THER GREATEST LOVE STORY

Hosea 3:1–5 ESV

And the Lord said to me, “Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisins.” So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and a homer and a lethech of barley. And I said to her, “You must dwell as mine for many days. You shall not play the whore, or belong to another man; so will I also be to you.” For the children of Israel shall dwell many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or pillar, without ephod or household gods. Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God, and David their king, and they shall come in fear to the Lord and to his goodness in the latter days.

All the Hebrew prophets, of course, prophesied the coming of the Messiah.

Hosea tells us about the one who will come through the account of his messed-up marriage. Seasoned Saints read this story and are blown away by its content, while others find it bizarre.

James Boice, pastor at Tenth Presbyterian Church in downtown Philadelphia once published a series of sermons on Hosea. He entitled his sermon on Hosea 3 The Greatest Chapter in the Bible.

There are three things this text teaches us. First,

our relationship with God is like a marriage.

Second,

our relationship with God is like a bad marriage.

Third,

how God healed his marriage and what it cost him.

our relationship with God is like a marriage.

Hosea 3:1 ESV

And the Lord said to me, “Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisins.”

This text and the whole book of Hosea are like a marriage. In the beginning, verse 1, it says to Hosea, “Go, love a woman as I love the children of Israel.”

The book's point is, “Just as you, Hosea, are married,” God continually says, “so am I, to my people.”

This is one of the main themes of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Hebrew prophets in particular. It’s in Jeremiah 2–4. It’s in Ezekiel 16. It’s all through Isaiah. It’s here in the book of Hosea.

The theme is you cannot understand our relationship with God strictly under the images of a king relating to subjects as a shepherd relating to sheep, or even as a father relating to children.

As important as those images and metaphors are, and they all are biblical and tell us something about our relationship with God, they don’t exhaust us because, in a way, they don’t go deep enough to tell us everything about what God wants and seeks in a relationship with us.

The Lord uses Hosea to show us His relationship's personal intensity and enduring nature with His people. He wants us to know that His love and our relationship cannot be understood apart from Him as our bridegroom.

It’s not enough to understand Him as our king, shepherd, and father. He must be known to us as our husband.

In Isaiah 54, God speaks to Israel, his people. He says,

Isaiah 54:4–8 ESV

“Fear not, for you will not be ashamed; be not confounded, for you will not be disgraced; for you will forget the shame of your youth, and the reproach of your widowhood you will remember no more. For your Maker is your husband, the Lord of hosts is his name; and the Holy One of Israel is your Redeemer, the God of the whole earth he is called. For the Lord has called you like a wife deserted and grieved in spirit, like a wife of youth when she is cast off, says your God. For a brief moment I deserted you, but with great compassion I will gather you. In overflowing anger for a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you,” says the Lord, your Redeemer.

In Isaiah 62 it says,

Isaiah 62:5 ESV

For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your sons marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.

Now what does this mean? What does it mean to say you don’t understand God or the relationship we are supposed to have with God unless you understand it under this heading of marriage?

For these three reasons:

Marriage is a relationship of priority.

If you are married, then your relationship with your spouse has to be the number one priority in your life. Nothing can come before it.

If you do give it that priority, and only if you do will the marriage be strong, but if you give it that priority, and if your marriage is strong, and everything else in your life is a mess, it doesn’t matter in a way. You move out into the world in strength. But if your marriage is weak, and everything else in your life is going fine, it doesn’t matter. You move out into the world in weakness.

Marriage is the human relationship that sets the course of your life. So first of all, when God says, “I’m your husband. You have to understand our relationship as a marriage,” he’s trying to say, “I’m the ultimate priority.” He says, “You can’t know me as an add-on. I’m not a booster to get you over the hump when you have troubles. I’m not a vitamin supplement. My relationship with you, your relationship with me, must be the number one priority of your life. Everything else is negotiable. Nothing can come before that. Everything else comes second. Everything else gets ditched for that.”

Marriage is a relationship of intimacy.

Marriage is the most intimate human relationship in a couple of ways.

One is knowledge.

It’s a relationship in which knowledge is the most intimate. You can hide stuff from your parents about who you are. You can hide stuff from your children. You can hide stuff from your friends. You can hide stuff from yourself. But your spouse will see because the relationship is so intimate.

It’s also the most intimate in another sense. The depth and passion of the expressions of love are also the most intimate. So when God says, “I want a relationship that is like a marriage,” he is saying, “You can’t know me from afar. You cannot know me formally. I have to be in every nook and cranny of your life, every centimeter, every inch of your life. I must be there. There can’t be any part you hold back from me.”

