We Are Gomer

So this morning we're kicking off our series in Hosea.

We're calling it Faithful God and Unfaithful People.

And what we're going to be trying to look at is to really understand what does this prophet, who existed such a long time ago, who used such extreme language and things that kind of make us uncomfortable when it talks about Israel and sin and all these different aspects, what does it mean for us today in 2019?

Because it's easy for us to be disconnected from the story that we're about to hear.

We see, like I said, Hosea using language, unctioned by God to proclaim to Israel, that makes us seem real uncomfortable, or words that we don't normally use in the way that we talk about other people or the church or the state of our own spiritual being.

And so we have to dive in deep to understand what it means for us now.

And one thing that we're going to understand is this that this is really at its heart a love story.

It's a love story about God and how much He desperately loves his people.

Now, I can know and understand firsthand an aspect of what this means because I have felt the relentless pursuit and love of God for myself.

You see, when I was 19, I ran from the church.

I had encountered some situations that made me not really have faith or trust in the church any longer.

I was hurt and broken.

And so, in response, instead of pressing into Christ and his people, I separated myself and ran back to my old way of living.

And I had found myself in a place that I really never thought that I would again.

I found myself entrenched in sin and entrenched in rebellion, and I felt like I just had no way out.

Now, don't get me wrong, there was an aspect where I was enjoying the life that I was living.

And in the midst of living in rebellion, it was insane how often God would show up, would pursue, would make himself known in how much that he truly loves me.

You know, I would be at parties and my phone would just pocket dial.

And we're not talking about like good phones, iPhones that we have now.

We're talking about the old Nokia, like all you can do is play snake on that thing.

It's got buttons on the outside.

And so it's pocket dialing people from my old church.

And after I had come back to the Lord, they would tell me that they would get these phone calls, and I was in the middle of party, and they could hear like what was happening and what was going on, and they said they would just pray for me.

They would pray and pray and pray that God would move in my life and bring me back to the church.

I thought that was wild.

Wow, wow, why would my phone pocket dial these people?

And we're talking like consistently.

And then he would bring situations and other people in my life that would remind me of how much he loves me, how much he cares for me, how much he wants me to come back home.

I even bought a little Bible and I would read it.

I had didn't have access to my uh belongings anymore because of certain situations, but I found I was able to get a little Bible and I was reading, and then it was just passage after passage that was demonstrating and displaying God's love for me.

And then at the kind of culmination of this life of rebellion, here comes my now wife into the picture.

And God used her in such a dramatic way to demonstrate for me how much He loves me.

She was willing to walk alongside me to help me travel down the journey back to the church when I didn't have the strength to do it, when I felt like I couldn't do it, when I was full of shame and guilt.

She came alongside to uphold me.

And the Lord used her in such a mighty way to show me how much, how relentlessly He loves me.

And I pray that this series would communicate that, that God loves you.

God will go to any length, any any circumstance, he'll do whatever it takes in his own strength and his own power to obtain you, to show you that he loves you, that you are his, and he's not gonna let anything get in the way of you being one of his children.

That's really the heartbeat of Hosea.

That's really what we're trying to uncover and see in this old prophet's text.

So let's read the introduction and then let's dive in to what I think the Lord has for us today.

Hosea 1, 1 through 2 says this: the word of the Lord that came to Hosea, the son of Biri, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam, the son of Joash, king of Israel.

When the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea, Go, take to yourself a wife of Horom, and have children of Horedom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.

This is the word of the Lord.

May God bless the reading and the proclamation of his promises.

You see, like I said, this text, this whole kind of book of the Old Testament is riddled with language that can make us uncomfortable.

But I'm hoping that by the end of this, we're going to be able to see Jesus bigger and more clearly.

We're going to be able to understand ourselves in relationship to him more clearly as well.

So when we look at verse 1, the way that I would summarize verse 1 will be this way: the Lord spoke to Hosea in a time when his people were deaf to his voice.

You see, at the time when the Lord spoke to Hosea, Israel was actually divided into two different kingdoms.

We had Judah in the south, and we had Israel in the north.

Both kingdoms were progressively moving into struggles of power and greed, and both were adopting the religious practices of other nations into their culture.

You see, Israel, the king of the north, though, they were a little bit worse off.

When we look at the two and we try to compare them, it was definitely Israel who was moving farther away from God and adopting the religious practices of other nations into themselves.

While Hosea's message was for all of God's chosen people, there was an emphasis to the kingdom of Israel in the north.

