Sermon Transcript March 12, 2017

Transcription

1 Sermon Transcript March 12, 2017 God s Persistent Love God Will Do It! Hosea 2:2-3:5 This message from the Bible was addressed originally to the people of Wethersfield Evangelical Free Church on March 12, 2017 at 511 Maple Street, Wethersfield, CT, by Dr. Scott W. Solberg. This is a transcription that bears the strength and weaknesses of oral delivery. It is not meant to be a polished essay. An audio copy of the sermon on CD is available by request at (860) An audio version of this sermon may also be found on the church website at 1

2 Sermon Text: Hosea 2:2-3:5 Hosea 2:2 Plead with your mother, plead for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband that she put away her whoring from her face, and her adultery from between her breasts; 3 lest I strip her naked and make her as in the day she was born, and make her like a wilderness, and make her like a parched land, and kill her with thirst. 4 Upon her children also I will have no mercy, because they are children of whoredom. 5 For their mother has played the whore; she who conceived them has acted shamefully. For she said, I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink. 6 Therefore I will hedge up her 4 way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, so that she cannot find her paths. 7 She shall pursue her lovers but not overtake them, and she shall seek them but shall not find them. Then she shall say, I will go and return to my first husband, for it was better for me then than now. 8 And she did not know that it was I who gave her the grain, the wine, and the oil, and who lavished on her silver and gold, which they used for Baal. 9 Therefore I will take back my grain in its time, and my wine in its season, and I will take away my wool and my flax, which were to cover her nakedness. 10 Now I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, and no one shall rescue her out of my hand. 11 And I will put an end to all her mirth, her feasts, her \ new moons, her Sabbaths, and all her appointed feasts. 12 And I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees, of which she said, These are my wages, which my lovers have given me. I will make them a forest, and the beasts of the field shall devour them. 13 And I will punish her for the feast days of the Baals when she burned offerings to them and adorned herself with her ring and jewelry, and went after her lovers and forgot me, declares the LORD. 14 Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. 15 And there I will give her back her vineyards and make the Valley of Achor 5 a door of hope. And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth, as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt. 16 And in that day, declares the LORD, you will call me My Husband, and no longer will you call me My Baal. 17 For I will remove the names of the Baals from her mouth, and they shall be remembered by name no more. 18 And I will make for them a covenant on that day with the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the creeping things of the ground. And I will abolish 6 the bow, the sword, and war from the land, and I will make you lie down in safety. 19 And I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. 20 I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the LORD. 21 And in that day I will answer, declares the LORD, I will answer the heavens, and they shall answer the earth, 22 and the earth shall answer the grain, the wine, and the oil, and they shall answer Jezreel, 23 and I will sow her for myself in the land. And I will have mercy on No mercy, and I will say to Not My People, You are my people ; and he shall say, You are my God. 2

3 Introduction Hosea 3:1 And the LORD said to me, Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the LORD loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisins. 2 So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and a homer and a lethech of barley. 3 And I said to her, You must dwell as mine for many days. You shall not play the whore, or belong to another man; so will I also be to you. 4 For the children of Israel shall dwell many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or pillar, without ephod or household gods. 5 Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek the LORD their God, and David their king, and they shall come in fear to the LORD and to his goodness in the latter days. As we began our study last Sunday on this Old Testament book of Hosea, we heard God make three very stern and sobering pronouncements of judgment upon the children of Israel. In this order, God said to the ten northern tribes of Israel, I will put an end to the kingdom of the house of Israel... I will no more have mercy on the house of Israel, to forgive them at all... You are not my people and I am not your God. I must admit, when I shared these three statements with you last week, I felt the sting of these words. I visibly saw an expression of shock and dismay on some of your faces when I shared with you what God said to the people of Israel. Can God really say that? Can God do that? We live in a day and age where we throw statements around about God without really stopping and thinking about what we are saying. For example, we say things like, God loves me just the way I am. No he doesn t. He loves me in spite of who I am. He loves me enough to not let me stay the way I am. Or, we hear things like, It doesn t matter what you do, God will always love you. On one hand, I want to say, yes, that is true. For the one in Christ we are told that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ. But when I hear that statement, I sometimes wonder if it causes us to be too casual about our own sin. Because, quite frankly, it does matter what we do. Jesus holds out the prospect of equally shocking words when he says that Many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord to whom Jesus turns and says, I never knew you. So, yes, God can really say that. And, yes, God can do that. And yet, don t let these words cause you to lose sight of the heart of God for his people. God doesn t deliver this sobering message to the people of Israel only through a sermon preached by a prophet. But his message for the people of Israel is also delivered through the illustration of the marriage between Hosea the prophet and his promiscuous wife, Gomer. We saw last week how Hosea was instructed by God to Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom. And so the pain that Hosea feels as his wife tramples on his heart time and time again, is the pain God feels with Israel s continued idolatry. 3

