Today, Mother’s Day, on this day when we celebrate all things mom, in the course of our journey through the not-so-minor prophets, we look at a rather infamous mother, if you will. Her name was Gomer. And she was a prostitute. She derived her livelihood such as it was by getting paid for sleeping with men who were not her husband. Yes, Hosea is a book about a harlot. In the eyes of every self-respecting Jew, she was repulsive. She was unfaithful. Unlovely. Unloveable. Gomer is about unfaithful Israel… Gomer is a picture of God’s ungodly unfaithful people.
And what we will see today, is that God is in the business of removing the “un”. un-removal. The un-removal business. Sort of like stain removal.
[stain removers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPKCkWjoQ9c]
Let’s (re)set the stage. After the nation Israel split in 930BC, the northern tribes immediately began to stray from the Lord, with their first king, Jeroboam I, setting up not one but TWO golden calves, one in Bethel and one in Dan.
1Kings 12:27-30
“If this people go up to offer sacrifices in the house of the LORD at Jerusalem, then the heart of this people will return to their lord, even to Rehoboam king of Judah; and they will kill me and return to Rehoboam king of Judah.” So the king consulted, and made two golden calves, and he said to them, “It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem; behold your gods, O Israel, that brought you up from the land of Egypt.” He set one in Bethel, and the other he put in Dan. Now this thing became a sin, for the people went to worship before the one as far as Dan.
Bethel was only 10 miles from Jerusalem. Dan a ways further. But light years away in terms of the people’s relationship with God.
Unfaithfulness. Unfaithfulness is about putting something else in the place of the one who belongs there. That is the essence of idolatry. Putting something anything else in God’s place. And God sends along Joel to His wayward people after about 100 years of straying, right on the heels of this massive locust swarm - the land is beginning to fight back, the surrounding nations are beginning to fight back, and God is saying, "Come back!" He is trying to get their attention. Jonah of course went to Nineveh, but he also prophesied to Israel. Jonah himself also had a lesson to learn - his deeply ingrained Jewish religious pride needed to learn compassion. He needed to learn that there was something greater than Jonah. And God also sent Amos. Saying what? Not again. Stop doing these things. Stop all this straying, all this unfaithfulness. Not again. And here God is, sending Hosea with a variation on a theme. Come back.
We get a glimpse of God’s heart:
Hosea. 2:19
“I will betroth you to Me forever; Yes, I will betroth you to Me in righteousness and in justice, in lovingkindness and in compassion,
The word “betroth” here is the Hebrew word for marrying a spotless virgin.
Hosea. 6:3
“So let us know, let us press on to know the LORD. His going forth is as certain as the dawn; and He will come to us like the rain, like the spring rain watering the earth.”
Hosea 6:6
For I delight in loyalty rather than sacrifice, and in the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.
Hosea 10:12
Sow with a view to righteousness, reap in accordance with kindness. Break up your fallow ground, for it is time to seek the LORD until He comes to rain righteousness on you.
Hosea is talking about rain and a harvest of righteousness, of being and doing right in God’s eyes, which He rains down on us. And it begins with breaking up our fallow ground. This is the ground which has gotten hard and unproductive, unuseful through season of neglect and overexposure to the elements. Break up your fallow ground. How do we do that? Humility and gratitude. Humility and gratitude. Humility - KNOW your proper place - there is a God with Whom I have to do, and I am not Him - and gratitude - ACKNOWLEDGE His chesed. Chesed is His grace, His undeserved favor and blessings. Which of course are manifold and multiplied daily.
Romans 1:21
For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.
