Hosea: "I Will Love Them Freely" | Hosea
Brian Hedges | June 15, 2025
Today we are going to be in the book of Hosea if you want to turn there. While you’re turning there, I want to read this quotation from the southern novelist from the mid-twentieth-century, the novelist and short story author Flannery O’Connor. Flannery O’Connor one time said, “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw huge and startling figures.”
It was something of a commentary on her own literature. If you’ve ever read a short story from Flannery O’Connor, you know that almost every one of her stories has a shocking twist at the end. It’s the twist that’s kind of the punchline of the story, the way she drives home a point that really makes you think about ethical issues, moral issues, spiritual issues. Flannery O’Connor was Catholic, and she wrote these stories in a way that really captured the imagination of the American public in the mid-twentieth century.
I think that the statement she made about her stories is a statement that can often be made about parts of Scripture. God knows that we also are almost blind and that we are hard of hearing, and so God sometimes shouts to wake us up. And he draws startling pictures that shock us, that tap into our heart’s imagination, and that bring us to a greater awareness of who he is and who we are in relation to him. There’s perhaps no place in Scripture where you see that more clearly than in the Old Testament prophets.
Today we’re beginning a new series, a series that’s going to take us through the next twelve weeks, a series on the Minor Prophets, those prophets from Hosea to Malachi. So if you want to follow along in your Bible, we’re going to be again in Hosea 1. It’s probably somewhere around page 750 or 800. Hosea follows Daniel, and we’re beginning the series on the Minor Prophets. Now the Minor Prophets, I think, don’t get enough press. There’s not a lot of attention given to the Minor Prophets, either from the pulpit or in our Bible studies or even in our personal devotions. The Minor Prophets may be one of those places that you kind of tend to pass over.
I think even the name is unfortunate. You hear “Minor Prophets,” you hear “Major Prophets,” and you’re thinking, “Okay, is that like major baseball and minor league baseball? Why would I go to a minor league baseball game if I can go see the Cubs or the Braves play? So, you know, just ignore the Minor Prophets and read the big ones. Read Isaiah.”
But the Minor Prophets are not minor because they’re insignificant, just because they’re smaller, they’re shorter books. In fact, there are twelve books, and really, in the Hebrew canon, these belong together and we should read them together. It’s called the Book of the Twelve. Just as the book of Psalms has five books within it that together form a composite unity, so it is with the Minor Prophets.
I have to give you just a little bit of historical context before we dig in. The Minor Prophets were those prophets that preached to Israel—some of it’s prophecy looking to the future, but much of it was just preaching and proclaiming the truth of God and proclaiming judgment on Israel and on Judah. They were active in about three centuries from 770 to about 440 B.C., and they spoke to the divided kingdom.
You may remember that under Solomon the people of Israel were all united in a glorious kingdom, but as soon as Solomon died and his son Rehoboam took the throne, there was a split, there was a division. So for the rest of Old Testament history you’ve got a Northern kingdom called Israel, and you have the Southern kingdom called Judah, because Judah was the chief of those tribes. So Jerusalem was in Judah, the capital of Judah. Samaria was the capital of Israel, the Northern kingdom. And sometimes the Northern kingdom is called Samaria because it’s the capital. It’s sometimes called Ephraim because Ephraim was the most prominent tribe in the North. You’re going to see that in the language of Hosea.
Hosea was one of those prophets that specifically addressed the North. He would have been around the mid-eighth century B.C., preaching to the North and warning them about impending judgment. Really, what was to come within just about a generation was the fall of the North to Assyria, this kingdom to the North that invaded, so the fall of Samaria to Assyria in 722 B.C.
This was a turbulent time in the nation of Israel. In fact, if you look at the dates in which we think Hosea was prophesying, there were something like six kings in the course of thirty years following Jeroboam II. Four of those kings were assassinated, and another one deposed, so this was a turbulent time.
Think about the 1960s in United States history. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. Think about what it would have been like if from 1963 to 1993 four presidents had been assassinated and there had also been an impeachment. Now, the ’60s were kind of crazy anyway. But it was much more crazy than that, much more turbulent than that, for the people of Israel.
Of course, at the root of all of this turmoil is not just the political upheaval, but it was the moral decay, the lack of justice and mercy and righteousness in the land, and beneath it all, idolatry, as the people of God were turning to idols.