He says, “You can’t just know about me. You have to experience my love. Whatever our relationship is, and it is many other things, it must be experiential. There has to be a real sense of my love in your heart.

There has to be a real personal and experiential connection because we’re married.” So it’s a relationship of priority, and secondly, it’s a relationship of intimacy, but thirdly, as a result of those two,

Marriage is a relationship of life-changing potency.

Your spouse, because of the nature of the relationship, intimacy, and priority, has massive power to reprogram your self-value, self-worth, and self-view and actually heal you of anything.

Here’s why. If somebody in this room comes up to me and says, “You are a kind man,” I will feel good, but I’m also going to think, “Fooled you. You have no idea how irritable I am. I've cultivated this kind of patient, nice, pastoral demeanor over the years. It’s good and bad.”

But if my spouse comes up and says, “You are about the kindest man I’ve ever met,” I can’t say, “Fooled you.” You can’t fool your spouse on something like that. Your spouse can affirm and heal you of anything if he or she uses it.

In other words, if your spouse tells you you’re beautiful and everyone else in the world says you’re ugly, you feel beautiful. If your spouse tells you you’re ugly and everybody else in the world is telling you you’re beautiful, you feel ugly. Your spouse has that kind of power.

Your spouse’s love and positive affirmation have that kind of power to change you and that kind of power to heal you. If that’s the case, what in the world is God doing when he says, “I’m not just like a husband but like a bridegroom”?

In that place where he says, “As a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so I rejoice over you,” that’s a moment in your life.

God is evoking the moment in which the bridegroom is standing down here, and the bride comes around the corner and starts to come on down toward him, and he sees her in all her dazzling beauty and radiance. How does he feel at that point?

His heart is pounding through his chest. He wants to sweep her up in his arms. He wants to promise her the world, and he wants to lay down his life for her. That’s how he feels. God dares to say, “You know how that is? I’m like that.” He says, “The most incredible moments in the most incredible marriages in the history of the world are just dim hints of my love for you.

If you come to understand, both with your mind and your heart, His delight and love for you, that will be the most life-changing potency in your life. Nothing could be more potent than that.

God says, “Until you understand me not just as a king, not just as a father, not just as a shepherd, but as a husband, as a bridegroom, you have no idea who I am and what we could be together.”

Our relationship with God is like a bad marriage.

Hosea 3:1 ESV

And the Lord said to me, “Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisins.”

Hosea says, “The Lord said to me, ‘Go, again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress …’ ” Here’s what’s happening. That word again refers to Chapter 1.

It refers to the very beginning of the book, which also starts with God saying to Hosea, “Go …” Here’s what happens at the beginning of the book. God does something with Hosea that, on the one hand, is not very startling, but on the other hand, is incredibly startling.

He says to Hosea, “You see this woman?” he points out a particular woman, Gomer. He says to Hosea, “You see Gomer? She’s the one for you. This is the woman you are to marry.”

Now that’s not all that surprising. Why? Because Hosea is a prophet. This is what prophets do. They hear voices. They get revelations. God speaks to them.

Then they preach, they prophesy, and they tell people. That’s their job. So, on the one hand, for God to come and say, “There’s the woman for you. That’s the one you’re going to marry,” is not all that startling. He’s a prophet. But the next thing God says is rather startling.

Hosea 1:2 ESV

When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, “Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.”

He says, “You see that woman there?” This is 1:2. “Go, take her to yourself, this adulterous wife, because the land is guilty of adultery in departing from the Lord.” This adulterous wife?

This is a little bit more prophecy than we’d like, right? God is saying, “This is the woman for you, and I want you to know she’s going to absolutely break your heart.

She’s going to trample on your heart. She’s going to betray you. She’s going to be unfaithful to you. I want you to marry her.” Why? “Because the land is guilty, because the nation and the people are guilty of the vilest adultery in departing from the Lord, yet I will show love to the house of Judah, and I will save them.”

Why would God say to Hosea, “Go marry this woman who is going to utterly break your heart and be unfaithful to you”? There are two reasons. One is

so that God could get redemptive energy into Gomer’s life

which she most desperately needed, through Hosea. But the other reason is God is saying to Hosea,

You’re a prophet. It’s your job to understand me and know who I am so you can communicate it to other people and bring the knowledge of God into their lives and change them.

