The Jealous Love of God: Hosea 2:1-15

This morning's sermon scripture reading is to be found in Hosea chapter 2 verses 1 through 15.

Hosea 2:1–15

And you can find that on page 73, 74, and your Tier Bible there, or you can follow along in your bulletin.

You know the holy infallible word of God.

Say to your brothers, you are my people, and your sisters you have received mercy.

Plead with your mother, plead, for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband, that she put away her whoring from her face, and her adultery from between her breasts, lest I strip her naked and make her as in the day she was born, and make her like a wilderness, and make her like a parched land, and kill her with thirst.

Upon her children also I will have no mercy, because they are children of whoredom.

For their mother has played the whore, she who conceived them has acted shamefully.

For she said, I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.

Therefore I will hedge up her way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, so that she cannot find her paths.

She shall pursue her lovers but not overtake them, and she shall seek them but not find them.

Then she shall say, I will go and return to my first husband, for it was better for me then than now.

And she did not know that it was I who gave her the grain, the wine and the oil, and who lavished on her silver and gold, which they used for Baal.

Therefore I will take back my grain in its time, and my wine in its season, and I will take away my wool and my flax, which were to cover her nakedness.

Now I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, and no one shall rescue her out of my hand.

And I will put an end to all her mirth, her feasts, her new moons, her sabbaths, and all her appointed feasts.

And I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees, of which she said, These are my wages, which my lovers have given me.

I will make them a forest, and the beasts of the field shall devour them, and I will punish her for the feast days of the boughs, when she burned offerings to them, and adorned herself with her ring and jewelry, and went after her lovers, and forgot me, declares the Lord.

Therefore, behold, I will allure her and bring her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her.

And there I will give her her vineyards and make the valley of Acor a door of hope.

And there she shall answer as in the day of her youth, as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.

Let us pray.

Lord, we we need your spirit to work with the power that you would wish to bring to us this morning.

We acknowledge that without your help, we can we can read the alarm in these words that have just been read and not heed your purposes in it.

Lord, we can hear of the mercies and and not extract the sweetness from them.

We can listen and have a dullness toward what is said.

And so, Lord, we ask, we pray, Spirit of God, do not leave us without your help.

Accomplish what you intend, I pray.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

And so we return uh once again to this remarkable and uh, as we just read, alarming of prophetic writings in the book of Hosea.

And God has his reasons for that, God has his purposes in getting Israel's attention.

It's just the nature of the human heart that it can be harder to gain the attention of a hard heart than it can be to gain the attention of a soft heart.

That's just the nature of the human heart.

I think about when someone's sick.

You don't hear many alarm bells, do you, when someone is perhaps sick with a cold.

But when there's a severe medical emergency, when one is having a heart attack or some kind of fatal issue in their body, well then you hear the sirens blaring down the street, racing toward you, don't you?

They ring out with alarm to signal an emergency, an urgency to the situation.

And it's not unlike what we need to understand is going on here as we read this.

The intensity and the alarm of such language is not unlike that of an ambulance.

This is not a family in the park with a rug down, enjoying a picnic, engaged in warm conversation.

The scene here is with the alarm and severity of divorce proceedings.

The charges are clear that Israel has been unfaithful.

And because of the strain in the relationship, the call is for the children.

This is a family of fear now.

The children are called to intervene and bring sense to their mother who was going after other lovers.

Israel had cuddled up to the balls, and they had reduced God, their spouse, into playing second fiddle.

And worse than that, they thought that he would be okay with what we would deem as playing the third wheel.

Still having a part to play, but only really as an insurance policy if things didn't work out.

But the animating center of the nation was being driven by a fixation on other lovers, namely the Baals.

And the Baals were known for as the fertility gods, those that would help them achieve prosperity and human flourishing.

And it was clear that after many attempts, these other lovers were just consuming more and more of their hearts, and God wasn't going to stand down.

And so at this hearing, there is a call for an uprising of the people, the children, as it were, to reason with their mother, who is Israel collectively, to reform the nation.

Because no one, not even the children, will be exempt from this tragedy if the sentence is finally rendered.

In short, Yahweh pleads with Israel to clean up her life.

Spiritual adultery, as was said last week, Tom mentioned, is at the root of all sin.

Breaking God's heart, not just breaking the rules.

It's shunning him out, it's rebellion.

And it pains him.

And that's why he calls his prophet Hosea to be a living husband to an unfaithful wife and Gomer.