Now, we can even see in this first verse, we see all these different kings named off.

And this tells us a little bit something about what's happening in the context in this time.

You see, when they start naming the kings of Judah, the way in which they pursued getting that power, getting that seat of kingship was through greed, power struggles.

You see, what they had to do was they actually had to take out another king to be able to take his seat so that they could rule and reign.

Through these sinful pursuits, they obtained power and placed themselves in the seat of prominence and kingship in their land.

The people of God were also engaging in and adopting the false worship of other gods and the religious practices that came with it.

Now, the primary false God that they were worshiping, that they were adopting into their culture and religious practice was this God named Baal.

It was really the emphasis of their idolatrous heart.

Now, there were other gods that they were engaging with, and they played a part in kind of the story of who Baal is and how he actually impacted their lives personally, and we're gonna get to that in a second.

But the primary God was Baal.

Now, the worship of these false gods, and specifically Baal, was very eccentric, very violent, very licentious.

Animal sacrifices, infant sacrifices, prostitution, and orgies were the necessary aspects of religious practice for Baal worship.

While we could spend a lot of time narrating the gruesome and sexually explicit details of their religious practices, we need to focus on the heart and the why they were engaging in these false gods in the first place.

So let's take a moment and look at verse 2 to discover more.

Now, as we approach verse 2, the way that I would summarize this section of the text is that Hosea's life was to become an actual living parable of the unfaithfulness of God's people, but the faithfulness of God Himself.

You see, the Lord spoke through Hosea as a prophet, but the Lord also called Hosea to live as a parable of his prophetic message.

And here is where we land on the perspective of what's actually happening in the narrative.

So when we approach this text, what we have to understand is that historically, throughout time, other theologians and pastors and studies of the scriptures have landed on different conclusions.

I mean, some of the ones that, some of the guys throughout history that we hold up in high esteem, they land in some honestly goofy places, in my opinion, on what this text actually means.

Some think that this whole thing is simply just a story, something that was fabricated and created and made up.

Not that the book of Hosea itself was a story, but this kind of whole narrative of this prophet and his prostitute wife was just an example, just something that God had created to be able to tell a lesson to his people.

Some people think that Gomer, right from the beginning, was a prostitute, and Homer, uh Hosea actually married Gomer as a prostitute, and then we see all this other narrative play out.

What I'm trying to get at is that there's a lot of different perspectives of what is actually happening in the text.

So I'm going to help you understand where we land.

You see, what we can understand fully is that God constantly spoke to Israel as people of whoredom or people of adultery that because their hearts were adulterous.

You see, God is always going to come after our hearts before he comes after our behavior.

Because our behavior is an implication of the condition of our heart.

And so God is speaking to all of Israel that they collectively have hearts of infidelity because they chase after other lovers, false gods.

You see, we can't come to the table believing that every single Israelite was literally and physically participating in prostitution or some of these religious acts of adultery and licentiousness.

But what we can know is that truly, all of Israel was chasing after other lovers and other gods.

Their security, their place of comfort and hope, their place of peace was not rested in God alone.

It was chasing after and trying to find itself in other things.

And so when God speaks through Hosea about taking a wife of whoredom and having children of whoredom, we'll see all this kind of language play out through the book of Hosea.

What we believe he's saying is, take for yourself a wife who finds herself in the midst of all of Israel as a woman whose heart is chasing after other things.

Now, we do believe that eventually Hosea actually is chasing after his wife because Gomer herself has fully and physically brought herself to a place where she's imbibing in this religious act of worshiping false gods, which actually has all these other aspects inside of it, the prostitution, the group orgies, the different things of that nature.

But at the time of where God is calling Hosea to take a wife of whoredom, we believe that what he's saying is take a wife who represents the people of Israel in the way that their hearts are hearts of infidelity, hearts that chase after false gods, who couldn't love them, who couldn't care for them, who couldn't provide for them the way that I can.

You see, Hosea's life would be a difficult one filled with heartbreak.

As a prophet who was called to live the parable of his own prophetic message, we see and we will see throughout this series how he was devastated and heartbroken time again through the actions of Gomer.

Now, why was God calling Hosea to do this?

I believe that God was calling Hosea to experience the very prophetic message that he was giving to him.

A priest who is able to prophesy out of his experience.

That's one of the beauties of the gospel, is that we not only have Christ who proclaims the message of liberation and freedom from enslavement and bondage and sinful lives, but we also have one who can sympathize with us because he became man in the flesh.

