What the Lord Wants

Hosea 5-6:6
by Daniel Harrell

In 1810, Ludwig van Beethoven was still composing greatest hits. Napoleon annexed Holland and tragically, 18,000 Angolans were sold as slaves in Rio de Janeiro. King George III of England was declared insane. James Madison was president of the United States and Paul Revere was still crafting silver tea sets. Moose went extinct in the Caucasus region of Russia. There was no telegraph or steamboat yet. The Republic of West Florida declared independence from Spain—only to be annexed one month later by the United States so that college students would have somewhere to go on spring break. Here in Boston, the Society in Dedham for Apprehending Horse Thieves was founded. And cows still grazed on Boston Common. The Back Bay was mostly a bay, or at least tidal flats. And the recently completed Park Street Church, which held its first worship service on January 10, was the tallest building in Boston; its steeple reaching 217 feet into the sky. A lot has changed since then.

We’ve spent the past year and a half commemorating 200 years of Park Street’s history—as tonight’s video reminded us. My own personal history at Park Street comprises almost one-eighth of those two-hundred years, 23 to be exact, and over this relatively short time I’ve witnessed (and even instigated) plenty of change too—in ways we do worship, do mission, govern ourselves and serve Christ in the city. I’ve witnessed plenty of change in the congregation as well. We say that Park Street turns over by half every three years, which would make for about four totally new congregations since I’ve been here. That feels about right. It is a remarkable testimony to God’s spirit in this place that despite the turnover, the congregation remains true to its calling.

Pastor A.Z. Conrad, preaching at the 125^th Anniversary, asked, “Can you invest stones, brick, wood and mortar with sanctity?” He answered “yes” insomuch as in this place “the name of Jesus Christ is magnified as the Lord of glory and …proclaimed as the son of God and savior of the world.” Perhaps this is why we call this room a sanctuary rather than the traditional Congregational meetinghouse. Our heritage in this place has been one of determined faithfulness to Jesus, transferred from generation to generation and spread literally across the country and around the world. And yet this faithfulness is not something for which we can accept tribute. The praise always goes to Christ.

Now this is not to say that Park Street’s history has been all communion wine and roses. If you’ve read historian Garth Rosell’s recent book about Park Street (written for our Bicentennial) then you know how the last quarter of the nineteenth century proved to be pretty perilous for the church. The tremendous loss of life during the Civil War coupled with an enormous loss of homes and jobs following a citywide fire in 1872, made life brutal here in Beantown. Growing tension between Protestants and Catholics over politics and immigration, as well as education, led many to flee to a better life in the suburbs. Within Park Street itself, a string of ministers made controversial moves that upset a number of people (a tradition that some of us have continued today). Attendance and giving took a nose dive, forcing Park Street to dig up the corpses it had buried in its basement burial vault to make room for a rent-paying florist and grocery store. But that barely staunched the bleeding. By around 1901, things had grown so dire that many were convinced the only way to survive would be to sell the building and move the congregation out to the suburbs too.

However, as the story goes, architecturally-minded residents of Boston came to the rescue, forming a “Committee for the Preservation of Park Street Church” by which was meant the building. They managed to save this beautiful meetinghouse, but the church continued on life support for a few more years. The history books blame the decline on the culture and the pastors, but we all know that any church’s decline is a corporate affair. Inasmuch as even the most redeemed saints remain sinners on earth, it’s not hard to imagine the sorts of things that could have been going wrong. Power struggles guised under the ruse of righteousness, fights over worship, confusion of architectural preservation with following Jesus, basic selfishness and exclusivity, a general lack of forgiveness, run-of-the-mill hypocrisy and immorality—the sorts of things that we struggle with still.

That the redeemed remain sinners on earth is nothing new. Already in the book of Hosea, the Lord has called his own chosen and redeemed people “stubborn cows” and “promiscuous whores” on account of their sin and idolatry. Here in chapter 5, Israel’s insidious idolatry has spread into Judah. Remember that when the Israelites first entered the Promised Land, they found it teeming with those who thought the statues they worshiped could control death and fertility. They fashioned a faith that at the extreme called human sacrifice and forced prostitution religious rituals. God warned the Israelites to sweep the Promised Land clean of this scourge, but not all of it was so bad. A lot of it felt good. What’s wrong with getting a little buzz out of your religion? Why submit yourself to the will of your Creator when you can have creation submit to you? Why not craft a fantasy reality rather than this boring life you have to endure? Is it such a terrible thing to have a few shiny statues in your life? Aren’t we all going home after church to watch the Oscars? A little idolatry isn’t going to hurt anybody, is it? A little adultery on the side? That’s how God viewed idolatry. To him, to worship another was adultery of the highest order.

Unwilling to dispense with their playthings, God determines, verse 10, to “pour out his wrath on his cheating people like a flood of water.” Though by the time you get to verse 12—perhaps remembering his promise to Noah about not using water again—the Lord decides to become as a “moth” and “dry rot,” killing them softly enough that they might still have time to repent.

Two years ago I opened my closet to discover that a couple pairs of my wool paints had been eaten by moths. Figuring that this had to be some fluke, I tossed a few moth balls into my closet and let it go at that. This past year, when I opened my closet to fetch my winter clothes, every piece of wool I owned was eaten through: three suits, a sport coat, six pairs of pants and five sweaters. Hoping to salvage some of it, I went to a tailor who told me that the way to keep moths out of wool is to clean it.

But neither Israel nor Judah did anything to clean up their wooly lives. Though holes began to emerge everywhere, the responded with what amounted to tossing a few mothballs into the closet. They turned to the king of Assyria for financial and political help instead of turning to God. Therefore the Lord lets them have the king of Assyria and it turn, the king of Assyria lets Israel have it. Assyria devours Israel like a lion, verse 14, tears them to pieces and carries them off into exile with no one to rescue them. Assyria does the deed, but the Lord takes the credit. He is the roaring lion who afterward, “will go back to my place until they admit their guilt. They will seek my face; in their misery they will earnestly seek me.”

