On Not Getting What You Deserve

Introduction

In Book 2, Chapter Twelve of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, there is a moving scene where Jean Valjean is apprehended by gendarmes carrying the silver he had stolen from the Bishop. He had received the Bishop's hospitality just the night before. He lied to the soldiers, telling them that the Bishop had given him the silver. To his surprise, when the soldiers return with Valjean to question the Bishop, the Bishop supports his lie and adds that Valjean had forgotten the silver candlestick, which he had also given him.

Valjean was guilty of stealing and deserved to receive the sentence he had recently finished serving, but instead, he receives mercy. As the rest of the story shows, this act had a life-changing impact on him.

Christians especially resonate with this scene because it reminds us of the gospel and what God has done for us by extending grace so that we receive his mercy instead of what we justly deserve, namely death. This is also the story that Hosea paints for us in our text this morning. It's a story he painfully retells through his own family. His unfaithful wife, Gomer, serves as an illustration of unfaithful Israel as a whole nation. Whereas Hosea's children represent the individual members of the nation at large. As the prophet tells the story of God and Israel, it becomes clear that Israel is getting much less than she deserves. Like Jean Valjean, Israel deserves punishment. She deserves a certificate of divorce for her unfaithfulness to the Lord, but God never grants it. Instead, she receives mercy.

But to get there, the Lord disciplines her so that he may bless and once again show her his covenant love.

Hosea 2:2-23

Once again, we see the same pattern from Chapter 1 repeated here in Chapter 2. It's one that is often repeated in scripture. It's a story of creation, fall, and then redemption, or in terms of the metaphor Hosea uses, it's a story of marriage, unfaithfulness, and then covenant renewal. But just as in the story of man's fall in sin, first, the judgment of God's discipline must come before he renews the covenant with unfaithful sinners. As we look closer at this text, we will unpack these two aspects of God's great story of redemption.

The Lord Disciplines Unfaithfulness

"Plead with your mother" is God's charge to the children of Israel to call their nation back to faithfulness to the Lord. Not that the Lord has divorced her, but through adultery, she is living as if she is no longer married to the Lord. But before Israel can be reconciled back to God, there will be certain consequences she must endure. Partly to show her the error of her ways and partly to punish her unfaithfulness. Verse 3 summarizes what follows of God's discipline.

He Makes Sin Hard to Find

First, notice in verses 5b-7 that God promises that when Israel tries to go after her lovers (sin), He will block the way, making it hard for her to find them. Here, her lovers are the foreign nations and their gods which she is pursuing for the supposed gifts they give her. Whereas before they were more than willing to climb into bed with Israel, now she cannot find them. I think in modern terms we call this being ghosted. Here, God is preventing Israel from receiving aid from foreign nations and their gods as political alliances which would have afforded a measure of security, along with the promised fertility these foreign gods might offer willing worshippers.

The Lord's purpose in keeping Israel from her lovers is so that she would say, "I will go and return to my first husband, for it was better for me then than now" (v. 7). Isn't that just like us, after having exhausted every avenue of 'pursuing other lovers', only then will we return to the Lord, and this is still primarily for what he can offer us. We can't help but see images of the prodigal son in this Israel's behavior. Only when we come to the limits of ourselves does the thought occur that maybe things were better when we were in our father's house (with the first husband).

Personally, we may apply this analogy to our pursuit of sin. Isn't it often the case for believers that we pursue sin for the security it offers, only to find that kind of security to be woefully inadequate? Sometimes the Lord blocks the way, forcing us to come to the end of ourselves so that we will return to him. Sometimes he prevents us from finding those ‘other’ gods who we used to seek for security and satisfaction, so that we return and learn to rely on him.

He Will Take Back His Blessings

Israel had mistakenly come to believe that all the good blessings she enjoyed had come from her lovers (the foreign nations and gods). But they were actually given to her by God. These blessings for Israel came as a fruitful land, producing abundant crops of grain and wine. Israel, having whored herself out to other gods, Baal in particular, had looked to them for fertility. What's interesting is that Israel was fruitful. It seemed to work. But here God promises he will take these things away and notice when. Just as they were preparing to start the harvest. Right when the grain is ripe and ready for reaping, then the Lord would take it away. Just when the wine had finished its aging process, then he would remove it.

This discipline is designed to bring Israel to the realization that God was the one responsible for their blessings. God had given it to her, and instead of returning this blessing with covenant loyalty (love) and gratitude, she instead spent the blessings on Baal.

