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A message by
Rev. T. Franklin Harmon
Associate Pastor
August 10, 2008 Scripture: Hosea 2:2-13
“Do you take this man to be your husband, promising to live together with him according to God’s purpose in holy marriage? Will you pledge your faithfulness to Him, and cherish him in all faith and tenderness, and forsaking all others, will you keep Him only unto yourself, so long as you both shall live?
Now please repeat after me, I, (your name), take you, to be my wife, and I do promise and covenant, before God and these witnesses, to be your loving and faithful husband, to have and to hold you, from this day forward, in plenty and in want, in sickness and in health, in joy and in sorrow, to love you and to cherish you, according to God’s holy purpose, so long as we both shall live, and, in this commitment, I entrust you with my life.”
These words should be familiar to everyone, and many of you have said words very similar to these, in your own marriage service. Wedding vows are something that every man and women say to their spouse as a pledge and covenant in marriage. In wedding vows we pledge to be loving and faithful, in the good times as well as the bad, when one spouse is sick or healthy, so long as we both shall live. A marriage commitment is not something that should not be done lightly for when we hold true to our vows, it is a life long commitment.
Last week we talked about the covenant of friendship between David and Jonathan, and this week we are going to continue to talk about covenants, specifically the covenant of marriage. However, the marriage I want to talk about isn’t your marriage to your husband or wife, but as Hosea talks about marriage… our marriage to God.
Hosea is the first prophet to use the illustration of marriage to describe our relationship with God. Instead of discussing our love for each other, he compares us to his unfaithful wife, Gomer. We don’t know a whole lot about Gomer and Hosea, but many scholars believe that she was a faithful wife when they got married and only later in their marriage did she start to stray. Out of her unfaithfulness, Gomer had three children named Jezreel (which is also the name of the Day of Judgment of God’s people), Lo-Ruhamah (which means not pitied), and Lo-Ammi (which means not my people) Despite these children not being Hosea’s, he takes care of them as his own.
The words that Hosea uses in our scripture today are pretty hard to hear. He starts off asking Gomer’s children to rebuke their mother for her actions, and says that she is not his wife (v. 2). He continues in v. 3, saying that he will strip her naked and slay her with thirst. He will no longer show love to her children, because they are products of adultery and in the Levitical law this is all permissible for Hosea to do.
How does Gomer respond? V. 7ff she tries to chase after her lovers who she thinks will take care of her. She thinks they will give her food and water and clothes, but they have nothing to do with her. So finally, after being rejected by everyone she thought loved her, she turns back to Hosea and says, “I will go back to my husband as at first, for then I was better off than now (v. 7).” However, Hosea is still angry and continues to punish Gomer for her unfaithfulness. We end our scripture today with the words “I will punish her for the days she burned incense to the Baals; she decked herself with rings and jewelry, and went after her lovers, but me she forgot (v. 13).”
This whole discourse isn’t just about the unhealthy marriage between Hosea and Gomer. Instead Hosea uses this story to highlight the relationship between God and His people. During this time the Israelites were brought into the ‘land of milk and honey’ but they didn’t know how to live. They weren’t very good farmers so they relied on the Canaanites, the people living in Israel, to teach them and they slowly started to adopt the Canaanite way of life. The Israelites were faithful, but the allure of another, was very attractive. They thought “what harm is there in worshipping Baal along with Yahweh?” They still believed in Yahweh, but they wanted to cover their bases, because this is what the Canaanites did and it seemed to work for them. The more time passed, the deeper they got into their worship of Baal and they slowly pushed Yahweh to the back burner. And just in case you are keeping record, the Israelites cheated on God with Baal during the time of Elijah, I Kings 17 as well as during the time of Jeremiah, (Jer. 10 & 44).
Being enticed by things other than God is not something that is unique to the Israelites. We do it too. Maybe we don’t call it Baal, and maybe we don’t call it god, but Baal is whatever we give allegiance to and depend on to give us meaning in addition to God. When I was in high school, it was my fellow Christians. I was part of a big youth group of 100+ kids and was part of the leadership team. But I was the only kid from my high school, so I got to hang out with my Christian friends at youth group, ski trips and leadership trips, but on a daily basis I didn’t get to see them. I didn’t know them outside of youth group. I looked up to my Christian peers and depended on them to help me define who I was in high school.
I assumed that when they were at school and away from our youth group they acted the same way as when we were together. I was completely heartbroken when I learned at one of our meetings that several of my friends on the leadership team were out cliff jumping in one of the local rivers and their friend drowned. I was very sad to hear about this loss and but I was heartbroken when I found out that my friends were so drunk that they couldn’t save their friend, who was just a few feet away, from drowning.
A couple of weeks later one of the two core leaders stopped showing up to youth group, and I thought it was due to her friend’s death, so I asked one of my other friends how she was doing. I was told that she hadn’t been doing well. For the previous four months she had been smoking pot and that had become more important than coming to youth group. And, to top it off, my best friend, someone I really respected and put a lot of my faith into, got pregnant three weeks after she led a retreat on saving yourself for marriage and the mistakes of having premarital sex. My world was starting to crumble. I didn’t even realize it, but I had become Gomer. I had put my faith in people, not God, and God had stripped me of everything, left me parched and naked, chasing after my lovers only to have them reject me.
Maybe for you it is a different story. Maybe it is the shrine of power, prosperity, possessions or position. We depend on people and the recognition that we get from them so much that we seek to draw from people the security and assurance that we can only get from God. The worship of our own personal Baal and the adultery that comes with it isn’t just something that plagues adults but we put it on our children. Often times we unknowingly put great value in the success, status, and trophies we earn or that our children earn. These too can compete as gods, as we put value and devotion into these events making them gods. Baal represents a barter of blessings while we try to maintain control of our lives. We say, “God, if you do this thing for me I will do this other thing for you.”
As I mentioned earlier, Hosea would have been completely within his rights to divorce Gomer for the choices she made and the lifestyle that she chose. So, in this metaphor of our lives, God too would be in His right to abandon us, to leave us, to leave His unfaithful people to their own vices. Leave them in a parched land, slay them with thirst, and not show them any love… thankfully this is not what God does.
In the second half of chapter 2, God says, "Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her. There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor (which means trouble) a door of hope. There she will sing as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt. ‘In that day,’ declares the Lord, ‘you will call me 'my husband'; you will no longer call me 'my master.' I will remove the names of the Baals from her lips; no longer will their names be invoked. In that day I will make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the creatures that move along the ground. Bow and sword and battle I will abolish from the land, so that all may lie down in safety. I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, with love and compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the Lord. ‘In that day I will respond,’ declares the Lord—‘I will respond to the skies, and they will respond to the earth; and the earth will respond to the grain, the new wine and oil, and they will respond to Jezreel. I will plant her for myself in the land; and I will have pity on Lo-Ruhamah (one not pitied), and will say to Lo-Ammi (not my people,) 'You are my people;' and they will say, 'You are my God.'" Hosea 14-23.
Despite our unfaithfulness, despite how we let people, success, and power share time with God or how we flirt with things or ideas that we think will bring blessings to our lives, no matter how we break our vows to God, God remains faithful to us and His vows to us. No matter what our lover might be, God just wants us back. He wants us to turn from our ways, and return to our vows. To 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,” (Mt 22:37). And this is the greatest love story of all time. Amen. and friendship. |
