Hosea

PASSAGE FOR THE DAY:

1        Praise the LORD, my soul;

    all my inmost being, praise his holy name.

2        Praise the LORD, my soul,

    and forget not all his benefits—

3        who forgives all your sins

    and heals all your diseases,

4        who redeems your life from the pit

    and crowns you with love and compassion,

5        who satisfies your desires with good things

    so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.

6        The LORD works righteousness

    and justice for all the oppressed.

7        He made known his ways to Moses,

    his deeds to the people of Israel:

8        The LORD is compassionate and gracious,

    slow to anger, abounding in love.

9        He will not always accuse,

    nor will he harbor his anger forever;

10      he does not treat us as our sins deserve

    or repay us according to our iniquities.

11      For as high as the heavens are above the earth,

    so great is his love for those who fear him;

12      as far as the east is from the west,

    so far has he removed our transgressions from us.

13      As a father has compassion on his children,

    so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him;

14      for he knows how we are formed,

    he remembers that we are dust.

15      The life of mortals is like grass,

    they flourish like a flower of the field;

16      the wind blows over it and it is gone,

    and its place remembers it no more.

17      But from everlasting to everlasting

    the LORD’s love is with those who fear him,

    and his righteousness with their children’s children—

18      with those who keep his covenant

    and remember to obey his precepts.

19      The LORD has established his throne in heaven,

    and his kingdom rules over all.

20      Praise the LORD, you his angels,

    you mighty ones who do his bidding,

    who obey his word.

21      Praise the LORD, all his heavenly hosts,

    you his servants who do his will.

22      Praise the LORD, all his works

    everywhere in his dominion.

Praise the LORD, my soul. (Psalm 103, NIV)

REFLECTIONS:

If you and I have a hard time receiving God’s love, the foundational problem is that we are not trusting and treasuring Jesus as your righteousness and life. The last two days we have considered how we can tend to think that we are either deserving or undeserving of God’s love because of something we’ve done. Yesterday we became aware of how our pride and shame are both deflections of God’s love. Pride and shame are two sides of the same self-righteous coin. Either your head is up or your head is down, but in both cases you are measuring your lovability on the stan­dard of your righteousness, or lack of it.

One of the places we see this most beautifully illustrated in the Old Testament is the shocking short story of Hosea. It begins like this: “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’” (Hosea 1:2, ESV).

God gives Hosea the unthinkable task of taking a prostitute as a wife. This is not unthinkable because her past as a prostitute, but because of her future unfaithfulness to Hosea. He knows this before he marries her. God wants to show Hosea, and the nation of Israel, how they are con­tinually unfaithful to their patient and faithful Husband.

Just as Hosea was sent to pursue Gomer in the middle of her adultery, so Christ was sent into history on a night into the arms of a young mother to pursue us in our unfaithfulness to God. We aren’t told Gomer’s reasons for her adultery, but if she’s anything like me, it probably had a lot to do with either pride or shame. When I am especially prideful or shameful, it is near impossible for me to receive God’s love for me, and I instead give myself to ones other than my Faithful Pursuer.

The Christmas story is that God created the heavens and the earth, and in the way that you love something you create, God so loved the world. When sin broke into the world, it marred its beauty and splendor. It dimmed the light, so to speak, but the darkness could not overcome God’s love. For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten Son to redeem what is his and begin the work of restoring Eden—a new garden with a new family. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life—unending fellowship and intimacy with the God who is Life.

The story of Hosea and Gomer demonstrates it is not necessarily the act of being loved that re-directs our affections. The hope of the Christmas season is that Christ in you is able to know the love of the Father gifted to us in the Son. Christ in you is able to treasure this beautiful gift especially in a season of sentimentality. If Christ is our love, then Christmas is the anniversary of his proposal—a faithful Husband wedded to a disgraced bride in a marriage brokered by a loving Father and sealed by the Spirit.

The Christmas story is not about whether or not we deserve the gift of God’s love. It’s not really about us at all, just as Gomer’s story isn’t about Gomer; it’s about Hosea. Just as the Old Testament isn’t about Israel, it’s about Israel’s God. The Christmas story is about God and his beloved Son, Jesus, who not only created the world, but then became a man in that world, to live the life that we should have lived and die the death that we should have died, so that we who are in him could become children of God.

PRAYER:

God, you are faithful to us even though we are unfaithful to you. Forgive us our unfaithfulness. Forgive us for not receiving your love and loving you in response. By your Spirit continue the work of sanctification by raising our affections from unsatisfying desires and instead to the image of Christ who derives ultimate pleasure from your presence.