Hosea’s Love - Betrayal and Judgement by Chris Appleby
If you’re familiar with the story of Les Miserables, then you’ll know that the story begins with Jean Valjean, a convict on parole, coming to a town where the only person who’ll give him a room and a meal is the local bishop, Bp Myriel. The bishop welcomes him into his house, feeds him and gives him a warm bed for the night. However, the riches of the bishop’s house prove too much for Jean Valjean. He succumbs to temptation and steals the bishop’s silver cutlery. He’s soon apprehended, though, and when the gendarmes bring him back, the bishop is faced with a dilemma: should he tell the truth, that Jean Valjean has stolen the silver, in which case he’ll be thrown back into prison, or should he show him the mercy of the gospel and make out that it was given to him as a gift? The choice he has to make is between mercy and justice. He can’t have both. Well, as you probably know, he chooses mercy. He lies to the gendarmes. He says that the silver was a gift. In fact he insists that Jean Valjean takes not just the silver cutlery, but his silver candlesticks as well. But before Jean Valjean leaves, he’s told that this gift of love requires a response. From now on he must reform his life, from now on he must begin to live as a law-abiding citizen.
Was it all right for the bishop to lie? Was it OK for him to sacrifice justice for the sake of mercy?
What about our lives? When is it ok to lie? Is it ever ok to lie? Is it right to break the law and speed because your spouse is in need of medical attention? Under what circumstances can you divorce?
Life is full of greys so the bible often uses stories to highlight the tension between two good acts.
I would like to read a story from the bible that occurred about 500 years before Christ.
On the one hand God wants to extend his love to the people of Israel but on the other hand they are not being kind to each other. Israel has become wealthy through slavery, taxing the poor, temple prostitution and trying to make all religions the same, including the violent religions.
So the story I am about to read to is where a prophet Hosea is trained from birth in a group called ‘the company of prophets’ and his job is to illustrate to the people what God wants for them. People do not read so he has to show the people with his life. And the story is half about Hosea’s marriage to his wife and God’s marriage to the people of Israel. When he speaks about ‘my wife’ you are never sure if Hosea means Hosea’s wife or if it means God’s wife, the people of Israel. It is deliberately vague.
I hope from this story, you gain a deep understanding that God has something special for each of us to do.
Read Hosea 1:2-3:2
Reading old testament stories like this one is much like looking at a Van Gogh painting. Van gogh paintings are so famous because they are like a story of his life. When you sit in an art gallery you are supposed to just meditate upon the picture without judging it. Just let its thought seep through to you. It is like that with an Old Testament story.
So I will start with the life of Van Gogh and then you will understand the bible.
Gogh, Vincent Willem van
(1853-1890)
Van Gogh was born March 30, 1853, in Groot-Zundert, son of a Dutch Protestant pastor. Early in life he displayed a moody, restless temperament that was to thwart his every pursuit. By the age of 27 he had been, in turn, a salesman in an art gallery, a French tutor, a theological student, and an evangelist among the miners in Belgium. His experiences as a preacher are reflected in his first paintings of peasants and potato diggers; of these early works, the best known is the rough, earthy Potato Eaters (1885, Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam).
Dark and somber, sometimes crude, these early works evidence van Gogh’s intense desire to express the misery and poverty of humanity as he saw it among the miners in Belgium.
In 1886 van Gogh went to Paris to live with his brother Théo van Gogh, an art dealer, and became familiar with the new art movements developing at the time. Influenced by the work of the impressionists and by the work of such Japanese printmakers as Hiroshige and Hokusai, van Gogh began to experiment with current techniques. Subsequently, he adopted the brilliant hues found in the paintings of the French artists Camille Pissarro and Georges Seurat.
In 1888 van Gogh left Paris for southern France, where, under the burning sun of Provence, he painted scenes of the fields, cypress trees, peasants, and rustic life characteristic of the region. During this period, living at Arles, he began to use the swirling brush strokes and intense yellows, greens, and blues associated with such typical works as Bedroom at Arles (1888, Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh), and Starry Night (1889, Museum of Modern Art, New York City). For van Gogh all visible phenomena, whether he painted or drew them, seemed to be endowed with a physical and spiritual vitality.
In his enthusiasm he induced the painter Paul Gauguin, whom he had met earlier in Paris, to join him. After less than two months they began to have violent disagreements, culminating in a quarrel in which van Gogh wildly threatened Gauguin with a razor; the same night, in deep remorse, van Gogh cut off part of his own ear. For a time he was in a hospital at Arles.
He then spent a year in the nearby asylum of Saint-Rémy, working between repeated spells of madness. Under the care of a sympathetic doctor, whose portrait he painted (Dr. Gachet,1890, Louvre, Paris), van Gogh spent three months at Auvers. Just after completing his ominous Crows in the Wheatfields (1890, Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh), he shot himself on July 27, 1890, and died two days later.
The more than 700 letters that van Gogh wrote to his brother Théo (published 1911, translated 1958) constitute a remarkably illuminating record of the life of an artist and a thorough documentation of his unusually fertile output—about 750 paintings and 1600 drawings. The French painter Chaïm Soutine, and the German painters Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Emil Nolde, owe more to van Gogh than to any other single source. In 1973 the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, containing over 1000 paintings, sketches, and letters, was opened in Amsterdam.
