Studies in Hosea
1 - A Tragic Picture
Amos and Hosea were the first prophets to commit their message to writing and Hosea has been called the tenderest of the prophets, perhaps because of the tragedy in his own personal life. He is the longest of the 12 minor prophets and he ministered from 760-720 BC. His words had a more compassionate ring than those of Amos. He addressed a nation in moral and spiritual decline. It made him weep to see how God was being treated.
Hosea’s God-given assignment was to show the people their sin from ’God’s perspective.’ Hosea has an extraordinary insight into the love of God who is giving His people a last opportunity to repent before judgement breaks over the land.
2 Kings 17 is a commentary on the ten tribes of the Northern Kingdom of Israel in Hosea’s day. “They worshipped idols, though the Lord had said, ‘You shall not do this’” (verse 12). “But they would not listen and were as stiff-necked as their fathers, who did not trust in the Lord their God” (verse 14). “They practised divination and sorcery and sold themselves to do evil in the eyes of the Lord, provoking Him to anger” (verse 17). Hosea was alarmed to see Israel so disloyal to God that they were courting the old Canaanite gods (the Baals) instead.
In the book of Hosea we shall find ourselves taken deep into the heart of God- into His loneliness, His pain and anger and longing, and the dangerous passion of His love. Of all the prophetic calls that of Hosea is surely the most peculiar and the least religious in form. Look at chapter 1:2. “When the Lord began to speak through Hosea” through his life, through what happened to him, not just through his mouth. “The Lord said to him, ‘Go, take to yourself an adulterous wife and children of unfaithfulness, because the land is guilty of the vilest adultery in departing from the Lord.” So he married Gomer.
Hosea was a man of sensitivity and God’s command must have thrown him into terrible spiritual turmoil. He is to marry a prostitute. One commentary on the book of Hosea is entitled: The prophet and the prostitute. Hosea showed remarkable obedience and he personally became a sign to the nation of how God saw them. It’s as if the Lord has said, “Go and marry a prostitute because this is exactly what I, the Lord, have married in pledging myself to all of you.”
Hosea was to do, in miniature, what God had done in giving His love to a partner with a chequered history and a roving eye. He married a shallow, mercenary woman, Gomer, who might walk out on him at any moment. She bore him a son. Then she had two more children, apparently not his own, and then she left.
The three children were given ominous names. It was a clear announcement of judgement. The first born was called Jezreel. This was the site of a gruesome battle in the past. At Jezreel the royal house of Omri had been exterminated by Jehu in a terrible massacre (2 Kings 9 and 10). So the name Jezreel carried ominous overtones of a coming judgement to the royal house in Israel. Imagine the shock if a father named his first born “Twin Towers” or 9/11.
The girl was named Loruhamah which means ‘not loved’. Fancy going through life with such an appalling name. Her third child, another boy, was to be called Lo Ammi which means ‘not my people’. As we read in chapter 1 verse 9. Then the Lord said, ‘call him Lo-Ammi, for you are not my people and I am not your God.’”
Can’t you sense the profound sadness of God in these words? Oracles like these are shouts of warning to a backslidden nation, rather than irreversible sentences.
In fact verse 10 introduces a promise of hope. As sin had marred both kingdoms and led Jehovah to withdraw His pity, so divine grace would triumph ultimately. The name of the first child, Jezreel, can mean “God will scatter”, for example, chaff, but it can also mean “God will scatter” seed in a ploughed field which suggests a bumper crop. It seems that judgement was not God’s last word to His people and that a word of grace was to follow.
Chapter 1 verses 10 and 11 read, “Yet the Israelites will be like the sand on the seashore, which cannot be measured or counted. In the place where it was said to them ‘You are not my people’, they will be called ‘sons of the living God’. The people of Judah and the people of Israel will be reunited, and they will appoint one leader and will come up out of the land, for great will be the day of Jezreel.” Chapter 2 verse 1 underscores their future hope, “Say of your brothers ‘My people’ and of your sister ‘My loved one’”.
Behind the message of Hosea – that Israel was God’s unclean wife – lay the anguish of the prophet who was living through similar unrequited love and whose marriage was on the rocks. Hosea learned from experience, from the things he suffered in an unworkable marriage, a little of what God felt when His wife, Israel, was playing fast and loose.
Chapter 2 appears with a court scene. A deserted husband, Hosea, wants a divorce from his unfaithful wife. She has been persistently unfaithful. Where is she now? Who’s she with this time? Children, can you make her see sense? “Rebuke your mother, rebuke her, for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband. Let her remove the adulterous look from her face” (verse 2).
In the divine court, Israel is arraigned. If He wanted it, God has grounds for divorce for Israel had found other lovers- the fertility gods of Canaan, the Baals. She had become fascinated in a fatal attraction to the forbidden and decadent. The poignancy and pathos of a suffering prophet teaches us volumes about the pain of a God whose people have played false with Him. And here’s the wonder. God does not have divorce in mind, but reconciliation.