Now, they were still involved in their religious ritual. They were still offering sacrifices, they were still praying to God, but they were also worshiping the Baals, the fertility gods of the Canaanites. So Hosea comes on the scene to confront Israel with all this idolatry, all of this ruin and decay; to warn of judgment, but also to hold out promises of restoration.
So this series is called “Judgment, Salvation and Hope,” and that is the thread that ties these twelve prophets together in the Book of the Twelve.
We’re going to begin this morning by just reading the introductory verses, Hosea 1:1-3, and then we’re going to work through three things together in the course of the message, where we try to understand the basic message and the thrust of the book of Hosea. There are many things in this book we’re not going to cover, but I want you to get the main idea, the main message of this prophet.
I think what we will see is that while Hosea spoke to Israel in the North, and his message was directed specifically to them, the things that Hosea said also speak to our hearts and address us in our spiritual needs today. So, let’s read Hosea 1:1-3.
“The word of the Lord that came to Hosea son of Beeri during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and during the reign of Jeroboam son of Jehoash king of Israel:
“When the Lord began to speak through Hosea, the Lord said to him, ‘Go, marry a promiscuous woman and have children with her, for like an adulterous wife this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the Lord.’ So he married Gomer daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son.”
Right off the bat, we are confronted with this startling, shocking thing, as God commands a prophet of God to marry a promiscuous woman, and literally the Hebrew is “a wife of harlotries.” It’s a word that didn’t just mean adultery. It was someone who was involved in prostitution, perhaps even in cult prostitution, as sexual immorality was also a part of the idolatry of the land.
So, the Lord commands Hosea to marry this woman. It would be like a prominent, high-profile preacher in America today marrying a porn star. I mean, this was shocking, and it’s a shocking thing that God commands Hosea to do.
But there’s a reason for it, and the reason is because Hosea’s marriage to Gomer is to be a living, dramatic parable of God’s relationship to Israel. You see that in verse 2, when it says, “For like an adulterous wife this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the Lord.”
So the basic theme of this letter is the theme of spiritual adultery and God’s call to repentance, to bring his people back to himself.
So here’s the outline this morning. Three words: idolatry, repentance, and grace. I want us to see,
1. Idolatry: The Sin of Spiritual Adultery
2. Repentance: The Call to Covenant Renewal
3. Grace: The God of Steadfast Love
1. Idolatry: The Sin of Spiritual Adultery
I’ve already kind of talked about this, but Gomer and Israel parallel one another in this book as the two unfaithful wives: Gomer, the unfaithful wife of Hosea; and Israel, the unfaithful bride of God.
Notice now Hosea 2:2-4, where this becomes really clear. These are words that Hosea is to preach to Israel.
“Rebuke your mother, rebuke her,
for she is not my wife,
and I am not her husband.
Let her remove the adulterous look from her face
and the unfaithfulness from between her breasts.
Otherwise I will strip her naked
and make her as bare as on the day she was born;
I will make her like a desert,
turn her into a parched land,
and slay her with thirst.
I will not show my love to her children,
because they are the children of adultery.
Their mother has been unfaithful
and has conceived them in disgrace.”
Drop down to verse 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.”
Now there’s the issue. Israel is being confronted as being an adulteress wife, and it’s because of the Baal worship. They’re worshiping these fertility gods of the Canaanites, and in doing so they have forgotten the Lord. Israel is God’s unfaithful wife. So the confrontation in this book is a confrontation with adultery, but not just physical adultery, but also with spiritual adultery, the sin of idolatry.
This provokes the wrath of God, and this kind of brings us, I think, into maybe the biggest problem in the book for modern people today. It’s what we might call the problem of God’s wrath. I think many of us want to worship a God of love and a God of grace, but maybe we struggle to reconcile the passages in Scripture about God’s love and grace with the passages about God’s judgment and God’s wrath.
But what you have to see in Hosea is that God’s wrath and God’s judgment against Israel is actually a function and expression of his passionate, jealous love for his people. So he confronts them with their betrayal.
Notice a couple of passages here—Hosea 13:1-2. “When Ephraim—” again, this is the Northern kingdom, the most prominent tribe in the Northern kingdom, so Israel, known as Ephraim.
“When Ephraim spoke, people trembled;
he was exalted in Israel.
But he became guilty of Baal worship and died.
Now they sin more and more;
they make idols for themselves from their silver,
cleverly fashioned images,
all of them the work of craftsmen.
It is said of these people,
‘They offer human sacrifices!