You see, Christ is the priest who lived out his prophetic message.

And Hosea here is a Christ type.

He's one who's called to do the very same thing, to live a life as a parable, a priest who would be able to sympathize with the prophetic message that he was to give God's people.

He wanted Hosea to minister out of a place of deep empathy.

Now, ultimately, the narrative of Gomer and the children she would bear are a living parable of the people of God.

You see, it was Israel who committed whoredom by forsaking the Lord.

It wasn't necessarily the details of the religious practices that caused God to speak.

Those were just expressions of a deep-rooted mistrust of God and his word.

Now we have to ask ourselves, why did then the people of Israel actually worship Baal?

Why were they drawn to this in the first place?

Well, if we look at the history of it all, Baal will see was the God of rain and fertility of the earth.

Now he was believed to be the triumphant God.

His name actually means Lord.

And you can look back about the story of his battles and his fabricated kind of life, but what we will see is that they believe that he was triumphant, he was one of the top gods, and that he actually controlled the rain and the fertility of the earth.

And so there's an aspect where if he doesn't perform, if he doesn't do what he says that he would do, or if he doesn't come through and what he says that his powers can obtain for them, then the people suffer greatly.

He would leave to the underworld during the off-season.

And so in the time of drought, or in the time of when harvest was not being produced or reaped, he would be believed to have gone to the underworld and been in retreat in aspect and not provide his power and giftings.

And so what the people actually believed is that to provoke him to come out from the underworld and to mate with this other God to be able to produce rain and to be able to increase the fertility of the earth, they would have to do these different practices to actually provoke his moving.

And so their religious practices were believed to provoke and encourage him to bring rain and to bring fruit for the harvest.

So all of these different things that they participated in, whether it be temple prostitutes, group orgies, the sacrificing of infants, whatever it was that they were able to do, they were doing it because there was a heart belief that it would actually provoke Baal to come out from the underworld and do what he said he could do, or at least what they believed he could do.

You see, they didn't live in a land that had this glorious river water system going through it that could actually easily be used to irrigate crops and to produce the harvest that they needed to survive.

They were in this area of land that didn't have a major water source.

They didn't have something natural and tangible that they could rely on to survive.

They were kind of in a place that they needed a miracle if they were gonna live.

They knew, they realized that they needed something beyond themselves, transcendent upon their human reality if they were going to make it.

And they didn't trust God.

They didn't trust Yahweh, their God, that he would do what he said he would do.

That he was a good and loving husband who cared for his bride, that he was a father who cared and provided for his children.

They didn't believe it.

And so they found themselves chasing after this other false, empty God named Baal to give them rain, to give them food, and we see the lengths and depths of which they would go to try and get him to move.

Killing their own children, living lives of adultery and licentiousness, at the end of the day, they would do whatever it took to survive.

You see, it was their distrust that God loved them, that he would care for them, and that he would meet their most basic needs that cause them to run to other lovers.

While God does detest sinful behavior, more so he detests the heart of man that runs after other lovers to care for them.

You see, we create spiritual whoredom when we abandon God as a faithful groom who will care for his bride to seek the false securities of weaker and lesser things.

That's when we create spiritual whoredom.

That is when we cultivate hearts of infidelity, when we run after weaker and lesser lovers because we don't trust God.

What's our main idea this morning?

It's this that God speaks through Hosea to show us that we are Gomer.

God speaks through Hosea to show us that we are Gomer.

How could this ancient prophet's message who lived such a strange story have any relevance to us today?

It's only if we're able to see that we are truly Gomer.

You see, we could easily sit back and dismiss ourselves from this story by focusing too much on the specifics of the religious practices and self-righteousness without much effort at all.

We could declare that we are nothing like them.

We could hold up our own morality as a reason to not see ourselves in this story.

But if we look honestly at the why behind the accusation itself, we can easily discover that we are in fact a gomer.

We are a people of whoredom.

And we engage in false worship that parallels eerily close to the ancient practices of these people.

Let's look closer.

You see, we commit spiritual infidelity when we run to other lovers for our security and hope.

We commit spiritual infidelity when we run to other lovers for our security and hope.

We all do this.

Not a single one of us can raise our hand and be excused from being counted.

We are constantly being pushed and pulled to place our sense of security and our sense of hope in everything other than God Himself.

Whether we find ourselves laying in the gutter of culture or seated at its high table, we have made strides toward our places through running after false securities and hope.

You see, it's neither the strung, out, homeless, or the powerful executive that landed in their places through one decision or act.

