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 how God had loved his people. God was married to an adulterous people – that’s what the image of Hosea is meant to teach us. So you might say that if Hosea was being immoral to marry Gomer, then you’re leveling the same accusation at God who married his adulterous people to himself! And that is the key point: Israel were an adulterous, whorish people.

As we look at their history, we see that this is undeniably true. Even at the very start, on the wedding night itself at Mount Sinai, as the covenant had just been freshly established, there were God’s people, committing adultery through the golden calf. Can you imagine that? On the very night of your wedding you find your spouse in bed with another person! And so the shock of Hosea’s marriage to Gomer, which is the symbol and type, pales in comparison to the reality of God’s marriage with Israel.

That’s the real point in Hosea’s life here, of course. If there’s anything to be shocked about, it’s not the shock that Hosea married Gomer, it’s the shock of thinking that God had somehow remained committed to faithless Israel. And so the question is not so much: “How could Hosea marry a harlot?” The far more significant questions are: “How could Israel be so faithless to their God?” and, more to the point: “How could God remain committed to such a faithless people?”

Be ye doers of the word…

There’s an important lesson here for us in application, and the application is this: sin is adultery. When we commit sin against God, it’s as though we’re climbing into bed with someone who is not our spouse. That’s how God feels when his people sin, he feels the heartache of a spouse who has been cheated. Because he sees in our hearts that we are not dedicated to him, but rather that we are dedicated to ourselves and the fulfillment of our lusts. Sin is spiritual adultery.

This knowledge should profoundly humble us in two ways. The first way lies in the fact that it teaches us what we were before God’s grace found us. We need to realise very clearly that, before we believed, that’s who we were. We were spiritual prostitutes, wondering up and down through the world, offering ourselves to whatever sin captured our hearts. And so in our salvation, we must never think highly of ourselves, because the truth of the matter is that each and every one of us is a Gomer. In his shocking love, God has chosen us and set his love upon us. We must never grow prideful in our Christianity, because but for the grace of God, we are nothing but immoral, filthy, prostitutes.

Do you live with this awareness of who you are? And do you live with this awareness of how staggering God’s love for you in Christ actually is? While we were still sinners, enemies of God, spiritual prostitutes, Christ died for the ungodly to bring us to God.

The second way in which we should be profoundly humbled here is to realise that in spite of the grace we have been shown, even as Christians we still go back to our old whorish ways often. As Gomer does in chapter three, do we not ourselves return to our old lovers regularly? Not only should we be humbled at who we were, but we must realise who we still are. We are new creatures in Christ (2 Cor 5:17 ), and yet there is still a harlot lurking within our hearts. Every time we sin, what we are doing is leaving Christ to embrace our sins as an adulterous lover. And every time we sin, God experiences that pain, the pain of a husband whose wife has slept with another man. The anguish of experiencing a faithless wife. And every time we sin, that’s what we have done – we have been faithless to Christ.

Think about this. And think of Christ’s words in Matthew 5:27 : “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” You see adultery is not just about the actual act of adultery – although that in itself is a weighty and serious thing it’s own right. The real issue of adultery is the state of the heart. It’s the direction of the affections. If a man never cheats on his wife, and yet habitually entertains lustful fantasies in his mind, then he has the heart of adultery beating in his breast, and that is who we are. Because when we sin, it shows that sin itself has captured our affections. We do this every day in a thousand ways. Do we not have every reason to be humbled? For even though we have been saved by God through Christ, even though he graciously empowers us, having given us a new spiritual nature, there is still adultery in our hearts.

We must not think highly of ourselves, we must not think of ourselves as better than others, because the truth is that – as we think that – we are committing spiritual adultery in that moment through our sinful thoughts. Are you starting to see the shocking grace of God? It’s shocking in the first place that he even considered joining himself to us. It’s shocking in the second place that – day by day – he continues to forgive us and pour out his grace upon us. But it’s more shocking still because of what he intends for us. Because not only has he married us, as it were, but he has poured out every spiritual blessing upon us. He has promised us eternal bliss in Christ. And he is constantly washing us, by his word, remaking us, and at the end he will have a spotless bride before him. Because that’s why he spilled his blood for us, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. He takes us, prostitutes that we were, and cleanses us, washes us, and will bring us spotless to his wedding feast.

So then your battle against sin is, as it were, and to switch the metaphor, as though you were a bride preparing for the wedding. For the marriage of the Lamb approaches, and the bride has made herself ready (Re