4 I have been in ministry for twenty-seven years. Based on my experience, I would say that there is no pain like family pain. It can be worse than death. When it comes to marriage, no matter what form the brokenness happens to be in, it is painful. It is painful when a child is neglected or abused by a parent. It is painful when a child rebels against a parent. It is painful when a long sustained family feud puts a permanent wedge between siblings and cousins. And it is this image of a family God uses to describe how God feels for Israel. You can hear his heart for Israel in the opening phrase of our passage this morning when he says, Plead with your mother, plead. He wants Israel to turn to God because God wants nothing more than to bless and love her. It is like the pain of Jesus, standing outside the gate of Jerusalem and weeping over the city. Here he says, Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace. And that is the beauty of the book of Hosea. Even though it starts out with very difficult words for our ears to hear, it is a book that tells us what God is going to do in order to heal and save his people. When you get to the latter half of Hosea 2, fourteen times you hear God say with great resolve, I will. Listen to what God says at the end of Hosea 2, And I will have mercy on No mercy, and I will say to Not My People, You are my people ; and he shall say, You are my God. God will do it! God will heal and save his people. On this side of the cross, no doubt, we see what is cost God to heal and save his people. On this side of the cross, we have a greater understanding of the persevering love of God for his people. And on this side of the cross, we hear the wonderful words, It is finished! God did it! As we will see in a moment, you can t fully understand the words of Hosea if you don t see the cross of Jesus in the background. But before we get to Jesus this morning, we want to walk through Hosea 2-3. We mentioned last week that this portion of the Old Testament is often the road less traveled for many of us, so let me give you some orientation to the flow of these two chapters. The passage begins with God laying out his accusation against Israel for their persistent idolatry. Then like a good preacher, two times he makes a series of three points. Three times, God says, Therefore... You see this in verses 6, 9 and 14. Here God tells Israel what he is going to do to them because of their persistent idolatry. Then, three times you find the phrase in that day. You can see this phrase repeated in verses 16, 18 and 21. This is the section where you find God saying fourteen times the phrase I will. It speaks to that day when God will heal and save his people. And that naturally leads us to Hosea 3, where I believe we are looking squarely in the eyes of Jesus. Here is how our passage ends, Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek the LORD their God, and David their king, and they shall come in fear to the LORD and to his goodness in the latter days. 4

5 Accusation: False Worship We begin with God brining an accusation against his people. The accusation had to do with false worship. Nothing gets to the heart of what it means to be God s people more than the issue of worship. God s people are first and foremost worshipers of God. The heart of the commandments is found in that most sacred verse, Deuteronomy 6:4-5 Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. In our passage this morning, we find Israel is being anything but faithful worshipers of God. Here God lays out his accusation against the people of Israel by equating their idolatry to playing the harlot. Starting in verse 2, God says of Israel, Plead with your mother, plead for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband that she put away her whoring from her face, and her adultery from between her breasts; lest I strip her naked and make her as in the day she was born, and make her like a wilderness, and make her like a parched land, and kill her with thirst. Upon her children also I will have no mercy, because they are children of whoredom. For their mother has played the whore; she who conceived them has acted shamefully. For she said, I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink. Instead of worshiping the one true God, Israel was found bowing their knee to a false god, a god known as Baal. Baal was considered to be the god of fertility. He was the god who brought the thunder and the lightning, the one who caused it to rain and the one who caused the ground to yield a plentiful harvest. And so this is why Israel s idolatry is described the way it is in verse 5, I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink. They no longer saw the God of Israel, the one who miraculously provided them with water and manna for forty years in the wilderness, as the one who would continue to provide for them. Rather, they put their trust in a god who was no god at all. I am afraid that sometimes when we hear this command to worship God and God alone, we view it as a heavy-handed commandment. It is the first of the commandments, You shall have no other gods before me. It is the first prayer request of the Lord s Prayer, Hallowed be Thy name. And perhaps you wonder to yourself, Why is the worship of God the primary concern of God for his people? Let me assure you, it is not because through our worship of God we fill some need that God has to be worshiped. Actually, it is the opposite. We can t fully find ourselves until we find ourselves in God. And so this call to worship God with all our heart is for our own good. 5

