Hosea 1:2-10
“Treated Like Children”
July 25, 2010 - Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

         We put my daughter Susan on a plane to Toronto this morning. We had our whole family together for a month this summer. It naturally brought back lots of memories, especially during our trip to California this past week as we all traveled on the same plane for the first time in several years. One memory our girls have is that events in their lives turned up fairly often as illustrations in my sermons. As they grew up, I generally tried to get their O.K. to talk about them in a message.

         However, it’s one thing for a pastor’s child to serve as the subject of an occasional funny or poignant story, and quite another for the children of Hosea, our prophet for the week, to serve as living illustrations of his message every day of their lives.

         The prophets often acted out their prophecies in graphic ways. The divided kingdom was predicted by Ahijah tearing his cloak in twelve pieces and giving ten ragged parts to the new king Jeroboam. Isaiah went around barefoot and nearly naked for three years to show what would happen to Egypt and those who trusted in Egypt. Jeremiah was sent to buy a clay jar and then smash it in the public square to show how God would smash the nation of Judah. Ezekiel was constantly acting out his prophecies, including shaving his head and burning the hair to show how God would burn down Jerusalem.

         So ancient Israel was accustomed to odd behavior from its prophets. It was part of the show, part of mass communication in a day before Facebook and Twitter. But only the prophet Hosea was told to make his whole life, his whole family into a living, breathing, ongoing prophecy of what God would do with His people, His own beloved family.

         Hosea was called as a prophet when he was young, of marriageable age, probably still in his teens. The first message he receives in verse 2 is to get married, not to the love of his life, not to a sweet, innocent young woman suitable to be the companion of a holy man, but literally, “a woman of whoredom,” a woman of prostitution. There’s some debate about whether she was actually a prostitute, but Gomer was definitely a woman of dubious character. The TNIV’s translation “a promiscuous woman” tries to capture the idea.

         The TNIV however completely misses the sense of what follows when it simply says, “and have children with her,” because the literal Hebrew tells Hosea to “take a prostitute as your wife and have children of prostitution.” Their mother’s character is going to taint the children. They are Hosea’s children, not another man’s. They are not the products of Gomer’s prostitution, but they are going to live with her reputation hanging over them. They will be known as the sons and daughter of a loose woman.

         Most of us get to leave our work and go home. Even as a pastor, I leave the office and go home and sit down with my family and we’re just a family, eating and joking and maybe watching television together. But when Hosea went home his work and message was there around the table. His wife and children were flesh and blood signs of everything he was sent to communicate to Israel.

         His children’s names were part of the message. In verse 4, God told Hosea to name his first born son, “Jezreel.” It’s the name of a place. Its meaning is actually rather pleasant, “God plants,” or “God sows.” Jezreel was a beautiful city in a fertile valley where it might be imagined that God actually did plant a harvest for His people. Yet Jezreel was also a place associated with extreme violence. It was there the rebel king Jehu killed the kings of Israel and Judah. It was there Jezebel was thrown down from the wall to her death. It was there Jehu’s servants murdered Ahab’s seventy sons and brought in baskets their heads which he stacked in two piles at the city gates. And it was there Jehu arranged by deception a mass slaughter of those who worshipped Baal.

         Imagine a child named “Hiroshima” or “Dresden” or perhaps “World Trade Center” and you will get a feel for what it was like to be the little boy named Jezreel. It was an ominous name, a name God says in verse 5 is not just about the past, but about a coming future defeat and slaughter of the people of Israel.

         Johnny Cash sang about the trials of growing up as a boy named “Sue,” but it was worse for Jezreel. His very presence playing on the streets with the other children would remind everyone of their ugly history and of their coming doom.

         You and I haven’t been given ugly names tainted with blood, but we may still feel how Jezreel’s name marked him. For many of us there are ugly, devastating events in our personal histories that left their mark on us. I’m talking about things like an illness, a disability, a time of being abused, a betrayal, an injury, a divorce, a death of a parent or of a child, a bankruptcy, a defeat or a deep and terrible disappointment. Things like that happen to us and, whether or not we caused them, they affect our whole lives. They become part of who we are. In our worst moments we imagine that awful event is who we are. It’s our name. It’s our identity. We can’t escape it. We carry it with us wherever we go, just like little Jezreel carried his name.

