Coming back home (Hosea 3)

Have you ever felt God asking you to do something and you really didn’t want to do it? I remember a number of years ago starting a weekly prayer meeting in my office with three other men and we were reflecting on how we might publicise it, given that we were not allowed to use official channels for any activity considered to be religious.

I shared this with a friend and he said, “That’s easy. You just put a notice on your office door and everybody passing by will see it.” Immediately I got that sinking feeling: I knew what he was saying was from God, but I didn't want to draw attention to myself in this way. In the end, after a bit of wrestling with God and with my own will, I put up a simple notice - and it had some very interesting effects.

Compared with what God asked Hosea to do, my example is rather trivial - though it is often the small decisions of life that reveal the state of our hearts. Hosea was finally enjoying a bit of domestic peace and quiet: after years of putting up with his wife Gomer being regularly unfaithful to him in their marriage (2:4-5), she had now left him for another man.

But this peace was not to last. For the Lord says to him, “Go and love your wife again, even though she is loved by another man and is an adulteress” (verse 1). We are not told what Hosea’s immediate reaction was, though I can well imagine him saying or thinking, “Oh no, Lord, I can’t do that!”. However, he obeys and he goes and buys her back from the man whom she is living with.

The idea of buying a woman from another man is repulsive to us today. But think of it in modern-day terms as a woman falling into drug addiction and becoming indebted to a pimp in order to fuel her drug habit; then her husband comes to buy out her indebtedness to the pimp so that she can be free from him and from the destructive lifestyle in which she is trapped. The real significance of this transaction, however, was not limited to Hosea and Gomer. The Lord wanted to show the Israelites that, even though they had left him and given their affections to other gods, he still was wiling to do whatever was necessary to bring them back to himself. And today, we, with the benefit of the New Testament, know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that we were redeemed (= bought back) from the empty way of life handed down to us from our forefathers, but with the most precious blood of Christ (1 Peter 1:18-19).

It cost Hosea the equivalent of 30 shekels of silver to buy back his wife (the price of a slave in his culture) - a large sum of money for him, which he could only scrape together by throwing in some barley with the cash (verse 2).

But when God wanted to buy us back from our slavery to sin and wrongdoing, it took much more than money - it took the most precious thing that he could ever find, the blood of his own Son. For us who live in a culture where blood sacrifice is an alien idea, we may well have difficulty understanding and appreciating this. But look at it in this way: the human race has fallen into the hands of ruthless masters called Sin and Death (see Romans 6). God longs to set us free so that we can fulfil our full potential as human beings; and in order to do this, he gives that which is most precious of all to him: the life of his own Son.

This has consequences: You are not your own; you were bought with a price. Therefore honour God with your body (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). None of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone. Whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord (Romans 14:7-8). Gomer, when she went back to Hosea’s house, had to follow what he told her to do. Hopefully, she was grateful to him for rescuing her from a horrible existence and therefore was more than happy to please him in this way, even if it was not easy for her. Likewise, when we come back to God, we can no longer do just what we want, but we make it our aim to please him.

Over the years I have found that often obeying God is really hard and runs contrary to what I would like to do. But disobeying him, although it might be easy in the short term, is always much harder in the long term. He always has our best interests at heart. Like the Israelites in Hosea’s words, we can come trembling to the Lord, and to his blessings (verse 5). He has many good things to give us, if we will let him.