I don't know about you, but one
of my most favourite stories in all the Bible is in Hosea.
So you have it there before you. We won't be looking at all of
these verses, obviously. But there is a verse in chapter
3, verse 1, which I think is a remarkable verse. It says,
Then the Lord said to me, Go again, love a woman who is loved
by a lover and is committing adultery. And then our New King
James translation says, just like the love of the Lord for
the children of Israel. In fact, it could easily be rendered
according to the love of the Lord for the children of Israel. And so, you know, the Bible scriptures
are in many ways the Lord's love pleased to His chosen bride,
that she, that we may see our husband, our Redeemer, the triune
God that loved us from eternity, that we might see them with increasing
understanding of how glorious they are, that we would know
what love and grace are. All of this creation and particularly
the salvation of people in this world is but the manifestation
of the glory of the God and the tapestry, the background upon
which he displays his true character. and especially his true character
as it's seen in the love of God for his particular people. And this is one of the most beautiful
pictures in all the scriptures. And again, it's a reminder, isn't
it, we live in this world where so much is talked about the love
of God. But if people are going to talk
about the love of God, then they need to go back to the Old Testament
and talk about the love of God as God describes His love in
these sorts of passages, just like according to the love of
the Lord for the children of Israel. All of God's attributes
are all linked together. Salvation is of the Lord. Grace and love are sovereign. They are undeserved, they're
undesired, they're unconditional. And we've been talking, Jenny
and I and others have been talking about prevenient grace. The fact
that God's love is an everlasting love and His grace is an unchanging
and everlasting grace. God loved us in eternity and
He loved us when we were born and He loved us when we went
astray. And He hedged our ways in. Everything
that's happened in our lives is but the preparation for us
to see the glory of God in the Lord Jesus. And it's distinguishing
grace. And it's effectual grace. It's
effectual love. And it's costly love. And it's
redeeming love. And wonderfully, it's unchanging
love. And it's covenant love. And hopefully
as we go through Hosea these first few chapters and just look
at them briefly, maybe God the Holy Spirit will reveal those
characteristics of the love of God. Verse 1, chapter 1. The word of the Lord that came
to Hosea Hosea means Joshua. It means salvation. It means
deliverer. And so Hosea, of course, is but
a picture of the Lord Jesus Christ. And Hosea lived through those
kings, Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah, kings of Judah, in
the days of Jeroboam, the son of Joash, the king of Israel. And so if Hosea started his public
ministry when he was 20, he may well have been an old man in
his 90s when these things were written. There is a lot of time
in Hosea's life and a lot that will be seen, I think, in his
life with Gomer. Gomer, the Lord said to Hosea,
verse two, he began to speak by Hosea, the Lord said, go take
yourself a wife of Harlotry and children of Harlotry, for the
land has committed great Harlotry by departing from the Lord. So
he went and took Goma, the daughter of Diblan. So Goma, the word
Goma means waste, or it means consumption. And she's the daughter
of Diblan, Diblane, which means dry or dead. We were and we are the dead children
of a dead father. We've wasted our substance with
sin. We're consumed by sin and we
are trapped by sin. But also wonderfully, goma, the
word goma also means consolation. And as we'll see in these passages,
all of Hosea's purposes, his great love, he's reflecting the
great love of God for his elect. These are all consummated in
Hosea's love for his wife. So what a strange command. What
a strange command. Go to the land. of evil men and women and select
your beloved from that fallen evil people just like the Lord
Jesus did for his people. He loved us, he chose us, he
came down to where we were. This man of God went to that
place and he picked out this particular woman out of a multitude
of young women there. God's electing love is particular. Herein is love, that God loved
us. We cannot We really cannot fathom
what it is to be loved by God. We can feel the times and yet
our flesh gets in the road. But we know, we know that we
are pictured here as Ghana. God's love has its basis entirely
in who he is, entirely in the characteristics of God, not in
anything he finds in us. He, on the other hand, as God,
as our Creator, is so worthy of being loved. Everything about
Him, in His characters, in His actions, in all of His ways,
in all of His attributes, in all of His being, calls on us
to love Him. But Him to love us, If it doesn't
remain a mystery in your lives, it will until we meet Him in
glory. We know much from the scripture
about the love of God, but the love of God is an experienced
thing in the hearts of God's people. And Isaiah is showing
us that by nature we are wasteful. We live in corruption. Nothing
draws us to worship God in our fallen human nature. And Hosea, like our husband,
