Did Hosea Love Her? (Hosea Study #1)
Did Hosea love her?
Well with all the Redeeming Love hullabaloo, I’m momentarily stepping out of 1 John and into Hosea. (If you are unaware of what I’m talking about, I’ll link my short video about it in the comments)
Something I didn’t articulate in the video is a point I think it’s vital we don’t miss. First of all, the book of Hosea in the Bible is not a love story. I repeat…. It is not a love story. In fact—and here’s the point I don’t want us to miss—the Bible is silent on Hosea’s feelings about the whole marrying an immoral woman situation.
In other words, God didn’t command Hosea to “take to yourself a wife of whoredom” (Gomer) and then magically make Hosea’s heart fall deeply in love with her. (If that DID happen, the text does not communicate that).
The more I ponder this, the more I realize how critical this is to understanding the larger theme of Hosea. Hosea was simply stone-cold obedient. He obeyed. It’s debated among scholars whether or not she was a prostitute when Hosea married her. The MAIN point is that when God commanded Hosea to marry her, she would cheat on him over and over. According to the Bible, Gomer’s unfaithfulness to Hosea was example of Israel’s continual unrepentant rebellion against God.
In chapter 3, God does command Hosea to “love her” after she had committed adultery and had fallen into destitution. Of course, love is not a feeling of infatuation. Initially, when God commanded the marriage, Hosea obeyed. There is no indication he was in love with her in the romantic sense at the time. Whether or not those feelings developed, the text doesn’t say…which, in my view, speaks volumes about the unconditional love of God. Hosea was commanded to love her despite how he may have felt about it. We’ll explore this more as we get deeper into the book.
I fear the “love story” angle could lead people to think that we are somehow like the victimized pretty girl that God sees something beautiful in, and chooses to redeem. NO. God does not love us because we are beautiful or because we are victims or because we are the prettiest girl in the brothel. 🙂
God loves us because He IS love. There is nothing we did to deserve his love. By nature, we are “children of wrath” (Eph. 2:3). There is absolutely nothing we’ve done to deserve his love, yet he lavishes it on us anyway.
The story of Hosea is not a love story about a victim of sex-trafficking who is loved out of a toxic system into a marriage with amazing sex and sudden fertility. In fact, in the next couple of posts, we’re gonna talk about those kids they had… .
Their names were:
“Jezreel” (“For I will punish the house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel”)
“No Mercy” (“For I will no more have mercy on the house of Israel.”
“Not my People” (…for you are not my people, and I am not your God)
Hoo boy it’s about to get good.
