Pursued by God: Covenant Love Hosea 1:1-11 Sunday, May 28, 2017 Wheatland Presbyterian Church

Transcription

1 Pursued by God: Covenant Love Hosea 1:1-11 Sunday, May 28, 2017 Wheatland Presbyterian Church Kids, I probably should start with you this morning by telling you what this story is about. Kids, this is the story of Hosea, a prophet hundreds of years before Jesus was born, and his wife Gomer (I know, it seems to us like a crazy name for a woman, but believe me the names in this story are going to get a lot crazier before we re done). In their marriage, Hosea is faithful to his wife, but Gomer she is not faithful at all. In fact, Gomer will leave her marriage with Hosea to go and love other men who are not her husband. She will even have children with those other men. This will be incredibly painful for Hosea her husband and for the children as well. But here is perhaps the saddest part of the story, Gomer left the one man who loved her most and loved her best to be with other men who only used her and then abandoned her. But here is the amazing part of the story, God gave Hosea a love for his wife Gomer that would never give up. Hosea would wait and hope and finally go and find his wife Gomer. Hosea would pay off with his money all her debts that she had incurred and bring her back home. But kids, here s the secret to the story, the real story is that God gave Hosea a love for his unfaithful wife to show us that this is exactly how God has loved us. We are Gomer. We have struggled to love God faithfully with all of our hearts and mind and strength. This entire story of Hosea s family is meant to show you and me this morning that God has loved us even when have turned our backs on his love. And perhaps even more than that, this story of Hosea and Gomer will teach us that if we will be honest about our own 1

2 unfaithfulness and our own sin, God s never giving up love will see us through our darkness and will finally win our hearts to his faithful, saving love. And if this story between Hosea and Gomer teaches us anything at all, it teaches us that it is always the people you love who can hurt you the most. Who hasn t heard a careless word or been on the receiving end of a thoughtless action from the very people whom we expected to love us best and protect us most fiercely. It stings to be hurt by a friend that you trusted, someone who had promised to be there for you. And to be estranged from a parent or child is agonizing. But perhaps the deepest and most crushing of all is the betrayal of a spouse: this person whom you had entrusted everything to hopes, future, dreams, your entire self - body and spirit. Some of you know that feeling all too well. Others can only wonder at that sort of pain. But in our text this morning God is speaking through Hosea, verse 2 states, in order to tell his own people whom he has loved and cared for so completely what it feels like to experience being forsaken by them, the very people he loves and longs for most. Here in the opening lines of Hosea it is astounding exactly how God chooses to communicate this pain to his people. We all know that generally, how we choose to communicate with each other says nearly as much as what we actually say. A couple weeks back, my father was taken to the emergency room and then admitted into the hospital with some complications with his kidneys. And although it was a two and a half-hour drive down to see him, and Terilyn was ready to have that baby at any moment, I still drove down to visit him in the hospital. There are times when a text, an , or a phone call just won t do. And in the life of God s people at this 2

3 time in their history, God s normal ways of getting their attention and communicating his love and care or his shock and hurt just won t do. His people needed desperately to hear what he had to say, and as your momma taught you growing up, actions speak louder than words. And so God speaks through Hosea to his own people using symbolic action. God tells Hosea to act out in real space and time for everyone to see this message he has for his people. And Hosea is to do so in this shocking way: he must, verse two says, marry a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom. Now what message was so important for his people that God s faithful prophet should have his heart ripped apart and his family life decimated and paraded before the entire Northern Kingdom of Israel in such a publicly horrific way? That message is a two-fold message, and we as a congregation this morning need to hear it along with that original audience that it was intended for there in Hosea 1. The first part of the message is loud and clear: God s people have forsaken him. But what shape did this abandonment take? What was this great whoredom that they were guilty of? How exactly did they forsake the Lord? Is there a clue in this dramatic and sordid story that Hosea was called by God to live out and put on display? I think so. And we get an idea in the children that are given to Hosea. In fact, these children will embody God s word to Israel and to us. They will be living and breathing signs among the people. And they speak to us as a church this morning as well. When we get down to verse four we find that God tells Hosea to name his first son with his promiscuous new wife Jezreel. This is to highlight the punishment 3