sets his affections on Gama, an unwavering affection. He loves
her. He called her out and he loved
her. He came to a place of depravity
and chose this particular woman. And he chose her before she'd
entered her path of rebellion. She may have been a very young
girl at this stage, a teenager. By the beginning of Chapter 3,
she may very well be an old woman. that He chose her out, and she
had three children. And after this, in verse 2, chapter
2, she plunged herself into wickedness. And the Lord pleads with her. Say to your brethren, say to
them all around, my people and your sister, mercy is shown. Bring charges against your mother,
bring charges. For she is not my wife, nor am
I her husband. Let her put her heart of trees
from her side and her adulteries from between her breasts. See, God's choosing of his people,
according to the commentary on Hosea, which is in Romans chapter
9, God's choosing of his people was before they had done anything
good or bad. For the children not yet being
born, nor having done any good or evil, that the purpose of
God according to election might stand, not according to works,
but of him who called. Jacob and Esau are held before
us as typical of God's choosing his people. Jacob means deceiver,
supplanter. In fact, in the scriptures, in
so many ways, Esau behaves more honorably. And yet it was Jacob
who was chosen and not Esau. It was Jacob who was loved and
not Esau. So Hosea knew. He knew her background. He knew her nature. He knew her
people. He had good reason to know what
she might become. But he loved her. He loved her
anyway. we might say as we think of this
woman's life. What a privilege to be taken
from a place, a pit of rebellion and wickedness, to be brought
into the home of a prophet of God, to be sustained by him,
to be given three children by him, to be loved unconditionally
by him. What a wicked woman. The answer from the Scriptures
is, what a wicked people are all of us. We're all dug from
that same pit. We sin because we are sinners. She was taken out of the red
light district like Israel was taken out of Egypt, but the red
light district wasn't taken out of her, just like Egypt wasn't
taken out of Israel. You see, we keep thinking, don't
we, our society says if we can just educate people enough, if
we can give them enough of these things, enough health, enough
services, enough social welfare, we'll change society for the
better. We'll pour billions of dollars
into all of these things and we'll have the best education
system in the world. If we can just educate these
kids right, if we can get Jack and Noah to be brilliant students,
then the world for them and the rest of us will be a better place.
Hosea and the Scriptures are saying no. We sin because we are sinners. It's as natural to us as breathing. It was natural for Goma to go
back to where she came from. The wicked go Australia from
the worm. It's remarkable to think that
in every environment that God has placed a creature, creatures
have fallen. God created the angels in heaven. Satan was an angel in heaven
and he and a third of the angels fell. The only reason the others
didn't fall is the grace of God. He creates Adam and Eve as perfect
and upright and puts them in the most remarkable environment
and gives them the most remarkable companionship and his own presence. And what happens? They fall. He saved Noah out of a wicked
generation who hardly had the ground dried and Noah was committing
sin and taking one of his sons, in a sense, into sin alongside
him. Lot was taken by the hand out
of Sodom and no sooner had got out than he is committing wickedness
with his daughters. Israel is taken out of Egypt
by the mighty hand of God and no sooner do they get out of
there and see God's remarkable deliverance and they're building
a golden calf and complaining against God and wondering whether
God is even with them or whether he even cares for them. was given
great power, great victories, great honour, great wealth, and
David fell. Solomon was the wisest man this
planet has ever seen, and he fell into wickedness. Judas walked
with God himself for three and a half years, ended up hanging
himself. Demas walked with Paul for years,
preached alongside Paul, saw those wonderful things that Lord
did in raising up those churches and proclaiming the gospel. And
then he just returned like Gomer to the world. The only hope,
the only hope for any of us is the amazing grace and love of
God for us. that God choosing grace and love,
that God restraining grace and love, that God creating a new
grace and love. That's why there is no place
of safety in this world. There is no plateau that we reach
in any attainment where we can say now I'm secure and things
are right for me. There's no place of rest, there's
no place of safety except the Lord Jesus Himself. Thank God He loves us. As Jeremiah 31.3 says, Yes, I
have loved you with an everlasting love. And as we see with Gomer,
therefore with loving kindness have I drawn you. An old lady
said, if the Lord hadn't loved me before I was born, he sure
wouldn't have loved me after I was born. What do we have to
commend ourselves? Hosea knew what she was. Hosea, like our saviour, knew
what she would do. God knows us so much better than
we know ourselves. He knows where we've come from.