6 Here is a good word that describes the word worship. It is the word love. James Smith asks the question, What if, instead of starting with the assumption that human beings are thinking beings, we started with the conviction that human beings are first and foremost lovers? 1 And so he says,, To be human is to have a heart. You can t not love. So the question isn t whether you will love something as ultimate; the question is what you will love as ultimate. 2 This is what led St. Augustine, the fifth century theologian to conclude about God, You made us for yourself, and our heart is restless unit it finds its rest in you. 3 In other words, Smith says, to be truly and fully human, we need to find ourselves in relationship to the One who made us and for whom we are made. 4 This call to worship God is ultimately a call to love God. When we find God and are in relationship with God, we actually find ourselves. It is not incidental that God describes the idolatry of Israel with these sexual overtones. The worship of Baal is likened to going after my lovers. Smith says, To be human is to be animated and oriented by some vision of the good life, some picture of what we think counts as flourishing. And we want that. We crave it. We desire it. This is why our most fundamental mode of orientation to the world is love. 5 The good life is found in loving God. It is worshiping God. Pursuing other lovers took Israel away from God. Therefore... God Graciously Intervenes So what is God going to do with wayward Israel? Hosea answers that question with three Therefore statements. On the one hand, the first two of these three Therefore statements convey tones of God s judgment. In fact he comes out and says in verse 13, I will punish her for the feast days of the Baals. We saw last week how God sent the Assyrians to carry out his judgment against the people of Israel. The ten tribes of Israel were uprooted from their land and deported throughout the Assyrian Empire. In fact, in some sense these ten tribes seem lost to history. So yes, you definitely read overtones of God s judgment in these statements. But there is more than God s judgment taking place in this passage. There seems to be an act of God s mercy in this passage through what he does in sending Israel into captivity. I say that because in this passage I see God s restraining hand at work. In other words, he doesn t let them continue down this path they are pursuing. Rather, he shows them that their system of worship and belief, at the end of the day, can not deliver what they are looking for in life. In the first of these Therefore statements, God starts by saying in verses 6-7, Therefore 6

7 I will hedge up her way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, so that she cannot find her paths. She shall pursue her lovers but not overtake them, and she shall seek them but shall not find them. In other words, when the Assyrians come against the people of Israel, Israel will turn to her lovers for help, but Baal will not be able to deliver them. And so because Baal will not come through for them, God suggests in verse 7 that the people will come to their senses and say, I will go and return to my first husband, for it was better for me then than now. In other words, through this hardship Israel will return to God. Don t you find that often when things are falling apart, God reminds us of our need for him? That is God s merciful restraining hand in our lives. It is as if Israel needs to be awakened from their stupor, for God says in verse 8, And she did not know that it was I who gave her the grain, the wine, and the oil, and who lavished on her silver and gold, which they used for Baal. With the second Therefore statement in verse 9, God goes on to demonstrate who really is the Lord of the thunder and the rain. It is not Baal, it is Yahweh, the LORD. By bringing famine and allowing the conquest of the land, God demonstrates his sovereignty over these things. He says, Therefore I will take back my grain in its time, and my wine in its season, and I will take away my wool and my flax, which were to cover her nakedness... And I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees, of which she said, These are my wages, which my lovers have given me. Israel falsely thought that Baal is the one who provides these things for them. But it was God! Gary Smith says, when God takes away the gifts of his blessing, Baal will be shown to be impotent, a worthless god who cannot be trusted.. God, not Baal, will sovereignly be in control of Israel s destiny. 6 In other words, Baal cannot satisfy their need. I find that God does that often. He allows us to come to the end of ourselves so that we might discover that these idols we are chasing, in the end, will not satisfy us. They leave us empty. They cause us to recognize that the longing we have in our heart will not be satisfied until they find their rest in God. That is the point Tim Keller is making in his book Making Sense of God. In the West, it was thought that secularism would continue to grow and eventually religion would be a thing of the past. But according to a recent Pew study, the trends show that worldwide, secularism is in the decline and religion is on the rise. Why is that? Among other things, secularism can t answer and satisfy the longing our hearts have for something bigger than ourselves. Mark Lilla has written, To most humans, curiosity about higher things comes naturally, it s indifference to them that must be learned. 7 Keller asks, Why do people feel they need religion... People believe in God not merely because they feel some emotional need, but because it makes sense to what they see and experience. Indeed, we have seen many thoughtful 7

