Why God’s love should not be taken in vain

One of my younger students at Bible college/seminary described his youth group in a discussion. He said members in the group knew little about what was in the Bible, apart from a few gospel stories and have never heard explained the overarching story the Bible tells about creation, sin and redemption. What they knew were soundbites about God’s love and forgiveness in Jesus. Every now and again, they felt guilty for what they supposed was wrong in their lives but not knowing what God required of them, they were left with a vague sense of unease assuaged by what they were taught about God’s love. Surely, God would forgive them!

Hosea marries a promiscuous woman

I suspect that this dismal picture is not unique in today’s churches and among young Christians. Neither was it unique in Israel where true teaching and understanding of God was partly lost, partly mixed with the cultural convictions of the day. Since worshipping Israel’s God as well as other gods was the cultural norm, it would have been hard for Israelites to appreciate what was so wrong with that. Into this setting enters Hosea with his prophetic action commanded by God to marry a promiscuous woman (Hos 1:2).[1] Ancient cultures were strict about the virginity of a young woman about to be married and wives were expected to be chaste (e.g. Deut 22:13-29).[2] Thus, Hosea’s action would have been shocking for those around him. How could a prophet, a holy man serving God, marry such a woman?[3] It would have given occasion for talk and therefore an opportunity for Hosea to say, ‘You think this is an outrage? What about what you do, when you worship other gods? It is faithlessness to the one true God!’.

Hosea’s children: symbolic names and what they mean

We can only imagine the terrible cost Hosea had to pay in embodying Israel’s relationship with God, since the report of his marriage is devoid of any emotion. The symbolic names given his children encapsulate God’s message to Israel. The first, Jezreel, denotes the bloodshed of Jehu (Hos 1:4), who brought God’s legitimate judgment on Ahab’s dynasty but overstepped the mark in his violence (2 Kings 9-10, see my posts on these events here and here).[4] It points not only to God’s judgment on Jehu’s dynasty but ultimately to Israel’s military defeat at Assyria’s hands (Hos 1:4-5). Children’s names often expressed parental hopes, so a negative name like Lo-ruhamah (‘No pity’; Hos 1:6) and Lo-ammi (‘Not my people’; Hos 1:9) would have been shocking, again occasioning talk. How can anyone say that they care so little about their children (no pity) and disclaim a relationship (not my people)?[5] Isn’t this unnatural? Outrageous as this may sound from a father, it was meant to shake Israel’s unthinking conviction that they could claim a relationship with God when their own faithfulness was questionable. This was the point Hosea’s lived parable demonstrated.

Why God’s love should not be taken in vain

Hosea’s message is a challenge to assumptions that God must be a God of love, and such love must be defined as precluding judgment no matter what we do. In truth, relationship requires reciprocity. Even secular people can appreciate that casual affairs in a marriage are devastating for the one betrayed and no one should be expected to put up with such abuse. Yet many expect God to do so.  Discipleship and living faithfully for God has much less emphasis in many churches these days for fear that it might encourage a mentality to earn our salvation. Hosea’s marriage reveals the distortion of this perspective. Living for God when he made us His people and making faithfulness to His will a priority is no more about earning salvation than love and commitment in marriage is about earning the right to be married. Rather, they are the natural outworking of a love received and reciprocated. The challenge for us is, do we know God’s love and, if so, how do we respond? Do we use our knowledge of His grace as permission to arrange our lives as we like? Are we using God? Much as this picture is confronting, its point is to bring about a change of heart to love God truly and to do so not only with emotions but with our thinking, actions and attitudes.

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[1] Many translations render this as ‘prostitute’, but the Hebrew is much less specific. The expression is ‘a wife of harlotry/prostitution’ (ʾeset zenunim), whereas the word for a prostitute is zonah. This may seem like splitting hairs, but using a more cumbersome expression suggests to me that the woman engages in promiscuous sexual activity, perhaps even for money at times, but is not a ‘professional’ as it were.

[2] Although Israel may not have followed the law’s requirements as Deuteronomy outlines them, the expectation for wives to be chaste reflected in it would have been common in ancient cultures even when men were allowed much more sexual licence. A wife’s unfaithfulness would put the family lineage in jeopardy (whose children is she bearing?) and this may be one reason why it was so jealously guarded.

[3] Some Christian commentators find such a command from God too shocking and look for ingenious ways to lessen its impacts. One solution is to suggest that this is simply a vision of Hosea’s and it does not bear any relationship to his real life, but there is no evidence in the text for this (compare Amos 7:1-9, where ‘show’ and ‘see’ are repeatedly used, or Ezekiel 10:1-22, where ‘I looked and behold’ [vv.1, 9] and ‘I saw’ [v.20] indicate a visionary experience). Another is to suggest that Hosea married Gomer in good faith and only later discovered her unfaithfulness. Hosea then realised in retrospect God’s will in this. While this is possible, the whole point of the prophetic action is precisely to shock and create a talking point. Other alternatives are that this was simply a parable Hosea told (‘Imagine if I married a woman like this…’) or that he married any woman, since all the Israelites were engaged in ‘prostitution’ symbolically or in practice. Both these latter options suffer from the same problem as the second one: the talking point is lost. Since prophets were known to engage in bizarre behaviour at times, the command to Hosea is in keeping with what we know of other prophets (e.g. Isa 20:2-6).

[4] King Ahab and his foreign wife, Jezebel, made Baal worship widespread in Israel (1 Kings 16:30-33). His unjust reign includes the infamous incident of getting Naboth’s vineyard by executing Naboth on false charges and taking possession of his land (1 Kings 21:1-16). Jehu, an army commander, was chosen by God to eradicate Ahab’s dynasty (2 Kings 9:6-7), but he overstepped the mark in his violence killing among others, the king of Judah (2 Kings 9:27), some of his relatives (2 Kings 10:13-14), as well people serving Ahab but not related to him (2 Kings 10:11). Jehu was promised a dynasty that will last for four generations after him (2 Kings 10:30). Jeroboam II, who would have been the king when Hosea’s son, Jezreel, was born, was the third generation after Jehu. Jeroboam’s son was assassinated six months after becoming king, which fulfilled God’s Word (2 Kings 15:8, 12).

[5] It is sometimes argued that Hosea’s first son was really his (‘she conceived and bore him a son’, Hos 1:3), while the other two children were from other men (note the lack of ‘him’ in the second two birth announcements, Hos 1:6, 8). However, the expression ‘bore him’ is not a fixed phrase to indicate parentage and should not be made much of. Such a shortening of repeated events is not unusual in Hebrew prose. Further, the introduction to God’s explanation of the names to be given to the children are progressively condensed, too. Thus ‘the LORD’ is dropped in the Hebrew in verse 6 and reads ‘and said to him…’ (the verb form in Hebrew indicates that the speaker is a ‘he’, so no personal pronoun is needed). In the third instance, the introduction to the explanation is even shorter: ‘and said’ (v.8).

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