They kiss calf-idols!’”
So you start to get an idea of one of the reasons why God is so incensed about this.
This idolatry is actually leading people into deep depravity, as they are literally offering their children as human sacrifices to the Baal gods. It makes God deeply angry, and you see his anger in Hosea 8:2. “Israel cries out to me, ‘Our God, we acknowledge you!’”
The God talk is still going on. There’s still a profession of faith. “But Israel has rejected what is good; an enemy will pursue him.”
Drop to Hosea 8:5: “Samaria, throw out your calf-idol! My anger burns against them.”
Why is God’s anger burning against Israel? Because God, the divine husband of Israel, is feeling deep in his heart—speaking in human terms—God is feeling deep in his heart the betrayal of his adulterous wife.
A number of years ago—I mean, this was back in the ’90s—there was a movie that came out about King Arthur and the legend of Arthur and Lancelot and Guinevere. Maybe you saw this movie. It’s called First Knight. It had Sean Connery playing King Arthur. It was really about the love triangle, and that is part of the legend, the Arthur legend. The movie was, you know, relatively clean. There’s nothing terribly inappropriate in it. But there’s a scene in the movie where Arthur, who is married to Guinevere—she’s the queen—Arthur walks in on Guinevere and Lancelot in this passionate embrace, and there’s this dawning realization that his first knight of the round table, Lancelot, has begun this affair with his wife, Guinevere.
It’s so interesting what the camera does. It’s something that’s kind of stood out as a great piece of cinematography. The camera zooms in on Arthur’s eye, and then it begins to morph into this smoldering fire, and the scene changes. It’s showing us the deep betrayal he feels, the deep anger he feels, the jealousy he feels as he realizes that he has lost the heart of his beloved.
That’s the picture that Scripture gives us of God—God who is the jealous husband, jealous for his bride, jealous in his love for Israel, and ultimately jealous in his love for us as well.
Even in the New Testament, Christ as the Son of God is said to have eyes that are like a flame of fire. Why? Because of his jealous love for the church. And in Deuteronomy 4:23-24 we get this covenant language. “Be careful not to forget the covenant of the Lord your God that he made with you, and do not make for yourselves an idol in the form of anything the Lord your God has forbidden. For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God.”
Now, if that language makes you uncomfortable and there’s something in you that says, “You know, I don’t want a God who throws temper tantrums, a God that is angry. This whole idea of ‘sinners in the hands of an angry God’ is offensive to me,” what you have to understand is that if you lose the wrath of God as the Bible portrays it, you also lose the depth of the passionate love of God, because the wrath is an expression of just how deeply he loves his people. That’s why he’s angry.
A husband who cares nothing for his wife and finds out, you know, she’s having an affair, sleeping around—he doesn’t love her anyway—he’s not going to be as angry. But the the husband who is devoted to his bride, she’s his everything, and she commits adultery? He’s deeply hurt.
C.S. Lewis defended the wrath of God in just these terms in his little book, Letters to Malcolm. He said,
“Anger—no peevish fit of temper, but just, generous, scalding indignation—passes, not necessarily at once, into embracing, exultant, re-welcoming love. That’s how friends and lovers are truly reconciled. Hot wrath, hot love. Such anger is the fluid that love bleeds when you cut it. Wrath and pardon are both, as applied to God, analogies, but they belong together to the same circle of analogy, the circle of life and love and deeply personal relationships. [Now listen to this.] All the liberalizing and civilizing analogies only lead us astray. Turn God’s wrath into mere enlightened disapproval and you also turn his love into mere humanitarianism. The consuming fire and the perfect beauty both vanish.”
The more we grasp who God is in his holy love, the more we’ll understand both the depth of his commitment to us, his love, his compassion, as well as his wrath against sin.
Friends, this has direct application to us, because we also are guilty of spiritual adultery when you think of the idols of our own hearts. It was the reformer John Calvin who said that our hearts are perpetual idol factories. We manufacture idols in our hearts. Our hearts are idol factories.
The Scriptures take the same kind of language of the jealous love of God and Christ as our bridegroom and sin as adultery against God—the Scriptures take that language and apply it to us. Let me give you two passages from the New Testament.
Second Corinthians 11:1-2. “I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy,” Paul says. “I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him. But I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ.”
He’s speaking to believers, and this whole metaphor of the marriage relationship with God, it applies not just to Israel, it applies to us, because God has made us for himself, and he claims our hearts. He claims our affections. He desires our love. And when we put anything in front of him, it offends him, because it is a betrayal of our relationship with him. It means that we are guilty of spiritual adultery.