         The sad and yet more terrible truth is that those hard moments of trauma and pain in our lives can lead to self-identity that’s still worse. In verse 6 we learn that Hosea’s wife Gomer had another baby, a girl child, and the Lord told the prophet to give her an even worse name than he had given his son. “Call her Lo-Ruhamah.” It sounds almost pretty in Hebrew and it mostly is. “Ruhamah” comes from the word for compassion, for mercy, for love. But to that lovely root God adds the prefix “Lo,” which means “no,” or “not.” Imagine a precious little girl growing up with the name “no compassion,” or “not loved.” That was Hosea’s daughter.

         It can also be you and I who grow up and live our lives imagining that we are not loved, at least not by God. Whatever has happened to us can make us think that He does not care about us, that He’s not listening. We can be like the person in Jesus’ parable in Luke 11, beating on God’s door in prayer and yet He doesn’t answer. The door is locked tight and heaven is silent. God has no mercy on us. He doesn’t love us. That too may be part of our self-identity, part of our experience in relation to God.

         This identity of “not loved” can be large or small in us. It can be a crushing sense of being worthless, of having nothing to offer God or anyone else. Or it can be just a little nagging doubt that God really does care about us or love us, a tiny worry that crops up now and then that my sins are really just too great for God to forgive, like God says here that he will no longer show love to Israel, no longer forgive them.

         So in dark days and hours we ask aching questions like, “If God really cared about me, how could this have happened to me?” or “If God actually loves me, why do I feel so awful, so full of shame, so worthless and defeated?” And the really, awful, really horrible thing is that those feelings of being unloved can give birth to yet one more sense of who we are in relation to God. Verse 8 says that after Gomer had weaned Lo-Ruhamah, she had another son. And God had a wretched name for him as well.

         The name the Lord gave Hosea and Gomer’s third child in verse 9 was “Lo-Ammi.” Once again that negative prefix “Lo” gives a dreadful twist to what was probably a common baby name expressing Israel’s place with God. “Ammi,” the name that means “My People” becomes “Not My People,” God’s declaration that because of their sins Israel is not only not loved, but no longer even His own. “You are not my people and I am not your God.”

         When we are devastated by events in our lives, when those events so overwhelm and mark our souls that we feel that God does not love us anymore, then the natural progression of our hearts is toward the bleak sense that we don’t even belong to God anymore, that He is not ours, that we are not His. In our time that often takes the form of rejecting God altogether, of atheism.

         From trauma to feeling unloved to disbelief in God. That’s our version of the progression that happened in Israel as God’s people turned away from Him to worship gods they thought might be more helpful, more profitable. As they struggled with their own devastating events like disastrous weather, poor crops and infertility, they thought that a thunder god like Baal or a fertility goddess like Ashtoreth might meet their needs more than the stern and demanding Lord of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

         In our text from Colossians 2 Paul addressed the early Christians as they wrestled with attraction to other, more convenient gods. When bad things happen, when it seems like God won’t answer, we’re tempted to turn away, to find better help for our problems. When you and I find ourselves traumatized and unloved, we turn to the gods of business and science and politics to meet needs we feel God can no longer handle.

         Imagine Gomer going to the market with her children in tow, Jezreel, Lo-Ruhamah, Lo-Ammi, every day reminding their neighbors that God had spoken, that God’s compassion and patience had run out for them. Imagine how the other women would mutter and talk behind their backs. It was enough to make Gomer’s own patience run out, to drive her to fulfill the prophecy even more dramatically. As we learn in chapter 3, she left Hosea, she had an affair, she committed adultery.

         Chapter 2 explains the ongoing parable of Hosea’s family life as Israel’s unfaithfulness to God, their forsaking of the Lord who loved and brought them out of Egypt and gave them the land they live in. Hosea compares God’s people to an unfaithful woman who deserts her husband and her children, running off with her lovers. In chapter 3, we discover it’s the literal truth for Hosea. Gomer forsook him, took a lover, left him, went off with another man and abandoned those three children with the hard names.

