Episode Details

Prayer

Heavenly Father, I come before you this morning with a confession upon my lips. I am desperately weak, desperately sinful. My sinful nature wages war within me, seeking to destroy me and to have sway over my heart. I am poor and needy, turn not your face from me. Deliver my soul, O Lord. Please forgive me for my many sins. Have mercy upon me for Jesus’ sake. I am yours, a slave of Christ. Disobedient, yes, but I belong to you. Deserving nothing, yet needing everything. Lead me in your truth, I pray, please subdue my rebel heart that I might live in a manner that honours you. Into your hands I commit my spirit, Amen.

Reading

Hosea 1:2-3.

“When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, “Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.” So he went and took Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son.”

Meditation

There is no other way to put it, this is shocking! God says to Hosea: “Hosea, go and marry a w***e. Go and take up a faithless, promiscuous, immoral woman and make her your wife – and then have children with her.” Now this should disturb you, in fact that’s really the point. Israel was so complacent with their sins, so hardened in heart, that God decided to send them this shocking image to show them what they were really doing.

Now I want to impress this on you, just imagine for a moment, try and step in to Hosea’s shoes. For those of us who are married, or hope to marry, we generally marry someone of our own choice, someone we love. We choose someone that we think will make a good and godly spouse, and generally that’s the way it’s supposed to work. You apply godly wisdom, and make a godly decision. And yet here is Hosea, a younger man at this point in time, and he is given this instruction: “Go and marry a w***e.”

Now can you imagine being in that position? In obedience to God, you go and take this woman to be your wife. And as you marry her and you bring her to the marriage bed, knowing full well that just days or weeks before, she has been sleeping with other men. “Go and have children with this woman Hosea.” That’s the instruction! That would be a trying thing to go through! And yet, full of faith, verse three simply says, “So he went and took Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son.”

This is the image God chooses to use to show his people what’s really happening in the northern kingdom. They had forsaken God, verse two says. They did not love him, they did not follow him, and they had set their hearts to love and worship idols. And what this amounts to, God says, is spiritual adultery. God’s people had become no different than a harlot.

I want to pause for a moment to address a question, because at this point there’s always a question that comes up in Hosea, and the question is: “How could God command Hosea to marry a w***e? Isn’t that immoral?”

And the answer, of course, is: No, it’s not immoral. Firstly, God does not command his people to sin. Ever. The question should be a moot point purely on the grounds of basic theology – i.e. God is righteous. But second, while whoring is immoral, and harlotry itself was worthy of the death penalty in a civil sense (Deut 22:21), the only people for whom it was a sin to marry a w***e were the Levitical priests (Lev 21:7). Hosea was not a priest. Did it defy logic for Hosea to marry a w***e? Well, in a sense, yes it did. No one in their right mind would marry a harlot. But was it immoral? No. The Civil Authorities had failed to implement Deuteronomy 22:21, but Hosea had broken no law in marrying Gomer. So although it is surprising and shocking that Hosea might marry a w***e, it was not immoral.

The other significant fact here is that Hosea’s actions were actually a reflection of