James uses exactly that language in James 4. He says, “When you ask you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.”
He’s confronting them for their worldliness. He says, “You adulterous people! Don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.”
Spiritual adultery is not just the problem of Israel, it’s the problem of all of our hearts if we are not rightly related to God, because all of us have idols in our hearts that we have to address. They’re not golden calves, but they are other things.
So just do a little inventory right now. Think about worldliness, when our hearts are dominated by materialism, material things, by appearance, by popularity, by the next upgrade in our standard of living.
Think of addiction, and in the whole realm of addiction, that can range from addiction to substances like alcohol, marijuana, drugs, all the way to behaviors, pornography or incessant scrolling. If you can’t put your phone down for fifteen minutes to read your Bible without distraction, you’re so addicted to that device. It’s an addiction. Something happens in our brains and it keeps us from God.
Think of busyness, when we just crowd out prayer and Scripture and worship. Why don’t we have more time for God? Because we haven’t made it a priority. That’s why. We choose to put other things first; that means God goes second. That’s an idol problem.
Or just neglect of God—maybe not open rebellion, but distracted disregard for God. We forget him in the good times. The only time we pray is when we’re in a crisis. We live as if God is an optional add-on to our lives.
It means that also have these idols in our hearts, and we need to ask ourselves, “What captures the attention of my mind? What captures the affections of my heart? What do I turn to for comfort when I am anxious or afraid or stressed or bored?” Whatever it is, that’s my Baal. That’s my idol.
The good news, friends, is that when you start to uncover the idols of your hearts, the good news is that God, while he is a jealous God, he is also a God full of compassion and love, and he invites us to repentance.
2. Repentance: The Call to Covenant Renewal
So the second thing I want you to see this morning is this call to repentance, this call to covenant renewal, in Hosea.
Hosea a couple of times refers to the broken covenant. Israel had broken the covenant, so he’s calling them back to renew their relationship with God.
Look at a couple of examples—Hosea 6:1-2.
“Come, let us return to the Lord.
He has torn us to pieces
but he will heal us;
he has injured us
but he will bind up our wounds.
After two days he will revive us;
on the third day he will restore us,
that we may live in his presence.”
It’s a call to return, a call to repent, a call to come back to the Lord.
I want us to see a couple of things here under this point about repentance. I want us to see the meaning of repentance and then the way of repentance. So, first of all, what it is, and then how to do it.
(1) We need to understand the meaning of repentance because it’s easy for us to mistake religious stuff for a real return to the Lord. And it becomes very clear in Hosea that what God is after is not mere religious ritual, but he wants a return of their hearts to God and he wants righteousness in their lives.
Let me give you a few examples. Hosea 6:4-6.
“What can I do with you, Ephraim?
What can I do with you, Judah?
Your love is like the morning mist,
like the early dew that disappears.
Therefore I cut you in pieces with my prophets,
I killed you with the words of my mouth—
then my judgments go forth like the sun.
For I desire mercy, not sacrifice,
and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.”
“I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” If that sounds familiar to you, it’s because Jesus quoted those words in the Gospel of Matthew, applying them to the religious Pharisees, the scribes and the Pharisees. They’re all about religion. They’re all about going through the motions. They got the externals right. They’re going to the synagogue, they’re reciting the law, they’re reciting the Shema. They’ve got all of that down; but their hearts are far from God.
God here says, “What I’m after is not the sacrifices, but I want mercy, and I want you to know me, to acknowledge me.” It’s not the burnt offerings. God is not pleased with the mere externals of religion, and that goes for us as well.
Look at Hosea 8:2-4.
“Israel cries out to me,
‘Our God, we acknowledge you!’”
There’s the God talk. They’re still acknowledging God.
“But Israel has rejected what is good;
an enemy will pursue him.”
Then drop down to verse 11:
“Though Ephraim built many altars for sin offerings,
these have become altars for sinning.”
What a striking way of putting it. “They are altars for sin offering, but you’ve turned them into altars for sinning.”
“I wrote for them the many things of my law,
but they regarded them as something foreign.
Though they offer sacrifices as gifts to me,
and though they eat the meat,
the Lord is not pleased with them.
Now he will remember their wickedness
and punish their sins:
They will return to Egypt.”