The problem is that their seeking wasn’t so earnest—despite their misery. The first few verses of chapter 6 seems sincere: “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.” However the Lord’s response reveals a darker reality. I knew a budding Christian folk singer who once put these verses to music and sang them as a ballad of God’s grace. She sang it in a church I was attending at the time, melodically strumming Israel’s certainty that God always comes around in the end. “As surely as the sun rises, he will appear; he will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth.” But she left out verse 4. Likewise that Israelites strummed their guitar and thought that enough to soothe the savage savior. Sure, they’d repeatedly and serially cheated on him as their husband, but c’mon, let’s hold hands and sing kum-bah-yah! That’ll make everything OK. But no sooner was their chorus completed than God just shakes his head. Verse 4: “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.” I sent my prophets to cut through your crap. I killed you with the words of my own mouth. My judgments were like bright lights in your eyes. I don’t want your songs. I don’t want your sacrifices. I don’t want your burnt offerings, verse 6. What I want is your love. What I want is for you to know me, says the Lord.

This word for love in verse 6, translated as mercy in your pew Bible, is a magisterial noun in Hebrew meaning steadfast love, loyalty and covenant faithfulness. It’s like being faithful to your marriage vows, for better or worse, which is the context for Hosea, remember. The Lord commanded the prophet to marry a prostitute who will cheat on him even during the honeymoon. God commands this so that Hosea might understand God’s own relationship with his unfaithful people and therefore speak from his own pained experience about God’s hurt and God’s anger. The word translated acknowledgement in your pew Bible is Hebrew for the verb to know in the Biblical sense. Knowing God has nothing to do with memorizing a list of attributes. The language is relational rather than informational. The Lord wants his wife to be his wife.

Now contrary to popular interpretation, Hosea is not rejecting singing or sacrifices or offerings or other aspects of worship practice. What is being rejected is worship without love—going through the motions while taking God for granted. The solution is not simply more passionate worship. The solution is passionate worship that results in compassion toward others. This is why the NIV translates marital faithfulness as mercy here. Jesus said that to love God is to obey his commands. If you love God you will love your neighbor. You will love your enemies.

Jesus quotes Hosea 6:6 twice in Matthew’s gospel, both times to the Pharisees, spiritual leaders known for paying lip service to God, just like the spiritual leaders of ancient Israel paid. In Matthew chapter 9, Jesus is having dinner with Matthew himself, a despised and corrupt tax-collector whom Jesus shockingly enlisted to become a disciple. They party at Matthew’s place afterwards with a houseful of other corrupt tax-collectors, causing the Pharisees to go crazy since no Messiah worth his salt would ever share supper with a sinner. To whit Jesus famously responds, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” But then he adds, “Go and learn what Hosea meant when he wrote: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” Had the Pharisees understood what Hosea meant, had they known God’s heart, they would have known their place was at Matthew’s table too.

Later in Matthew 12, the Pharisees do a nutty over Jesus’ disciples plucking a few pieces of grain for a Sabbath snack. Did the disciples not know that to pluck was to work and that work was expressly forbidden on the Sabbath? But again, Jesus replied, “If you had known what Hosea’s words mean, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent.” Keeping Sabbath for Sabbath’s sake means nothing.

It’s encouraging to note that by the time we get to Jesus’ day, God’s people had pretty much kicked their addiction to idols. The problem was that they did it by idolizing themselves. They took the Mosaic law and created a code whereby faithfulness could be achieved without faith. Go through the motions and you can be good without God. We see the same sort of thing in our own day. Take Sabbath-keeping. There’s a ton of guidance out there commending Sabbath-keeping as a means for achieving balance, and staying centered or resisting consumerism; a practice that is good for everybody no matter which god you worship. But attention to such spiritual practices—whether its prayer as a way to relax your mind or fasting during Lent as way to lose weight— attention to such practices actually deflects our attention away from God. As Methodist bishop Will Willimon writes, “The question that must always be asked is “Who is the God being served with what I do? …“Christians have learned from bitter experience that many of our allegedly helpful means of climbing up to God are easily perverted into ways of defending ourselves against God.”

However, as Hosea makes clear, against God there is no final defense. Like a husband madly in love with his wife, the Lord is relentless. For eight more chapters God will rail against his people’s infidelity, but only so they may finally realize that it is he who truly loves them. The Lord not only keeps faith as the devoted husband, but in Christ he will keep faith for his people too, and in doing so, he will make them faithful. “I am the one who answers your prayers and cares for you,” says the Lord in Hosea’s last chapter, “I am the tree that is always green; all your fruit comes from me.” “I am the vine, you are the branches,” Jesus echoes. “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.”

Though I think the words uttered by the people in chapter 6 were uttered insincerely, they were still the right words. Some would say they were more right than realized. Verse 2 has the people strumming, “After two days God will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him.” It’s impossible for us who sit this side of the resurrection not to make a connection to Jesus. Is Hosea preaching the gospel? Of course he is, as much as every prophet preaches the gospel. That Israel had been “torn to pieces” (verse 1) was not understood as merely a flesh wound. They knew they were dead and buried. But they knew that in the end, sinful and unfaithful as they were, somehow, God would raise them up.

Park Street Church still has its problems. Inasmuch as we’re comprised of redeemed saints who remain sinners on earth, we always will. The good news is that Jesus still shares supper with sinners.