This is how you will become a prophet because you do not understand me, and you don’t understand what I’m going through to love human beings.

You don’t understand sin, and you don’t understand grace, and you don’t understand my nature. You don’t understand human nature until you have been through the experience of having the person you love most in the world betray you.

God is saying, “This is how you’re going to become a great prophet, a great preacher, a great communicator, who is going to be able to touch other people’s lives. You’ll have to go through what I’m going through.”

So we’re told in chapter 1 that he did marry her. They had three children, by the way, two sons and a daughter. You know what he named the third child, the second son? Lo-Ammi. You know what it means? “Not mine.” She immediately began to become unfaithful to him, and then after that, she left him and went to move in with a lover.

Then she went with other lovers, and eventually, she became a prostitute. You say, “Oh, my goodness. How much further could she fall? How much worse could it get?”

It gets worse, because here in chapter 3 we see she’s for sale. You say, “How did that happen?” We’re not told. There are a couple of ways that could happen.

First of all, it says she’s still with a lover. See that? She’s with another man. She’s with a lover. It’s very, very possible he has put her up for sale. Either she has fallen into debt … that’s one of the reasons you get sold into slavery … or it could be he was a pimp, and she had lost her marketability, and he was cutting his losses.

It’s as far down as a person could fall. It’s as bad as it can be. It’s as broken as it can be. It’s as miserable as it can be. So there is Hosea’s really bad marriage. God says, “That is an image of what my relationship with human beings is like,” because he says, “… love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love cakes of raisin.”

By the way, The cakes of raisin were the delicacies served at the idol feasts. The Lord is saying this is how I feel when the people I love put other things before me and worship other gods before me. That’s the same thing.”

When God says that, which is one of the Old Testament’s great themes, he tells us two things about him. First of all, he’s telling us,

You do not understand the impact of wrongdoing on your God until you understand this image.

When a king sees a citizen breaking a rule, he is angry. When a shepherd sees a sheep straying, shepherds say, “Oh … you know sheep.” When a father sees a child disobeying him, that makes him angry. When the person you love most in your life is putting him or herself in the arms of another lover, that’s different.

Virtually all of you know somebody pretty well who has been through that. There’s almost nothing like it, yet God says, “Until you’ve been through that, or you know somebody who has been through that, you don’t understand the impact of your wrongdoing and your coldness and waywardness on me.”

The second thing we’re learning is

you don’t understand yourself.

When you read about Gomer in Chapter 2, you can see she’s out of control. She’s a sex addict. She can’t stop herself. When God talks about this image when he calls to his people and says, “You’re like a bride who has gone away from me,” it’s extremely interesting. He uses the same way of talking in Jeremiah 2–4, he says,

“O Jerusalem… I remember how, as a bride, you loved me, but you said, ‘I will not serve you.’ Does a maiden forget her jewelry and a bride her wedding ornaments?

Yet my people have forgotten me, days without number. By the roadside you sat, waiting for lovers. You ran after other gods until your feet were bare and your throat was dry.

But you said, ‘It’s no use. I love foreign gods. I can’t help it. I must go after them.’ But can the gods you made for yourselves save you when you are in trouble?

‘What are you doing, O devastated one?’ ” says the Lord. ‘Why dress yourself in scarlet and put on jewels of gold? Why shade your eyes with paint? You adorn yourself in vain, for your lovers despise you and they seek your life.’ ”

Here’s what God is saying. What does it mean to follow another god?

It means when something is more important than God in your life.

If making money turns your crank more, if that’s more important to your self-image and who you are, if that gives you more joy than your relationship with God …

If having children, if getting married, if being married, if your looks, if your achievements, if some great political cause … if there’s anything more important than God in your life, that’s your real god.

Here’s what God is saying. Sexual addiction is when you have an inner emptiness, and because of that inner emptiness, you are driven toward the false intimacy of various sorts of sexual practices that don’t satisfy you.

God has the audacity here to say, “If you make anything more important than me … your career or a good cause or your family or being married or trying to get married … you are doing the same thing with your soul that a sex addict does with his or her body.”

You’re putting yourself in the arms of something, and you have to have it, because if you don’t have the money, or if you don’t have the love, or if you don’t have the romance, or if you don’t have whatever it is that is so important to you, more important than God … You’re addicted.

You’ve given yourself to it. It’s your lover. But your lovers despise you. What is he saying? He says, “They cannot save you. They’re just idols. They didn’t create you. I did. They can’t save you. Only I can. You’re a slave.