It was a pattern of choices and behavior.

It was a pattern of compromises and the leveraging of things to gain their position.

It was repeated patterns of the placing of security and hope.

Let's leave and look at the parallels of our own actions, or as I would argue, religious worship and those of the Baal worshipers.

When it comes to the issue of child sacrifice, many of us participate in this through one of two primary ways.

Number one is that we sacrifice the emotional and spiritual life of our children for the security and hope of career or financial gain.

We are riddled in a culture with absent fathers, absent parents, parents who don't take the responsibility of discipling and caring and shepherding their children seriously.

No, they believe that if they can get this great career and they can have this financial gain, that they can actually create a home for their children that they will thrive in.

And what we're seeing is that that's not true.

That kids don't want their father's stuff.

They just want their father.

And we find ourselves in a culture where children are constantly coming up with all kinds of emotional and mental issues because of the condition of their home life.

Because we are chasing after career, after financial gain, after economic comfort, all at the sacrifice of the emotional and spiritual well-being of our children.

Or two, worse yet, we literally sacrificed the life of our children for the security and hope of a better future.

I remember not too long ago after one of our gatherings down at Central Campus, I was given a Kinect card that was asking to meet with me.

And I reached out to the young lady that filled out the Kinect card, and she came to our offices and met with me, and I had never met her before.

I didn't know who she was.

She sits down and she tells me, I just had an abortion.

And I didn't know how to respond, to be honest.

I didn't have a relationship with her, I didn't know how to comfort her.

I couldn't put my arms around her to hold her.

I was in shock.

And as she began to tell her story of why, it came down to this.

Her boyfriend was pursuing a career in the NFL.

And she was a college student.

And in their promiscuity and in their sexual relationship, he got her pregnant.

And he was terrified that that was going to jeopardize the possibility of his career in the NFL.

And so out of his own pocket, he put up the cash to give her an abortion.

I don't think she wanted it.

I don't think she wanted to have the abortion.

I don't think she wanted to go through with it.

I don't think she knew how to think right emotionally, mentally, and just such this horrible state that she found herself in.

But he was determined to not let that child get in between him and his dreams.

This possible better future.

And to the best of my knowledge, that guy never even made it into the NFL.

He never went back to her to love her, to care for her.

And the outcome and the aftermath of this whole sinful, greedy pursuit is a murdered child.

Let's look at this circumstance of prostitution or infidelity.

You see, again, we're not much different.

Some of us escape to the fantasy of pornography to live in a better, alternate reality.

Whether fantasizing about being the man that we are not, or about having the woman that we don't, we try to escape to these better, alternate realities through digital screens.

Others practice literal infidelity because we have become convinced that our spouse can't give us what we really want or need.

Still, some will give away our bodies to others who aren't truly committed to us in hope that emotional security will be granted in the exchange.

You see, we don't often remember this, but we are in one of the areas of Southwest Ohio where they were going to have the first national release of a reality TV show on swingers.

Married couples who would exchange partners with one another.

And they were going to blast us on television.

We were going to be put on the map as the place for swingers.

That's the culture we live in.

We've been convinced that our spouses can't give us what we really want or need.

We've been convinced that if we give ourselves over to someone else, we will get what we're truly looking for.

We have been convinced that God cannot provide.

And so we imbibe in sin.

We imbibe in the worship of false gods and hopes that we'll obtain it.

You see, if we define prostitution through the giving of oneself for the exchange of goods, then in certain ways, all of us in this room have imbibed.

God does not speak such strong language through Hosea because all of Israel has literally and physically participated in these actions.

No, it's but because they have all prostituted their hearts for the sake of security and hope.

We are Gomer.

Because we've done the same.

Where have you placed your sense of security and hope in the pursuit of false saviors rather than in the Lord?

Because we've all done it.

Every single one of us has ran after a lesser lover because we didn't trust God.

Because we didn't trust him that he was who he said he was.

But the beauty of the gospel is this Jesus secures us.

He secures us as a pure people through unfailing hope in the provision and will of the Father.

You see, through his death and resurrection, Jesus has purchased for himself a bride who will be presented without spot or blemish.

There will be no stain of infidelity that will remain as we are washed under his righteous blood.

Though he was presented to pursue other lovers, he stayed faithful and committed to his bride.

He was tempted in the desert with sustenance, power, and glory.

Yet he saw all of them as lesser lovers compared to his bride, the church.