4 that he will bring here upon the Northern Kingdom and the house of Jehu, which was currently the ruling family of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. But who was Jehu and why was it necessary that his house be judged? (Fair warning: we are heading into a bit of Israel s history which can be a messy enterprise on a holiday weekend Sunday morning. I do hope you ll try to stay with me here through it. If we don t have some grasp of the backstory there is no way to make sense of the text here.) But Jehu became King of Israel through a bloody campaign in the valley of Jezreel when he put to death all the surviving members of the house of Ahab including Jezebel, Ahab s Baal worshipping wife. That story is in 2 Kings chapters 9 and 10. In fact, it was Jezebel, Ahab s wife, who some time earlier had sought to introduce Baal worship in Israel through 450 prophets of Baal and 400 prophets of Asherah that she fed at her own table and kept at her own expense. These were slain by Elijah after that famous showdown between Elijah and the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel. 1 But that did not eradicate Baal and Asherah worship for the Kingdom of Israel. For when Jehu had done all of his bloody campaigning and putting away all of the Baal worship from Israel, we are told there in 2 Kings 10 that nevertheless Jehu did not walk after God with all of his heart, but continued to allow the sins of Jeroboam to be practiced in the kingdom. And what were the sins of Jeroboam? Jereboam s sin was to set up temples in Dan and Bethel to rival Solomon s temple in Jerusalem. Each of these 2 alternative places of worship were meant to make the worship of God more convenient for those in the Northern Kingdom. Jeroboam appointed his own priests to these temples and even changed feast days. Golden 1 1 Kings

5 Calves were set up at the temples in Dan and Bethel and these images or idols continued to foster false worship in the Northern Kingdom of Israel. And ironically, tragically, this persisted under the house of Jehu, even though Jehu had sought to eradicate Baal worship and done some really spectacular things in cleaning up Israel. But here s the thing, that wasn t enough. There was only one way to be God s people, and that was to have no other gods before him. The covenant that God made with his people was intended to be kept completely. God would be perfectly faithful to them, and they would worship him alone in return. There was no way to be mostly faithful to God. Imagine with me for a moment that you are married this morning. For some of you that is not so difficult a stretch. What sort of marriage do you think you might have if you are mostly faithful to your spouse? Inside you are probably either laughing or crying at that question, depending on your experience. Why? Because we know that even one brief and passing moment of infidelity in a marriage is an abandonment of the marriage vows that were made on your wedding day. Nobody promised their spouse on their wedding day that they would almost always be faithful. And this seems to be what has moved God to use this incredible symbolic action of having Hosea marry an unfaithful woman as wife. Israel had abandoned God through her worship. Israel was in fact worshiping Asherah, sometimes thought to be the female companion of Yahweh, alongside the one true God. And this was idolatry. And yet somehow Israel, partly because of the prosperity that she enjoyed at this time, an partly because of the influence of the surrounding cultures, lived as if her idolatry wasn t an issue. She kept up her sacrifices and worship as if all were 5

6 well. And so God graciously seeks to use this tragic drama to drive home his point. And in this dramatic three-act play that God has written for Hosea to perform for his people, Hosea takes a wife with a sordid history and a wandering eye to be his unfaithful wife and is to make a home and family with her even while she continues in her adultery and unfaithfulness. And the point that God is graphically making for Israel his people to see is this: their idolatry is equal to adultery in marriage. This is not a new way to think about idolatry. God had emphasized this through other prophets as he spoke to his people. But God is confronting his people in the starkest of terms through Hosea s marriage and family in their community. Israel s worship of other gods brought into her relationship with the one true God all the effects that adultery introduces into a marriage: shame, guilt, suspicion, isolation, coldness, distance, rejection. To break faith with God in idolatry is actually painful and debilitating adultery. And God through Hosea is bringing all of that shame, guilt, suspicion, isolation, coldness, distance, and rejection for Hosea and Gomer to experience and for his people to see and feel and hear up closely. And so it happens that Gomer gives birth to two more children. The Hebrew language in which this is originally written leaves out the words that would indicate that these last two kids were clearly Hosea s offspring. That s not to say that for sure they weren t Hosea s children. It only highlights perhaps the painful ambiguity of building a family in a marriage filled with ongoing infidelity. Hosea is to name his second child, a daughter, No Mercy. After just announcing our new son s name as Basil, I can only imagine what Hosea s family was saying after hearing that name for the first time. You should read some of the texts I received back from my sisters when I sent 6

7 pictures of the little guy and announced his name. Now in all fairness, part of it might be that I was blowing up their phones at 5:30 on a Saturday morning, but still family have their opinions and they rarely hold back. But I can imagine the texts that Hosea got back after shooting out this birth announcement No Mercy? Really, Hosea? Wasn t it bad enough that you went and married that tramp Gomer? But now you re going to call your daughter that? She better have a really great personality. All joking aside, the name wasn t just depressing, it was actually far worse than that. By naming his daughter No Mercy, according to the text God was telling the Northern kingdom of Israel that they would not be saved from the Assyrian invasion that would eventually ransack Israel and carry them off into slavery. There would be no way around the exile. The God who had rescued his people over and over again when they found themselves in the most impossible of situations: Egypt, the Red Sea, Jericho, the Canaanites, and all the others, is telling them that there will be no stunning victory at the last moment, no surprising miracle, simply put, there will be No Mercy. And then when Gomer had weaned No Mercy, another son of her promiscuity is born. And this time in verse nine, God said his name is to be Not My People. This is the end of any pretense in Israel s relationship with God. Through Hosea, God declares with the name of this youngest son what Israel had been living out all along. In her idolatry she had abandoned God. She ceased, by her own choosing and desire, to be God s people. This nation, who had been called out in Abraham, rescued from Egypt, made to be God s own possession and a kingdom of priests, given a land in which to flourish and serve God and be the people through whom God would 7

8 rescue the rest of the world, these people have issued their loving and faithful God a bill of divorce. And in verse 9 God underlines it by adding And I am not your God. As one theologian put it, God s rejection of Israel was but a recognition and a confirmation of Israel s own choice. God s love, though endlessly patient, could not be coercive. Israel has forsaken God and God has declared a divorce. The first act of this heart-wrenching drama is nearly over. Idolatry has done its work. And if idolatry is this dangerous in our life with God, if idolatry can do in our life with God what adultery can do in a marriage, we must pause this morning and look deeply into our own hearts. Is there any sense in which we might be unwittingly caught up in the idolatry that is in the air we breathe each day? Tim Keller has a helpful description in his book Counterfeit Gods that is a wonderful diagnostic for our hearts. In his book he says this, An idol is whatever you look at and say in your heart, If I have that, then I ll feel my life has meaning, then I ll know I have value, then I ll feel significant and secure. It is difficult for us to judge nearly 3000 years later just how it was that 2 golden statues of cows made ancient Israel feel valuable or significant or secure. But before we dismiss their idolatry as primitive and backwards and terribly unsophisticated, can we sit for a moment with our own temptations towards false gods? Is it possible to identify people or things that are functioning as idols in our own life with God? Often as we seek to identify these functional idols in our life we discover the things that typically displace our love for God are not bad in and of themselves. More often than not our idols turn out to be good things like family, work, sex, relationships, financial security, recreation. These are each in themselves lovely and delightful and good. 8

9 And yet they so quickly become the things that we are making to support a weight that they were never meant to bear the weight of identity, significance, security. Will you this morning honestly confront these places in your own heart that you have exchanged God s love for a counterfeit god that that you believe will bring you meaning or value or significance or security? If we will take seriously this morning our own tendency to forsake God through a life of idolatry, only then can we begin to acknowledge the places where we, like Israel, have forsaken God. And only then will we find the incredible hope and comfort in the other half of this two-fold message from Hosea chapter 1. And this final message is even louder, drowning out the first: God has not abandoned his covenant of love and salvation, healing and flourishing that he made to his people. Listen again to the closing verses of chapter one (1:10-11) This is the promise God made to Abraham in Genesis 22. This is the promise of a Savior. This is our rescue in Jesus. On this final Sunday of Eastertide, this Ascension Sunday, we must hear these words clearly. At the very depths of our unfaithfulness and wandering and craving for identity and significance and security from so many other places, our God pursues us even there to remind us that he has not abandon his covenant. In fact, when we are willing to hear God s words to us and to deal honestly with our idolatrous hearts, we will find our Father to be lovingly, patiently, persistently, pursuing us in love, remaining faithful to his promise to heal and save us through the death and resurrection of Jesus. Where are the places of divided love and faithfulness to God that you know still lurk in your heart this morning? It is no secret 9

10 from our own history that we are people with wandering eyes. Our history is a history of repeated unfaithfulness to the God who has loved us and rescued us in Jesus. This morning Hosea s outrageous actions come as confrontation and warning to us in our idolatry. From our love affair with counterfeit gods, God is calling us back to faithfulness to his covenant love love rooted in his own boundless capacity for love and mercy to his people and his world which he has created and sustains. In your darkest and most difficult struggle, God will not, God cannot abandon you. Acknowledge your unfaithfulness and return to him. God s mercy and his love, his covenant promise to rescue and heal and save you always gets the final word. May God grant us the grace to believe that this morning. May our eyes be opened to our own unfaithfulness. And may we together this morning run back to this One who will transform our abandonment and despair into healing and salvation. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. 10