📖 Bible Characters II — Unit 2: Hosea — The Prophet Who Loved an Unfaithful Wife

God once asked a prophet to do the unthinkable: to marry a woman who would break his heart, and to keep on loving her even after she betrayed him. The whole marriage was meant to be a living picture, acted out before the eyes of a nation, of how God loves a people who will not be faithful to Him. That prophet was Hosea, and his message is the gospel of relentless grace: God's love pursues the unfaithful and forgives the unforgivable.

Subject: Hosea — the prophet who loved an unfaithful wife, a living picture of God's unyielding love.

Proposition: God's love pursues the unfaithful and forgives the unforgivable.

We will follow three movements in Hosea's story.

I. The Command

Hosea prophesied in the northern kingdom of Israel at a time when the people were chasing after false gods. They had not entirely abandoned the LORD; they simply wanted to worship Him and Baal both, to keep one hand on heaven and one hand on the idols — a very open-minded thing to do, they no doubt thought, and a very wicked one. Into that situation God gave Hosea a strange and painful command:

So Hosea married Gomer. And as children were born, God gave them names that preached His coming judgment to the whole nation. The first was called Jezreel, meaning "God will scatter" — a name that echoed with the bloody memory of Jezebel and Jehu and the dogs in the courtyard of Jezreel. The second, a daughter, was named Lo-Ruhamah, "No Mercy," for God said He would no longer have mercy on the rebellious house of Israel. The third was named Lo-Ammi, "Not My People," the most terrible word of all — for God to say to His covenant people, "You are not Mine." Every time Hosea called his children in for supper, he was preaching a sermon.

We should understand why God calls idolatry "harlotry." The covenant between God and Israel was like a marriage, and Israel was His bride; to run after Baal was therefore not a small religious preference but spiritual adultery, a betrayal of the most intimate bond. Yet even in the naming of judgment, God could not keep from hinting at mercy. For He added that the day would come when, in the very place where it was said "You are not My people," they would be called "sons of the living God" (Hosea 1:10). Judgment was real, but it would not have the last word.

II. The Betrayal

For a while, perhaps, Gomer tried. But her faith was shallow, and in time the old pull was too strong. She drifted back to her former ways, and at last she walked out altogether, leaving Hosea alone with the children. And here is the wonder of it: Hosea still loved her. He did not stop loving her because she stopped loving him.

I have known something of that kind of one-way love. In my high-school years I loved a girl named Sharon with all my heart, and she only ever wanted to be my friend; I learned what it is to pour out love on someone who will not return it. I think too of the little girl who came to her mother with a doll cradled in each arm and said, "Mama, I love them and I love them, but they never love me back." How true that is of us toward God. We are not the faithful Hosea in this story; we are the faithless Gomer. We are the ones who take all His goodness and wander off after lesser loves, and break the heart of the God who has loved us from the beginning.

This was Israel's exact folly. They chased after their "lovers," the Baals, imagining that these false gods gave them their grain and their wine and their wool, when all along it was the LORD Himself who had provided every good thing they enjoyed (Hosea 2:5-8). How often we do the same, taking the gifts of God and crediting them to anything and anyone but the Giver. We spend His blessings in the service of idols and never stop to thank the hand that gave them.

III. The Redemption

The story could have ended there, with a wife gone and a heart broken. But God was not finished, because God's love is not finished when ours fails. Gomer sank lower and lower, until she was no longer young or beautiful, scarred by her sin, and finally sold into slavery itself. And then God spoke to Hosea again:

So Hosea went down to the slave market, and there he bought his own wife back — paid the price to redeem the very woman who had shamed him — and took her home and loved her as his wife again.

Scripture even records the price: fifteen shekels of silver and a homer and a half of barley (Hosea 3:2) — the going price of a slave, and a humble one at that. Hosea counted out the cost coin by coin to win back a wife who had given him nothing but grief. And that is precisely the heart of God toward the wanderer; earlier in the book He had said, "I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfort to her" (Hosea 2:14). He does not merely take the sinner back; He woos her with tenderness.

There is a phrase for that: unforgivable forgiveness. It makes no sense by the arithmetic of the world. And that is exactly the point, for it is a picture of how God loves Israel, and how He loves us:

He loves freely. He heals the very backsliding that wounded Him. He goes down into the market where we have sold ourselves and pays the price to buy us back.

And so the very names that once preached judgment are turned inside out by grace. The God who had said "Lo-Ammi, Not My People" now promises, "I will say to those who were not My people, 'You are My people!' And they shall say, 'You are my God!'" (Hosea 2:23). "No Mercy" becomes mercy; "Not My People" becomes "My People." That is what the redeeming love of God always does: it does not merely cancel the sentence, it reverses it, and writes a new name over the one who was lost.

This is the kind of grace that startles the world. There was a German pastor named Uwe Holmer who, when the fallen communist dictator Erich Honecker and his wife had nowhere to go and no one would take them in, opened his own home to them — the very rulers whose government had barred Holmer's own children from the university. He returned love for cruelty, because that is what grace does. We look at a man like Jeffrey Dahmer and call him beyond all forgiveness; yet if the love of God could reach Gomer in the slave market, there is no sinner so far gone that grace cannot find him.

And this grace makes a demand on us. The God who forgave the unforgivable calls His people to forgive in the same way. From the cross our Lord prayed, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do" (Luke 23:34). Stephen, as the stones crushed the life out of him, cried, "Lord, do not charge them with this sin" (Acts 7:60). And when Peter asked how often he must forgive, thinking seven times was generous, Jesus answered, "I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven" (Matthew 18:22). The forgiven are to become the forgiving.

That is the message of Hosea. God's love is relentless. It pursues the wanderer down every wrong road, it forgives the sin that should have ended everything, and it buys back what was hopelessly lost. If you have wandered far, hear the heart of God in this little book: He has not stopped loving you, and He stands ready to heal your backsliding and to love you freely. And if someone has wronged you beyond what seems forgivable, look at Hosea in the slave market, look at Christ upon the cross, and forgive as you have been forgiven.

For the whole book is finally about the cross. Every shekel Hosea paid in the slave market was a faint shadow of the infinite price the Lord Jesus would pay to redeem His own unfaithful bride. We were the ones sold under sin, scarred and enslaved and unable to free ourselves, and He came down into our market and bought us with His own blood. That is why Hosea's strange and painful marriage still speaks across the centuries: it lets us see, in one man's broken heart, the love that would one day stretch out its arms upon a cross and refuse to let us go.