He remained ever faithful, ever faithful to the will of his father, and ever faithful to the pursuit of his bride.

Do you see with what great tenacity he saw to purchase you?

How then will he not fight all the more to keep you?

There is no other for Jesus than his bride.

Though he can be presented with all these other weaker and lesser lovers with these distractions that could be calling for his heart to chase after something else, there is no other for Christ in all of creation than his bride.

He has one pursuit, one tenacious task to purchase for himself this bride.

He is eternally and transcendently faithfully committed to you.

God has no other lovers.

What assurance, church, what comfort, church, should that bring to us that nothing we can do can cause us to be separated or removed from the love of God.

You see, that's the whole story of Hosea is that there's nothing that we could do that would cause God to say it's not worth it.

It's not worth it.

I might as well go after this people, I might as well go after this lover because these people over here keep rebelling against me.

They keep chasing after other lovers, they keep uh ignoring the pursuit of my love for them.

That's not the case.

There's nothing that we can do that could cause God to choose another lover.

He is eternally committed to you.

While we might be swept away to the arms of another, Jesus remains ever faithful to us.

And as Jesus took on the task of ransoming his church, he remained unfailing in his hope and trust that the Father's will was both good and prosperous.

There was no temptation that could prevail against him.

Even at the hour of his death, he stayed faithful in hope.

He said, Father, if there's another way, if there's any other way, let it be so.

Do you see how committed Jesus is to you?

Do you see how committed Jesus is to his lover, the church?

Because his response after that question was not, let's find a different way, let's search to try and discover a different way.

No, his response was, nevertheless, Father, your will, not mine, be done.

You see, it wasn't only that he stayed ever faithful to us his bride, but he stayed ever hopeful that God was good.

That God was right, that God was who he said he was, that the Father loved him.

He trusted in that.

He trusted in that even to the point of death.

You see, Jesus is the eternal, faithful husband who is making for himself an eternal, faithful bride.

Praise God.

So our gospel vision this morning is this: that we would faithfully place our hope in who Jesus is and who he is making us to be.

That we would faithfully place our hope in who Jesus is and who he is making us to be.

Look at what cost Jesus has taken to obtain us and what cost he has taken to make us pure, holy, and righteous.

You see, to place our hope in Jesus is to place our hope in the only one who can truly do anything about our situation, our very lives.

Why do we not trust him to provide?

Why do we run to lesser lovers?

With all that he has proven to us and accomplished on our behalf, why do we still struggle to see him as trustworthy?

Surely, church, if I can tell you anything this morning, Christ alone is trustworthy.

He's the only one.

He's the only one who we can put all of our hope and security in because he alone is trustworthy.

You see, too often we look solely at the cost Jesus paid to save us from our sins, and we fail to look at the cost Jesus paid to remove sin from our very being.

The work of Jesus is not summarized in full through his death and resurrection.

We have to also see the work of Jesus through his perfect faithfulness to the Father.

You see, he gives us the reward of his faithfulness so that we might walk it out in our flesh.

Where there once reigned infidelity in our being, there should now reign faithfulness unto Christ.

Do you hear me, church?

Where there once reigned infidelity in your being, there should now reign faithfulness unto Christ, because it is not just trusting in who Christ is.

Yes, that is true, but we should also trust in who Christ is making us to be, because he doesn't just save us from the pits of hell, but he saves us and conforms us to the very image of himself.

And so if you believe that Christ died for your sin, that he raised again victorious over death, hell, and the grave, then Christian, you must believe too that through the power of the Spirit, He is conforming you and shaping you to the image of His glorious self, so that when we are presented before the Father, it is the total finished work of Christ that presents us holy and blameless, without spot or wrinkle or any stain of infidelity before him.

We are a new creation, a faithful and pure lover, and we are called to live as such.

In all of our life, we should walk in full confidence of who Jesus is and who he is making us to be.

Let's pray.

Father, I thank you for the finished work of Christ.

I thank you for all that he is doing in and among us and how he is transforming us and conforming us to the image of himself.

Father, I pray that you expose the ways in which we are chasing after lesser lovers.

Expose the ways in which we are partaking in the worship of false empty gods.

Expose our hearts where we don't trust you.

We don't trust that you are good, or we don't trust that you are who you say that you are.

Father, cause us to walk in the truth of our new life that we have in Christ.

Hearts that are faithful unto you, hearts that trust you, hearts that don't run to weaker and lesser lovers.

Keep us in your power and in your strength.

In Jesus' name that we pray.

Amen.