So here’s the problem, and we can all do this. We can cover our disobedience and lack of repentance with religious talk, with ritual, with going through the motions, with God talk, and we try to sanctify doing what we really want to do by putting God’s name on it when we’re really ignoring what God requires of us in his word.
Let me tell you a little story. So this happened years and years ago in in our family, when our kids were much, much younger. Holly used to take our kids to a splash pad on the south side of South Bend, and they would play in the water on summer days. And one day she told them, “Okay, we’re going to leave in five minutes.”
One of the kids—I’m not going to say the name, to protect the guilty here—one of my kids, probably four or five years old at the time, came to Holly and said, “Jesus said we could stay longer.”
You see what he was doing. I mean, kids learn quick, don’t they? You put a spiritual spin on it, maybe you get to do what you really want to do.
But Christians do this all the time. “Jesus said I could do this. God said I could do this. God is leading me to do x, y, z,” and maybe it is directly counter to the clear things that God has required of us in Scripture. We’re putting God talk on it, and it’s a cover for sin. It’s a lack of repentance.
God wants real change. He wants real righteousness. Hosea 10:12:
“Sow righteousness for yourselves,
reap the fruit of unfailing love,
and break up your unplowed ground;
for it is time to seek the Lord,
until he comes
and showers his righteousness on you.”
That’s the meaning of repentance.
(2) So how do you do it? Look at Hosea 14:1-3. These three verses are three of the most practical verses in the Bible, outlining exactly what repentance looks like. Let me read it to you and then show you the four steps of repentance.
“Return, Israel, to the Lord your God.
Your sins have been your downfall!
Take words with you
and return to the Lord.
Say to him:
‘Forgive all our sins
and receive us graciously,
that we may offer the fruit of our lips.
Assyria cannot save us;
we will not mount warhorses.
We will never again say “Our gods”
to what our own hands have made,
for in you the fatherless find compassion.’”
There are four steps to repentance in those three verses.
Number one, confess your sins. He says, “Take words with you and return to the Lord.” Take words with you. It’s a call to confession, and we in Scripture are called to confess our sins. First John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” When’s the last time you confessed your sins to the Lord?
But you not only confess, you seek forgiveness. “Say to him: ‘Forgive all our sins and receive us graciously.’” We have to ask God to forgive us of our sins.
But that comes with repentance, turning from idols—step three. Notice it says, “We will never say again ‘Our gods’ to what our hands have made.” And before that, “Assyria cannot save us.” They’re turning away from the political alliances that they’re putting in front of trust in God. They’re putting away the political alliances, they’re putting away the false gods.
The analogy for us is that we quit seeking refuge, we quit seeking comfort in the other things, the things that we are choosing instead of God.
Then trust God’s grace: “In you the fatherless find compassion.”
Just linger on this for a minute. Okay? Will you linger on this for a minute and get what repentance looks like? Repentance is not just saying, “I’m sorry,” it is turning the heart back to God with the necessary changes of behavior. That’s the pattern.
So, make this really concrete and think of a specific sin. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you’re a parent, or maybe this is with a spouse, and let’s say that you lost your temper, like you just blew your top. You got really angry, and you kind of exploded with this torrent of words. You said hurtful things, you yelled. You just kind of lost control. And maybe you just did this for, you know, three, four minutes or five minutes, but it broke the relationship. You can see it, the hurt look on your kid’s face. You feel it, the cold shoulder from your spouse. You’ve broken the relationship with the sin of anger.
How do you repent from that? You confess your sin, and you confess it to God and to the person that you sinned against. “I am so sorry for the way I behaved. I’m sorry for what I said to you. I’m sorry for the way I said it to you. I’m sorry that I lost control. I’m sorry that I lost my temper. That was a sin. Will you please forgive me?” You confess. You seek forgiveness. You seek reconciliation.
But then, here’s the piece I think sometimes we forget: you also have to dig deep. You have to figure out what was the idol that was driving the behavior, because you got angry for a reason. You got angry because your ego was offended, you felt disrespected, you felt misunderstood, it was an interruption to your plan, there was a lack of flexibility, you were inconvenienced. I mean, there’s all kinds of reasons. But every one of those reasons is rooted in some kind of an idol. We have to do that work.
Friends, I’ve had to do this. Fifteen years ago or so, I had an anger problem. I don’t remember the exact words, but I remember Holly confronting me about that. “Brian, you’re angry all the time, and it makes me afraid to bring things up and to talk to you.” I had a problem, and I needed to do some deep work.
