Hosea Part One Dive
LET ME SHOW YOU WHAT A BROKEN HEART FEELS LIKE
There is no way to dress this one up or step around the fact that the Book of Hosea is a little weird. From the beginning you are like, “What! Did I read that right! Did the LORD really say to Hosea, ‘Go, marry a promiscuous woman and have children with her, for like an adulterous wife this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the LORD’?” Talk about commitment to the prophetic message! Hosea is a Jewish prophet, so to marry a promiscuous woman goes against his religion and calling. Imagine him telling his relatives, “God told me to marry her!” I love the prophets of the Old Testament, they are truly committed to the prophetic symbolism of God’s message!
The Book of Hosea is about God showing a human what it really feels like when His people betray Him. At times, we feel like God is a robot, immune to the depth of feelings that we experience as humans. We doubt His compassion, His love and don’t allow Him to be offended at our behaviour. Perhaps, like myself, you have said to God, “You don’t understand how much this hurts.”
So, after watching His nation betray Him over and over again, prostituting themselves with other nations, He told a prophet to go and marry a ‘promiscuous woman’ in an effort to display how He truly felt about His fickle people. He wanted to show them how it feels when the one that you adore betrays you, when the love you pour out is thrown back in your face, when your wife prostitutes herself with another man, when your children turn against you.
From the Snapshot video, we know that this is one of the few prophetic books where we get to know more about the life and feelings of the prophet than we do his message. Most prophetic books are just about the message of the prophet, but because this book is showing us how God feels, we get to hear how Hosea felt being put into a similar situation. The focalisation in the story jumps between Hosea and God, along with instances where the story is told in third person. This is a prophet that felt the depth of betrayal, the representation of God’s feelings, and God communicated through him His depth of despair for Israel. Notice the language of heartache:
H 4:1 There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgment of God in the land.
And the list of Israel’s betrayals...
H 4:6 Because you have rejected my knowledge… because you have ignored the law of your God.
H 4:12 My people consult a wooden idol
And a diviner’s rod speaks to them
A spirit of prostitution leads them astray
They are unfaithful to their God.
H 5:4 A spirit of prostitution is in their heart;
They do not acknowledge the LORD.
Look closely at Chapter 8; they have broken the covenant and rebelled against it, rejected what is good, set up kings without the Lord’s consent and made idols for themselves. They were incapable of purity, their altars for offerings had become altars for sinning. It was heartbreaking to God that His people would openly reject His wisdom, guidance and laws.
The most heart-breaking statement in all the lists for me is in verse fourteen…
H 8:14 Israel has forgotten their Maker.
God is allowed to feel this depth of betrayal. God is allowed to withdraw His blessing from those who have turned against Him.
H 5:7 He will devour their fields.
I know verses like this can offend us, but I would argue that we should respond differently. We should be heartbroken by the first section, they were unfaithful to the Lord, they were giving birth to illegitimate children, but we get offended that God would respond to Israel’s unfaithfulness by ‘devour[ing] their fields’.
Maybe your initial reaction will be, “How could God do that? How could He destroy their fields?”, but let’s change our heart and allow our reaction to be “How could they turn against God like that?” My question to you is when God was betrayed by His people, when they worshipped idols and ‘prostituted themselves’, was He supposed to be ‘all-loving’ ‘all-forgiving’ and take the abuse? Hosea challenges this and shows us that God was heartbroken and sick of the betrayal, so He lifted His provision off His people. He was showing them that He won’t put up with bad behaviour.
He even points out in history specific moments when they broke His heart before...
H 9:10 When I found Israel, it was like finding grapes in the desert…But when they came to Baal Peor they consecrated themselves to that shameful idol and became as vile as the thing they loved.
You can read about this heartbreaking moment in Numbers 23-31 – especially Chapter 25:1-3.
The climax of the heartbreak is found in Chapter 12, when God reminisces about the ‘good old days’ as a parent.
H 12:1 When Israel was a child, I loved him.
H 11:4 I led them with cords of human kindness, with ties of love. To them I was like one who lifts a little child to the cheek, and I bent down to feed them.
This chapter is like God wrestling with His own compassion and as He remembers Israel and His great love for them, He begins to question His own actions, and then He proclaims,
H 11:8-10 My heart is changed within me and all my compassion is aroused... For I am God, and not a man–the Holy One among you… They will follow the LORD; he will roar like a lion.
I love this book! It really reveals the inner heartache and love of God! Today God is heartbroken by those who are following other gods. We are, first and foremost, His created beings, His children, His bride, and He allows us life. Some take that life and use it for their own purpose and glory. They are guided by emotions rather than by the Spirit, as if the life we have wasn’t given to us by God Himself. He doesn’t despise those who turn against Him, He is heartbroken that they are ‘prostituting themselves’ with other gods.
So as you read Hosea, feel the heart of God for His people. As Hosea feels the very heart of a man betrayed by his wife and children, so God opens His heart to us in this book and reveals the heartache of being betrayed by His bride, His children: the people of Israel.
recommended
An Introduction to the Old Testament
Esther part One
Hosea part One