Go, love your wife again though she is…“intimate with chocolate cake”.
What?!
“The Lord said to me, “Go, show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another man and is an adulteress. Love her as the Lord loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods and love the sacred raisin cakes.”” (Hosea 3:1, NIV, italics mine)
How do you love again when over and over love is betrayed? How do you love her when she is an adulteress, a prostitute? Perhaps you can forgive the past offense, but what if she continues to pursue her other lovers? And what if her lover was chocolate cake? The absurdity of this…
Hosea is to love Gomer like You love Israel – committed, unconditional, faithful, unfailing – though Israel keeps returning to other lovers, and to “raisin cakes”, go figure! There’s a seriousness about the way Israel keeps returning, unfaithfully to other lovers…lovers like other gods, living in the defiled ways the other nations do, pagan rituals instead of worship, immoral sexual practices, etc…and then raisin cakes? Is this serious or a joke? It could mean that Israel loved to offer food to Baal and their other idols, or loved to eat what had been offered them. It could mean wine as in the celebrations held at the temple feasts, but one person – and he must’ve been thinking the ridiculousness of it like I was, says this:
“This probably has more to do in Hosea with Israel turning to the things they love, instead of God who they should love – and other women and raisin cakes being two examples. One adultery and the other just a food item. God’s comment/remark is almost comical in that he is telling Hosea that the Israelites will once again go and follow after women (gods) and a small tasty cake.” (Stack Exchange)
God, it seems like You really are remarking on the ludicrousy of it. How ridiculous it is when we compare Your Love and what You offer in relationship to what Israel – what we, what I keep hankering for and returning to – a piece of sweet cake! Why?
Why are we so seemingly fearful of Your love, and choose instead, cake?
When we have been hurt by love, broken by the totality of humanity’s ruin, each on a haunted search for love, but each coming to it with the brokenness of self-interest and self-motivation, desperate to have the question of our value answered and our love needs met, we instead, continually just hurt one another. It is the reason, though ludicrous and utterly sad, that we will turn to other lovers – lovers that do not demand vulnerability of us – “A great cup of coffee cannot reject us” (Journey Answers). A coffee, or a raisin cake, a bottle of wine, a pair of new shoes, a sweet piece of chocolate cake, a hobby, a habit, a career, become our lovers. These lovers are safe. They do not expose us. When love fails us, when we are broken by it again, we turn to cake.
Oh, chocolate cake…!
We turn to cake for emotional fulfillment. Something such as cake (absurd!) can draw us in for fulfillment. Though Your Love provides and meets all our needs and can so deeply and completely satisfy us, we think it will be as human love has been to us. That it will hurt us as human love has. Its so ludicrous, God You laugh! (or so it seems), but cake is one of our many lovers!
“Cake is the answer, no matter the question.”
“You can’t buy happiness, but you can buy cake, and that’s kind of the same thing.”
“When all else fails, eat cake.”
“Cake is my happy place.”
“No day is so bad it can’t be fixed with a cupcake.”
“Dear Diamond, we all know who really is a girl’s best friend. Yours sincerely, Chocolate Cake.”
“All you need is love, and maybe a piece of cake.”
“I want someone to look at me the way I look at chocolate cake.”
“Cake is happiness! If you know the way of the cake, you know the way of happiness! If you have a cake in front of you, you should not look any further for joy!” (C. JoyBell C.)
A diary entry –
04/18/2008 I didn’t want it for hunger… it was just to numb out. Later…I had to put the brownies away. I need them out of sight. I’ve been snitching some every time I pass by. Sometimes I feel so empty inside… and food “fills” that void. But not today… I put them away.
04/23/2008 I’m done… I feel like giving up! Just throwing in the towel! Why is this such a problem for about myself. It’s like I’m searching to fill my “void”… but nothing fills it. I want to feel complete. (Overcome binge eating)
God, I know I’m guilty. Cake is definitely one of my lovers.
Cake, its sweetness, its forbidden fruit quality is temporary fulfillment and indulgence in a rebellious act or in combat to the stress-filled, needy for love, broken world around me. I’ll eat it when I am unhappy. I’ll eat it when I feel unloved. I’ll eat it when I am feeling empty inside. I will savour its flavour as if it were nourishment for my soul. When I am in control, when I am happy, when everything is going well, I can be strong and resist this lover. But as soon as the littlest of stress enters my world, or I am feeling low or empty, or when I desperately need love, I run to this love – I indulge and find relief – even if just for a moment – in this casual lover of mine.
Viktor Frankl says, “When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure”. Saint Paul says something similar, “They will…love pleasure rather than God” (2 Timothy 3:4, NLT). Pleasure such as cake! Cake is safe. Love is not!
You know this about us. Yet, Your love persists. So great is Your love for us that you continue to love though we cannot seem to receive it, and though we reject it for other lovers, lovers such as cake.
Continued in next week’s blog…
[Hosea was a prophet of God to the nation of Israel. It is where much of this journey of love was awakened. His story is found in the Old Testament part of the Bible. Read more here.]
One reply on “Intimate with chocolate cake…”
But……. cake!!!!!! I really got this, though. Speaks to me in volumes. Thanks beautiful lady x