I was really helped—I read a book called Uprooting Anger that really helped. But what the book did is it went after the idols, and I started seeing the reasons why I was angry were because of specific idols in my heart. You’ve got to go after the idols and turn from the idols.
But then also, trust in God’s grace. Here’s the good news, friends: the gospel gives us every reason in the world to repent, because God is there waiting with open arms to receive us.
3. Grace: The God of Steadfast Love
That leads us to point number three: Grace, the God of steadfast love.
Again, you get the model in Hosea in Gomer, as you see redemption and reconciliation. We don’t know exactly what happened in the relationship. This is not a biography, but we get just enough of the story. So it it seems that something like this happened: that Hosea marries this woman, Gomer. She’s a woman who has a background in prostitution. But after they’re married, she goes back to it. She goes back to the prostitution. She goes back to the adultery. So God tells him to go after her again. You get it in Hosea 3.
“The Lord said to me, ‘Go, show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another man and is an adulteress. Love her as the Lord loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods and love the sacred raisin cakes.’
“So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and about a homer and a lethek of barley.”
You know what that means? It means that Hosea had to go buy Gomer off of the auction block, most likely. He had to buy her out of slavery. And we can only imagine what that was like. This would have been common in the ancient world. Maybe she was stripped and naked in the streets on an auction block, just waiting for the highest bidder. And here, Hosea has to come with all of the shame, all of the betrayal, all of that disgrace, and he has to pay dearly for her and bring her back home.
Verse 3:
“Then I told her, ‘You are to live with me many days; you must not be a prostitute or be intimate with any man, and I will behave the same way toward you.’”
“For the Israelites will live many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or sacred stones, without ephod or household gods. Afterward the Israelites will return and seek the Lord their God and David their king. They will come trembling to the Lord and to his blessings in the last days.”
So once again Hosea and Gomer become a parable, this time not of spiritual adultery, but a parable of redemption and of reconciliation.
It’s a picture of the covenant and compassion of God. And I just want you to hear now for a moment, as you reflect on your own heart, you think about your own betrayals of God, your own idols, your own sins—maybe you’re convicted this morning of neglect or being backslidden, or maybe there’s a very specific sin issue that you are deeply convicted of. I want you to hear the “I wills” of Yahweh in Hosea, just some of them. There are many “I will” statements that God makes. Some of them are statements of judgment, but sprinkled through are all these strong statements of God’s commitment, his covenant love for his people. These are beautiful. Listen to this, and hear God saying this to you.
Hosea 2:14:
“‘Therefore I am now going to allure her;
I will lead her into the wilderness
and speak tenderly to her.
There I will give her back her vineyards,
and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
There she will respond as in the days of her youth,
as in the day she came up out of Egypt.
“‘In that day,’ declares the Lord,
‘you will call me “my husband”;
you will no longer call me “my master.”
I will remove the names of the Baals from her lips;
no longer will their names be invoked.’”
Verse 19:
“I will betroth you to me forever;
I will betroth you in righteousness and justice,
in love and compassion.
I will betroth you in faithfulness,
and you will acknowledge the Lord.”
He restores the relationship with his wayward people.
Hosea 11:8-9, one of the most emotional parts of the book, as you see the deep passion and compassion of God for his people. Hosea 11:8:
“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 Zeboyim?
My heart is changed within me;
all my compassion is aroused.
I will not carry out my fierce anger,
nor will I devastate Ephraim again.
For I am God, and not a man—
the Holy One among you.”
Two more verses. Hosea 13:14:
“I will deliver this people from the power of the grave;
I will redeem them from death.
Where, O death, are your plagues?
Where, O grave, is your destruction?”
If that sounds familiar, it’s because Paul quotes it in 1 Corinthians 15 when he talks about the triumph of the resurrection of Jesus Christ that delivers us from death.
Hosea 14:4. This is what follows that call to repentance, the four steps of repentance we just looked at. Verse 4 says,
“I will heal their waywardness
and love them freely,
for my anger has turned away from them.”
“I will love them freely.” Spurgeon said there’s a whole body of divinity in that phrase, a whole theology. You do not understand the gospel until you understand that. “I will love them freely.” Grace is free, love is free, first to last. He does not impose these works that we have to perform in order to be loved. Instead, he loves us even in our sin, and that causes him to pursue us, to rescue us, to redeem us, and to bring us back to himself.
