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HOSEA 3:1-5
(Reading: Luke 3:1-20; 2 Samuel 7:1-17)
The Marriage Of The Prophet
Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ…
In chapter 2 the Lord declared the most amazing grace towards His people.
What was alluded to there as taking place in the future would be the most miraculous thing.
For He would love the most unlovable!
That’s you and me!
For that prophesy is particularly about the coming New Testament age.
Then there would be the new covenant because of the doing and dying of Jesus Christ.
Now, at the time of our text this afternoon, that phenomenal kindness was still some time away.
But this is something Israel had already experienced so much of from the Lord.
For the covenant God had time and again been patient and loving with His people.
He even graciously gives them a golden period under Jeroboam II, while he as a king was just as bad as any of the other they had.
The love of the Lord for His people is what Hosea is called to act out once again.
I say once again because that exactly how verse 1 describes it.
It literally means that he takes Gomer as a wife again.
‘Oh, how very sacrificial,’ we might think.
“Hosea must be some guy!’
Well, to be honest, I don’t think it would have been something Hosea was inclined to do at this point.
Humanly speaking, his heart would have already endured more than enough torment from Gomer.
Rather, this is what God’s doing.
In the words of the first aspect to our sermon this afternoon, this is WHAT HOSEA IS TOLD TO GO AND DO.
Congregation, according to the law of Moses, Hosea had every right to wash his hands of this woman once and for all.
Indeed, under the law of Moses, she should have received capital punishment.
Leviticus 20 verse 10 is very clear about this.
It declares, “If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife – with the wife of his neighbour – both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death.
But that’s just it, isn’t it?
The people were following other gods now.
The gods of their own evil desires.
The spirit of the law of the Lord was the last thing on their minds.
It was certainly the last thing on their hearts now!
But what God did was to take the love Hosea still felt for his wife and stir him on to woo her again.
Hosea was told to resume the courtship of long ago.
You imagine the old hurts that would have opened up.
He had already bent over backwards for her.
And while he still had feelings for her, surely you wouldn’t go this far?
And then consider what we read next in verse 1.
The Lord makes it clear that Hosea is to do this while Gomer is in an adulterous relationship!
Gomer didn’t just slip up once, she’s been at this for years!
Congregation, it’s clear this is God’s love.
Because what do we find is its complete opposite?
Listen to verse 1.
Twice it has two positives: “Go, show your love to your wife again…”, and “Love her as the Lord loves the Israelites…”.
And yet what do we find in juxtaposition to these two?
What’s right next to them?
Why, there are two negatives!
There is “…though she is loved by another and is an adulteress…”, and “…though they turn to other gods and love the sacred raisin cakes.”
So, there is love – and there is lust.
There is what seeks out the very best thing for another – and there’s the most selfish self-love.
How completely opposite can you get?
This is illustrated by the sacred raisin cakes.
We may have wondered how they fit in here.
It sound a bit like something we have with our tea or coffee.
Yet they actually show us how deeply involved Israel is in this pagan worship.
For it’s not those idols who love those raisin cakes.
And these raisin cakes are not what’s being offered to all and sundry.
Rather, these raisin cakes are delicacies which figuratively represent that idolatrous worship so full of carnal sensuality.
You can get a sense of this with some of those chocolate commercials on television.
The chocolate is being eaten as though it were part of an ecstatic experience.
Sometimes the word heavenly is used – even as a brand name!
Job 20 has a similar thought.
There, in verse 12 sin is described as food which sweet as new honey in the mouth.
As the description of sin continues there, though, it pictures how that food will turn sour in his stomach.
Indeed, verse 14 there says it will become the venom of serpents within him.
Raisin cakes are just food – and yet look at what they become!
They are as much idols as those carved images of Baal the people have surrounded themselves with.
Derek Kidner quite rightly says of this last part of verse 1, “it ends in utter bathos.”
In other words, it goes from the most serious to the most ridiculous.
As Kidner says further, God loves Israel to the uttermost, while Israel gives her heart to – of all things – cakes of raisins!
He says, “However one may try to soften the jolt of this, by associating these delicacies with religious feasts or rare occasions, the incongruity of it is still outrageous.
“The bride, it seems, is only here, or anywhere else, for the cakes and the ale.”
So we have noted from verse 1 WHAT HOSEA IS TOLD TO GO AND DO.
Now in verse 2 and 3 we see HOW HOSEA GOES ABOUT FULFILLING THIS.
