Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

How does Hosea act out God’s covenant love for his people?

He pursues his wife, to get her back.

God says, “Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisins” (Hos 3.1).

One commentator says, “They turn to other gods and love—what do they love?—raisin cakes! These were probably used in Canaanite rituals. They show just how carnal and unworthy is Israel’s outlook” (New Bible Commentary, 769).

So Hosea finds his wife and buys her back (Hos 3.2). Apparently she has sold herself into slavery, perhaps to get enough food and shelter to survive. Like the prodigal son, she has learned that a life of licentiousness is one not of freedom. She is not in an attractive state, but her husband pays the redemption price.

She is now technically and legally his slave. The penalty for adultery is death, and he could take her to the civil authorities for execution, but he does not choose that route. (That calls to mind the thinking of Joseph, “a just man,” about Mary in Mt 1.19.) He tells her that she is to live under his support and without immorality, but also apparently without marital relations, for a period of time (Ho 3.3). This is to illustrate the fact that Israel will be exiled, without a king, for “many days” (Hos 3.4).

But the time will come when Israel will seek to return to David her king (Ho 3.5). In Hosea’s time David was long dead; we know that the one she will seek is David’s greater Son, the Lord Jesus, the Christ (Ac 2.29-36).

One commentator notes,

The pain was just a step along the way of God’s efforts, not to destroy, but to get his people to respond to his love. … The pain was caused by their sin but was motivated by God’s loving desire to restore their original relationship of love and obedience. The pain is designed not to make believers run away from God but back to him (Tyndale Concise Bible Commentary, 323).

That day has not yet fully come. Israel today remains resistant to the rule of its Messiah, though many individuals from that nation have recognized and believed in him. But in the meantime, as Paul has noted, God has used this ongoing resistance to bring into his kingdom all nations of the world:

Now if their trespass means riches for the world, and if their failure means riches for the Gentiles, how much more will their full inclusion mean! (Ro 11.12).

This is about more than Hosea, and it’s about more than Israel.

It’s about more than “the heart of Gomer, who cannot remain faithful, and the heart of Hosea, who cannot abandon his commitment” (Bible Reader’s Companion, 523).

It’s about God, and it’s about us.

The chastisement of God’s people took place within the context of God’s unchanging commitment. His goal through discipline was his people’s perfection, never his people’s eternal destruction. Through his unfailing love, God desired to inspire a similar love in his people. Hosea emphasized that the essence of God’s kingdom was a relationship of response to God’s love (Tyndale Concise Bible Commentary, 322).

We have a heavenly Husband, who loves us as no other ever has or ever will. We need to leave our trivial paper gods and serve Him with our whole hearts.

He is our Husband. Let us love Him.

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash

Part 1 | Part 2

Hosea’s experience with his wife Gomer is not just an ancient story with an obvious moral: marry someone with the character to be loyal. This is a story that began because God commanded it, with a command contrary to all common sense: “Marry a woman who will not be faithful” (Hos 1.2).

Unlike pretty much everyone else in the story, Hosea does what God tells him to—thereby condemning himself to a miserable marital relationship.

Why would God command such a thing?

God exercises flawless teaching technique, and he often uses educational methods that have proven over centuries to be highly effective. For example, he has Ezekiel repeatedly act out scenes for the exiled Jews in Babylon (Ezk 4.1-8, 9-17; 5.1-4; 12.3-7, 17-20). Here he’s going to use a case study, implemented experientially, so its lessons will hit close to home and be both highly impactful and long remembered.

Hosea is going to be a character, the lead character, in a morality play. And, astonishingly, he’s going to play the part of God, at God’s request. A command performance, if you will. What actor would take on such a role, and at such real personal sacrifice?

Hosea’s marriage represents God’s marital relationship with Israel. He entered into a covenant with them at Sinai, a covenant most thoroughly expressed in the book of Deuteronomy, which Moses wrote down and delivered to the people just before they entered into the land that God had promised to them. He had made promises to them, great and precious promises, and they had responded with a corporate shout, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do!” (Ex 19.8). But from almost that very day the people had turned away and demonstrated a shallow view of the marriage and a lackadaisical commitment to it.

Now, centuries later, their pattern of infidelity has been consistent. Through the shocking infidelity of Gomer, Hosea’s wife, God illustrates the many ways his people have broken his heart.

Let me count the ways.