Herding Cats

Hosea 4
by Daniel Harrell

On the one hand, Hosea is the perfect book for Valentine’s Day. It features a loving husband who spares no expense to express his devotion to his beloved. He romances and woos, he lavishes with extravagant gifts, he sacrificially gives and forgives when she wrongs him. He even pays off her debts. On the other hand, Hosea is a lousy book for Valentine’s Day. That’s because the object of all this unconditional devotion has no scruples about snubbing the affection and re-gifting the gifts to someone she likes better. She tromps all over the forgiveness and exploits his financial generosity by taking the money and running off with other lovers, without a care for how it rips out her husband’s heart. By now you know that the two-timed husband is God himself, and his chosen Israel play the part of the trollop. It’s a Valentine’s Day nightmare that also plays out in the personal life of Hosea. Despite his undying devotion and mercy, Hosea’s two-timing (or make that three or four-timing) wife Gomer dumps him for a string of stiffs she can’t help but idolize. Any normal man would have divorced the tramp and been done with her. But God won’t let Hosea off that easily. Instead he commands Hosea to “go love that adulterous woman” so that Hosea would know what it was like for the Lord to love Israel. It would make him a better prophet. So Hosea obeyed. Chapter 3 ended with Hosea taking his cheating wife back. Or to be specific, Hosea bought her back. Apparently Gomer’s adulteries had landed her so deep in debt that Hosea had to rescue her. But note that Hosea saved and forgave the sinful Gomer without any appeal or repentance on her part. He did it because he loved her and because God loved him. The Bible tells us that our ability to love those who’ve hurt us comes from God who first loved us and forgave us. And yet to forgive is not to pretend as if nothing happened. You only forgive someone who has done something wrong. To forgive begins with blame. Ideally, forgiveness ends with reconciliation, but that can be harder than forgiveness to achieve. Grace is never permission to stay just as you are. Here in Hosea, grace comes with ground rules. Hosea told Gomer, “You are to live with me many days; you must have no sex with any man, nor I with you.” For this promiscuous woman it was time to go cold turkey. As it pertained to Israel, it was time for idolatry detox. Despite all the love from the Lord, Israel inexplicably chased after other gods to love. Though what made their idolatry especially egregious was the fact that the gods they chased after weren’t gods at all. In verse 12 we read how they were nothing but tinker toys. Sticks of wood. Lincoln logs. OK, so maybe that’s not so inexplicable. We all love our toys. They do what we want and never talk back. They make no demands. Not like relationships. True, the Israelites had to do nothing to earn God’s love, but they were expected to do something once they’d received it. Like any marriage, the expectation was that they’d be faithful in good times and bad, for better or worse. The only difference was that Israel’s wedding vows needed more specificity. So God spelled out what faithfulness to him looked like: honoring parents, speaking truthfully, not stealing or murdering or coveting or lying or cheating―all the sorts of behavior you’d rightly expect from someone who promises to love you. But as the old saying goes, promises are made to be broken, and in Israel’s case, they weren’t worth the stone on which they were chiseled. Nevertheless, Hosea sought to fix his marriage, but it had to kill him to do it. Just as it would kill God to bring his people back to their marriage. Hosea’s hard love previews Jesus’ own dying love, and love that would seek to draw all people to him. In chapter 3 Hosea writes how “The Israelites will return and seek the LORD their God and David their king”—“David their king” is code for Jesus, the son of David and inheritor of his eternal throne. Chapter 4, however, describes Israel in the throes of her detox, with God the scorned husband making plain the sins of his wife. The wife does represent Israel; but in particular, she is Israel’s leadership. Her priests and her kings. The people in general are represented by Hosea and Gomer’s three children. However it is something of a distinction without a difference. The Lord had declared all of Israel to be “a kingdom of priests,” a designation that Peter picks up on in the New Testament when he refers to all believers in Jesus as “a royal priesthood and a holy nation.” Basically, a priest is anybody devoted to serving God. However, within Israel then, as within churches today, there are those individuals who embody the people as a whole, discharging service to God on behalf of the community―like elected representatives serve a constituency in Congress. In the Congregational tradition, we teach that every member is a minister, and yet there are those of us ordained by the congregation to perform duties and rituals on behalf of the entire body. We call these people pastors and elders, and we ordained a few new ones this past Wednesday night at our annual meeting. Pastors and elders, like Old testament priests, represent (but don’t replace) the people’s devotion to the Lord. In doing so they seek to set an example for the rest of the congregation to follow―in both faithful obedience and faithful repentance. To be a priest was a privilege. Unfortunately in Hosea’s Israel it was an abused privilege. Chapter 4 begins with a litany of wrongdoing, from cursing to murder, that essentially violate every wedding vow they’d made. Verse 1: “There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgment of God—only cursing, lying and murder, stealing and adultery; they break all bounds, and bloodshed follows bloodshed.” So depraved was their sin that the whole earth was at risk. “The land mourns,” verse 3. Paul famously describes it in Romans as “the creation groaning,” eager to be let out from under the weight of human depravity. So pervasive was the sin of the priests in chapter 4 that the Lord forecasts their destruction. “I will destroy your mother,” verse 5, going on to declare that because “you reject the law of God, I will also reject your children.” To reject the law of God was to reject the way of God and will of God―it was to reject God himself. In ancient Israel the “law of God” governed everything. There was no such thing as separation between church and state. Faith informed every aspect of societal life: government, business, law, education, health as well as worship. I hope you’ve heard about the Social Change Competition we held here last weekend. Your church put up $200K (before the recent recession) as grant money to encourage undergraduate and graduate students to develop ideas that might change the shape of society with the gospel―in effect, to infuse faith back into the realm of government, business, law and health. The disconnection of faith from the “real world” has reduced our faith to little more than a reason not to have sex or steal supplies from work (and sadly we all know how effective that’s been). Still, as one of the judges of the competition, I was blown away by the ingenuity of students who brought their faith to bear on almost every societal arena―from manufacturing brick in Zambia to job training for drug addicts in Boston. Due to the marginalization of our faith, we’ve become accustomed to sharing the gospel being reduced to embarrassingly blurting out that Jesus died for your sins, forgetting that it is the gospel that brings about new creation and true humanity. Jesus death and resurrection has inaugurated an eternity that has already started and thus should be evidenced in the ways that God’s people do everything. God’s