And so what I want us to see here this morning is that God is jealous in his love.

And because of that, God will not let spiritual adultery go unpunished.

Yet just when all hope seems lost, his mercy abounds.

A jealous love.

Perhaps you haven't given too much time thinking about that.

A jealous love.

What does that look like?

God's love is of such a nature that can't leave him apathetic.

He's not without concern or interest or feeling.

He has led to a holy jealousy to see the relationship with those with whom he is called to himself protected.

J.I.

Packer comments about this.

In a marriage, this kind of jealousy, which is a necessary byproduct of love, is evoked as a way of protecting the relationship and keeping it intact.

It wants to preserve that which is valuable and beautiful.

And so there is something good and there is something right about a spouse who is willing to move toward the issues that try to, the cancer that tries to get in between two spouses, as opposed to being indifferent.

It moves within the relationship precisely because it does care.

The kind of love that desires to protect the relationship, to win the affections of the other, and to keep it intact.

Author Becky Pippert says it well.

She says, think how we feel when someone we love is ravaged by unwise actions or relationships.

Do we respond with benign tolerance as we might towards strangers?

Far from it.

Anger isn't the opposite of love, hate is.

And the final form of hate is indifference.

Human love here offers a true analogy.

The more a father loves his son, or in this case, the more a husband loves a wife, the more he hates in him the drunkard, the liar, the traitor.

If I, a flawed, narcissistic, sinful woman, can feel this much pain and anger over someone's condition, how much more a morally perfect God who made them.

You see, love within the bounds of covenant means engaging in such a way that it aims to see the cancer that undermines the relationship dealt with in order to kindle the love and pleasing affections within it.

And so what follows here is language that is centered around three therefores.

You see that in the passage in the text.

Three therefores.

The way in which God in his jealous love will intervene to win back the affections of his bride.

And so there are three points this morning that I want to expound on.

First, God's love intervenes to frustrate wayward affections.

Second, God's love may move to withdraw necessities.

And then third, God's love opens the door of hope by extending mercy.

God's love intervenes to frustrate wayward affections.

God says, and I'm paraphrasing here, I'm going to intervene by weaning you off your lovers.

I'm going to create barriers to you having your wayward desires fulfilled.

Israel is seen here to be looking for some way of connecting with her lovers.

She would keep on pursuing the bowels.

She would keep on seeking to do what she's always done.

She would keep running after these things.

But God would intervene to frustrate those attempts and not allow those desires to be fulfilled.

He would move in to get in the way of these affections being met.

And commentator Ray Ortland shed some light on this.

He says, the course the nation has chosen to take, a path supposedly leading through idolatry to prosperity, is being closed off by sovereignly imposed affliction.

When she approaches the familiar ways of soliciting the idols, she finds no help, no pleasure, no payoff, but only pain and frustration.

It's not working anymore.

Yahweh brings his people into tighter economic conditions, depriving them of the rewards they thought they received from their devotion to Baal.

Here's the issue.

What is getting in the way of our affections being met in him.

Some years ago, Donald Gray Barnhouse, the pastor at that time of 10th Presbyterian Church down here in Philly, was counseling a young woman outside the building there after an evening service.

And um and she said she was a Christian and that she wanted to follow Christ, but she she wanted to be famous too.

She wanted to pursue a stage career in New York.

After I have made it in the theater, I'll follow Christ completely, she said.

Barnhouse at that time uh took a key out of his pocket, and there was uh a little uh postal box standing there next to them, and he took the key and he scratched along the top of the surface of the mailbox.

That is what God will let you do.

He said.

God will let you scratch the surface of success, he will let you get close enough to the top to know what it is, but he will never let you have it, because he will never let one of his children have anything, rather, or over top of himself.

Years later, he met the girl again, and she confessed that this had indeed been her life story.

She had dabbled in the stage, she had even had her uh picture put up in a magazine, but she had never quite made it, and so she told Bonhaus, she said, I can't tell you how many times in my discouragement I have closed my eyes and seen you scratching on that postal box with your key.

God let me scratch the edges, but he gave me nothing in place of himself.

Now that may seem hard, especially to those who go through it.

But you see, that's what the jealous love of God is like.

God intervenes to wean our wayward affections off counterfeit lovers.

Because not only is it unfaithful to Him, but the Bible is clear that we become like what we worship.

We become like our idols.

We become like them.