He knows where we were. He knows what we would do. And
He knew it all from before the foundation of the world. The remarkable thing is that
here's Hosea, picturing our Savior. He comes home. to his three children
one afternoon and Goma is gone. And he finds her playing the
harlot, living the life of a prostitute down in the red light district.
And what was he doing? What did he do? Just look at
what it says. He talks about the fact that
He will hedge your way in verse 6 with thorns, and He will wall
her in. He won't let her run the way
she wants to run. She will chase her lovers, but
not overtake them. Yes, she will seek them, but
not find them. Then she will say, I will go
and return to my first husband. For it was better for me then
than now. She hasn't yet been brought to
that stage. But look at verse 8. Look at Hosea's actions in
response to this wicked, wicked woman. Our response is retribution,
isn't it? Every time we are hurt, what
is our instant reaction? I'm going to hurt them back.
I'm going to make them pay for that. Apart from the grace of
God, that's how we respond. She did not know. And we didn't
know that I gave her grain, new wine and oil, and multiplied
her silver and gold, which they had prepared for bar. How much, how much of your life
I know how much of mine, one of the advantages of being converted
late in life is that you know a little bit more about your
wickedness, not much, but you know a little bit more about
the grace of God. I look back, and I hope you can
too, and you can see how God set a wall around our wickedness
and set a hedge around our wickedness. And we would go as far into wickedness
as we possibly could, and I did. I tried to live it up like Solomon
did. And God set boundaries to it. He wonderfully set boundaries
to it. One of the most startling ones
for me is having had a very late and naughty night with some friends
of mine. I was driving home to Tarrara,
and in Tarrara there are no stones. If you find a stone in Tarrara,
it's been put there by a man, either an Aboriginal or one of
us. And I was driving down Tarrera Road, and I fell asleep driving
along that straight. And my car veered off the road
to the right, so I crossed across the road onto the wrong side
of the road. I crossed onto the verge, and from here to the corner
away was a telegraph pole, and I was headed exactly straight
forward. And just before the telegraph
pole was a great big rock that they'd left there 30 or 40 years
ago when they made gravel roads down there and not tarred roads.
Not only did this rock stop me, the rock picked the front of
the car up and steered me back onto the road and woke me up. God does that, doesn't he? I would have gone my way. I would have gone to the pit
if God didn't hedge my way in. See, we didn't love God. We all
want to sing with Frank Sinatra, I did it my way. We want to follow
our desires and we want to reap the rewards that we would get
from this world and this world will applaud us If we continue
our path away from God, if we compromise and we are tolerant,
the world will pat us on the back and they'll tell us how
wonderful it is that we are such forgiving and tolerant people. But God will not allow his children
to live like that. In all of that wickedness, God
was feeding Gama. God was caring for her. By the grace of God, we are what
we are. Saul was murdering God's people
and destroying that church. And at exactly that time, the
very power that he had to breathe out those threatenings came from
God who loved him infinitely. the very clothes he wore, the
very horse he rode on, was all God's provision in his life. This is God's creation. Everything
here happens according to His plans and purpose. And God will reveal that. How is she going to be brought? How are we, any of us, going
to be brought to acknowledge and love the one, the only one
of all these who truly loved her. The only one who ever truly
loved us. As verse 3 verse 1 says, according
to the love of God for the children of Israel. Just look at God's
activities now. Verse 9. Therefore, I will return and
take away my grain in its time and my new wine in its season.
