He Loves Us Anyway
Hosea on three images of God’s Love
2/25/07
PSCOC
Intro: Love expresses itself most fully in the midst of betrayal.
We would all agree that love is one of the most overused words in the English language. We love our spouse. We love pizza. We love our kids. We love the Lakers. We have basically stripped the word of its meaning. So, love is best understood in context and demonstrated through actions. Here’s one such demonstration.
Dearest Jimmy,
No words could ever express the great unhappiness I’ve felt since breaking our engagement. Please say you’ll take me back. No one could ever take your place in my heart, so please forgive me. I love you, I love you, I love you! Yours forever, Marie.
P.S., And congratulations on winning the state lottery.
That’s the kind of love we get! It is often the kind of love we practice. Let me share with you another kind of love.
During World War II, Hitler commanded all religious groups to unite so that he could control them. Among the Brethren assemblies, half complied and half refused. Those who went along with the order had a much easier time. Those who did not faced harsh persecution. In almost every family of those who resisted, someone died in a concentration camp. When the war was over, feelings of bitterness ran deep between the groups and there was much tension. Finally they decided that the situation had to be healed. Leaders from each group met at a quiet retreat. For several days, each person spent time in prayer, examining his own heart in the light of Christ’s commands. Then they came together.
Francis Schaeffer, who told of the incident, asked a friend who was there, "What did you do then?" "We were just one," he replied. As they confessed their hostility and bitterness to God and yielded to His control, the Holy Spirit created a spirit of unity among them. Love filled their hearts and dissolved their hatred.
It is difficult to imagine being one of the churches that endured horrible persecution and lost many loved ones while those of the same fellowship compromised their faith and survived the war in relative peace. Could you express love and fellowship to those who so deeply betrayed you? At this point, something greater than human love must be present in our hearts. That love recognizes that God’s love is most visible in the midst of our betrayal. Yet, he loves us anyway. That’s what’s so amazing about his love. Hosea gives us three enduring images of God’s love that impact us deeply.
Image 1: The husband and wife.
1. Historical background to Hosea
Hosea was a prophet of the Northern kingdom near the fall of Samaria to Assyria. God will allow Assyria to destroy Israel, because Israel has played the harlot. Here’s how God described his current relationship to Israel. Read. 2:20:1-5, 13. Israel was God’s bride since he rescued her from Egypt. God provided everything Israel needed or even wanted. Yet, God through Hosea will declare Israel guilty of the vilest offenses. Israel has been guilty of lying, violence, drunkenness, turning to other nations instead of God for help, religious hypocrisy, and even child sacrifice. Yet the worst is that Israel had turned to the worship of Baal, the Canaanite god of fertility. They had practiced prostitution both literally and spiritually in the name of Baal. They had forsaken the true lover and gave glory to Baal for the gifts that God had showered on his bride. God is personal and jealous. If he didn’t love Israel he wouldn’t care, but in Hosea God is the jilted lover. He will punish Israel for her adultery. He even puts her away from him as his bride. How would a husband feel for the gifts that he showered on his bride to be shared with another lover? That is exactly how God feels.
2. Hosea is asked to be the example.
Read 1:2, 3. Hosea is asked to do something really unfair to him, yet he is God’s servant, and God’s servant will be God’s illustration of his relationship with Israel. He is asked marry a woman who will become an adulterer. She bears him two sons and a daughter and even their names tell the story of God’s judgment against Israel (not loved and not my people). Later Gomer sells herself into slavery and God speaks to Hosea again. Read 3:1-3. How is it that God could ask Hosea to do this? It is exactly what he intended to do with Israel.
3. God’s love will not abandon Israel.
We would think nothing of a spouse that is treated this way for never wanting to see their spouse again. We know that no one deserves a second chance that has betrayed another to the level that we see in Hosea. But God’s plan of punishing Israel is simply so that she might come back to him from her own heart. Read 2:14-16. It is amazing that God’s love will not abandon his people. He loves them still and intends to allure Israel again and bring her back as his bride. This is the love that Hosea is asked to emulate. It is love demonstrated in the midst of betrayal. It is love given when it is not deserved, and though Hosea can do as God commanded, nobody commands God. It is ultimately divine love. Why doesn’t God just do away with his people forever? He answers himself; “For I am God, and not man” (11:9b).
4. Christ and his bride.
Read Eph. 5:25-27. The NT often describes this relationship between Christ and his church. In the end, his love perfects us as his bride, and we enjoy a never ceasing relationship where there is no more betrayal, but Christ first redeemed us in the midst of our betrayal (cf. Col. 1:21).
Image 2: Husbandman and the vine.