8 people are drawn to belief somewhat unwillingly. They embrace religion because they think it is more fully true to the facts of human existence than secularism. 8 Like in verse 8, through the restless heart God allows us to get to the end of ourselves and he awakens us from our stupor and we realize what he had forgotten all along, And she did not know that it was I who gave her the grain, the wine, and the oil, and who lavished on her silver and gold, which they used for Baal. God s mercy for wayward Israel comes to full bloom in the third Therefore statement in verse 14. Listen to what God says, Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her. And there I will give her back her vineyards and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth, as the time when she came out of the land of Egypt. And so when it looked like there was no hope and that God would bring an end to his covenant with Israel, instead we see God pursuing Israel again. He is wooing her back to himself. And it is purely out of his wonderful mercy and grace for this one who played the harlot. It is here we begin to see the resolve of God to do it! It is here where we begin to see this string of fourteen I will statements. God is going to embrace and restore sinful Israel. In That Day... Today! This brings us to the last portion of Hosea 2 and three times in this section, Hosea refers to that day. In verse 16 God says, And in that day, declares the LORD, you shall call me My Husband, and no longer will you call me My Baal. In other words, they will be found worshiping God. Then in verse 18, God says, And I will make for them a covenant on that day. And then finally, in verse 21, we read, And in that day, I will answer declares the LORD,... And I will have mercy on No mercy, and I will say to Not My People, You are my people ; and he shall say, You are my God. Clearly, that day is a day of great hope. When Hosea speaks of that day he clearly speaks of a day that is off into the future somewhat beyond the horizon from when Hosea pens these words. But when that day comes, God will do something that will completely turn things around. Make no mistake about it, what happens on that day is the work of God s grace. Hosea is not the only one to speak of that day or as he says at the end of Hosea 3, in the latter days. The Old Testament prophet, Isaiah, speaks of the latter days as well. In Isaiah 2 it is described as a day when the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established... and all the nations shall flow to it. In Hosea 3:5 these latter days are 8

9 linked to King David, which points us to Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of David. Hosea writes, Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek the LORD their God, and David their king, and they shall come in fear to the LORD and to his goodness in the latter days. In the New Testament, on the Day of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit comes with power and Peter is proclaiming that this Jesus who was crucified has risen from the dead, his fellow Jews wanted him to explain what was happening. How was it that they were able to proclaim the message of the resurrected Jesus in the native languages of the people gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate the feast of Pentecost? Listen to how Peter explains what is happening on that day. He says, And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh. Do you know what that means? That day that Hosea saw as a day off into the distant horizon, that day is here today! Today, the door of hope has been opened and the I will of God has been accomplished. It is anchored in the work of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. God has done it! All the way back in Genesis 12, God chose Abraham and his seed to bring about God s blessing to this broken world. I think it is important to note that when it comes to us connecting with God, that God is the one who has moved towards us. We have all played the harlot. That is the message of Romans 1-3. Whether you are a pagan Gentile or a religious Jew, we have all erected idols that we thought would satisfy our hearts. We are all without excuse For though we knew God, we did not honor him as God or give thanks to him... We exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. And so God gave us over to ourselves and rendered us without excuse. But he didn t leave us there. Out of love, he moved towards us. Clearly, through the picture of Hosea s marriage to Gomer, his wayward wife, we see the intensity of God s love for his people. When the scene shifts from Hosea 2 to Hosea 3, we shift from God and Israel back to the prophet Hosea and his promiscuous wife Gomer. And what do we see? In Hosea 3:1, And the LORD said to me, Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the LORD loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisins. The story of the Bible is God s persevering love for his people. As the story of God s persevering love for this broken world unfolds, he enters into covenant with the people of Israel to bring about his love and his blessing to this broken world. But Israel is just as broken as the rest of the world. They can t be that covenant partner who brings about the healing of the heart we all need because of our sin. But we find out that the seed of Abraham is still the way God intends to restore our broken 9

