Adoption (Hosea 1)

All over the world soap operas are very popular television. Many purport to show the normal domestic life of ordinary people, but their story lines, so often centred on unfaithfulness, betrayal, violence, deception and revenge, hardly give a balanced picture of the average person’s life. This is how it has to be. For if my life - and the lives of most of us reading this - were turned into a soap opera in real time, they would not make for very gripping television.

Hosea, however, was not your average person and his life could easily have been made into a soap opera. First he marries Gomer, a prostitute who already has children by a number of men (verse 2). Then she bears him a son; but after this she has two more children that are not his (see verses 4 & 5 of chapter 2). He finds it really hard to accept these children, calling them (in Hebrew) ‘Not loved’ and ‘Not my people’. Then Gomer runs away from Hosea and he has to search for her and buy her back (chapter 3).

Yet Hosea’s life was much more than a real life soap opera. The Lord chose this life for him so that he would be a sign to the northern kingdom of Israel, to show them that he had finally rejected them and would have them deported (verse 6) - something which came about only 30 years after Israel’s golden age came to an end with the death of King Jeroboam.

And that could have been the end of the story: a domestic tragedy which acted out and predicted a much more serious national tragedy. But it is not the end; there is more. To find that more, we again need some help from the apostle Paul, writing nearly 800 years later. He quotes the verses at the end of this chapter in Romans 9:25-26, and he refers them to events which were taking place in his own lifetime.

Most of you reading this will be, like myself, Gentiles - that is, you were not born into a Jewish family. The Bible tells us that at one time we Gentiles were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenant of the promise, without hope and without God in the world (Ephesians 2:12). That is how it was  until Jesus came into the world. We were in the same position as those illegitimate children whom Gomer bore.

And Paul points out in Romans 9 that, just as Hosea finally accepted these children as his own, so God has accepted us Gentiles on the same basis as the Jews. He has created a new people for himself, consisting of Jews and Gentiles on an equal footing, through the blood of Jesus Christ (Romans 9:24, Ephesians 2:13-18).

If all this seems a bit theological, it actually has a real impact on us today: I had no hope of finding God by myself, nor did you. But he found us - and more than that, he has given us the Spirit of adoption, so that we can know him intimately and cry out to him, “Daddy!” (Romans 8:15). And this is where Hosea comes in.

Sometimes we might think: maybe God just puts up with me, because I have so many failings and weaknesses, and I keep on letting him down; maybe he only chose me as an afterthought. No! Over 2,500 years ago the Lord used Hosea’s tangled family life to predict that he would adopt Gentiles - you and me included - into his chosen family.

Hosea probably had little idea of the full significance of what he was saying and doing (see 1 Peter 1:10-12), but the fact that his prediction comes hundreds of years before the event shows that God was determined to make this happen. You are not an accident or an afterthought; God does not regret that he chose you.

Great will be the day of Jezreel (verse 11). Jezreel means ‘God plants’. We have been planted together with Christ Jesus in his death, and we will certainly be planted together with him in his resurrection life (Romans 6:5) - that is the wonderful life that is in store for us now that the Lord has adopted us as his children.