What a sobering picture of sin. We often pursue idols for the supposed 'blessings' they offer. As Tim Keller once said, an idol "is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give" (Counterfeit Gods, xvii). Sometimes we even turn the blessings into idols themselves. The testimony of scripture is clear that every good gift comes down from the Father. He loves to give gifts to his children. He pours them out in abundance. All he expects in return is covenant loyalty (love) and grateful acknowledgment that they come from him.

Money, food, drink, sex, children, wife, house, cars, careers, and billions of other gifts are all good and God-given, but when pursued as ends in themselves, when you have to have them and if you don't life isn't worth living, then those things have become idols.

Saints, one method God uses to show you that you are seeking the gift rather than the giver is He will take His gifts away. Or at least take away the fruit we thought they were giving us. But it's not personal idols that Hosea is speaking of, but what we might call cultural idols. These are idols the nation is trusting in rather than in God, idols of political power, and economic prosperity. But God is the one who blesses nations with military power and economic blessings. Donald Barnhouse, Pastor of Tenth Pres. before Boice, imagines the scene this way:

Gomer left Hosea and lived with other men; and each lover was poorer than the man before him. One day Hosea said to a certain man, “Are you the man who is currently living with Gomer the daughter of Diblaim?” “Well, what of it?” replies the man, “I am Hosea, her husband.” As the man recoiled, Hosea said, “But I love her, and I know that you don’t have enough money to take care of her. Take this money and see that she does not lack for anything.” So the man took Hosea’s money and bought clothing, oil and wine for Gomer, who gave her lover credit for providing these things; but Hosea said, “She doesn’t know that I paid the bills…No doubt the man who took Hosea’s money was thinking, “There is no fool like this old fool.”…And we can see Hosea lurking in the shadows to catch a glimpse of her who filled his heart; weeping as he sees her embrace her lover and thank him for the gifts which true love has provided, which villainy offers and folly accepts. (Barnhouse, God’s Freedom, 189).

But eventually, desperate to have her back, He stops the gifts. He blocks the way so that she cannot find her lovers, all so that she might return to him and be faithful. Knowing ultimately that this will not be a long-term solution to her infidelity he goes one step further, he exposes her sin.

He Exposes Her Sin

"Now," he says, in verse 10, "I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers."

This is a startling form of discipline. Especially in an honor/shame culture, being exposed as an unfaithful spouse had devastating effects. But this is not a PG-rated exposure of her sin. This is a picture of an aggrieved husband, gathering all his wife's lovers and taking them to see her engaged in the act of adultery. Those who had often uncovered her nakedness would see her not as a desirable woman, but as the whore that she was.

The Lord, in often startling ways, will expose the sins of his bride when she is unfaithful to him. At present, the bride of Christ, the church, has fallen into disrepute through the public exposure of her sins. Largely this is seen is because ministry leaders subtly change the church's mission from the pursuit of God (i.e., faithfulness) to some other pursuit, such as church growth, truth, justice & activism, or a myriad of other 'good' things. There is nothing wrong per se with church growth, or pursuing truth, or even justice (provided it's biblically defined). The problem is when we pursue those without respect to God, they soon become god. In that way, they are other lovers that steal our attention and devotion to the Lord. As big Evangelicals pursue church growth, and the Reformed pursue the truth, and progressives pursue justice, the divided body of Christ misses the one important thing, pursuing Christ.

Mercifully, God does not leave us in this condition for long, at least not in the scheme of things. Just as he has exposed the bankruptcy of the seeker-sensitive movement, whose attitude of winsomeness has set the church on a progressive slide away from orthodoxy. He has also exposed the deadness of many Reformed churches who have pursued doctrinal purity but have neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice, and mercy and faithfulness (Mt. 23:23). I am confident that he will also expose the progressives' pursuit of social justice as what it is, another religion entirely, just as he once did with Machen and the liberalism controversy of the early twentieth century. God will have the church, his bride, be faithful to him. He will expose her sin, so that all her lovers see her for what she is—and unfaithful bride.

SO THAT HE CAN (AGAIN) SHOW US HIS COVENANT LOVE.

But just as in Chapter 1, the story does not end with judgment, since for the people of God, judgment is always for the purpose of showcasing his mercy. It's abrupt too, for so is the salvation of our God. As the history since the fall unfolds through a series of judgments followed by salvation, albeit somewhat localized, all of which is building to a climax when in the fullness of time God would judge once and for all, sin and death, bringing about what all those disparate instances of salvation pointed to—the salvation of the world. That day, commonly called the day of the Lord, would be a great reversal, leading to the restoration of all things. This is variously pictured in scripture, often in terms of a wedding. Which is what we have here in verses 14-23.

Except the imagery here is of a husband who goes and finds his estranged wife, and woos her back by 'speaking tenderly' to her. It may seem strange that He would 'bring her into the wilderness' when that was a term of judgment previously in verse 3. It is true that the wilderness is a place of judgment, or better, a place of discipline, or testing. But it is also a place for Israel to learn to depend on God. It's kind of like Israel's honeymoon, abstracted from life, she spends forty years in an all-inclusive desert pilgrimage. True, the weather wasn't great, and after a while the food got old, but all her needs were met.

More importantly, it was a time for Israel to get to know the LORD, her husband. Without distraction, without wars, nation-building, estate planning, and all that will come when they go in and take possession of the promised land. In the wilderness, Israel's sole focus was (supposed) to be on God, and he was focused on her. It's that sense that God will recreate when he brings back his estranged bride.

Then the emphasis begins to fall on the gifts the Lord brings for a bride-price (dowry). The chronology of the prophet's message is sometimes hard to follow, but here there are five gifts the Lord gives that will result in a restored creation with no more war. When will this happen? The phrase 'in that day' is a common reference in the Old Testament to the Day of the Lord. Which turns out to be a much more complicated timing than just one future day, since Christ, in his first advent, inaugurated the Day of the Lord, and will bring it to its consummate purpose when he comes again. Before we consider the result of God's bridal gifts, let's consider the gifts themselves.

First, notice that the gifts come in two pairs: righteousness and justice, and steadfast love and mercy, and then conclude with faithfulness. These are the basic building blocks for a covenant community. But more importantly they are attributes of the Lord. So in one sense, this is a pledge by the husband to his bride of himself. But these gifts are something that he shares with her, imputing them so that they become characteristic of the marriage.

"Righteousness describes conduct that does not deviate from the norm" (Mackay). When we speak of the righteousness of God, we are describing his perfect conformity to what is right. Specifically, from our perspective as creatures, this means that he always does what is right according to his will. There is a coherence in God. He decrees what is right and then acts in accordance with his decrees. Which is closely related to the concept of justice. God's justice is his judgment, which is consistent with what is right (His law). It is seen when God, as judge, defends the righteous and condemns the wicked. Often, these two concepts become synonymous with salvation/deliverance.

Not only is God righteous towards us, but part of his bridal gift to His church is the imputation of His righteousness. In order for God to be just and the justifier, someone needed to satisfy God's justice for sin. Christ, loved His bride by offering to die in her place. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:21, "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."

How did God bring about the great reversal, turning an unfaithful wife into a most beloved wife? He did it by sending his son, who stood in her place. He took on himself all the shame and guilt of her whoring after other lovers, all her unfaithfulness. He takes the just penalty those sins deserve - death. So instead of the stroke of God's righteous justice falling on His unfaithful bride, He took it on himself, granting her His perfect righteousness, so that he may present her "to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish." (Ephesians 5:27)

The next pair of bridal gifts are steadfast love and mercy. Steadfast love is the English Standard Version's translation of ḥeseḏ, the Lord's covenant-keeping love. I still love the Jesus Storybook definition of this love. "Never stopping, never giving up, unbreaking, always and forever love" (Lloyd-Jones). In terms of the prophet's message, this is the exact opposite of unfaithful Israel. The Lord is loyal to his covenant people. It's that long-suffering love that made a way through His son for us to be made righteous and holy. He did this by being merciful and not giving us what we deserve.

The crown of the Lord's bridal gifts is what Israel, at the time of Hosea's message, most lacked—faithfulness. This is a 'dependability and consistency' of all of God's attributes. Another word for this is trustworthy. God is trustworthy and so is His word of promise. And staggeringly, we too, who have struggled to be faithful to the Lord, will one day be made perfectly faithful. On that great day, the Lord will put away all our spiritual adultery and betroth us to him forever in faithfulness. No longer will we be tempted to mix faithfulness to God with other idols, for there will be no syncretism when God removes idolatry, causing us to remember it no more. The result, of course, is that we will know the Lord.

Obviously, we don't want to press the metaphor too far, but when an estranged wife is reunited to her husband, there will be intimacy. Just as husband and wife are said to know one another in their union of one flesh, so too in the consummation there will be an intimacy in our knowledge of God, through our union with Christ. As the Apostle John put it, "when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3:2). There, faith will give way to sight, and we, with unveiled faces, will behold the glory of God shining in the face of Jesus Christ.

That day will not only bring knowledge of God, but also a restored creation and the promise that hostility has ended.

Notice that the Lord in verse 18 says that he will make a covenant with the creation, represented by the beasts, birds, and creeping things. Meaning that he would restore man to his rightful place as ruler over God's creation. That no longer would creation be subjected to futility, under the law of entropy, with death the natural course for everything. On that day, the intended goal of creation would be reached. The ground would not produce brambles, but would reach its full potential under the intended stewardship of mankind. Notice verses 21-23, the heavens will produce sun and rain, so that the earth could bring forth fruit. There is a play on words there between Jezreel and "I will sow" since Jezreel means "God will sow". For the Day of the Lord is a day of fruitfulness, a day for God to restore His creation and bring it to its intended goal, which is a habitable Eden, that covers the whole earth with the image and glory of God.

Which also means, as we see in verse 18b, that God will abolish hostility. The bow, sword, and war are all products of that enmity God placed between the seed of the serpent, and the seed of the woman. Why do we fight? Why is there hostility? It has much less to do with defending national borders than it does with a deep-seated hatred for God, driven and fired by hell itself and the enmity between Satan and God, between good and evil. We noted when we looked a few months ago at John 8 that the murderous rage that drove the Jews to seek to kill Jesus; he attributes to their being offspring of the devil. When Jesus puts Satan down, banishing him to eternal darkness, and at the same time removing sin by redeeming us from its power and effect, what is left in the world of that old enmity? Nothing, none of it remains. Which means there is no more war, for there is no longer any reason for it. That will usher in an age of shalom that will last for all eternity, typified in the expression "I will make you lie down in safety."

Kristen and I watched a show recently following a Jewish family through WWII called "We Were the Lucky Ones." It was staggering to see the depravity of mankind in their attempt at genocide of the Jewish people. That wasn't that long ago. One of our missionaries, Jacob Pursley, has been doing his best to make the West aware that there are still attempted genocides going on today, as Armenians face persecution from their neighbors. Then there's Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, and the fear that one day soon conflicts such as those may make their way to our shores too.

But the hope of the gospel is that God is restoring his creation. That means that all this isn't just meaningless, and the best we can hope for is oblivion. Out of all this enmity, God will create a lasting peace, the world could only ever dream about.

Conclusion

When Hosea first declared this Word of the Lord, things were bad in Israel, but not as bad as they would get. As the prophet's own marriage to unfaithful Gomer reminded Israel of the nature of her spiritual adultery, the message of the prophet this morning was a warning to them to repent and turn back to God. As we noted in Chapter 1 of Hosea, God is patient, but that has limits, and for his bride the church that means when we are unfaithful to keep covenant with him, we will be disciplined so that we return to him and he can (again) show us his love. "For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness for those who are trained by it" (Hebrews 12:11). What's more, Hosea is speaking to the church, she is the unfaithful wife, and he begins this message to her children saying, "plead with your mother, plead" (verse 2). Sometimes the children, who have borne the fruit of their mother's spiritual adultery, have to plead with the church to return to the Lord and remain faithful.

The one constant in the church is Semper Reformanda, the church reformed and always reforming. Orthodoxy has a way of calcifying as it ages, and hardening into an unrecognizable form that is almost always devoid of orthopraxy (right living). A brief glance at the Lord's admonition to the seven churches in Revelation 2-3 will prove to you that each church is unfaithful in its own unique way, often arising from the culture that the church finds itself in. Which is why we must constantly be examining ourselves to ensure that we are walking faithfully.

Yet, on our own, we will never be clean enough, never pure enough, never free from the idols that capture our hearts and affections. So although the Lord disciplines unfaithfulness, he does so for the purpose of showing us his love (again). Only as the story unfolds do we find that it took His Son, the husband, dying in the place of his bride the church, to rid her of her adultery, and call her to be faithful to him. In order for you to move from a place of judgment to Shalom, you need Jesus to stand in your place and take the punishment your sins deserve. Only then would God show his great mercy on you, giving you, not a divorce, but renewing His covenant with you, and purifying you by removing your sins, so that you know the Lord and the blessings of his covenant love. As we heed the warning of the prophet, we do so always with our eyes on the cross, where "righteousness and peace kiss each other" (Psalm 85:10). Only the Lord Jesus can turn a whoring bride into a faithful wife. And it's the cross of Christ where God speaks most tenderly to you, alluring you and turning a valley of trouble into a door of hope. Amen.