How will your money save you when you lose it, which is constantly happening? It can’t. It can only curse you with the sense of its absence. Only I can save you.

If you build your life around an individual, no matter how good he or she is, what happens when he or she is dead? See, your idols can’t save you. Your lovers, in a sense, seek your life. They can’t help you when your heart is broken.”

God says, “Until you understand the absolute devastation of having the person you most love betray you, be unfaithful to you, you don’t understand how I feel about your waywardness and about your sin.

You don’t even understand your own heart and how addicted and enslaved you are to other things besides me that can never save you and will only drive you into the ground.”

How God healed his marriage and what it cost him

Let’s first see how he told Hosea to do it. Verse 1: “The Lord said to me, ‘Go, again …’ ” She has left him. She has been a prostitute. She is up for sale. God says, “Go again …”

What God is saying here is, “You have a thousand reasons for divorce. I want you to go get her anyway.” Some people, making a mistake right away, say, “Is this trying to say there’s no such thing as grounds for divorce?

No. There are plenty of places in the Bible that say there are grounds for divorce.

Hosea would be very upset if you saw him as this inspiring example of love conquering all. That’s not what it’s saying. It’s saying God conquers all. God says, “Let’s show the world what I’m like. Go to her.” And so he does.

Hosea 3:2 ESV

So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and a homer and a lethech of barley.

Gomer was being auctioned as a slave in a public marketplace. We also know she was either then stripped virtually naked or naked because the bidders had to see what they were getting. So she’s up for sale. The bidding starts.

It’s not hard to imagine that she probably would have had her eyes closed because there was not much left to shield herself from the moment of her greatest degradation.

So she hears the voices, and she hears “Five shekels,” “Eight shekels,” and suddenly she realizes one of the voices is her husband.

She’s thinking, “What is he doing here? After all I’ve done, what is he doing here?” Then he goes, “Ten … Twelve … Thirteen … Fifteen. Fifteen and a lethech.” Fifteen and a homer of barley, which by the way, is the equivalent of about thirty shekels, which was about the average price for a slave. “Sold!” to Hosea.

He would have come up, and he would have covered her nakedness with a cloak and led her away. She must have been saying, “Why would he still want me?” Probably her first response was, “Oh, I get it. Revenge. Now you can do what you want with me.” But in verse 3, He speaks tenderly to her.

Hosea 3:3 ESV

And I said to her, “You must dwell as mine for many days. You shall not play the whore, or belong to another man; so will I also be to you.”

Three things. First,

I want to dwell with you.

He says, “No, I don’t want you as a slave. I want you as my wife. I want to build a home again. I want to have a life together with you.” That’s the first thing. But secondly, he says,

However, for a set period, for many days, you will have sex with no man, including me.

The grammar says, “No man, including me.” There will be a period in which we don’t sleep together, and you certainly don’t sleep with anyone else. “But then,” the end of the verse says, “I will indeed be yours.” Do you know what he’s saying? He says, “I want to rebuild our lives together, but there’s going to have to be a period here in which we don’t get together, but we do all the hard work of going back through everything that has happened. Then I will indeed be yours. Not just, “You will be mine. I’m the husband here. I bought you.” No, “I will be yours.”

Derek Kidner, in his commentary on Hosea, says it like this. What was Hosea doing? “… there were the disloyal habits of years to be broken and the realities of personal relationship … to be unhurriedly explored together.”

Hosea doesn’t have any of this naïve, sentimental, “Oh, God will just make everything okay.” No, he’s paying a price. He has already paid the financial price and probably an enormous social and cultural price when all of his friends and everyone else in society say, “What? Her? After she has been a prostitute? You’re going to take her as your wife?”

So he’s paying the price financially. He’s paying the price socially. But most of all, he’s paying the price emotionally. He’s doing what we would call deep emotional work today.

He’s saying, “I’ve been hurt. I can’t just climb back into bed with you. We have a lot of work to do, but I will pay the price so that eventually, I shall be yours.”

Even though we’re not told by the text what happens, the fact that this relationship between Hosea and Gomer has come down out of that period as one of the great parables of God’s relationship with Israel probably means that finally, Gomer found rest in her husband’s love.

But this raises a bit of a problem, doesn’t it? The whole idea is that Hosea is an image, an analog, of God. Hosea was in love. God is in love. Hosea has been betrayed. God has been betrayed. Hosea pays an enormous price to get her back. Where does that happen to God?