Friends, this can give you hope today. If you feel like your past disqualifies you, hear God say, “I will heal your waywardness.” You’re not outside the reach of God.
If your love has grown cold, remember that God says, “I will allure her. I will woo them back to myself. I will speak tenderly.” God wants to draw you to himself, not push you away.
If you feel ashamed and stuck in your sin, hear him say, “I will love them freely.” Not because we’ve earned it, but because he’s chosen us in love.
And if you are grieving and afraid of death, if you fear the consequences of sin, you fear that moment when you breathe your last breath and you don’t know what comes after, hear the Lord say, “I will redeem them from death. Where, O death, is your sting?”
God’s covenant love is a compelling love. His grace is unrelenting, and it’s when we see this grace—more than the guilt, more than the judgment—it’s when we see the grace that our hearts are softened, our wounds are healed, and we are drawn back to the Lord.
This, of course, ties right into the story of the gospel, doesn’t it? I want to end with just one more passage of Scripture, this time in the New Testament, as the Apostle Paul takes the language, not directly of Hosea, but he takes the language of marriage and the whole idea of God and of Christ as the divine bridegroom. Paul says in Ephesians 5:25-27, “Husbands, love your wives.” Now that’s an exhortation to husbands, but it’s not just about husbands, it’s also about Christ.
“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.”
Christ is the divine bridegroom who saves the bride by taking the sins of the bride upon himself, dying in their place. He takes their judgment. He takes our judgment. That’s how we are redeemed.
Ray Ortlund, in a wonderful book on this whole theme of spiritual adultery in the Bible—can you believe there’s a whole book on this? It’s actually a very good book. Ray Ortlund ends the book with these words, which I found beautiful, and I can’t improve upon them. He said,
“The biblical story lifts up before us a vision of God as our lover. The gospel is not an imperialistic human philosophy making overrated universal claims. The gospel sounds the voice of our husband, who has proven his love for us and who calls for our undivided love in return. The gospel reveals that as we look out into the universe, ultimate reality is not cold, dark, blank space; ultimate reality is romance. There’s a God above with love in his eyes for us and infinite joy to offer us, and he has set himself upon winning our hearts for himself alone. The gospel tells the story of God’s pursuing, faithful, wounded, angry, overruling, transforming, triumphant love, and it calls us to answer him with love.”
If you are a believer this morning and you have forsaken your first love, and you know that your heart has wandered from God and that you’re not as close to him as you once were, you’re not as full of love and affection for him as you once were—something else has captured your heart—the call of the Spirit through the word this morning is to return to your divine husband. He made you for himself. The reason your heart is restless is because he’s meant to fill it.
Friend, if you are not a Christian this morning, but you are conscious today of a deep, aching void inside, this God-shaped hole that nothing seems to fill, and you have tried—you have gone from substance to substance, you have left behind you a string of broken relationships, you’ve tried to find it in achievement, you’ve tried to find it in romance, you’ve tried to find it in escapism. Maybe you’re on the edge of just losing it and giving up once and for all. The call for you this morning is to return to the creator of your soul, the lover of your soul, the divine husband who is wooing you to himself, who’s knocking on the door of our hearts this morning and inviting us to open our hearts to him and to enjoy the intimacy of a deep, loving relationship with him.
Brothers and sisters, friends, let’s hear that call today and return to the Lord. Let’s pray.
Our gracious, merciful God, we bring our hearts to you now in this moment. We thank you for your word, we thank you for your steadfast love. We thank you for the good news of the gospel and for how Scripture on every page reminds us of your character as a passionate, loving God, a jealous God, but also a God so full of love that you will go to the greatest possible limits in order to win us to yourself. And we turn to you now in our hearts. We ask you, Lord, to forgive us of our sin. We ask you to show us our idols and help us repent. We ask you, Lord, to conquer the hardness in our hearts with the sight of your love, demonstrated through Christ crucified for our sins on the cross.
We pray that as we come now to the Lord’s table that we would bring our hearts to you, that we would respond to your love with our own love for you. Lord, would you draw near to us as we draw near to you? Would you work in our hearts that which is pleasing in your sight? Would you do for us what we cannot do for ourselves? Bring the brokenness, bring the change, bring the transformation. And we pray that you would use our continuing worship this morning to that end. May you be glorified, and may our hearts be deeply satisfied as we once again see what a wonderful and gracious Savior you are. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
