Hosea 2 & 3: The Nature of God & Rejection

August 17, 2008

 

Being made in God’s image means we are social beings with both the capacity to give love and the need to be loved in return. Even the simple fear of being rejected in important social relationships can cause us to yield to peer pressure and comply with the demands of others.  “Abraham Maslow and other theorists have suggested that the need for love and belongingness is a fundamental human motivation…[and] that simple contact or social interaction with others is not enough to fulfill this need. Instead, people have a strong motivational drive to form and maintain caring interpersonal relationships. People need both stable relationships and satisfying interactions with the people in those relationships. If either of these two ingredients is missing, people will begin to feel lonely and unhappy…In fact, the majority of human anxieties appear to reflect concerns over social exclusion” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_rejection).

 

If this is true, I wonder what kind of life the two children born to Hosea and Gomer called “Not Loved” and “Not My People” had growing up. Was God deliberately creating antisocial poster children? Does God think like the dad in the Johnny Cash song, “A Boy Named Sue”? (The words are printed below.) It seems so unfair to call an innocent child such a name and then send them out into this cruel world to constantly remind a nation that their sins would soon separate them from God’s love and presence and lead them into captivity. It seems more okay for God to challenge an adult and call him a prophet. But to do this to an innocent child seems wrong. At the same time, I wonder what kind of life the children born to Gomer before she married Hosea, children born outside of any marital relationship in a nation that stoned prostitutes and rejected their children, could have had. I can’t blame God for Gomer’s children’s problems.

 

If we continue reading, we can get even more confused: "Yet the Israelites will be like the sand on the seashore, which cannot be measured or counted. In the place where it was said to them, 'You are not my people,' they will be called 'sons of the living God.' The people of Judah and the people of Israel will be reunited, and they will appoint one leader and will come up out of the land, for great will be the day of Jezreel” (1:10-11).

 

This part of God’s nature troubles me.  In one set of verses, He is pronouncing judgment on wickedness, rejecting His chosen people, and using the pagan nation that introduced the sins of Baal idolatry to His chosen people as the instrument of their destruction.  In the very next breath He is promising something far greater than anyone in Israel could have conceived or asked for.

 

He continues His paradoxical ways: God tells these same two children, “Not Loved” and “Not My People” to “say of your brothers, 'My people,' and of your sisters, 'My loved one'” (2:1). This verse means God is using these children to reach out to the children born outside of wedlock to Gomer and offer them one last chance to receive God’s love and approval.

 

Then in the next set of verses God is telling “Not Loved” and “Not My People” to "Rebuke your mother, rebuke her, for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband. Let her remove the adulterous look from her face the unfaithfulness from between her breasts. Otherwise I will strip her naked make her as bare as on the day she was born; I will make her like a desert, turn her into a parched land, and slay her with thirst. I will not show my love to her children, because they are the children of adultery” (2:2-4).  Is God schizophrenic? Is He confused?  Is He just an angry father and husband shouting the first angry words that come to His mind? What is God really saying?

 

Let’s go back and work through these verses more slowly. First, we must accept that every player in this story represents someone else.  Gomer represents the unfaithful nation of Israel.  Her sexual sins are representative of the current spiritual sins of the nation of Israel.  In Abraham’s day, God chose Israel and entered into a mutual covenantal relationship. This relationship was similar to a marriage in that it was to be based on mutual love and be exclusive (Israel was to have no other gods except Yahweh) in nature. God would provide everything Israel needed to prosper. But by Hosea’s day, Israel had come to attribute their current state of prosperity to Baal and worshipped his idols to maintain their prosperity. God compared Gomer’s running after illicit lovers to Israel’s running after idols: what sexual adultery and fornication did to a marriage idolatry did to Israel’s covenant relationship with God.

 

The children born to Gomer outside of and before her marriage to Hosea represent individual people in the nation of Israel.  The corporate sins of the nation of Israel would lead to their captivity under the Assyrians, but individual Israelites, like these individual children conceived in Gomer’s sinful state, could still determine their individual destinies. That is why the three “sign-children” born to Hosea and Gomer are told to speak to their brothers and sisters.  Jezreel, Lo-Ruhamah, and Lo-Ammi are God’s voice offering one last chance to everyone they meet. Every time one of them passed an individual Israelite God was offering that Israelite one last chance to repent.  That is why God commanded them to speak words of hope to their brothers and sisters.