passion for the world has all systems and communities and enterprises operating with the energy of his sovereign care and love. And yet even with God palpably in their midst, the Israelites could never function this way. Line up all the kings that get listed in the Old Testament as rulers of Israel and Judah and only three get described as not doing evil in God’s sight—David, Hezekiah and Josiah. It was worse for the priests. Not that this surprises anybody. In our own day, politics is basically synonymous with corruption. Mention “priest” or “minister” and the first word that comes to mind is “pervert.” It’s gotten so bad that a friend described a seminary class where the professor informed the budding pastors that the secret to a successful ministry comes down to one rule: “don’t fornicate.” In verse 7 the Lord bemoans the demise of the priestly vocation. “The more the priests increased, the more they sinned against me; they have turned their glorious calling into a shameful disgrace!” Rather than viewing their calling as a privilege to serve God and their neighbors, the priests treated it as an exclusive and a privileged position for themselves. Arrogance ensued and eventually cynicism and abuse. Bad press continues for the Roman Catholic Church in Germany and Ireland―so much so that one writer compared Pope Benedict to Toyota―trying to manage yet another crisis before the whole enterprise accelerates off a cliff. Yet now as then, priestly sin is a problem that just won’t go away. Verse 12: “The wind of promiscuity blows them astray; they commit spiritual adultery against their God.” A couple of historical explanations paint a better picture of what was going on in Hosea. Verse 8 says “they feed on the sins of my people and relish their wickedness.” Since Old Testament animal sacrifices provided meals for the priests―most of the offerings (the choice livestock) weren’t burned as much as they were cooked―you get the picture of priests urging people to sin more so that they could eat more steak. In verse 13, the picture of shade trees and picnics refers to the hilltop shrines where the idol worship took place. This worship tied crop fertility to human fertility, the idea being that if a farmer had sex with a woman at the crop-god shrine (and apparently every woman in the community had to take a turn at representing the crop god), then your crops would flourish. It was a convenient and twisted way for men to get what they wanted from women. And since tinker toys don’t talk back, who’s going to stop them? Read Hosea 4 and things seem hopeless. The Israelites are stubborn cows, verse 16, how can God ever get them to pasture like lambs in a meadow (shepherd being one of the preferred Biblical metaphors for God). It’s a rhetorical question. The best Hosea can hope for is that somehow Israel’s sin won’t contaminate Judah too (Israel and Judah were split kingdoms following the reign of Solomon). Hosea pleads with Judah not to take after her sister because God is serious about Israel’s destruction. He’s going to put a stop to their evil. In 720 AD the Assyrians would overrun the northern kingdom and Israel as Hosea knew it would be over. And yet, Hosea’s hope for Judah would be Israel’s hope. Judah was Jesus’ ancestor and tribe, and when you turn to the book of Hebrews, its Jesus who steps up to take over the role of priest. Centuries of failure and abuse by Israel’s priests would be redeemed by a great high priest who Hebrews 5:8 says “learned obedience from what he suffered and once made perfect, became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.” When we were in Hosea chapter 2, we read how the Lord promised his people he’d fix their marriage. He’d fix the marriage by fixing them. True, God fixed them by letting the Assyrians run over their country. But he also fixed them by sending Jesus to die for their sins. God keeps his marriage vows, and he keeps Israel’s vows too. Jesus stands in for Israel ―he stands in for us―at the altar—both as bride and groom, both as priest and sacrifice. Jesus came to earth as God in the flesh to be sure, but he also came to earth as representative of all humanity. As our representative, his faithfulness becomes our faithfulness. His obedience becomes our obedience. And his death becomes our death and his resurrection becomes our resurrection too. However to represent our obedience is not to replace our obedience, any more than Jesus’ death and resurrection replaces our own deaths and resurrection. As Hebrews declares, Jesus “became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.” While there is nothing you can do to earn your salvation, you still must do something to show you’ve received it. And yet in Jesus, what God demands he also provides. Obedience is no longer a pipe dream. Jesus in us makes obeying God doable. How? Through prayer. With others. Through practice. Obedience remains a discipline. Even for Jesus. That same verse in Hebrews reads that Jesus himself had to learn obedience, even though he was the son of God. It sounds ludicrous, but even though Jesus knew what it meant to obey God, he didn’t learn it until he did it. There’s a necessary conjunction that occurs throughout Scripture in regard to obedience. While the word itself derives from the verb “to hear,” it always comes tied to the verb “to do.” With Christ in us, we have access to his power. His obedience is our obedience. But like Jesus, we still have to learn it. We still have to do it. If you don’t obey God it’s not because you can’t. It’s because you’re not trying. Either that or you don’t want to. Easy for you to say Mr. Minister Man. You work in a church. Some of you guys even live in the church. Try coming to my office or my classroom or my lab or move into my neighborhood. Love your neighbor? Have you met my neighbor? Everybody cheats where I work. That’s how you get ahead. Jesus says don’t worship money? How else am I supposed to make a profit? And what about my boss? What am I supposed to say to him―”sorry boss, making too much money is idolatry.” I can’t go around telling people I’m a Christian or I’ll get fired. I’ll lose my grant. I’ll get left out when people hit the bar after work. If I go around acting like a Christian? I’ll get run over. I’ll get passed over for the promotion. My customers and clients will think I’ve gone soft. They’ll think I’ve gone crazy. I did try once. I prayed with a patient I was treating. I introduced a child I was coaching to a church youth group. I mentioned that cutting salaries before laying off workers might be the right thing to do. I refused to go along when everybody else padded their hours. I stood up for the person everyone else ostracized. I stayed in my marriage. I resisted temptation. And she left me anyway. I got reprimanded by my superiors. I got slapped with a demotion. I got nailed by the parents. I just got ostracized too. Obedience does work that way sometimes. But that only makes you know that it’s right. Hebrews 5:8- Jesus “learned obedience from what he suffered” because when you suffer for the gospel you learn what it means to love God. “For better or worse” is how the wedding vows put it. If you love me you will keep my commands, Jesus said. If you want to follow me you’ll carry a cross. A cross is like a wedding ring―suffering is what people who love Jesus wear. And yet there’s a strange comfort in it. If you’ve ever put yourself out there for the sake of Christ and the gospel―done what’s right, helped the needy, forgiven the enemy, stood up for righteousness, exposed the works of darkness and suffered for it―then you’ve experienced that power, that spiritual juice, that joy of obedience that energizes you to put yourself out there even further. What God demands, God provides. That’s how obedience works.