Congregation, this is where we see the depths of how far Gomer and Israel have fallen.
Because notice what verse 2 details.
Hosea says there, “So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and about a homer and a lethek of barley.”
Yes, you heard right!
To be reunited with his wife, he had to buy her back!
But aren’t we a little bit curious here?
Don’t we wonder how much that would be worth by today’s values?
Well, a shekel is approximately 10 grams in weight.
So fifteen shekels is about 150 grams of silver.
And silver on today’s market is worth about 50 cents Australian per gram.
That makes the fifteen shekels of silver worth about $75.
And with the barley being an equivalent value it would mean Hosea paid $150 for Gomer.
Oh, if that was all a wife costs!
But let’s not become distracted here.
The point isn’t the expense.
Because it wouldn’t have involved that much.
Hosea wouldn’t have needed another mortgage to cover this.
A more important concern for us is what was the reason for this purchase.
I mean, if she were a prostitute, did he have to pay off her pimp?
Along similar lines, was this what Hosea had to pay her ‘boyfriend’ – and then it says a lot about the kind of relationship that was!
Or was this what was needed to cover her debts?
Could she have sold herself into slavery because of her debts and so this was to buy her out of it?
For this amount was equivalent to what a slave was worth under the law.
As Exodus 21 verse 32 says in regards to when a slave is gored by a bull, “the owner must pay thirty shekels of silver to the master of the slave, and the bull was be stone.”
We can’t begin to imagine what Hosea is feeling while he’s doing this.
In the Bible we find that love is mostly being practical first.
So you show what you feel by what you do.
Didn’t Jesus say in Matthew 7 verse 16, “By their fruit you will recognise them”?
But that this is true love we shouldn’t doubt.
Hosea is certainly showing his love for his wife.
And who knows which part of town he had to go into to bring her back home again?
What squalor did he find Gomer in?
In fact, we see Hosea’s love definitely come out in verse 3.
For there he is very clear with her about her boundaries.
He tells his wife, “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 modern secularist would no doubt condemn this as an unfair subjugation.
He would say this is just another form of slavery.
But there is actually a greater good involved here.
Hosea is doing it for Gomer’s best interests.
We can compare this to when undisciplined children nowadays are sent to a special boot camp.
Despite what they may feel before they get there, or even while they’re doing that course, it is for their good.
Afterwards many of them acknowledge that too.
They were properly trained in the right standards there.
This is what John the Baptist meant when he challenged the Jews.
They thought that because they were physically part of the Jewish race, they were somehow privileged.
But they weren’t living out of true faith.
They were self-righteous.
As he told them, they need to repent and change.
So Gomer won’t have any of the normal privileges of a wife until she has passed this probationary period.
She won’t be restored to what she had at first with Hosea until she endures this time.
Though it is a long time, it is yet limited.
It will finish.
And then she’ll be a lot better off.
Hosea even includes himself in this trial of separation.
He shows the extent of his love by going through this with her.
He won’t be involved intimately with her, even though he would love to have that.
He wants her to know how to truly love.
The love that is a committed, sacrificial relationship, instead of the instantaneous lust that she has only known so far.
You see, a lot has to be undone.
Gomer has been badly malformed by years of rebellion against her husband and her God.
It will take time.
Just like someone has to be weaned off an addiction so Gomer has to go through this form of ‘cold turkey’.
Congregation, are you getting the picture?
And it is a clear enough picture, isn’t it?
And so we follow logically into the third aspect this afternoon.
Here we realise WHY GOD ACTS OUT HIS WORD THIS WAY.
Because this is really all about another truant wife – Israel.
This is all leading up to the real point here.
And so we consider verses 4 and 5.
You see, just as Gomer would be taken away from the crutches she depended on, so too would Israel.
Verse 4 prophecies the removal of the very pillars of life as Israel knew it.
It declares, “For the Israelites will live many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or sacred stones, without ephod or idol.”
All their treasured things – those things so entwined with the very fabric of their being – well be completely taken away.
And what a list it is too.
On one extreme there is “sacrifice”, a key part of their worship of the covenant God.
And then said in the very same phrase is “sacred stones”, altars set up for pagan gods which went right against the Lord.
How much more opposite could you get?
And again the same thing happens with the third pair.
The “ephod” is worn by the high priest in the worship of the Lord, while the “idol” is the worship of a totally foreign god.
Hosea mentions both the objects connected with the worship of Yahweh and the worship of idols.
Because both were mixed together.