Read 9:10; 10:1—Hosea uses this imagery throughout this section. The grape vine must be cultivated to produce the fruit intended. When God found Israel in Egypt, Israel was not a nation, just a wild vine growing in the desert. All that Israel would become was through God’s careful cultivation. Israel owed all that she was to the tender care of the husbandman, Yahweh. The sad thing is “as his fruit increased, he built more altars.” The more God blessed Israel, the more Israel worshipped idols. The corruption had to be cut off at the roots, so God’s only course is in 9:16.
- Jesus, the true vine.
Again, we find the love of God demonstrated most fully in Jesus Christ. We could never be the vine that God intended us to be. So, Jesus says in John 15:1-8…that he is the true vine. He’s what we couldn’t be. But through God’s love, if we remain in Christ, then we are the branches of the vine. We have life and produce in Christ. Outside of Christ, we whither and die and are cast off. We main not be able to be the true vine, but we can remain in the true vine. In the fruit that we bear we demonstrate that we are disciples of Christ.
Image 3: Father and Son
1. Israel was God’s son since Egypt (read 11:1-4).
Hosea is describing God’s love with simply another metaphor. We have the beautiful imagery of a father teaching a son to walk, yet tragic choices break the heart of the gentle father. “The more I called Israel, the further they went away from me…they did not realize it was I who healed them.” I recently saw in a movie the story of a son who believed his real father had abandoned him. He treated the man who raised him with disregard as he became an adult and had opposing interests with the man. His cruelty eventually led to the father’s suicide. It was only then that his mother told the son that he was really his father. The man had always been his father, but the son didn’t recognize it. So, it was so with Israel and God. God is both the jilted husband and the rejected father. That is his reward for showering love on Israel, yet read 11:9-11.
2. The story of the prodigal.
Despite rejection and rebellion the son doesn’t cease to be the son. One of the greatest stories of the love of a father is found in Lk. 15. There a son despises his father, takes his inheritance and leaves, blows it all, winds up destitute and begins his journey home. The son knows he has blown it. His only hope is to be a slave in his father’s household. But the father sees him from a distance and runs to him! He embraces him, puts the robe on him, sandals, and the signet ring. He throws a banquet in his honor. He celebrates that though his son was dead, he is alive again; he was lost and is found! Every parent who has a child walk out on them, longs for that day. They long for the day to embrace their child and say you’ve always been my child. So, it is with the love of God.
Conclusion: God’s love and you.
Illustration: Are you my father?
My father-in-law received a call the week before last from a girl with his same last name. She told him, “I know this sounds strange, but have you ever had a daughter?” He wasn’t sure why she was asking and she clarified that her father had left her when she was born, and she had hoped he might be him. My father-in-law explained. He had a daughter who died, and had adopted another girl at birth. So, it was not possible for him to be her father. He told he knew what she was looking for and he was sorry he couldn’t give it to her. He was most struck by the fact that after all of these years a girl abandoned at birth still longed to know her father.
With God it is the opposite. He created us. He loved us. We abandoned him. We rebelled. We walked out. We hurt God. Yet God’s love continues to pursue us. His love is steadfast and boundless. He seeks to give us the father we all need. His heart never changes. His is the husband, husbandman, and the father that will not give up his love. You see we say things like God is omni benevolent, but that’s just an academic word. We need to be able to picture his love for us. We need to know that it is personal, persistent, and pursuant. Even when we experience punishment, it is so that we might return to him.
God’s love is so much greater than what we deserve. It was demonstrated in its fullest when Jesus Christ hung on the cross and he died for those chanting for him to be crucified. It is our sin that put him there. It is our sin and rebellion that made us the enemies of God. Yet, God in Christ died for us anyway. We deserved his wrath, and instead his Son bore it. We instead are offered grace.
But see we often run from that kind of love. It is too good to be true. So, we continue to break the heart of the Father whose greatest desire is to share his love with us. When will we quit running from him and run into the loving arms of God who waits for his children to return to home?! It is too good to be true, but it is true, nonetheless. It is also too good to pass up. You know what the tragedy of hell is all about it? Hell is for those who reject the love of God with finality. They are offered the only pure, unadulterated love in the universe, and they continue to say “no thanks.”
We see a story like Anna Nicole Smith, rejected by her father at birth. So, her life becomes one colossal tragedy, culminating in her death at age 39. What would that life had been, if she had known the love of her true Father? Please don’t go to your death with that question unanswered in your life. We have all been guilty of spurning the love of God. If that caused God to stop loving us, then it would be no different than human love, but alas, God’s love pursues us even more, as it did Israel.
Invitation:
Come home to the Father, become a part of his bride, the church, and be cultivated in the true vine for all of eternity. He loves us anyway. Will you love him?