I will take back my wool and my linen given to cover her nakedness. Verse 10, now I will uncover
her lewdness. Verse 11, All of what she thought
was her mirth and her joy. What a party and a party girl
she must have been. Now I will uncover her lewdness
in the sight of her lovers and no one shall deliver her from
my hand. I will also cause her mirth to cease. He has whitened the smile off
her face. Her feast days, her new moons,
her Sabbath, her appointed feasts. And I will destroy, verse 12,
her vines and her fig tree, of which she has said, these are
the wages that my lovers have given me. All the rewards that
she thought she was receiving for her sin. God is going to
expose them. He is, in salvation, going to
expose us for what we are. It's a mercy of God, and it must
happen. It's humiliating, humbling to
know what we are, what we really are, who we're really living
with, who we're really getting our pleasure from. But God will
do it. See, the judgment of God must
precede the grace of God. There will be no appreciation
for the love of God, the grace of God, for the mercy of God,
until a person has been brought down. how different Hosea and
how different Goma's experience is from the modern gospel, which
begins by putting people on a pedestal. by honouring their will, by honouring
their worth, by honouring their work, by telling them how much
God loves them, before they have been brought to a place to see
who they are as rebels. A person must be brought down. There is no clothing with the
righteousness of our Lord Jesus. until we are stripped of all
of our garments. We've got to stand before God
with no covering of our own. We have to have, as Isaiah 28
says, we have to have the refuge, the place that we're hiding,
that refuge of lies has to be swept away by the judgment of
God. Just exposing two things, who
we are and who He is. There will be no exaltation until
there has been a humbling. There will be no resurrection,
there will be no new birth until there's been a death. We won't
be found until we know we are lost. We have to be taken, as
Saul was, as Gomer is going to be, to a place of absolutely
no ability whatsoever. Like Gomer and the prodigal son. We have to be taken to a place,
God has to take people to a place where they feel the shame and
the burden and the guilt of the sin that they are. We can't taste grace until we
are weary of sin and we won't We won't love God
and know the love of God until the things that we love in this
world are caused by God's activities to be seen to be what they are. Like gamers, lovers, they must
be seen to flee from us and leave us. As Henry Mayan says, to miss
conviction of sin, is to miss repentance. And to miss repentance
is to miss faith. And to miss faith is to miss
Christ. So here we see in chapter 3,
Gomer brought to a slave market. This woman who had earned a living
from her beauty. earned her living from her many
lovers is brought to a place of humility. She was there, verse 2 of chapter
3, I bought her for myself for 15 shekels of silver. It's half
the price of a slave. So there is Gama. Old Goma, imagine
the scene, probably stripped and maybe naked on the slave
block, and no one's bidding for her. Her lovers, who had provided
her sustenance for all those years, don't need her anymore. All that's been stripped away
from her. very few bidders and the price
is not very high in Israel it was just half the price of a
slave half a human being for 15 pieces of silver and an hour
and a half of barley And yet what did David say about the
love of God? When my mother and father forsake
me, he will take me up. He has always loved her. Not because of what he sees in
her. This is pure grace and mercy. It's all in him. He is light. Gomer and us are seen to be darkness. He is good. She is evil. He is truth. She is a liar. And God says to Hosea, you go
down to that slave market and you show these people the love
of God to his own. have been the most remarkable
scene. Imagine, Hosea may have been
an old man. He had lived as God's prophet,
an honourable life before these people. He had lived all of his
life bearing, not all of his life, but a large part of his
life, bearing the shame of having a wife who was a notorious harlot. And here he is, this old man,
comes to the slave block. He'd been humiliated publicly,
in a sense, of her actions for many, many years. And the people would have been