I want you to realize something everyone has a problem and to love anyone with a problem involves a substitutionary sacrifice. Just think about this. What if you have a friend, and she’s going through a horrible time, and she just desperately needs to have somebody to talk with about her problems. She’s lonely and she’s weeping? You know, “If I go by to see her, there goes my evening, and I’m just going to be involved, and it’s going to make me feel bad.” Look, it’s her or you. You can have your evening, you can keep yourself emotionally untapped, and she just sinks. Or you can go by, and when you’re done with the evening, she feels so much better, and you feel so much worse. But that’s the way it is. That’s the way it always is.

There’s no way for you to love a weak person without some of that person’s weakness coming to you and some of your strength going to her or him. That’s just the way it works.

All love of anyone with any kind of need is a form of substitutionary sacrifice. Hosea loves it and shows what it costs. How does God pay a price for us? Even though this is the Hebrew Scriptures, even though this is the Old Testament, the book is just crying out with the question … Where does God come into the marketplace? Where does God pay the price to get his people back?

The answer is in verses 4 and 5. It’s cryptic because it’s a prophecy. It says

Hosea 3:4–5 ESV

For the children of Israel shall dwell many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or pillar, without ephod or household gods. Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God, and David their king, and they shall come in fear to the Lord and to his goodness in the latter days.

there’s going to be a period of time (verse 4) in which Israel is cold and away from everything, but eventually (verse 5) it says, “Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God …” The relationship is healed. “… and David their king …” Wait a minute. David is dead.

This must be a descendant of David, and it is. When they asked Jesus Christ in Matthew 9, “Why don’t your disciples fast?” he said,

Matthew 9:15 ESV

And Jesus said to them, “Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.

Jesus is calling himself the bridegroom. Everybody knew the bridegroom of Israel was the Lord himself, God. Jesus Christ is saying, “I am that bridegroom. But soon, I will be taken away, and then they will fast and mourn. I’m the bridegroom, but I have come to die.” There’s the answer to all the riddles.

In Jesus Christ, God entered the world. He entered the marketplace. He clothed us, covering our nakedness with his righteousness, because on the cross Jesus Christ died and paid the price to buy us away from our enslavements.

So when God dares to say, “I’m like that bridegroom seeing the bride coming down the aisle, who wants to sweep her into his arms and says, ‘I want to give you the world, and I want to lay down my life for you.’ I’m really like that bridegroom …”

God says, “In Jesus Christ, I did. I laid down my life for you. I did the thing cosmically and visibly that you have to do every time you try to love somebody with needs. It was a substitutionary sacrifice. Your sin, evil, and problems came onto me so that my righteousness could be put on you. Do you understand that?

To the degree you understand that, and you take it into the middle of your life, that has the most life-changing, potent power of anything in the world. May I just suggest three things quickly?

First, are you suffering? Is everything going wrong in your life? Are you in the middle of a cataclysmic meltdown of everything you ever hoped? Maybe God is making you a prophet. Maybe God is turning you into somebody who can speak into other people’s lives. That’s how he did it to Hosea.

Second, are you unmarried and really afraid of it? Or are you unmarried and really, incredibly upset because you’re not? In other words, are you under-wanting marriage or over-wanting marriage? Jesus Christ looks at you and says, “Until you have my spousal love, until you realize I’m the only groom, I’m the only spouse, who will really satisfy the deepest recesses of your heart, and our wedding day, yours and mine, at the end of time is the only wedding day that will fill you down to the corners, and it awaits you … Until you understand that and have my spousal love, you’re going to under-want or over-want marriage.” Not only that, if you’re married, and you don’t have Jesus’ spousal love, you’re going to be a lousy spouse, because you’re either going to look at your spouse and insist your spouse meet all your emotional needs, be perfect … that’s too much freight for any human being to bear … or else you’ll just get cynical. Jesus Christ says, “I’m the spouse you need. Until you have me, you’ll be poorly married or poorly unmarried.”

Last of all, do you have Jesus in your life as your spouse? Or is he just a kind of boss? If you want the experience of his love in your life, for that life-changing potency, you have to make your vow or remake your vow. That’s what the Lord’s Supper is.

It’s basically a renewal of your marriage vows. Say, “I, believer, take you, Lord, to be my Savior, my wedded Savior, and I do promise and covenant before God and these witnesses to give you my all.” He has already given you his. Let’s pray.