Let’s be perfectly clear about the situation in Hosea. Hosea was no doubt a very self-respecting Hebrew. He was most likely as devout and as observant as he could be. And God tells him... to go and marry a harlot. In the eyes of religious Jews, there was probably nothing more abominable, more offensive than a woman or a man who was perverting God’s design for sex and marriage. And no doubt, God is highly vested in that as well. Let’s back up…
We need to talk about our Great Designer for a second. Our God, the God of the universe, He is a Master Designer. He designed and crafted the entire universe with indescribable complexity and beauty. Ineffable. He designed you, and me. He designed it all. With a plan and a purpose - ultimately to show off His glory, for the maximum display and celebration of His manifold perfections, His breathtaking goodness. He designed each of us, all men and women, fearfully and wonderfully - and burdened us with glorious purpose - to enjoy Him forever, to bear the image of His breathtaking goodness, and to be fruitful and multiply. To that end Scripture makes it perfectly clear that in the beginning God created male and female, and designed the covenant of marriage, in which a man and a woman would come together in faithfulness 1) to express the unity and faithful chesed of the triune God for a lifetime, and 2) for the fulfillment of God’s command to be fruitful and multiply. Biology itself supplies abundant evidence of this on every level. One flesh. To raise up children who will also enjoy Him forever. And He declares with no uncertainty, what God has joined together, let no one separate. Never separated, joined to no other.
This is God’s design. It is His divine engineering, His beautiful plan for addressing the ONE thing in all of creation which initially was NOT good. God admitted it Himself: it was NOT good for man to be alone, and as there was no other suitable partner to be found for him, the Lord designed woman. Fashioned her out of the man, and ordained that the two should become one flesh and never be separated. Never. Always together. Always faithful. What He was doing was creating a picture. Marriage is designed to be a picture of God’s gloriously good plan for His relationship with His people. Always together. Always faithful. A beautiful dance of breathtaking goodness. I will bless you, I will shower My goodness on you, and all nations, all the families of the earth will be blessed through you, through you and your offsrping as you celebrate and spread the knowledge of My goodness wherever you go, and then ultimately through the Seed Who will come from you.
Psalm 86:9
All nations whom You have made will come and worship before You, O Lord, and they will glorify Your name.
This was (and still is) God’s plan A. His design. And yes in His sovereignty He ordains that some of us will express His faithfulness as we journey with Him in singleness. For others He ordains that we experience fruitfulness and multiply our lives not through biological children but in other ways, other journeys which can be just as glorious. Because WHATEVER we do, we can do it to the glory of God. We can and should aspire to celebrate and show off His breathtaking goodness in all that we do. Amen?
But something happened…
The people, these would-be image bearers who God made for Himself, chose to go away in their hearts. They chose something other than Him. They put something else in His place. This beginning of death. Brokenness, in all its ugliness. Hiding. Hurting. Taking life. Loss. Barrenness. Emptiness. And Unfaithfulness. Unloveliness. Cascading brokenness, misuse and disrespect for God’s glorious design, the image of His beautiful breathtaking goodness increasingly marred, almost beyond recognition in some places. Unspeakable horrors, man’s inhumanity to man. Unfaithfulness and unloveliness, on down through the ages. Even God’s chosen people, going away from Him in their hearts - even after He miraculously brings them out of slavery in Egypt and into the promised land, a land flowing with milk and honey and grapes and figs - not multiplying-fruitfulness but multiplying-UNfaithfulness and UNloveliness and UNrighteousness, manifesting towards one another. Towards their heavenly Father.
And so the Word of the Lord comes to Hosea, saying, go and marry an UNfaithful woman. She was unfaithful before marriage, and she was unfaithful after marriage. The woman he married was named Gomer. Gomer means, complete. As in completely unfaithful. The perfect picture of unfaithfulness. Of God’s people.
Important note: notice that God doesn’t actually instruct Hosea to say anything at first - only to marry an unfaithful, unloveable woman. Our lives do a lot of talking. Sometimes they do all the talking. Our lives often do speak louder than words. The loudspeaker of your life and mine is pretty much always on.
Hosea and Gomer have three children together. The first was named Jezreel. The word means, God sows. It is associated with the valley of Jezreel, which is some of the most fertile land in the entire country. It is the breadbasket of Israel.
Jezreel was where Jehu, the then-current ruling house of Israel, massacred the family of Jeroboam I. God says that Jezreel is also where the house of Jehu will come to the end of their rule.