• She has worshiped other gods (Hos 2.8, 13), which God calls “other lovers.” Idolatry, seen clearly, is spiritual adultery, even prostitution (Ezk 16.33). From its first days as a nation under Jeroboam I, the northern kingdom of Israel had worshiped at shrines—golden calves—in Bethel and Dan (the southern and northern regions of their land) (1K 12.25-33). King Ahab married the Canaanite princess Jezebel and then built a shrine to Baal in Samaria (1K 16.29-33). The astonishing thing is that Baal, the Canaanite god, was the supposed protector and prosperer of the Canaanites, whom Joshua’s army had defeated in battle. How does it make sense to worship the gods of the people you’ve just defeated?! This is not only faithless, but it’s just, well, stupid.

• She has failed in her obligation to know the Law and its Lord. She is not practicing the attributes of God—truthfulness, faithfulness, kindness (Hos 4.1). She is not loving her neighbor. She has no interest in knowing what the Law teaches about God, let alone practicing it in daily life. She has rejected the Covenant.

• She is turning to other champions—her own military leaders, and alliances with other nations such as Assyria and Egypt—for her strength and security (Hos 1.7).

• She is practicing social Darwinism, with the powerful and connected taking advantage of—abusing—the weak, the poor. “There is swearing, lying, murder, stealing, and committing adultery; they break all bounds, and bloodshed follows bloodshed” (Hos 4.2).

So they have broken, and continue to break, the two great commandments: to love God, and to love your neighbor. Over centuries. Despite national commitment and promise to treasure the special relationship that God has granted them.

How does God respond to this?

He speaks with anticipation of the day when he will woo her back to himself (Hos 2.14-23), when his unfaithful wife will call him “my husband” and not just “my lord” (Hos 2.16). He speaks of “steadfast covenant love” (hesed) in his relationship with her (Hos 2.19). He still loves her and wants her back.

And as we shall see, Hosea will act out that role perfectly.

Part 4

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Part 1

Chapters 1 and 2 of Hosea tell us about his marriage relationship, which is, to say the least, pathological. God tells Hosea, “Go and marry a woman of promiscuity, and have children of promiscuity” (Hos 1.2).

Now, right away we have an interpretational problem. Did God tell Hosea to marry a prostitute? The difficulty we have with that prospect has led to a host of suggested interpretations—

• Some have suggested that the command was not literal. John Calvin and Carl Friedrich Keil, both noted commentators, hold this view. Perhaps she was an idol worshiper; God frequently calls idol worship spiritual adultery. But this still seems objectionable; why would a prophet of God marry an idol worshiper?
• Perhaps she wasn’t promiscuous before they married but became promiscuous later. The New Bible Commentary makes this suggestion, as do others.
• But maybe the text means what it says; she was promiscuous, even a prostitute, before her marriage. This is the view of the New American Commentary and many others. It certainly illustrated Israel’s history accurately; she was sinful when God executed His covenant with her. And there was no lack of such women in Israel (Hos 4.14). Perhaps she was a Baal cult prostitute, a pagan practice designed to encourage the gods to grant the land fertility. It was against the Mosaic Law for priests to marry any woman who was not a virgin, but there’s no indication that Hosea was a priest.

I would suggest that attempts to soften the situation miss the point. As will become clear, Gomer’s sin represents Israel’s sin and by extension our own, which is heinous, brutal, and sociopathic. We were sinners when God found us, and that’s the whole point!

In the normal course of events, this marriage yields children, beginning in the very next verse.

The first child is a boy. God instructs Hosea to name him Jezreel, for the valley where Jehu had judged Ahab’s idolatrous line in the past (2K 10.1-11) and where God will carry out judgment (Hos 1.3-5).

The second child is a girl, whom God instructs Hosea to name Lo-Ruhamah, or “no mercy.” This is a clear prophecy of the coming judgment; God is no longer extending mercy to his unfaithful wife. In his paraphrase of the passage, Eugene Peterson renders God’s statement as “I’m fed up with Israel.”

This is astonishing. God is longsuffering, patient. Can the patience of an infinite God be exhausted? Has he broken his covenant promises to Abraham? to David?

No, he hasn’t. In the next sentence (Hos 1.7) he contrasts his judgment on Israel, the Northern Kingdom, with his mercy toward Judah, the Southern Kingdom. Judah is where the sons of David rule—and while they’re a mixed bunch in terms of their obedience to God, his mercy continues there. For now.

Hosea’s wife has one more child, a son. Again God himself names the boy: Lo-Ammi, or “Not my people.” I don’t know, maybe Hosea wasn’t confident of the boy’s paternity?

And with this name, God makes explicit what was only implied by the daughter’s name: Israel is no longer God’s people; the covenant is reversed.

Now it’s horrific.

But again, in the very next sentence God assures these idolaters that the reversal, the judgment, is only temporary:

¹⁰ Yet the number of the children of Israel shall be like the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured or 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.” ¹¹ And the children of Judah and the children of Israel shall be gathered together, and they shall appoint for themselves one head. And they shall go up from the land, for great shall be the day of Jezreel (Hos 1.10-11).

Verse 10 in particular should sound familiar to us, as it undoubtedly did to Israel. This is the wording of the Abrahamic Covenant itself (Ge 22.17)—which was unconditional. God’s patience is not in fact exhausted.

In the end, God is faithful, even when his people are not.

In the next chapter Hosea is going to make explicit the spiritual lessons of his troubled marriage.

More on that next time.

Part 3 | Part 4

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In the previous series we’ve looked at one of the facets, or metaphors, of our relationship with God: he is our Father. It seems appropriate now to turn to another metaphor, that of husband.

This relationship is commonly acknowledged among Christians, but there is surprisingly little biblical information about it. I suppose most people think first of Ephesians 5.22-33, where husbands are instructed to love their wives in the same way that Christ loves the church. This passage is the text for the pastor’s charge in pretty much every wedding ever performed. I’ve been convinced by a colleague, however, that this passage is commonly misinterpreted. Dr. Gary Reimers, a longtime friend and professor at BJU Seminary, has observed that the husbands are instructed “to love their wives as their own bodies” (Ep 5.28)—and since this same epistle notes that the church is Christ’s body (Ep 1.22-23), then to love “as their own bodies” is to love like Christ (Ep 5.25). So I don’t view this passage as primarily presenting Christ under the metaphor of husband.

That leaves just two other New Testament passages that speak of Christ having a bride. The more well-known of those, I suppose, is Revelation 21, which speaks of “the bride, the Lamb’s wife” (Re 21.9). Earlier John has heard an announcement of the pending “marriage of the Lamb” (Re 19.7), at which his wife is dressed in “fine linen [which] is the righteousness of the saints” (Re 19.8). Now he sees “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Re 21.2). But here the bride is said to be not the church, but the New Jerusalem, which I would say includes the church but is more than that.

The other passage, less well known, is 2Corinthians 11.2, where Paul tells the Corinthian church that he has “espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ.” But that stops short of saying that the universal church is the bride of Christ, although I think it’s safe to assume that by extension from the passage.

So I think there’s little to no clear biblical evidence for the statement that “the church is the bride of Christ.”

But in the Hebrew Scriptures God regularly describes himself as the husband of his people. And since the Old Testament saints will be in the New Jerusalem as certainly as we, I think we can legitimately apply what God says there to our relationship with him as children of Abraham by faith (Ga 3.7).

Several OT passages speak to this relationship. Isaiah 54.5 mentions it, and Ezekiel 16 speaks very directly of Israel’s idolatry as sin against God her husband. But I suppose that the most concentrated and well-developed description of this relationship is in the prophecy of Hosea.

Hosea writes during the reign of Jeroboam II (Hos 1.1), in the waning days of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. You can read about the culture of Israel at this time in 2Kings 17. It’s not a pretty picture. One commentator writes, “This is a period when Israel is prosperous, proud and pagan—and thoughts of God and judgment seems ridiculous.”[1] Hosea writes to explain the reasons for the Assyrian judgment (e.g. Hos 12.8) and, perhaps surprisingly, to give hope for the future (e.g. Hos 13.14; 14.4-9).

Much of Hosea’s prophecy follows the standard outline of the Old Testament prophets:

• Israel’s sin (chapters 4-7)
• Coming judgment (chapters 8-10)
• Future restoration (chapters 11-14)

But the book begins with an illustration from Hosea’s marriage, a metaphor for God’s relationship with his people. Hosea’s marriage is not typical (!), but it tells us much about our relationship to God as our Husband. 1Peter 2.10 applies the names of Hosea’s children to the church, as does Paul in Romans 9.22-26 (note “not from the Jews only, but also from the Gentiles,” Ro 9.24).

So let’s glean what we can from this remarkable story of a failed and restored relationship.

More next time.

[1] Andrew Knowles, The Bible Guide (Minneapolis: Augsburg), 353.

Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

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