Saints By Seven

Hosea 3

by Daniel Harrell

I’d say that with this being Super Bowl Sunday, most of your minds are on football. But if that were true you wouldn’t be here. So rather than thinking about whether the Saints can slow down Peyton Manning and the Colts tonight, imagine this scenario instead: A man walks into my office and informs me that the Lord told him to marry a woman with a pretty shady past. OK, she has a pretty shady present too. She’ll sleep with anybody. Stays faithful to nobody. Still, he loves her. God told him she’s the one. So he married her. Had three kids with her—though he’s not sure that the third one is his. She cheated on him―he doesn’t know how many times. And then she left him―left him with the kids but without the credit cards. She took them and maxed those out. And now the creditors are calling, and even the police. He took her to court. For all practical purposes they are divorced. He hasn’t seen her in months. The whole thing has been utterly humiliating and hurtful. Horrible, basically. But now he hears that she’s broke and homeless. So he’s thinking of taking her back. Despite everything, he still loves her. He wants to know what I think. I think he’s crazy. The woman is clearly messed up and needs professional help. Why he would want to open himself up to more hurt? And what about the children? But then he says that God told him to take her back. God told him to pay off all her debts. I tell him he’d better get some professional help too. There’s no way that God would ever tell him to do that. But then he tells me his name is Hosea.

You might wonder how a loving God could ever make a blameless man go through such misery, but then you already know the reason. The Lord commanded Hosea to marry this slatternly woman because he wanted Hosea to know how it felt for God to be married to Israel. Only then could Hosea prophesy with the pathos and the passion of God himself. Hosea had to suffer what God suffered so that he could speak for the Lord. Bad enough that Hosea had to endure adultery and abandonment from his wife―but now in chapter 3 God commands Hosea to take her back and do it all over again. Why? Because God still loves his people. He can’t help it. And no matter how horrible they behave toward him, he always takes them back. And make no mistake―they have treated him horribly. Hosea’s wife, Gomer, may have dumped him for other men. But the Israelites dumped God for what amounted to snack food. Verse 1; “…they turn to other gods and love their sacred raisin cakes.” Your NIV adds the word “sacred” to try and make Israel’s rejection not seem so unseemly. But there’s nothing sacred in the Hebrew text. Israel dumps God for a Twinkie.

How do you get over such rejection? How do you forgive such betrayal? Love is the answer―but love is what got you into the mess to begin with. Isn’t it better to move on? Cut your losses? Lick your wounds? Guard your heart? Live to love another day? Not here. God commands Hosea to “show your love to your wife again,” though the command is actually more forceful than that. The Hebrew literally says “go love that adulterous woman.” How does Hosea do that? Where does he get the strength and the love to suffer more humiliation and more hurt? He gets it from God who suffers humiliation out of his love for Israel. It’s as the apostle John wrote in the New Testament: “We love because God first loved us.” Or as the apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “The love of Christ compels us.” Likewise, God’s love compels Hosea’s love. And it compels our love and makes us able to forgive. Now mercifully, in some cases, love and forgiveness are made easier because the ones who’ve hurt you confess their wrong and ask for forgiveness. But this is not one of those cases. There is nothing approaching repentance on Gomer’s part. Still, Hosea must love and forgive her? Why? Because God loves and forgives her. God loves and forgives Gomer and he loves and forgives Israel―which means that he loves and forgives Hosea too. Just as he loves and forgives you and me.

But isn’t this all a little dangerous? Unconditional forgiveness is so easily taken for granted and abused. How will Gomer learn her lesson if Hosea just lets her off the hook? Where’s the justice? I think it is important first to remember that to forgive is not to abandon justice. If anything, to forgive is to indict, to accuse. You only forgive people who’ve done something wrong. To forgive is to blame. Secondly, I think it’s important to remember the distinction between forgiveness and reconciliation. Forgiveness is necessary for reconciliation to occur, but forgiveness is not dependent on reconciliation. It is a free gift given, even if reconciliation never happens. You do have to repent to receive forgiveness―you can’t be forgiven if you never confess your wrong. But repentance does not cause forgiveness. Forgiveness does not wait on the offender to repent or apologize. Forgiveness does not wait for the hurt to diminish or the scars to heal. It was while we were still sinners and enemies of God that Christ died for us. It is while your enemies are still your enemies that Jesus commands you love them. Is this hard to do? It is unbearably hard to do. It kills you. But it killed Jesus more. And it’s because he died for us that we can die to him. “Christ’s love compels us,” Paul wrote, “He died for all that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.” It is Christ’s suffering for the sake of forgiveness that makes our suffering doable. Christ’s love in us forgives through us, and that is why and how we forgive.

I was out in Minneapolis last weekend speaking at a church where I retold the story of a man I knew who was in a serious financial mess. He had delayed the sale of a house he owned for several years so that he wouldn’t have to evict two tenants, both of them professing Christians―brothers and sisters in Christ. Nevertheless, these Christian tenants put off paying their rent to this brother, offering one excuse after another, month after month, until they’d run up a back-rent of more than $30,000. Still willing to help, this man refinanced his mortgage in order to lessen their financial obligation. Eventually however, unable to sustain two mortgages on his own, he ended up having to sell the house and evict the tenants anyway. He called me because he wasn’t sure what to do about the back rent. It was causing him a ton of stress. My initial advice was to suggest he seek legal assistance and get what was rightfully owed him. It wouldn’t have been an unbiblical route, especially given that it was a last resort. But as a follower of Jesus I couldn’t help but also ask, albeit hesitantly, whether he’d considered just forgiving the debt. I hesitated because I knew most people would consider such a move enormously irresponsible, unfair and as far as the tenants were concerned, totally underserved. But I noted an immediate lightness in his voice at my suggestion. He sheepishly asked, “Would that be OK?” See, he also knew that to forgive such an enormous debt was irresponsible, unjust and clearly undeserved—which was precisely what made it feel so much like grace. I assured him that, yes, grace is always OK.

Afterwards, someone from the congregation walked up shaking his head. He told me his story about a trusted friend who swindled him not out of back rent, but of out of his entire life savings in Bernie Madoff fashion. He went to his minister who, like me, advised that he take his friend to court and get what was rightfully owed him. And doing so saved his life―though he obviously lost the friendship. Not that there was much of a friendship to lose. What kind of friend cheats you out of everything you own? I’m thinking, probably one like the wife who leaves you and the kids, runs up your credit cards and runs off with the snack food vendor. The good news is that God takes Israel to court. We read about that back in chapter 2. The hard news is that he does it in order to take her back. The Lord courts Israel in both senses of that word. His indictment is an invitation. He accuses in order to spur repentance. He forgives in order to invite reconciliation. God uses every art and tool to win a response that will make for a genuine reunion. He can’t help it. He loves his people. So he does whatever it takes. Even though it kills him. On a cross.

It’s Christ’s love in us that forgives us. It’s what makes forgiving others possible. “So I bought her back,” Hosea says, verse 2. “I paid off her debts with my own money even though I didn’t have to. I took her back into my home. I loved her. And I forgave her.” But again, to forgive is not to pretend as if nothing happened. To forgive someone implies that he or she is not a good person. There would need to be ground rules. Verse 3: Hosea 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 live with you.” A better translation has Hosea saying to Gomer, “you must have no sex with any man, nor I with you.” In other words, for this promiscuous woman it was time to go without. Cold fish. Cold turkey. A clean break. In Israel’s case: idolatry detox. Verse 4: No idols, no ephods, no sacred stones, no sacrifices, no princes, no kings. Ephods are liturgical vestments. Sacred stones are like monuments. Along with sacrifices, these were all parts of proper Israelite worship. But they had become corrupted by Israel using them in pagan worship. Princes and kings would have been fine, except that these were leaders of pagan nations whom Israel ran to instead of God for help. They had rejected the Lord and his gifts, turning his good gifts toxic. Sin does that. It gets all its power from the good things it perverts. It’s why we describe it with words like injustice or iniquity or ingratitude, disorder, disobedience, unfaithfulness, lawlessness and ungodliness.

But Israel’s deprivation was not an end in itself. Like all detox, its purpose is intended for good. A clean break was needed—deep enough and long enough to make a new beginning possible: a pure return, in all humility, to the Lord himself; a renewal of marriage that had seemed beyond all repair. God’s harsh indictment turns out to be an open invitation. He ferociously accuses in order to ferociously embrace. He unfairly and unconditionally forgives in order to spur repentance and pave the way for reconciliation. God’s mercy is as severe as it is generous. It killed Jesus, and it kills the sinner too. “Christ’s love compels us,” Paul wrote, “because we have concluded this: that Christ died for all; therefore all have died.” This would be Israel’s come-to-Jesus moment. Where is the Jesus they come to? Verse 5: “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.” The reference to “David their king” is a reference to the one who ultimately would inherit King David’s throne and crown, the one before whom every knee will bow and every tongue confess as Lord, Jesus Christ the risen king.

So what’s the takeaway for you and me? If you’re like me, you read chapter 3 and immediately identify with Hosea. You think of all the people in your life who have humiliated you and hurt you like Gomer hurt him. How do you forgive them? How can God ask you to do that? Even if to forgive is to indict and detoxify for the sake of repentance and reconciliation, it’s exhausting. Who’s got time for all that? Isn’t it better to move on? Cut your losses? Lick your wounds? Guard your heart? Live to love another day? Besides, what are the chances that forgiveness would work anyway? Most likely you’d just end up humiliated and hurt all over again, and how does that help anybody? Good for Hosea. But I’m not Hosea.

I’m Gomer. That’s the takeaway. Inasmuch as Israel’s story is our story too, we’re the adulterous wife, the unfaithful bride of Christ, the ones too willing to put everything else before our husband. We refuse to love, we take no time to care and take God’s grace for granted. We deliberately choose to do the same stupid things over and over again with little regard for the hurt we cause. It is me and you whom God indicts. You and me whom he blames. You and me whom he accuses. You and me whom he loves. He can’t help it. No matter how horribly we behave toward him―and make no mistake, we behave badly―God always takes us back. He spreads a table before us even though we act like his enemies. He forgives us and overflows our cup so that we might spill his grace even onto our own enemies. The only remaining question is whether his grace is enough to spur your repentance and return you to the Lord to fix the marriage. His indictment is an invitation. Come to Jesus and his table, confess your sins and receive his grace.

How I Met Your Mother

Hosea 2

by Daniel Harrell

There are few things uglier than divorce court. Couples who had pledged undying love to each other now only want each other dead. Heated courtroom battles rage over previously ridiculed wedding presents. Accusations fly over formerly adorable habits. And of course the kids are stuck in the middle and forced to choose sides, all the while watching the two most important people in their lives ruin everything. This being America, we’ve managed to turn divorce into entertainment. Three times a day in Boston, you can tune to WFXT to watch Divorce Court, now in its eleventh season. Viewers can witness firsthand the embittered fighting between husbands and wives. This week’s episodes featured one wife divorcing her husband for pawning her grandmother’s rosary beads. Another has a husband admitting to sneaking through his wife’s belongings where he found love letters and a picture of another man on her cell phone.

Of course you don’t have to watch Divorce Court on TV. There are plenty of places to turn away from such scandalousness. Unfortunately your Bible is not one of them. Hosea 2 is Biblical divorce court. Last Sunday I began a tour through the life of this prophet―a life embittered by his own obedience to the Lord. Because the most effective communicators are those who speak from experience, God gives Hosea an experience he would have never picked for his worst enemy. He commands Hosea to go out and [quote] “marry a whore, and get children with a whore.” Why? “Because the country itself has become nothing but a whorehouse by abandoning Yahweh.” Remarkably, Hosea goes out and does it. He enters a marriage that was as horrible as it was necessary. In his miserable marriage, Hosea empathized with God. He grew to understand that his own personal sorrow echoed God’s sorrow. Hosea suffered what God suffered—and therefore could speak for the Lord.

Chapter 2 works as a poetic replay of chapter 1. Same sordid beginnings. Same unexpected ending. The difference is that rather than viewing Israel’s predicament through the literal lens of Hosea’s predicament, chapter 2 features the Lord himself as the jilted husband. God takes Israel, his two-timing wife, to court and there instructs their children to denounce their mother. Who are the children here? There are three of them, represented by Hosea’s actual children whom the Lord named Jezreel, No Mercy and Not My People. Jezreel (which deliberately sounds like Israel), hearkened back to a time when Israel’s King Jehu was commanded to eliminate all idol worship, but he became enchanted with it instead, taking everybody else down with him for years afterward. Thus the Lord pronounced No Mercy and Not My People, for to God, idolatry was adultery of the highest order. Bad enough that idolatry credited other gods for creation and the provision of crops and rain. Worse that these other gods didn’t actually exist but were made (and made up) by human hands. Why? To make up your own gods means you can make up your own values and ethics too. You can do unto others however you want. You don’t have to deny yourself for anybody or anything. You can forgive whomever you like, or not. You can say whatever you want. You can keep all your money for yourself. You can sleep around. You can ignore needy people and not feel guilty―or at least pretend that you don’t feel guilty. All the while feeling good about yourself since you’re so religious.

It’s sad, really. Why do people chase after pleasures that are so selfish, yet capricious, hurtful, and ultimately disastrous―and then rationalize, minimize and blame everybody else? Hosea will write that we do it because the human heart is deceitful. We want what we want. Though we were made, theologian Richard Niebuhr wrote, “to stand in the presence of eternal, unending absolute glory, to participate in the celebration of cosmic deliverance from everything putrid, destructive and defiling, to rejoice in the service of the stupendous artist who flung universes of stars on canvas, sculptured the forms of angelic powers, etched with loving care miniature worlds within worlds… we throw away that heritage and are content with the mediocrity of an existence without greater hope than the hope for comfort and for recognition by transient others. Human beings made to be great in the service of greatness, make ourselves small by refusing the loving service of God; and in our smallness, we become very wicked and covetous of the pleasures that soon will be taken away.”

You’d think this would make God sad too. But instead, it just makes him mad. If ever you have loved and given yourself completely to another only to have that love betrayed and abandoned, then you know the hurt and the grief and the anger that ensue. Thus God angrily announces in chapter 2 that Israel is no longer his wife. Eugene Peterson taps into that anger with his own translation, The Message: “Haul your mother into court. Accuse her! She’s no longer my wife. I’m no longer her husband. Tell her to quit dressing like a whore, displaying her breasts for sale. If she refuses, I’ll rip off her clothes and expose her, naked as a newborn. I’ll turn her skin into dried-out leather, her body into a badlands landscape, a rack of bones in the desert. I’ll have nothing to do with her children, born one and all in a whorehouse. Face it: Your mother’s been a whore, bringing bastard children into the world. She said, ‘I’m off to see my lovers! They’ll wine and dine me, dress and caress me, perfume and adorn me!’ But I’ll fix her: I’ll dump her in a field of thorns, then lose her in a dead-end alley. She’ll go on the hunt for her lovers but not bring down a single one.”

Now a bit of metaphorical clarification is in order. If Israel is the adulterous wife, and her children are Israel the unfaithful children, who’s accusing whom? Most commentators make the distinction between the government, priests and kings of Israel as the mother, and the ordinary citizenry as its children. Thus having the children denounce the mother here is not unlike Massachusetts voters electing Scott Brown. Arrogant leaders who take voters for granted get their due. If such is the case in modern democracies, how much more in ancient Israel where God himself directly determined who sat on the throne? Facing the wrath of voters is one thing. Facing the wrath of God is another. This goes for everybody.

Understandably, the adulterous wife attempts a turnaround. Sounding a lot like the prodigal son in verse 7, she says, “I will go back to my husband as at first, for then I was better off than now.” But unlike the waiting father, God as the cuckolded husband knows better. He’s got history. He refuses to be taken in by fake sincerity or phony contrition. He continues to read off the charges.

Verse 8. “She has not acknowledged that I was the one who gave her the grain, the new wine and oil, who lavished on her the silver and gold—gifts which they then wasted as offerings to Baal.” Baal, remember, is kind of the catch-all name for Israel’s pagan idols. Baals were believed to be patrons of fertility and thus you had to pay homage to them if you wanted a bounteous crop come harvest time. This not only included the kinds of offerings and sacrifices you were supposed to pay God, but it also included having sex with temple prostitutes―a blatant and adulterous violation of sex as the expression of marital faithfulness. It was twisted stuff—made even more so by the belief that to have sex with these prostitutes was to have sex with the gods and somehow to tap into their virility for yourself. Like taking some ancient version of Viagra. Except that temple prostitution was not just personal sexual sin. It was a personal grab at divine power. Having an idol meant you had control of your personal universe, that you could do whatever you wanted, or so you thought.

In this way some suggest an analogy between ancient idolatry and modern science. Just as local idols were understood to account for natural phenomena in Israel’s day, so in our day science explains natural phenomena, and if you can explain natural phenomenon scientifically, who needs God? Moreover, if you can explain it you can eventually control it, or so we think. But if God is the author of nature, then he is the natural source of nature’s ability to do all that it does. A natural explanation is not a godless explanation because God made nature. As creatures made in God’s image, we are given power to creatively and humbly participate in the goodness of God’s creation. But whenever that participation becomes an arrogant and idolatrous power-grab―from atomic energy to genetic engineering―harm and disaster are genuine dangers.

Verse 9: “I will take away my grain when it ripens, and my new wine when it is ready. I will take back my wool and my linen,” says the Lord. “I will expose her nakedness before her lovers, all of whom will be helpless to help her.” The punishment will fit the crime. The Israelites literally uncovered their nakedness in temple prostitution as part of the Baal fertility rituals. Yahweh will, in effect, give them the nakedness they wanted, only not the way they wanted it. Yahweh will withhold the agricultural fertility they sought from Baal resulting in their own “nakedness”—a metaphor for destitution and shame and ultimately exile—all of which Baal is powerless to do anything about. Hosea foretells famine and finally God’s abandonment of Israel to the Assyrians, a military calamity that will finish off the northern kingdom.

It was a bitter lesson to be learned. And Hosea tried to warn them. It’s like the Ohio mother who just before Christmas called the cops on her 6-year-old daughter after she caught her shoplifting a package of stickers. “You’ve got to catch them when they first start if they do something wrong,” said the mom. Bloggers and child psychologists were predictably aghast, labeling the mother abusive and uncaring. (Though the mom did turn down the $30 reward from the store for catching a shoplifter.) I thought my own dad abusive and uncaring when he marched me back to the store from whence I’d lifted a candy bar as a 6-year-old. I had to shamefully confess my sin to the store owner and not only give back the candy bar, but pay for it too—a tough thing to do when you have no income. I hated it but have to admit it did me some good. Here I am a minister. It’s easy to read God’s punishment as abusive and uncaring too. He names Hosea’s kids No Mercy and Not My People. He decimates their fields, their country and allows them to be taken captive by their enemies. And yet this is not the end of the story. The Lord punishes Israel but he has never ceases to love her.

Nowhere is this more evident than in verse 14, where Hosea offers the third of three “therefores.” The first was in verse 6: “Therefore I will block her path with thornbushes; I will wall her in so that she cannot find her way.” Israel deserved that. The second is in verse 9: “Therefore I will take away my grain when it ripens, and my new wine when it is ready.” Israel deserved that too. The third shows up in verse 14, where you rightly expect a deserving final declaration of divorce and retribution. But instead you get the gospel—an unexpected expression of mercy. “I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the desert…” Now for every Israelite, “desert” was a code word for abject failure. It was in the desert that their forebears so abysmally messed up on their way to the Promised Land. Despite being rescued from Egyptian slavery by God in truly miraculous fashion—ten plagues, Passover, Red Sea crossing, pillars of fire, the works—they rolled out a golden calf―an idol ―and showed their gratitude to it instead. It was adultery of the highest order. So why go back to the desert and risk all of that again? Because the desert was also the place where God and Israel had their first date. God takes Israel to court, but what he wants to do is court her. He uses every art and tool to win a response that will make reconciliation genuine. “I am going to speak tenderly to her.” I’m going to romance her and win her back. I will give her back her vineyards, roses and wine, and she will sing as she did when she came out of Egypt, before everything went wrong. It’s a chance for a do-over.

Hosea makes it sound so promising. Verse 16: “In that day,” declares the LORD, “you will call me ‘my husband’….” Verse 17: “I will remove the names of the Baals from her lips,” Verse 18: “I will make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the creatures that move along the ground. Bow and sword and battle I will abolish from the land, so that all may lie down in safety.” It does sound so promising―but it also sounds crazy. Ask any marriage counselor and they’ll tell you that going back to the beginning doesn’t fix anything that’s bad about a relationship. You have to fix the people involved.

Which is what God does. Verse 19: “I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion.” God lavishes bridal gifts on his wife again, only the gifts he gives are the gifts of himself. Righteousness, justice, love and compassion are all core traits of the Lord. God gives his whole self to this new marriage. But God wasn’t the problem. Marriage is a two-way street. What about Israel? What’s going to make her faithful this time around? The answer is God. Verse 20: “I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the LORD.” It’s a shotgun marriage. Or better―a crucifixion marriage. God takes Israel back to the desert, but this time, rather than relying on her to keep faith, God keeps it for her through Christ. Jesus takes Israel’s place―he takes our place―at the altar. Jesus came to earth as God in the flesh to be sure, but he also came to earth as representative of all humanity. When Jesus confronts Israel’s temptations in the desert―satanic temptations to cheat on God by bowing to the devil himself―Jesus stays faithful. As our representative, his faithfulness becomes our faithfulness. His obedience becomes our obedience. And his death becomes our death and his resurrection becomes our resurrection too. God fixes his people. He fixes us. “I have been crucified with Christ,” is how the apostle Paul put it. “I no longer live. Jesus lives in me.”

And it is to Jesus in us that God responds. Verse 23: “I will show my love and mercy to the one I called ‘No Mercy.’ I will say to those called ‘Not my people, ‘‘You are my people’; and they will say, ‘You are my God.’” The whole thing sounds just like a renewal of marriage vows. And it is. Only this time, in Christ, the vows have been kept. The do-over has become a done deal. As the apostle Peter writes, “You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises [and serve] the one who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”