Hosea 1
It is moving to think that the Book of Hosea is, in essence,
the story of a broken marriage. Hosea was just a man who could have been anyone
– someone like you or me – who was called to sacrifice his emotional and family
life for God’s purposes. Sometimes God chooses to speak through great kings and
prophets, other times he speaks through an ‘everyman’. Although this account
took place between 790 and 686 BC, it is vital that we remember that God
intended this experience of this one man, this story of a broken marriage, to
affect our lives. We must never underestimate the value of our personal lives
for God. We should be staggered at Hosea’s obedience, and challenged by it.
Hosea 1, I think, is God’s irrefutably clear expression that
we have broken His heart. God is using the model of marriage to demonstrate
that our relationship with Him could (and should) be deeply intimate – but we
(individually and corporately, historically and presently) have broken His
heart. Others have caught our attention and distracted us; our hearts have
wandered into the hands, eyes, and pockets of ‘the World’, abandoning the One
who passionately chases after us. The metaphor is that we have chosen to give
birth to children of unfaithfulness. In other words, our hearts are unfaithful
when consort with pride, envy, greed, selfishness…and the ‘children’ we produce
are sinful destructions. Hosea 1 exposes this, by using the model of marriage.
We are called to be faithful to the lover of our soul, the Lord God, and
produce holy and righteous ‘children’, or in other words, fruit of the Spirit.
Our actions are symptomatic of the condition of our heart. Simply put, hearts
faithful to God produce beautiful works, and show the smile of one, big, happy
family. As Jesus says in John 13:35, ‘by this all men will know that you are my
disciples, if you love one another’; and John, 14:23 ‘if anyone loves me, he
will obey my teaching’.
(member of the congregation)