Hosea 3: “Bought Back”

August 24, 2008

 

Rescue video

 

We have been raised on happy endings.  We know how fairy tales end—“and they lived happily ever after.”  The good guys win and the heroes always live except for an occasional tear-jerker like “Old Yeller” (which still ends with a new puppy). We get upset when bad things happen to the ones we like.

 

This need we have for happy or at least heroic endings comes from our Heavenly Father. In the story of history, He can’t let Israel remain destroyed, He won’t let Satan win. Yes, Israel had to be punished for their idolatry. Yes, they had to completely stop worshipping idols and surrender to the will of God.  His nature demands exclusivity. But, “just how exclusive?” you ask.

 

“I will remove the names of the Baals from her lips; no longer will their names be invoked” (Hosea 2:17), God answers. So completely must the nation of Israel stop worshipping Baal that to even say its name out loud was prohibited. As Baal’s name disappeared from their lips, it would pass from their minds, their hearts, and its influence would end with its complete extermination.  How badly does God hate sin?  God hates sin so badly that to even consider doing something against God’s will should be such a horrific thought that we would immediately fall to the ground and cry out for God’s intervention.  Do you remember how God had Moses destroy the golden calf?   “He took the calf they had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it” (Exodus 32:20). No sign or piece of the calf was to remain; Israel was never to go back into idolatry again.

 

True repentance means really dealing with our sin.  It goes so far beyond saying we are sorry that words fail. God wants to totally destroy our propensity even to want something other than His best for our lives. We must come to the point where the sins that once dominated our lives are not even the slightest of temptations any longer. That kind of dealing with our sin comes not from the prohibitions of the law and not from self- or external discipline; it comes from the work of the Living God, the Holy Spirit, at work in our lives. That is the true nature of truly mutual and exclusive love—God Himself living in us. 

 

To deal with sin at this level truly is beyond our abilities. Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” Or, if you are old and were raised on the King James Version, you might remember this verse this way: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” We don’t like to think that any hint of evil lives in Christians.  That is one reason newer translations of the Bible often avoid its use in reference to us. We lie to ourselves because it is our nature, the nature with which we were born.  It takes God years of enticing, alluring us into the desert and speaking tenderly to us before we rid ourselves of the “bentness” of our sin nature.  That is why the Old Testament covers such a long period of time—trying harder just doesn’t work.  Knowing what we should do, i.e., the law, only shows us how far from being like God we truly are. It takes yielding control of our lives to the active work of the Holy Spirit indwelling us to produce a bountiful harvest of the fruit of the Spirit to the point that Galatians 5:22-24 really is a description of who we are.

 

“The LORD said to me [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, though they turn to other gods and love the sacred raisin cakes." So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and about a homer and a lethek of barley.  Then I told her, "You are to live with me many days; you must not be a prostitute or be intimate with any man, and I will live with you" (Hosea 3:1-3).

 

God told Hosea to go and rescue Gomer from the arms of another lover. I think we’ve heard enough stories in our lives to imagine how a normal person feels when they “discover” their loved one in the arms of another “lover.”  Hearing is bad enough; seeing is overwhelming and endless. Here, God commands Hosea to go and search out the one he married knowing she was a prostitute, knowing he would find her in the arms of another man, and bring her back home to live with him for the rest of their lives, to live again as husband and wife. This “lover” gladly “sold her back” to Hosea.  Is that a description of love to you?

 

The problem is that “and they lived happily ever after” aren’t the next words.  Instead we find: “For the Israelites will live many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or sacred stones, without ephod or idol. Afterward the Israelites will return and seek the LORD their God and David their king. They will come trembling to the LORD and to his blessings in the last days” (Hosea 3:4-5).

 

You see in the promise of Hosea 2:16, "In that day," declares the LORD, "you will call me 'my husband'; you will no longer call me 'my master '” the “that day” follows only after a very long period of cleansing. Gomer’s nature had to change.  She had to stop going “after my lovers, who give me my food and my water, my wool and my linen, my oil and my drink'” (2:5) and acknowledged that God “was the one who gave her the grain, the new wine and oil, who lavished on her the silver and gold” (2:8). It would require Israel being without king or prince—the nation itself would endure but the monarchy would disappear. It would require Israel being without sacrifice or sacred stones—her religious system and structure. It would require Israel being without ephod or idol—the idolatry had to end and the covenant would have to change. It would not happen until after Jesus came. “His blessings” come only “in the last days” (3:5).

 

We want resolution to come in ½-hour or an hour if it is on TV or in less than two hours if it on the big screen. That’s the way our babysitter has taught us. Thousands of years don’t compute for us; it is beyond our comprehension.  A god who sees history from that perspective is too big and impersonal for us.

 

Oh, my friends, oh if we can only learn to love Him on His terms and not our own.  If we can only learn to truly trust Him and wait on Him for our deliverance, look what He promises us:

 

18  In that day I will make a covenant for them
       with the beasts of the field and the birds of the air
       and the creatures that move along the ground.
       Bow and sword and battle
       I will abolish from the land,
       so that all may lie down in safety.

 19 I will betroth you to me forever;
       I will betroth you in righteousness and justice,
       in love and compassion.

 20 I will betroth you in faithfulness,
       and you will acknowledge the LORD.

 21 "In that day I will respond,"
       declares the LORD—
       "I will respond to the skies,
       and they will respond to the earth;

 22 and the earth will respond to the grain,
       the new wine and oil,
       and they will respond to Jezreel.

 23 I will plant her for myself in the land;
       I will show my love to the one I called 'Not my loved one.'
       I will say to those called 'Not my people,' 'You are my people';
       and they will say, 'You are my God.' "

 

God promises us the “mother of all happy endings.”  The new covenant promised in Jeremiah 31 became a reality for us on the day of Pentecost recorded in Acts 2, but “the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the creatures that move along the ground” remain “subject to bondage” waiting to be “brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (Romans 8:19-21). Every one of us continue to be touched by the “bow and sword and battle.”  Their abolition seems so far away.  Can every Christian everywhere say they have been betrothed “in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion…in faithfulness?”

God wants to “plant” each of us “in the land” (2:23), as God’s sign-children, to share His “happily ever after” with all of the “not loved” and “not my people” of this world. God is waiting for us to acknowledge Him before governors and kings (Matthew 10:18; Mark 13:9; Luke 21:12). God is waiting for us to carry the gospel of the kingdom to the whole world so that every person has a chance to make up his or her own mind before the end of time comes (Matthew 24:14). God’s “happily ever after” is written in the Heavens and a New Earth responds (Hosea 2:21-22).

 

God is giving us time to get it right.  God is giving us time to learn.  God is giving us time to respond.  God is giving us time to truly repent.