When it comes to idols, there is always something that has taken over our heart's functional trust, something that has become central to us.

And in being central, it begins then to serve as the animating influence in our lives.

And so we become like them.

If money captures our hearts, then we ought not to be surprised then if our life and our relationships become increasingly transactional and devoid of love.

Or if power and reputation captures our hearts, then we ought not to be surprised if that we become increasingly controlling and more and more insecure.

And it's not always apparent.

We think of Revelation, the church in Laodicea, the angel writes there, he says, You say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.

Not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, and blind and naked.

You know, here they were.

They were, they thought they were doing pretty good.

Life was going okay.

But the but the provisions that God had provided them were now being used against him.

They were getting in the way of their devotion to him.

They were grabbing onto their affections.

And so the devotion had cooled, and they were in fact spiritually empty and bankrupt.

Being cut off from these things may alarm us.

They may even feel like a death to us at times.

They may disappoint us, it may frustrate us, but it would be the worst thing in all the world for God to hand us over to our wayward desires.

And so God may let you and I scratch the edges, but he will give you nothing in place of himself.

And so we must examine ourselves as to the condition of our hearts.

And I would ask you this morning: is there something that has taken over your heart's functional trust?

Is there something beside Jesus Christ that you feel like you must have in order to be happy?

Is there something that is more important to your heart than God and is enslaving your heart through inordinate desires?

We must examine the condition of our hearts and ask the Holy Spirit to reveal these things.

But even then, the frustration of being hedged in and coming back to God doesn't equate to true heart change.

And we see that here.

The motivation we see in the life of Gomer is that she would return because it was better than what she was now facing.

All right, so ultimately she returns to her former husband because life was just a little bit better.

But in the end of the day, it is still self-serving.

And having our desires blocked can still ultimately be self-serving.

That's the kind of attitude, you know, that does something from a motivation of I have to, or I was made to.

You know, you feel the squeeze, you feel the inhibition of having your desires unfulfilled, whether it's for sex or for power or or for whatever it is or comfort.

You feel that squeeze.

You know you should be doing what God says.

The desires are restricted, but the affections, well, they remain far from home, still with those things, far from being at rest in God's all-sufficient love.

We can deal with the behavior and not deal with the root of the issue.

And so God says, I'm going to intervene with more intervention.

And so love moves to withdraw necessities.

God responds that He will not only hedge Israel in, he will not only stop the behavior, but he will also withdraw the necessities to get at the root.

He will show her that it was never the bowels that provided for her, even though she thinks otherwise, but it was he who provided for her.

And so one commentator is helpful here and says the withdrawal of God's gifts would not only demonstrate Israel's separation from her true husband, it would make impossible all means of liaison with her pseudo-husbands.

The fervent cult which was directed toward the Baals could only continue if fueled with wine, beasts for sacrifice, and all manner of food for feasts.

And so the idea here is that they were in need of God providing these things in the first place in order to be able to serve the Baals.

And God was going to withdraw those necessities to show himself as God and to show her that she had taken his gifts and turned them into lovers.

And how good we can be, I think, at turning God's good gifts against him.

The late Charles Spurge.

Illumines us to one symptom of his heart deceit.

He writes, We do this whenever the gifts of God are used to augment pride.

This is a temptation that besets all.

We all have a tendency to swell and grow great simply because God has given us more than other people.

Where is that but makes us the great debtors?

I have heard that in the days of imprisonment for debt, there were people in prison who used to be quite proud because they owed 10,000 pounds, and who looked down with scorn upon a poor fellow who had come in only owing a hundred pounds, or perhaps only a five-pound note.

The more they were in debt, the more they thought of themselves.

Now is that not the case with every proud man?

Because you have greater ability or greater wealth than another, you owe so much more to God.

And yet you are foolish enough to make that which ought to be a reason for being humble, a reason for being proud.

God surely feels that his gifts are misused when we handle them so as to make ourselves haughty and important.

In doing this, we forget him who gave us all.

You see how deceitful the human heart can be.

Using God's gifts, the gifts that he has given to us.

A gift that is just that, a gift.

To then augment pride.

The very thing that God is not.

The subtle shift of receiving gifts from his hand, only to puff ourselves up and in our self-importance to forget him.

And it's not only that, we can do that in many ways.

John Calvin said that the heart is like an idol-making factory.

The scientist can lose God and nature.

A pastor can lose God in a sermon or in a sermon preparation.

Turning even good things into ultimate things.

