(Based on Jonah and the Minors: Chapter 1—Hosea)
Juliette Alvey
Dear Grown-up,
Last year our monthly blog posts followed the Daniel Zine, which took us through some wild adventures: crazy dreams, fiery furnaces, lions’ dens, and scary prophecies of conquering nations. We used our imaginations to put ourselves in Daniel’s shoes and hear God’s timeless word to us all. This year we are moving on to the next section of the Old Testament after Daniel: the minor prophets!
These guys are not called “minor” because their message wasn’t very important, but rather due to the shortness of their writings. God sent some powerful messages through them.
We begin our new year and our new blog series with the first minor prophet in the Bible: Hosea… and what a way to begin! This is not your typical optimistic New Year’s message of trying harder or bettering ourselves. Instead, the message God sends through his prophet Hosea is kind of a downer.
In Jonah and the Minors, the Hosea chapter skit has this dialogue between God and Hosea:
God: “....first of all, you are going to get married to a woman named Gomer. She is not going to be perfect… but I will share my message of hope through her story.”
Hosea: “Okay… will I love her?”
God: “Very much… the same way I love my people.”
Hosea: “Ah… so you’re saying this is going to be tricky.”
Tricky indeed. The message God sends to and through Hosea is challenging: God asks Hosea to face the nearly impossible situation of marrying an unfaithful wife. And notice that Hosea knows of her unfaithfulness before marrying her. There’s no unrealistic or wishful thinking that she might change her mind and make good choices; God tells him ahead of time what will happen. Through Hosea and Gomer, God demonstrates the nature of his own love for his people.
The story in a nutshell goes: Hosea marries Gomer. Gomer goes her own way. Hosea pursues her and pays to redeem her. When she goes her own way, he does not wait for her to be sorry and come crawling back. Why? Because she finds herself enslaved, unable to free herself, unable to come crawling back even if she wanted to. God commands Hosea to “love her as the LORD loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods” (Hos. 3:1). Like Gomer, God’s people are stuck and in need of rescue.
In the New Testament, Jesus quotes the book of Hosea right after he has called Matthew, a Jewish tax-collector, to follow him. Jesus is eating at Matthew’s house when many other tax-collectors and “sinners” show up to hang out with him. When the Pharisees criticize Jesus for eating with them, Jesus responds, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matt. 9:12-13, Hos. 6:6). The full verse in Hosea says, “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.” The Pharisees believed that our own sacrifices and offerings were necessary for God to acknowledge and love us. Jesus corrects the Pharisees on the order of things. It does not go: (1) Obey God, (2) God will love us. God’s order is: (1) God creates and loves us, (2) We turn away from him and cannot free ourselves, (3) God redeems us (and pays the necessary price) and then continues to love us.
This is a good-news sandwich! We are created in love and redeemed in love. God is aware from the very start that we will go our own way, yet he chooses to go through with his plan, just like Hosea marries Gomer knowing what is ahead. We were stuck in our sin, but God starts and ends the story with his perfect love.
