Hosea 4 onwards, is the writing of a scribe, the voice of a prophet, telling of the offense felt by a God, a Lover, who has been wronged. As the people murmur among themselves about what could this picture of Hosea and his prostitute wife mean, You, God, send out its message. As it spreads throughout the nation, town after town hear Your words, but stubbornly refuse to receive the heart of it.
A disgruntled God is their indignant retort. They have turned their backs on you.
I imagine Hosea, pen in hand at the ready as You tell him Your story. Relaying case after case of offense felt by You through the ways that this nation, Your beloved, have walked away from Perfect Love, and sought the affections of their casual lovers. Perhaps You pace as You dictate Your words. Perhaps You hang Your head in sorrow. Perhaps Your voice rises often in anger. Perhaps there is often a heavy silence. Perhaps Hosea shrinks back quietly into the shadows as he obediently transposes Your emotion into words. He understands the pain felt. He too has had a prostitute bride. In the writing of Your words, perhaps Hosea pens them with as much of his own deep emotional pain, as he does Yours.
The hours spent in Your presence listening and transcribing Your message becomes heavy. The bleakness and blackness of offense felt is disparaging. Hosea feels the heavyheartedness of it all – Israel has been ruined. A special treasure lost. Having given themselves unabashedly and wantonly to her other lovers, she has been all but used up and tossed out, yet she still persists in the pursuit of any lover other than You. Hosea wades through the drudgery of Your telling of it. The revelation of their ruin is labourious and painstaking. He cannot escape the gloom of ruin felt as You speak.
Arduously he writes as if lifting one foot in front of the other in squelching mud, in the grim reality that sin has ruined this people completely.
Years later in the New Testament, St Paul tells his version of the ruin of humanity – “It is obvious what kind of life develops out of trying to get your own way all the time: repetitive, loveless, cheap sex; a stinking accumulation of mental and emotional garbage; frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness; trinket gods; magic-show religion; paranoid loneliness; cutthroat competition; all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants; a brutal temper; an impotence to love or be loved; divided homes and divided lives; small-minded and lopsided pursuits; the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on” (Galatians 5:19-21, MSG).
And down through the years to our own generation, comedian Russell Brand recently said this, “There’s a famous quote: ‘Every man who knocks on a brothel door, he’s looking for God Crackhouses and these dens of suffering and illicit activity, they’re all people trying to feel good, trying to feel connected. People are trying to escape…humanity is (metaphorically) knocking on a brothel door, in that they are looking for fulfillment in things that will only leave them empty. And because instant, but quickly fleeting, gratification is always at our fingertips…we have become addicted.” (Relevant Magazine). How is it that generations later, this famous comedian of our day, is still telling the same story of Paul’s day, of Hosea’s day? Nothing has changed!
All of humanity has been lost from Perfect Love. In its place, is this “repetitive, loveless, cheap sex…frenzied and joyless grabs for happiness…paranoid loneliness…all-consuming-yet-never-satisfied wants…an impotence to love or be loved…uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions…” empty pursuits to try and find love, the pre-occupation of casual sex with many lovers in the quest to attain what cannot be gotten – love from others and from things.
But here in Hosea, the offense expressed and felt in chapters Hosea 4-14, is like a piled high mountainous stack of foul and rancid sludge, threatening to topple or slide.
There is no faithfulness,
no love,
no acknowledgment of God in the land.
There is only cursing,
lying
and murder,
stealing
and adultery;
they break all bounds,
and bloodshed
follows bloodshed (Hosea 4:1-2, NIV).
In rejecting You, Your beloved people yield to a lifestyle of cursing, lying, murder, stealing and adultery, to name a few. They don’t just try it once, feel guilty and return to You; they don’t even just dabble in it like a rebellious child might, they break all bounds. These acts are who they have become characterized as; it is their way of life and their way of thinking. There is a without restraint kind of indulgence in the debase life they are living. Breaking any and all boundaries. Going beyond. Intentional. Planned. Without regard. ‘Don’t care’ sin. And it has ruined them.
Israel’s rebellious acts are often expressed in sexual language and as adultery. And in the same way, what could be read as an angry, punishing, vindictive, jealous God towards a rebellious humanity who continually refuse to acknowledge You, and turn their backs on You, is actually the telling of a broken-hearted Lover, longing for the relationship with His beloved to be restored. Their actions of adultery and their ignorant pursuit of love crushes Your very heart.
You are God who is love. The essence of One who is Love feels deeply the full knowledge of delight in the mutually satisfying joy of connection – and the acuteness and heart-agony of betrayal.
Their ruin dictates the rest of Your story. It does not stop with the people of Hosea’s day, You feel the ruin of all of humanity, and in equal measure, Your heart breaks over Your love offered but rejected, Your people treasured, but lost.
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.]