Hosea and Free Love

Week of Monday, June 10, 2002

When you enter the world of the Old Testament prophets you enter the world of the extravagant and the bizarre. Think about Jeremiah thrown down into a well, of Daniel's dream interpretations, or of Ezekiel's exotic visions of wheels within wheels and a valley strewn with human bones. But for sheer shock value you would be hard pressed to do better than Hosea, whom God commands to marry a whore named Gomer. His entire prophecy compares God's love for Israel to the raw and stormy emotions of a jilted, aggrieved and passionate lover, who despite his justified anger at the unfaithfulness of His woman simply cannot help Himself because He loves her so much.

The bulk of Hosea, chapters 4–14, seesaws back and forth between a description of Israel's sin, God's angry judgment, and His irrepressible love. The litany of degradation that Hosea describes is comprehensive, and no one escapes his indictments. Prophets, priests, kings and everyday people are engulfed by their sin, they “relish wickedness.” Baal worship, unsavory political alliances, greed, religious fakery, and moral debauchery characterize the state of the nation. Yahweh, Hosea warns, responds to all of this like a savage lion or a bear robbed of its cubs (5:14; 13:8). He has withdrawn from them, will turn away from them (5:6), and no longer extend His love and forgiveness (1:4; 9:15). The gig is up for Israel. Or is it?

What we learn from Hosea is that God's word of judgment to Israel, and to us, is a next-to-the-last word; it is not His last word. To communicate this Yahweh instructs Hosea to enact a living parable or a symbolic act. The first three chapters of Hosea describe this remarkable symbolic act, the point of which is simple but powerful: “Go, love the harlot Gomer; love her just as the Lord loves the Israelites even though they turn to other gods” (3:1). Sprinkled throughout the many warnings of judgment in Hosea we find God's confessions of His unconditional love for Israel. He is a spurned lover who cannot help Himself and who wears His heart on His sleeve.

Yes, Israel had prostituted herself in almost every way imaginable—religiously, politically, economically, and so on. But Yahweh still loved her. He himself longed to woo and allure her, to “speak tenderly to her,” and to “show my love.” Three times he still promises to “betroth Israel to me forever.” In a beautiful play on words the Hebrew reads, literally, “I will show my love to the one called ‘Not my loved one'”(2:14–23). A few chapters later we read how Yahweh longs to heal Israel, bind up her wounds, restore her, to come to her like the winter rains after a hot, dry summer (6:1–3). Then, in exasperation, He fairly well blurts out some of the most tender and beautiful words of Scripture:

How can I give you up, Ephraim?
        How can I hand you over, Israel?
How can I treat you like Admah?
        How can I make you like Zeboiim?¹
My heart is changed within me;
        all my compassion is aroused.
I will not carry out my fierce anger,
        nor devastate Ephraim again.
For I am God, and not man—
        the Holy One among you.
        I will not come in wrath. (11:8–9)

First, Hosea reminds me that what finally separates me from God is not so much my sin but my refusal to accept His forgiveness. Hosea, and my life in various ways, might tell a recurring story of weakness, sin, failure and betrayal—much like many characters in the Biblical drama such as Moses, David, Jonah, Peter, and so on—but the real story is that God always longed to “heal their waywardness and love them freely” (14:4). Further, there is a significant difference between weakness, sin and failure, on the one hand, and active hostility, insolence and stubbornness, which is how Hosea describes Israel (5:5, 7:10, 9:7). “He does not return” (7:10) but instead “refused to repent.” They were “determined to turn from me” (11:5, 7). The more Yahweh called to them the further away Israel wandered (11:2). They made the worst mistake anyone can make when they “turned from their helper” (13:9). Israel did not merely sin; they “loved their shameful ways” (4:17) and “relished their wickedness” (4:8). So, the problem was never God's reluctance to forgive but Israel's refusal to be loved.

The NT parallel here, I think, is the notion of forgiveness in God's kingdom. Jesus says that we must forgive our neighbor seven times seventy, meaning forgiving a person who is not too very serious about changing. This gives us an idea of God's metric in offering forgiveness—it is lavish to say the least. But somehow it can be more difficult to receive such lavish forgiveness than to give it. Despite a life of chronic sin and squander, the Prodigal Son had the sense to return to the Father and accept His love. And the Father? Luke says that he “ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him” (Luke 15:20). Hosea could have written that.

Similarly, Hosea reminds us that God's grace, mercy and forgiveness far outweigh our worst sin(s). The litany of Israel's sins that Hosea details is standard fare for the prophets, but it is no less egregious for that reason. They committed “the vilest adultery” (1:2). Still, despite all that, Yahweh always “longed to redeem them” (7:13). In the New Testament the Apostle Paul puts it more boldly still when he affirms that where my sin abounds, God's grace abounds all the more (Romans 5:20). In most of our human relationships—parents, employer, spouse or friend—this is almost never true. We resort to shaming and guilt manipulation. Rather than short memories that forgive and forget we somehow savor remembering sin and failure. But not Yahweh. His mercy triumphs over judgment (James 2:13).

Finally, Hosea prescribes just what it is that Israel must do to enjoy this free love and forgiveness, and the antidote is remarkable. In the last chapter we read, “Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God. Your sins have been your downfall! Take words with you and return to the Lord” (14:1–2). Take words?! Yes, simply words. Not promises never to fail again, not legalistic acts of righteousness, not grandiose resolutions or religious rituals. The New Testament parallel here is a single word, confession, and Hosea captures if perfectly: “Say to him: ‘Forgive all our sins and receive us graciously, that we may offer the fruit of our lips'” (14:2). Compare this to 1 John 1:9 and you get the message: “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” The only thing Israel needed to do, says Hosea, was to “admit their guilt” (5:15), to agree with God's assessment of their sin, repent, and bask in His freely offered love that had never left them in the first place.

The remarkable thing about Hosea is not so much that his marriage to the whore Gomer symbolizes some exceptional incident. No, quite the opposite. His extravagant act is a reminder of God's normal, everyday love and of how He longs to love us freely, unconditionally, and fully, not so much in spite of our sins but even with all our sins. We only have to accept it. I need not clean up my act and then turn to Yahweh. No, in the words of the great revival hymn, I come to Him “just as I am” in order to find healing and wholeness. No wonder, then, that Paul prays for the Ephesians, and we do well to pray for ourselves, that we might by some miracle of grace “grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:18).²