So you can see, you are supposed to look at a Van Gogh, meditate upon it and gain wisdom from his life. Only then can you learn from Van Gogh.
So it is with stories from the Old Testament.
The story of Hosea is the story of God’s struggle with His people. Here we see God’s never ending love for his people balanced against his need to see justice done; they were persecuting the people around them! Something had to be done.
Here being ‘all powerful’ doesn’t help.
In a marriage the solutions are never simple.
You cannot ‘make’ your spouse love you. You can’t yell at your kids until they turn and fall in love with you. You can’t guilt your friends into catching up with you. Yelling, guilting, manipulating etc does not work in making people love you. You just cannot do it.
But you also cannot stand by while your spouse belittles and puts down people. You cannot stand by while your children use foul language. You cannot stand by while your friends are rude and obnoxious.
Life is a tension, yelling does not work but sometimes you just cannot stand by.
God wants to really bring this message home to ancient Israel. He tells his prophet Hosea to go and marry an unfaithful wife - because, he says, that’s exactly what I’ve done by pledging myself to all of you. God knew His own people would do horrible things, yet God chooses to be united with them.
Well, how had Israel been unfaithful?
Look at 2:5: “She said, ‘I will go after my lovers, who give me my food and my water, my wool and my linen, my oil and my drink.’
But if you think about it, what they were doing wasn’t so different from the way people today behave. We don’t worship pagan gods of course. We’re far too sophisticated for that. But who do we look to for success in our various enterprises? As a society Australians are very ignorant about the suffering in Asia, we just don’t care about the suffering of the Indonesians on our doorstep.
We live in a society that says if you are rich you ‘deserve it’. But not everyone is equal, some were fortunate to come loving Christian homes where we encouraged good education, good health and received all the love and support. Others were born into houses of violence, ignorance and no love. We are not equal and we need to show God’s love to everyone. Even those who were not born into loving households.
In china, the chinese work very hard. But at the current growth rate, and the hard work, and the environmental damage being done, it will still take 50 years for them to achieve our levels of income. But in those 50 years Australia will be even richer than it is today. They have roads, rail, airports, houses, shopping centres, banks etc to build. They work hard and their only mistake was to be born in a country ravaged by communism. Do we really have sympathy? Are we really showing God’s light? Do we look to our churches and think, we are ok? We have our church. God will destroy all the churches in Australia if the Christians going to those churches do not carry out his will of love.
As a Christian I believe in education. I believe in science and study, I believe that there is a God of order and we need to research that. But I disagree that science will save the world. For science builds microwaves to cook foods, and it builds atom bombs to kill people. Scientific study creates vaccines to save lives, it also creates biological weapons that kill millions of people.
So when something good happens, it is the Christian duty to thank God for the good and moral application of science. When a doctor heals us of a disease, or we make a good business deal, it is appropriate to thank God for the wise application of what he has given us.
In thanking God, we are kept humble, hard working and sincere. When we start thinking we have done everything ourselves are in danger of becoming arrogant, lazy and insincere.
Keep God first so you do not become self centred.
In fact look at the great irony of Israel’s sin. She thought she was going after lovers because of what she got from them, but in fact everything she had came from God.
Hos 2:8 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.
We have all seen this in life. The arrogant person who never thanks you for the help you gave them. The person you bend over backwards for and they don’t acknowledge it. And instead they put all their attention on people who don’t even help them. But life has a way of sorting this out.
Hos 2:9 “Therefore I will take away my grain when it ripens, and my new wine when it is ready. I will take back my wool and my linen, intended to cover her nakedness. Hos 2:10 So now I will expose her lewdness before the eyes of her lovers; no one will take her out of my hands. Hos 2:11 I will stop all her celebrations: her yearly festivals, her New Moons, her Sabbath days—all her appointed feasts. Hos 2:12 I will ruin her vines and her fig trees, which she said were her pay from her lovers; I will make them a thicket, and wild animals will devour them. Hos 2:13 I will punish her for the days she burned incense to the Baals; she decked herself with rings and jewelry, and went after her lovers, but me she forgot,” declares the LORD.
We see this again in life. Those people who take others for granted usually wind up alone. As soon as something bad happens people do not want to help them out any more because they do not say thankyou. Those people who do not want to spiritually grow but who always have the same immature habits. In the end their lives usually wind up ruined. We see this in life, it is part of how we live.
But at the same time, he says in
Hos 2:14 “But then I will win her back once again. I will lead her out into the desert and speak tenderly to her there.
So it is with us. Firstly we should always take back people who have done us wrong and are repentant. Secondly we should never be afraid to turn back to God after we have ignored him.
We should aim to grow spiritually without punishment
As a Christian we believe this whole process of growing through pain is bad. We see it in life all the time, people who only change because bad things have happened to them. But God wants us to avoid this whole process by becoming more Christ like every day.
Hos 3:1 Then the LORD said to me, “Go and get your wife again. Bring her back to you and love her, even though she loves adultery. For the LORD still loves Israel even though the people have turned to other gods, offering them choice gifts. ”
There are people in life who are always becoming better people the more you know them. They do not need to be told their faults by you because you see them always changing for the better. As a Christian this is the model we follow. Always facing the difficult question, how can I become more Christlike? Never needing anyone to tell you how to become better, because Christ is your goal.