The Hosea’s second child was named Lo-Ruhamah. Meaning no compassion. God will no longer have compassion on Israel - they are definitely going to be delivered over to and defeated by their enemies. And the third child was named Lo-ammi. Meaning no people. Not My people, God says. You are no longer My people.
And then we come to chapter 3. [read it]
Hosea has to go and retrieve his wife from what appears to be a brothel. Unfaithful Gomer has actually gone into exile. And her husband needs to pay a price to extract her from her captivity. And I think we have a double picture here - one of the harlot Israel who will soon be taken captive and into exile by the Assyrians, BUT God will buy them back. He will bring them back home and plant them again in the land He gave them when He first brought them out of Egypt. Yet they won’t have a king, they will not be restored to their former glorious status as a nation. But then there is another picture: one day - in the last days - God will pay the ultimate price to ransom all the people He has made, to redeem and rescue them from the penalty of sin by paying the price of the penalty for all their unfaithfulness Himself. Not in shekels and bushels of barley, but in blood. The spotless precious blood of the Lamb of God. Jesus.
But look at the price which Hosea pays for Gomer. 15 shekels of silver, and a homer and a half of barley. A homer was 10 ephahs. Which for math majors makes that 15 ephahs of barley, which was valued at 15 shekels. Why half in silver and half in grain we are not certain. But either way we’re looking at a total payment of 30 shekels of silver. Which was considered the price of a slave. We’ll see it again in Zechariah. But where else do we see 30 pieces of silver? It is the paltry sum which God’s unfaithful people would one day pay to be able to kill God’s Son. Messiah. Jesus.
[parable of the tenant farmers]
Matt. 21:33 “Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who PLANTED A VINEYARD AND PUT A WALL AROUND IT AND DUG A WINE PRESS IN IT, AND BUILT A TOWER, and rented it out to vine-growers and went on a journey. 34 When the harvest time approached, he sent his slaves to the vine-growers to receive his produce. 35 The vine-growers took his slaves and beat one, and killed another, and stoned a third. 36 Again he sent another group of slaves larger than the first; and they did the same thing to them. 37 “But afterward he sent his son to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’ 38 But when the vine-growers saw the son, they said among themselves, ‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and seize his inheritance.’ 39 “They took him, and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. 40 “Therefore when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those vine-growers?” 41 They *said to Him, “He will bring those wretches to a wretched end, and will rent out the vineyard to other vine-growers who will pay him the proceeds at the proper seasons.”
Matt. 21:42 Jesus *said to them, “Did you never read in the Scriptures, ‘THE STONE WHICH THE BUILDERS REJECTED, THIS BECAME THE CHIEF CORNER stone; THIS CAME ABOUT FROM THE LORD, AND IT IS MARVELOUS IN OUR EYES’? 43 “Therefore I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people, producing the fruit of it.”
What is this fruit? What are the expected proceeds? Chesed...
Hosea 4.1 “There is NO CHESED…”!!! —> Micah 6.8
Micah 6:8
He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you, but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
Humility. Faithfulness. Righteousness. Godliness. Chesed. Beautiful shalom and goodness and grace spreading to the ends of the earth. That’s God’s design, just like He drew it up. God's chesed is designed to (re)produce chesed through the lives of His people.
But let’s imagine for a moment, what this assignment was like for Hosea. Having to marry a woman so unloveable. So broken. Knowing what she was like. Knowing that in spite of his chesed, his choosing her and loving her, that she would be unfaithful to him. Yes, imagine what it was like. So then imagine what it was like for the God of Israel. Choosing a people so unloveable. So broken. Knowing what they were like. Knowing that in spite of His chesed, His choosing them and loving them and all His bountiful provision and miraculous dealings with them, that they would be unfaithful to Him. Yes, imagine what that was like. Imagine what it was like for the Son of God. Choosing to die for a world so unloveable. So broken. Knowing what we were like. Knowing that in spite of His chesed, the love and the blood which He poured out on the cross, that we would still reject Him. We would still find other things to put in His place. Imagine that.