And God makes it clear that He is not opposed to removing His kind providences in order to bring clarity.

Often we might talk about a person who needs to hit bottom in order for them to truly get clarity, to truly deal with the issue at hand.

And they need to be brought to this place of clarity.

And that's where God is essentially saying of Israel, that Israel will hit bottom.

Because he says, I need to bring not only words, but a sense of concrete reality to her because she has been living in another reality.

And all too often it's it's easy for us to think more highly of ourselves or to think that we are better than we actually are, and to paint a different reality than is the one that God sees.

And so he brings a sense of concreteness to it.

What else will get her to deal with the issue?

Now, obviously, not all suffering is owing to this.

We reminded of Job, who was a righteous man, and he suffered.

Not all things that we suffer are naturally owing to sin in this way.

But God wants to move to get not only at the behavior, but at the root of the issue.

The wilderness is where he will show himself, for she will see his true character with sobriety in that place.

You see, Israel had no doubt who was the one who provided for them when manna and quail came down from the heavens, when she was in the wilderness.

The people had no doubt in the wilderness that it was God who was providing water when it rushed out of a rock.

The prodigal son had no greater certainty of who provided for him and who was most valuable in his life than when he longed for the food that the pigs ate.

See, it's in the wilderness that God shows himself to be God to us in no uncertain ways.

Do you know something of this clarity that is revealed through affliction?

Have you been led out to the wilderness?

Do you know something of the alarm bells of conviction that ring?

That is the jealous love of God pursuing you.

But in the wilderness not all is lost.

Because it's in the wilderness that he opens the door of hope.

He says, Therefore, behold, I will allure her and bring her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her.

And there I will give her vineyards, and make the valley of Acre a door of hope.

And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth, as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.

Oh, the great mercy of God, surprising mercy of God.

His thoughts are above our thoughts, are they not?

Because just when we expect another judgment to come out of his mouth, another judgment of what she has done, of which there was many, out come these marvelous words, heartening words of mercy.

Tender, kind, lowly, lavish.

Although she doesn't deserve it, he shows her even greater depths of his mercy.

It's not unlike a woman who spoke to the great Napoleon when she wanted to save the life of her father.

Napoleon said to her, Woman, I have pardoned this man two or three times before.

And she said, Sire, I pray you pardon him again.

The emperor answered, I see no reason and justice why I should do so.

No, sire, she replied, and there is not any.

But I am appealing to your mercy.

It's a fine opportunity for you to show mercy, for he does not deserve it.

The great man said, That is well put.

Let him live.

You see, this is how Jesus pleads for you before your Father in heaven.

He is your advocate that though we stray, that though we are guilty also of running from him, of spiritual adultery, he is the propitiation for our sins.

He pleads his own sacrifice, and so no other sacrifice is necessary.

You may be saying to yourself this morning, God has my attention.

I know I have blown it.

I know I'm getting what I deserve.

I know what it is to be in a wilderness, to have wayward affections toward God.

Well, if that's you, then consider this something of a homecoming an invitation to come home.

Because nowhere is the Father's love and mercy so close as it is to sinners.

Nowhere is his compassion held out so mercifully as to the contrite in heart.

Nowhere is he so ready to forgive as he is to the penitent.

There is no one, there is no one unlike him that is so willing to show his favor toward us sinners than when we occupy a humble and lowly heart.

His love is of a quality that will pursue you.

Because he cares more for your heart than anyone else besides.

Because he would have you to be with him always and forever, he will not stop loving you and rooting out those things which keep you from setting your affections upon him and finding him to be your all-sufficient love.

He wants you to be with him always and forever.

He will not remain indifferent to you.

Do you hear his tender voice?

Do you hear his willingness to bless you?

In your need, in your rags, in your poverty, calm and rest and his all-sufficient love.

Amen.

Let's pray.

Oh gracious Father, we praise you now for such a love that is willing to go to great lengths.

Lord, even as we know went to ultimate lengths to save us, to win us.

And to keep winning us to yourself.

Oh Father, we thank you for the your jealous love that does not leave us to ourselves.

Does not leave us in our sin, does not leave us in our waywardness, but continues to come after us, offering us mercy and grace.

And so, Father, it's this morning that we praise your name for who you are.

We thank you for your goodness.

We thank you for your love.

Oh Lord, help me not be thankful for your great, great mercy and love.

We give you thanks now in Jesus' name.

Amen.