Congregation, both would be completely taken away, together with their civil government.
Not that that government had been very civil.
As we’ve seen, it was marked by violence of the most brutal kind.
While there’s reference to kings and princes here, they were all self-appointed.
There was nothing godly in how they ruled and their rule was far from the legitimacy the house of David had in Judah.
But this was what Israel depended upon.
For all its obvious hypocrisy and total inconsistency it was what they looked to.
And how much different is that to our society today?
Well might they invoke the ANZAC spirit and all their pious talk about a sense of fairness, until they find out what they can get away with!
Well, imagine all that gone.
In fact, you have gone too – into exile.
Deported to a far away land where none of what you take for granted here is.
And, yet, that’s also a blessed relief then.
For all that distracted you from the Lord will not be there either.
In the words of one commentator, “As Gomer has to abstain many days from every lawful and unlawful communion with men, so too Israel has to abstain from every lawful and unlawful cult.”
It’s this self-denial which brings repentance.
Verse 5 draws out what the Lord is doing through all this.
And let’s note that this has a wider application to Judah also.
Hosea has several times alluded to their suffering the same fate also.
As much as there will be an Assyrian exile of the northern ten tribes, so there will be the Babylonian and Roman exile of Judah.
The prophet Azariah said as much to King Asa in 2nd Chronicles chapter 15.
There in verse 2 he said to him, “Listen to me, Asa and all Judah and Benjamin.
“The LORD is with you when you are with him.
“If you seek him, he will be found by you, but if you forsake him, he will forsake you.”
But the self-denial – that self-discipline – brings repentance.
Verse 5 predicts of a future time: “Afterward the Israelites will return and seek the LORD their God and David their king.
“They will come trembling to the LORD and to his blessings in the last days.”
There are two parts to this verse, which relate to each of its two sentences.
The first part is the return of the people to their God.
And when they do that they’ll naturally be seeking David as their king.
So after all the pride of their independence as a separate kingdom – of having their own rival king, their rival sanctuaries and priests and festivals, and their golden calves – they’ll be humbled.
Now, some may see this being fulfilled in the number of those who went to Judah in 722BC with the fall of the northern kingdom.
And we know that even further down the road, in the next century, Josiah conquered back all the land belonging to the ten tribes.
He completely destroyed all any vestige of pagan worship which was still left behind.
But the name of the Israelites here, and certainly the name of David as their king, points to something far beyond any physical reunification.
This is declaring the great and coming day of David’s greater Son.
Here is what Revelation 22 verse 16 is all about as Jesus there declares Himself to be “the Root and Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star.”
So what we see here is not David the individual but David the family line.
The line which leads to the Messiah.
For this is what the Lord promised to David in 2nd Samuel 7 verse 16.
As we hear there these words of the Lord to David, “Your house and your kingdom will endure forever before me; your throne will be established forever.”
Then there is the second sentence.
This tells us of people who “come trembling to the LORD and to his blessings in the last days.”
Let’s not misunderstand.
These are not people who fear for their lives.
Rather, these are those who know God for who He truly is; these are those who come in true repentance; these are those rejoicing in the salvation of God their Redeemer.
The Lord has worked on them as Hosea worked on Gomer.
As Gomer finds her happiness again with Hosea so will God’s people find their richest joy in the divine bridegroom.
In the words of the last verse of the previous chapter, they who were once called, “not my people,” are now called, “You are my people.”
Congregation, these are those who say, “You are my God.”
Who are they, if they be not physical Israel?
Why, they are spiritual Israel!
And while we pray and work that physical Israel may be brought into this new covenant Church, this word is primarily about us.
These are the last days.
And who is more blessed than us?
Amen.
PRAYER:
Let’s pray…
O Mighty Redeemer…
We have been reminded again of Your powerful saving deeds.
You brought Your people through the Red Sea out of Egypt, while the Egyptian army was drowned.
And it was Your only begotten Son who conquered the devil, hell, and sin, so that we are brought out of eternal damnation into the everlasting paradise.
We are amazed at such grace.
For we deserve none of it.
Like the apostle Paul we confess that we are the worst of all sinners.
And so, with him, we cry out our deepest thankfulness.
For from You and through You and to You are all things.
To You be the glory for ever and ever.
Amen.
* As a matter of courtesy please advise Rev. Sjirk Bajema, if you plan to use this sermon in a worship service. Thank-you.
(c) Copyright 2008, Rev. Sjirk Bajema
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