10 lives. In fact, Jesus is introduced in Matthew 1:1, the first verse of the New Testament, as the son of David, the son of Abraham. It is through Jesus that God keeps his covenant promise. It is through Jesus that God establishes a new covenant. It is through Jesus that the door of hope is opened to all who repent of their sin. That day is Today! We come to Romans 9 where God gives us a glimpse into his master plan to reach this broken world, both Jews and Gentiles. One of the main points of the book of Romans is that the true children of Abraham are children of faith, not children of the flesh. That is the point of Romans 4. It was by faith that righteousness was credited to Abraham. It wasn t circumcision, or the law, that made one the people of God. And so we hear Paul say this in Romans 9:24-26, even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles. That is what Isaiah said about that day. In that day... the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established... and all the nations shall flow to it. In order to prove his point, look where Paul goes. He goes to Hosea and our passage this morning. Applying this verse to both the Jew and the Gentile, he says, Those who were not my people I will call my people, and her who was not beloved I will call beloved. And in the very place where it was said to them, You are not my people,; there they will be called sons of the living God. I love what Mark Seifrid says about this. It is profound. He says, In this reference to the adulterous wife Paul elaborates what it means to be the people of God. Can I pause and ask you that question? What does it mean to be the people of God? Perhaps in thinking of an answer, you think of a certain way of live to be lived or various religious rituals to be observed. No doubt, that is part of the expression of being the people of God. But that is not the heart of the answer. Seifrid says, it is to be a harlot embraced and restored by God s love. 9 That is powerful. In other words, the child of God is the one who falls on his knees and cries out, God have mercy on me a sinner. In doing so, he or she turns to Jesus by faith. And this incredible loving God will meet you right where you are and he will change the course of your life. Door of Hope In closing, I am struck by what God says to the people of Israel in Hosea 2:15. He says that he will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. Literally, the Valley of Achor means valley of trouble. It comes from Joshua 7. It was the place Israel was camped at when they began to take possession of the Promised Land. Having just defeated Jericho by the miraculous hand of God, a man by the name of Achan had rebelled against the word of God by taking some of the spoils and burying it in his tent. He coveted these 10

11 things for himself and experienced the judgment of God. But now, Hosea says, because of what God will do through Jesus, that he will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. In other words, in that day... Today, God s grace and mercy is greater than our sin. Can you see your story in Hosea? It starts with the accusation of God. Who here can stand in their own righteousness before God? We all stand condemned! You may want to stand here and point a condemning finger at Israel, but three fingers are pointing back at you. There is no one righteous, no not one. What will God do? He holds us accountable and if we persist on our own way without God, we will face the judgment of God. But often, by God s mercy, he allows us to pursue other lovers only to discover that they cannot satisfy. The Heidelberg Catechism asks, What is your only comfort in life and in death? That is a worship question. The only true comfort that will last in this life and in death is that you belong to your faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. And so, through Jesus, a door of hope has been opened. Through his life, his death and his resurrection from the dead, God has done it! God has opened a way for us to love the one we were made to know and love. The image I have had all week from this passage is the woman of Luke 7 who wiped the feet of Jesus with her hair and her tears. Why? Like Gomer, she was a woman of ill repute and through Jesus she was forgiven much. She couldn t hold back her devotion and love for Jesus because of what Jesus had done for her. Truth be told, you are that woman. I am that woman. My comfort comes in knowing how great my sin and misery are. How Jesus sets me free from such misery. How I am to thank him for his grace. May this week be filled with such devotion. Praise God! Great is his Faithfulness! 1 James K. A. Smith You Are What You Love (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2016) 6 2 Ibid., 10 3 Augustine Confessions trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) Smith, 7 5 Ibid., 11 6 Gary V. Smith The NIV Application Commentary: Hosea, Amos, Micah ((Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001) 7 Mark Lilla, The Hidden Lesson of Montaigne New York Revie of Books 58, no 5 (March 24, 2011), cited in James K. A. Smith, How Not to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor (Grand Rapids MI, Eerdmans, 2014), p TIm Keller Making Sense of God : An Invitation to the Skeptical (New York: Viking, 2016) 22 9 Mark Siefrid, Romans in Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament ed. G. K. Beale and D. A, Carson (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2007) 647 by Dr. Scott Solberg - All rights reserved 11

12 Sermon Title: God Will Do It! Sermon Text: Hosea 2:2-3:5 Sermon Date: March 12, 2017 Getting To Know Me Questions 1. Share with the group one thing about yourself that others in the group probably don t know about you. 2. Which of these six emotions best describes how you are currently feeling: Sad, Angry, Scared, Happy, Excited, Tender. Share why you are feeling this emotion. 3. From your reading or from the sermon this week, share one thing you observed from the book of Hosea. Diving Into The Word 4. Read Hosea 2:2-5. Pay special attention to verse 5. What were the lovers Israel chased after other than God? What are the lovers we tend to chase that take us away from loving God? 5. Read Hosea 2:6-15. Make note of the three Therefore statements in this passage. How do you see both God s judgment and God s grace in these three statements? 6. Read Hosea 2:16-3:5. Make note of the three times God refers to that day. What are some of the things God is going to do in that day? What encouragement do you find in these verses? 7. Read Luke 7: Share how this story relates to Hosea. Share how your story relates to Hosea and to this passage in Luke. Taking It Home 8. Consider where God has placed you. How can your life be a door of hope where he has sent you? 9. What is one thing you want to do in light of this study? 12