amazed. The last person you would expect
to be there to buy a herd would be Hosea. But there was someone
else who would have been more amazed to see Hosea there. And
that was Gamah. How she must have felt that day
when Hosea came and clothed her again. and put his arm around
her and took her home to show Israel, to show Israel the love
of God for his children. Ghana, like so many women in
the scriptures, is but a picture of the church, isn't it? We belonged to a fallen humanity. We were held captive. We were the possession of law
and justice. It demanded something very simple
from us, didn't it? Absolute perfection is what it
demanded, with absolutely no compromise whatsoever. And there was a price on our
heads. Eternal condemnation. Curse and a debt. A death that we deserved. The wages that we had earned. What wages had Ghana earned through
that life? What wages have we earned through
that life? I wonder sometimes when you're
one of the surest markers of the grace of God in the life
of His people is that the personal pronouns that prop up the throne
of me, I, me, mine, the personal pronouns slowly fade away. They lose their luster. They cease to be things that
we want to talk about. We actually have our eyes fixed,
like Gamma did that day, on someone else who has shown us what real
love and real mercy is. And she was a slave, to be sold
as a slave. She went home beloved. She went home free. What liberty she must have felt. That's what the Lord Jesus did
for us. It's remarkable, isn't it? It's a beautiful picture
of grace. Let's turn to chapter 2 and look
at why all this is done. How does God show the love that
He has for the children of Israel? You see, it all has to begin
with Him. Verse 17, I will take from her mouth the names of the
Baals. She and her lovers were worshipping
the Baals and thinking that the Baals had provided the food and
the silver and the gold. Verse 18, I will make a covenant for them. with the beasts of the field
and the birds of the air and the creeping things to the ground.
Bow and sword of battle I will shatter from the earth to make
them lie down safely. This earth which is a terror
ultimately to the people of this world. Just give them something
to be terrified about. Tsunamis, asteroids, Y2K, turn
of the century, and they'll be terrified. And God will make
this place a place of peace and a place where we can lie down
safely, not in what we have done, but in the covenant that He has
made, verse 18. Verse 19, I will betroth you
to me forever. Yes, I will betroth you to me
in righteousness and justice, loving kindness and mercy, I
will betroth you to me in faithfulness." What wonderful descriptions of
the Lord Jesus. Righteous, justice, loving kindness,
mercy, faithfulness. And you shall. I will and you
shall, is the promise that God has made. You shall know the
Lord, verse 21, and it shall come to pass in that day that
I will answer, said the Lord, I will answer the heavens and
they shall answer the earth. Down to verse 23. And I will
sow her for myself and the earth, and I will have mercy on her
who had not obtained mercy. And then I will say to those
who are not my people, you are my people. And they shall say,
you are my God. God must act. God must humble. God will act according to his
covenant promises. We might finish with the final
chapter of Hosea, if you can turn to the verse that I've quoted
so often. As we look at the Lord Jesus
coming to His bride so often, the church, after the resurrection.
He says, I will heal their backsliding, verse 4 of chapter 14. I will love them freely for my
anger has turned away from Him. Who's the Him? It's the Lord
Jesus. God poured out that wrath on
the Lord Jesus that God can pour out love freely upon us. The cause is not in us. The cause
is in our Saviour. The love that God has is not
the wimpish love that we see paraded in this world today.
The love of God is a powerful love. It comes with all the power
of God Almighty. It's an effective love. It works
in the hearts of God's people. It's unchanging love. He knew what we were going to
be like before we ever breathed a breath. He knew what sins we
were going to commit before we committed one of them. And He
loved us. And He loved us. And He loved
us like Hosea loved Gama. This is according to the love
of God for the children of Israel. Let's pray.