 

Looking at their lives from that perspective gives me an even greater appreciation for God and His love.  These three children were born to offer hope. None of us want to go through hard times or to suffer, but the stories of our lives, from God’s perspective for sure and hopefully from our God-inspired perspective, are meant to be messages of hope to our friends and those we meet along the way. Maybe God will use what we have gone through to save someone we love a lot of wasted time and days of fearful wondering. While Hosea, representing God and His special brand of sacrificial love, and Gomer are presenting the big picture, their children are delivering individual messages of hope.  While it is important for all of us to see the big picture of what God is doing in our world, sometimes knowing He takes time to speak to us individually means even more.  I could greatly love God for choosing my children to bring salvation to as many people as possible before His coming day of wrath.  As a matter of fact, I can think of no greater gift than knowing that all of our children are being used of God in this way. 

 

Hosea 2:7-8 give us a second important clue into God’s character. “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.' She has not acknowledged that I was the one who gave her the grain, the new wine and oil, who lavished on her the silver and gold—which they used for Baal.”

 

When people are in trouble and nothing else has worked, they sometimes are willing to “try” God. It is not an act of faith or love.  It is not an act of true repentance or a statement of their willingness to serve God. They simply have found nothing else works and are now willing to see if God will do what they want done.  These verses tell us how God views these efforts. What the nation of Israel wanted above all else was continued prosperity and ease.  Worshipping Baal seemed to work so everyone had as many Baal idols as they had hopes or problems—kind of like superstitions or good luck charms. They wore them on their clothes or bodies, placed them by their fields and in their homes—kind of like putting an icon on the dashboard hoping that statue will keep you from a wreck. Now that God had withdrawn His blessing and things were going bad, the nation of Israel wouldn’t admit God had been the source of their prosperity. Still, if He would prosper them, they would appear to return to Him and go through the motions. However, if prosperity followed, they would go back to spending their wealth however they wanted. It is kind of like the person who loses his or her job and “makes a deal with God.”  If God blesses them, instead of gratefully acknowledging His work and using the money God provided to build His kingdom on earth, they turn right around and use the money to buy boats, fancy cars, bigger homes, vacations, and all the things that take them away from church.  Now their weekends are full, they drift away from God again, and their hearts remain empty.

 

This way of living never works. Nothing except true repentance works. God, however, is still faithful; He continues to be true to His nature. The statement, “I shall not be yours” applied only to Hosea’s generation, the generation God is punishing for rejecting His covenant. And, though He may forsake a disobedient generation, he remains true to his promise. Hosea, through God, speaks a message of hope in a manner reminiscent of the words He first spoke to Abraham in Genesis 22:17: “I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore.”

 

There is much more to say about the way God responds to true repentance.  There is just as much to say about how he judges.  That is why we must continue this message next week. But with what we have already shared, I hope you understand how God works in our lives a little better. So many things don’t make sense.  They appear at first to be hard and arbitrary.  We ask so many questions and seem to get so few answers. We often feel rejected, hurt, and confused. We, like the boy named Sue, go looking for “Dad” wanting to punish him for what he has done to us. It is true that God made us social people and He doesn’t talk to us in a flesh-to-flesh way. So we tell bargain with Him and tell Him, “If You will just talk to me individually, if You will explain things to me or spend some time with me, my hurt and rejection will go away.” We promise we will respond to Him and do anything He says if He will just talk to us, show us where He is at in all of this, and explain what is going on in our lives.

 

Remember the rich ruler who in Luke 18 asked Jesus, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” When Jesus talked with Him kindly and told him, “You still lack one thing,” “he became very sad, because he was a man of great wealth” (Luke 18:18-25).