         Fortunately for Hosea, for Gomer, and for us, this living family parable is not the end of the story. In our text today, even as God says He will not love Israel in verse 6, verse 7 goes on to say that He will love Judah, that He will save them. And even for Israel, verse 10 changes abruptly to a note of hope, when after saying that they are no longer His people, the Lord announces a future day when, “the Israelites will be like the sand on the seashore, which cannot be measured or counted. In the place where it was said to them, “you are not my people,’ they will be called ‘children of the living God.’” As Psalm 85 said to us today, “God promises peace to his people.”

         Whapter 3 tells what that meant for Hosea. God told him to take back his unfaithful wife because God will take back His people. The prophet actually paid to have her returned to him. We’re not told the whole story. Hosea may have paid off Gomer’s employer in temple prostitution, or he may have made a settlement with some other man she married. But he loved her enough to buy her back. His story points us to the love God has for us.

         Hosea is not an example for us. We’re not meant to imitate his life. He married a woman for whom he had low expectations. He gave their children impossible names. We don’t want to reproduce those actions. Yet at God’s direction, Hosea went and rescued Gomer and welcomed her back when she lived up to expectations and betrayed him. We can’t possibly imitate such a life, but in this story we’re meant to see how God loves us.

         You and I blame the disasters and sorrows and pains of our lives on God. We feel unloved and walk away from Him. Yet He always comes after us. He came after us in Jesus. He paid the price of our redemption and return with His own blood on the Cross. We were unfaithful, but He loved and welcomed us back.

         No matter where you and I wander off to, no matter what we name ourselves, whether it’s “Abused” or “Divorced” or “Crippled” or “Alone” or “Failed” or “Sinner” or “Stupid” or even “Unloved,” God loves us all along. God’s love in Jesus wants to bring us back, to call us His own once again.

         God loves us enough to make us even more than we were. Look at the change from verse 9 to verse 10. In verse 9 God is saying that the Israelites were “not my people,” but when He promises to bring them back in verse 10, He says, “they will be called ‘children of the living God.’” The plan of God is to take us from being merely His people, His worshippers, to being His children. Wherever our lives have gotten to, God will find us and invite us to belong to Him again, as His children.

         That’s the point of the little parable in Jesus’ lesson on prayer in Luke 11. He taught us to pray saying, “Our Father…” God loves us like a father loves His children. And though sometimes it seems like we pray and pray and ask and ask for God’s help and nothing happens, like knocking on a neighbor’s door in the middle of the night, our Father is there. And if a neighbor will eventually get up and give us what we want just to be rid of us, how much more will a Father who loves us bless and help and give His children what they need?

         God treats us like children. That’s how He wanted to treat Israel, as cherished and beloved children. The sign of his love then was a young man, who probably had no idea what he was signing up for when God called him to be a prophet. God showed them Hosea loving children whose names meant horrible things. God showed them Hosea loving those children’s mother even when she was not being a wife or mother at all. God showed them that His own love was at least as great and persistent and constant as Hosea’s was. God showed them how He wanted them, and us, to be His children forever.

         We have the advantage of the Israelites, however. God showed them His love as a father and husband by showing them the human husband and father Hosea. But God showed us how He loves us as children by showing us His own child, His own Son Jesus Christ. It’s in and through the love of the Son of God that we see how the Father truly loves us as His children. It’s through Jesus, says Paul in Ephesians 5, that we see how husbands ought to love their wives as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for us. It’s through Jesus that Hosea’s prophecy becomes completely and finally true. It’s through Jesus that you and I are made “children of the living God.”

         I don’t know which of Hosea’s children you are today. Maybe you are carrying around a “Jezreel” as your identity, some horrible experience of pain or sorrow that you wish to forget but cannot. Maybe you are little “Lo-Ruhamah,” playing all alone, feeling unloved and unwanted. Or you may even be the boy “Lo-Ammi,” ready to walk away and say that you don’t belong to the Lord and He is not your God. Whichever and wherever you are, your heavenly Father wants you to be His child. He wants to treat you like His child, as Jesus said in the Gospel, to give you the good gifts He has for you, to give you Himself in His Holy Spirit.

         We will take up one more chapter in Hosea next week and talk more about what it means for God to love us as our Father. In the meantime, please remember that we are His children, that in and through and with Jesus Christ, you can be His child. May all the other hard and ugly things you’ve been called or that you’ve called yourself, fade beneath the glory and wonder of your true identity, child of God.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2010 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj