Hosea: Friends with Benefits…
Evan Carter
After hearing this reading, you’re probably thinking the same thing I thought last week…. So this is why Marthame is out this week. Well done Marthame, well done. Actually, the reality is, we’ve been reading difficult texts like this all summer long.
[RECAP] For those of you who haven’t been with us, this summer we’ve been pouring through a series on various prophets in the Bible, and a lot of them have some pretty strange things to say.
These are the texts you don’t exactly want to play Bible roulette with — you know, those times in life when you want the Lord to give you a sweet message for whatever you’re dealing with…so you sit down with your Bible and you open it up randomly. But you land on stories about Elijah or Amos or Hosea and God is promising wrath and destruction upon his people. These prophecies can be tough to reconcile with our notions of a loving, compassionate God.
[BRIEF HISTORY] – The book of Hosea is pretty strange in it’s own unique way too. According to scholars, Hosea immediately followed the prophet Amos. Amos’ words of wrath and destruction had little impact on the Israelite people’s behaviors. They continued to live wildly and participated in all kinds of idol worship. So, just before the Assyrian conquest, God sent these words to Hosea to prophecy to the Northern Kingdom:
UNPACKING THE TEXT
“Hosea, go take for yourself an adulterous wife… And even though she is going to run around and cheat on you, I want you to remain faithful to her. Oh, and she’s going to have three children, which may or may not actually be of your seed.
I don’t know if any of you have ever heard the Lord speak to you. I personally have never heard an audible voice tell me anything… But, I suppose if I ever did, and God told me what he told Hosea, I’m sure I’d act like I didn’t hear it anyway. Did God really tell this guy to go and marry a woman he knew would be unfaithful to him? That seems contradictory to the Old Testament moral code. It’s stories like this that stop and make me think, if people were making all this stuff up in the Bible, don’t you think they would have left out something like this?
Regardless, what does this story have to do with you and me today? And what does this story tell us about God, who is timeless? Is God going to tell me to go and do something crazy like marry an unfaithful prostitute too? Well, I hope not, seeing as I’m supposed to marry someone else, who is absolutely amazing, in three weeks.
As I read about the Israelite people in these stories, I see that… not much has changed… People were running around on God then, and we’re still running around on God now. You see, if I can be so bold, we are all like Gomer. We’re cheaters……who are unfaithful to the Lord too. Though it’s not the most joyful message for a Sunday morning, it is the truth! We are all guilty of the same adultery on a spiritual level.
What does it look like for us to be unfaithful in our relationship with the Lord? After all, it’s not like we’re worshipping other gods like the people we read about in the Bible! But are we? Maybe we don’t understand the concept of worship. The reality is…we are all worshipping something…it’s just that it is often not the Lord.
“To be unfaithful to God is to worship or to love something or someone else more than our relationship with the Lord.” To put God second, whether knowingly or unknowingly…that is unfaithfulness.
What does unfaithfulness look like directly between the Lord and me? It’s when I know the Lord is leading me to step out in faith and do something, yet I choose not to. It’s the, “Lord, if you’ll get me out of this, I promise I will never get myself into a situation like this again.” He picks me up, and I fall right back down.
[Finances] Unfaithfulness is when I don’t make the time to sit down and look at my finances in order to make tithing a priority of my spiritual life….because then I will actually know how much the Lord has given me that I should give back in gratitude and in faith. “Lord, I’m not sure if anyone has filled you in, but we’re in a little bit of a recession right now and times are a little tough these days.” A lot of people can give when the barns are full.
[Friends with Benefits] Unfaithfulness is when my prayer life consists of a list of demands and reminders for the Lord – without a response of thanks, praise, and obedience. It’s when I treat God like a “Friend with benefits.” I want the perks and the freedom without the responsibility. “I don’t have time to hang out today Lord, work is really busy right now and I need to make some things happen, I got some errands to run.” You know what that is? That says, I’ll make time for you when I need you Lord…like when life starts falling apart. When my career is in jeopardy, someone I love gets sick, or my finances are not as secure as I thought they were…then I’ll be interested in talking to you Lord – when I remember that I feel my need for you.
[Other people] – Not only is unfaithfulness directly between us and the Lord, it can also involve our relationships with other people too. Unfaithfulness is when I chose to ignore what Jesus referred to as the second greatest commandment…to “love my neighbor as myself.” Yeah I know I’m supposed to love everyone but I just can’t love “so-and-so.” Lord, you made him and….and you knit him together in his mother’s womb remember? So you know how they are. I just can’t love them right now.”
And lastly, I think unfaithfulness can also manifest itself in the way we interact or worship what the world offers us. Unfaithfulness is when I’m not content with what I have, so I lust or covet what another has. When I compare my body image to anothers’….When I worship success or popularity or money or….myself. It’s when I allow my thoughts to be consumed with worry and anxiety constantly, doubting if the Lord can really be trusted. This is all unfaithfulness too.
We are guilty of unfaithfulness. And Oglethorpe, this will only hurt us as a body and as individuals. Love is not contingent upon whether someone is deserving of it. Love is not optional. Yet, it is the only way.
So, why do we do it? Are we just selfish with our time and selfish with our love? No, the problem is deeper. These are mere symptoms. It’s not a coincidence that we all just happen to randomly struggle with these things like selfishness, greed, judgment, envy, lust…or our inability to love people. The problem is…I have the same DNA as Gomer….and so do you! It’s called sin, and we all got the virus.
[McKittrick] I asked a friend this week what he thought unfaithfulness with the Lord looks like in his life. He simply replied, “It looks like what I see when I wake up and look in the mirror.”
How’s your faithfulness? Are you able to see the Gomer inside of you? Where are you unfaithful? Where do you need to drop to your knees and repent of your adultery?
And yet… even as we all continue to run around on the Lord, placing everything and everyone in front of God….there is good news! You see, adultery is not the point of the story of the life of Hosea and Gomer. So what, a guy married a prostitute who cheated on him, big deal!?! It’s not a story about unfaithfulness…….it’s about faithfulness! God alone is faithful! God is faithful, loving and pursuing even when we are not. These words of prophecy in Hosea are part of the plan the Lord had all along. God commands Hosea to do these things and speaks against the people for all their adultery… and then in verse ten, we get a glimpse of what it’s all about.
“Yet the Israelites will be like the sand on the seashore, which cannot be measured or counted. In the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not my people,’ they will be called ‘sons of the living God.’
The Israelites needed to understand that they could not be faithful to the Lord on their own… and that they needed a savior! And the same is true for us today! God’s faithfulness culminates in the way of sending us a messiah to save us from our adultery. Jesus, the Christ, entered into our world and died the death that we deserved, so that we could be restored into a right relationship with God. That’s faithfulness!
[“Faithfulness” story about Julia and I] – Julia and I were coming back from a family vacation at the beach a few weeks ago and we were talking a lot about how helpful some of our pre-marital counseling has been. At one point in the conversation, I felt compelled to make a pseudo-confession. In the midst of some of the intense self-discovery that pre-marital counseling tends to push people towards, I explained to her that I suddenly realized that, if I were not careful, I was actually capable of making some of the same adulterous mistakes that tore my family apart during my childhood. If I didn’t have a healthy awareness and fear of my sin, I too could be an adulterer. And I’ll never forget what she said back to me. I expected to hear words filled with fear and emotion. Instead, she softly replied, “I’d like to think that even if you were to make a mistake and hurt me like that…it would still be “till death do us part.”
Whew! That’s faithfulness….and that’s only a glimpse of the Lord’s faithfulness. The challenge for all of us is to learn to accept the Lord’s unmerited love and grace. To the extent that we are able to do that, to be able to really accept and understand such unmerited love and grace; the more we will be able to grow in faithfulness with the Lord and with others.
FOCUS: I think this text is trying to say that….
God is faithful even when we are not.
FUNCTION: I think this text is encouraging us to….
Think about where you’ve been cheating on the Lord and make serious efforts to repent from those things.
“If we are faithless, God will remain faithful, for God cannot disown himself.” ~ 2 Timothy 2:13