 

Every excuse is just an excuse.  The bottom line is that we are born in sin, born selfish, and self-centered. We always believe we know what is best for us. We want out of life what we want and when things don’t go our way, we feel rejected, lonely, and sad.  God, on the other hand, wants us to learn sacrificial love and gives us two choices: remain self-centered and continue to be the master of our destiny or surrender control of our lives to Him. Our self-centered ways of responding to life don’t work. When that person doesn’t have the friends or social life he or she wants, rejection and loneliness result.  When he doesn’t get the job he wants, he questions the God who gifted or handicapped him, however he views it.  When things go bad or she faces difficult days, she withdraws from God and everyone else and forges on alone.  God says, “I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her” (Hosea 2:14).

 

Do you see the difficulty? When God leads us into the desert, that means we have to give up the life we once knew.  Most of us don’t want to go there.  It doesn’t matter that once we are there, He promises to speak tenderly to us.  We don’t want to go into the desert. But you know, that is why Camp E.C.C.O. works—kids leave the world they know for a simpler place where they hear God speak tenderly—their needs are met, and they are ready to listen.  In the desert, we are dependent on God for our survival and we listen, finally. The “noise,” however you experience it, of everyday life keeps us from hearing God’s voice.  But when our hearts and lives are truly quiet we finally hear what he has been speaking all along.

 

Still, we have a choice once we do hear.  Will we be utilitarian in our faith—meaning, “What have I got to lose?  I’ve tried everything else and it hasn’t worked.”  How would you like for that to be your marriage proposal—“I’ve asked everyone else I’ve met and you are the only one left, the only one dumb enough to say “yes” so let’s get married” ?

 

God is willing to allure us and speak tenderly to us. But He demands our hearts, our minds, our souls, and our strength. Is that a marriage you are willing to enter into? Can you say, “I do” ?

 

 

 

 "A Boy Named Sue" by Johnny Cash

My daddy left home when I was three
And he didn't leave much to ma and me
Just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze.
Now, I don't blame him cause he run and hid
But the meanest thing that he ever did
Was before he left, he went and named me "Sue."

Well, he must o' thought that is quite a joke
And it got a lot of laughs from a' lots of folk,
It seems I had to fight my whole life through.
Some gal would giggle and I'd get red
And some guy'd laugh and I'd bust his head,
I tell ya, life ain't easy for a boy named "Sue."

Well, I grew up quick and I grew up mean,
My fist got hard and my wits got keen,
I'd roam from town to town to hide my shame.
But I made a vow to the moon and stars
That I'd search the honky-tonks and bars
And kill that man who gave me that awful name.

Well, it was Gatlinburg in mid-July
And I just hit town and my throat was dry,
I thought I'd stop and have myself a brew.
At an old saloon on a street of mud,
There at a table, dealing stud,
Sat the dirty, mangy dog that named me "Sue."

Well, I knew that snake was my own sweet dad
From a worn-out picture that my mother'd had,
And I knew that scar on his cheek and his evil eye.
He was big and bent and gray and old,
And I looked at him and my blood ran cold
And I said: "My name is 'Sue!' How do you do!
Now your gonna die!!"

Well, I hit him hard right between the eyes
And he went down, but to my surprise,
He come up with a knife and cut off a piece of my ear.
But I busted a chair right across his teeth
And we crashed through the wall and into the street
Kicking and a' gouging in the mud and the blood and the beer.

I tell ya, I've fought tougher men
But I really can't remember when,
He kicked like a mule and he bit like a crocodile.
I heard him laugh and then I heard him cuss,
He went for his gun and I pulled mine first,
He stood there lookin' at me and I saw him smile.

And he said: "Son, this world is rough
And if a man's gonna make it, he's gotta be tough
And I knew I wouldn't be there to help ya along.
So I give ya that name and I said goodbye
I knew you'd have to get tough or die
And it's the name that helped to make you strong."

He said: "Now you just fought one hell of a fight
And I know you hate me, and you got the right
To kill me now, and I wouldn't blame you if you do.
But ya ought to thank me, before I die,
For the gravel in ya guts and the spit in ya eye
Cause I'm the son-of-a-bitch that named you "Sue.'"

I got all choked up and I threw down my gun
And I called him my pa, and he called me his son,
And I came away with a different point of view.
And I think about him, now and then,
Every time I try and every time I win,
And if I ever have a son, I think I'm gonna name him
Bill or George! Anything but Sue! I still hate that name!