren’t God’s people? That was the only identity they had.
But to fully appreciate what’s going on, we need to experience it from Hosea’s point of view. [Imagine when Mark comes home from work, sits down - Trudi puts Henry in his arms: ’Here you look after him for a while, I’ve had him all day!’ I imagine Mark doesn’t mind at all. He looks at him and thinks ’This is my son. Isn’t God good.’ But] you can imagine that as Hosea held this boy in his arms, the opposite happened. The words must have formed themselves in his mind many times: "You’re not my child. You’re the result of my wife’s faithlessness. This isn’t my son." At that moment the great bitterness of his situation can’t have failed to bring home to him the profound sadness of God’s words to Israel: "You are not my people and I am not your God." Sadness not just for the people - but pre-eminently for God. God has nurtured Israel from the time of Abraham until this present time. He’s created a nation from nothing. He’s brought them out of slavery to a land flowing with milk and honey. He’s given them prophets and kings. And all the time they’ve been rejecting Him, until at last he’s come to the decision that he won’t persevere with them any longer, that it’s time for justice to be served. Without the personal experience of Hosea these might sound like cold, unfeeling words of judgement. But clearly they’re more. They’re the words of One who mourns over his faithless loved one. Who turns her away only in order to win her back again.
Well, how had Israel been unfaithful? Look at 2:5: "She said, "I will go after my lovers; they give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink." She wasn’t just being unfaithful; she was doing it for money, like a prostitute. Israel had been so corrupted by the pagan nations around them that they’d begun to accept the beliefs of those nations. They thought that the fertility of the soil depended on the local gods, on Baal and Asherah. The God of Israel was a newcomer. So if you were a farmer and you wanted the land to be fruitful, then you’d better get on side with the local gods. So they mixed up their worship, bringing in elements from the local religions, sacrificing to Baal and Asherah alongside their worship of the God of Israel. And God wasn’t pleased!
But if you think about it, what they were doing wasn’t so different from the way people today behave. We don’t worship pagan gods of course. We’re far too sophisticated for that. But who do we look to for success in our various enterprises? The world around us looks to the economists, the financial planners, the marketing people, the management gurus. Most people would say that God has no relevance to the natural world, and even more so to the business and commercial world. The theory of evolution has taken god out of the equation as far as the natural world is concerned and business studies have taken him out of the commercial world. Mind you when we suffer from a hurricane or a tsunami some people momentarily think about God, but mostly he gets ignored. And that sort of thinking filters down even to us, the minority who still think God has some relevance to life. And so we run the same danger that the Israelites did, of failing to give God the glory for our successes, for our prosperity, for the provision of our daily needs.
And even if we’re not in business, we can still fall into the trap of failing to give God the glory that’s his due. How? By relying on popular psychology perhaps? Looking to the latest popular fad. Perhaps looking to new age remedies for our ills. Or to scientific advancement? Thinking that science will have the answers to our problems. You’ll find Christian ministers who spend more time and energy on psychological counselling than on telling people the gospel. The question is, does the answer to people’s problems really lie in psychology or in the gospel. Now there’s nothing wrong with using the insights of science as psychologists do. There’s no direct parallel between the worship of Baal and the science of Psychology or any other science for that matter. There’s nothing demonic about science or technology, or the theory of evolution; there isn’t even anything evil about computers despite what some people may think. In fact these things can provide a great deal of help to us. The parallel between the people of Hosea’s day and us is seen when we start to attribute our mental health or our well-being, or our enjoyment of technological advances, purely to science, or economics without acknowledging that God is the source of all good things.
In fact look at the great irony and pathos of Israel’s sin. She thought she was going after lovers because of what she got from them, but in fact everything she had came from God. "8I am the one who gave her the corn, the wine, the olive-oil, and all the silver and gold that she used to worship Baal." Even the luxury items, the precious metals she had, came from God, and yet she used them for worshipping Baal. And it’s not that she doesn’t really know where they came from. From the start God had reminded them of his provision for all their needs, but they would never acknowledge it. The myths and rituals of the fertility gods were much more enticing than the simple assurance that everything they had came from God. People today would much rather think that their success comes from their hard work or business acumen, from their management skills, from their years of study, from their scientific advances, or even from their good fortune, rather than acknowledge that God provides us with every good thing.
So what is God going to do about it? Well he isn’t going to just sit back and take it. God’s love isn’t as sentimental as that of Bishop Myriel. His is a tough love. It’s a love that mixes mercy with justice. The first thing he’s going to do is to fence her in with thorn bushes, wall her in so she can’t find her way. He’ll cut off her external supports. The thorn bushes suggest a removal of the fertility of the land. Instead of bearing fruit it’ll sprout only thorn bushes. Later in the chapter we see that the land will become a wilderness, the vines will be overrun and wild beasts will roam the land at will. This is a foreshadowing of the exile, when the land will be left empty. So the annual and monthly festivals, all the religious celebrations, will stop.
But at the same time, as we’ll see in more detail in 2 weeks time, he says (2:14) "I am going to take her into the desert again; there I will win her back with words of love." He’s going to take her back to the place where their covenant was first made. Back to the desert, to the scene of the Exodus where Israel first became truly the people of God. And so they’ll return to Him and will again discover God’s love. And to those who were called "Not-My-People" He’ll say "You are my people" and they’ll answer "You are our God". (2:23)
This is a picture not only of the way God hurts when his people are unfaithful, but about the real power of his love. Here is a love that expects a response of single-minded faithfulness, and that won’t rest until it gets it. But the way God does it isn’t by coercion; it isn’t by forcing obedience. Yes, he removes his blessings from them so they’ll realise what they’ve lost, but then he acts to win them back.
How does he do that, in the end? We know, don’t we, that he does it by sending his Son to live among us. By revealing himself to us in Jesus Christ. By bringing us into a personal relationship with him through Jesus’ death and resurrection. At the end of ch1 there’s that interesting juxtaposition of God’s judgement yet his overriding mercy: "9Then the LORD said, ’Name him Lo-ammi, for you are not my people and I am not your God.’ 10Yet the number of the people of Israel shall be like the sand of the sea, which can be neither measured nor numbered; and in the place where it was said to them, ’You are not my people,’ it shall be said to them, ’Children of the living God.’" A time would come when God’s Spirit would be poured out on all people; when the number of those whose faithfulness is assured by the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit would be uncountable.
Hosea looked at his son and said "You are not my child". God looks at us and says "I will give up my only beloved Son to death on a cross so you who were once no people can now become my people. You who once had received no mercy can now receive mercy."
What’s our response to this kind of love going to be? Will we ignore him and rely on the gods of our age to give us all good things, or will we hear the message of Hosea and respond in gratitude and with single-minded faithfulness and ongoing trust; with a lifelong commitment to loving and serving this loving and faithful God? In the end the only adequate response is to acknowledge God’s provision with heartfelt gratitude. In the end, only single-minded faithfulness to a loving and faithful God will do.
For more sermons from this source go to home.vicnet.net.au/~sttheos/