That which makes the unfaithful Gomer lovely is the chesed love of her husband. Choosing to love her in spite of. In spite of her unloveliness, her unfaithfulness, her unworthiness. Her worth, her beauty, her faithfulness flows from the faithful pursuit of her Redeeming Husband. The love of the One Who chose her. She just needs to receive it. It is a wonderful metaphor for God’s people - for the nation Israel. For us. For you, mom. And you too, dad. More than anything else, what makes each of us beautiful, and loveable, is the everlasting chesed love of God, poured out on the cross, through His Son, Jesus Messiah.
We just need to receive it. Receive Him. God comes to us, and says, here, let Me take this. I love you so much. This much. Let Me love you. Let Me take away all the un’s of your life. All your un’s. Unfaithfulness, yes. Unloveableness, yes. Unrighteousness. Unbelief. All that is unacceptable, all that is unjust and unkind and uncaring and unloving and unlike Jesus. The Great UNremoval of the ages. In the end, Hosea. Is a picture. Of Messiah.
Hosea 13:14
Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol? Shall I redeem them from death? O Death, where are your thorns? O Sheol, where is your sting?
Hosea 11:1
When Israel was a youth I loved him, and out of Egypt I called My son.
Hosea 6:1-2
“Come, let us return to the LORD. For He has torn us, but He will heal us; He has wounded us, but He will bandage us. He will revive us after two days; He will raise us up on the third day, that we may live before Him."
Hosea 2:21-23 “It will come about in that day that I will respond,” declares the LORD. “I will respond to the heavens, and they will respond to the earth, and the earth will respond to the grain, to the new wine and to the oil, and they will respond to Jezreel. I will sow her for Myself in the land. I will also have compassion on her who had not obtained compassion, and I will say to those who were not My people, ‘You are My people!’ And they will say, ‘You are my God!’”
Romans 9:23-26 And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory, even us, whom He also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles. As He says also in Hosea, “I WILL CALL THOSE WHO WERE NOT MY PEOPLE, ‘MY PEOPLE,’ AND HER WHO WAS NOT BELOVED, ‘BELOVED.’ AND IT SHALL BE THAT IN THE PLACE WHERE IT WAS SAID TO THEM, ‘YOU ARE NOT MY PEOPLE,’ THERE THEY SHALL BE CALLED SONS OF THE LIVING GOD.”
Just how the Lord designed it from the beginning...!
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For further study...
Hosea outline
- Israel’s Adultery Illustrated (ch 1-3)
- The Word of the Lord (1.1)
- A Picture of Unfaithfulness (1.2-9)
- A Future Hope (1.10-2.1)
- The People Disciplined (2.2-13)
- Faithfulness Restored (2.14-23)
- A Picture of Faithfulness (3.1-5)
- Israel’s Adultery Illuminated (ch 4-11)
- The Case Against Israel (4.1-5.4)
- The Case Against Judah (5.5-15)
- A plea to return (6.1-3)
- Incurable Corruption (6.4-7.16)
- Apostasy and Judgment (ch 8-9.9)
- Degeneracy and Ruin (9.10-11.7)
- God’s Faithfulness (11.8-11)
- Deceit and Injustice (11.12-12.8)
- Forgetfulness summarized (12.9-13.6)
- No compassion (13.7-16)
- Another plea to return (14.1-3)
- God’s Ultimate Faithfulness (14.4-9)
Indictments
2.2
2.5
4.1-4
4.11-19
5.1-7
6.7-7.15
11.1-4
11.12-12.5
12.7-8
12.10-13
13.1-2
13.4-6
13.9-13
Pronouncements
2.3-4
2.6-13
3.4
4.5-10
5.8-15
7.16-10.11
10.13-15
11.5-7
12.9
12.14
13.3
13.7-8
13.14-16
Urgings
6.1-6
10.12
12.6
14.1-3
14.8-9
Promises
1.10-2.1
2.14-23
3.5
11.8-11
14.4-7
