Hosea Concluded
Hosea 2, Acts 22:-24, 32-41, Colossians 1:15-23
The book of Hosea covers a few things that are effectively foreign to us in 2021, and at the end of a heavy and dense book, I think it is worthwhile to sit and meditate on them.
The first is the concept of our sin and God’s absolutely justified wrath for our sin. Growing up in America, in the era of “you do you” and a near exclusive focus on positive reinforcement in the classroom and in churches, where hellfire sermons were at least frowned upon and at most seen as an outright assault on the god we created in our own image, whose love could only consist of kindness and never justice or wrath, I don’t think I learned all that much about God’s attitude toward my sin. I learned to feel shame for the more shameful sins, and to shame those who were yet more sinful than me. I learned that sin was bad, and I felt guilt for my sin, but I don’t know that I could have given a robust explanation of what God thought about sin, or why it deserved wrath. It left the door wide open for the “but why is it bad?” questions; and honestly, I think most of us have probably lost Christian friends to that argument. They believed that ultimately it was all kind of relative anyway right? God wrote those rules for people like a million years ago, and they were outdated. What we miss there is the fact that God designed a way for us to live—he offered us the best life imaginable with him in a garden forever, he told us that he would be our God and that we would be his people, and while we said yes with our mouths, we betrayed him with our lives. And, it wasn’t just Adam, or Israel, or the Pharisees, or the Romans who nailed Jesus to the cross. When Peter lays the accusation on the crowd at Pentecost, he wasn’t just talking to people who literally crucified Jesus, but he told them all that they had done it, they were responsible for the death of the Son of God and like them we all need to repent. We all spit in the face of God and are deserving of His wrath, and Hosea makes those words from God clear.
I also think that we miss the concept of covenant that Hosea gives us. We are the children of too many divorces to get what a real covenant looks like (too real? Too soon?). See, in the midst of that story of broken covenant and deserved wrath, we have a God who maintains steadfast covenant love with us. However, I don’t think we get what that looks like. We don’t understand what it is to deserve to be abandoned—to have justified a divorce—and be met with love instead. That is what God has done for us. While we failed to keep our end of the covenant and while we were unfaithful, God remained faithful to us. Colossians says it like this “And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him”. That is some pretty incredible news. We were hostile in mind, and now we are holy and blameless, all because God was faithful to us. He pursued us when we were not worth pursuing, not because of anything that we have done but because of his steadfast love, his faithfulness. We should be in awe of our God who is a covenant keeper while we are covenant breakers—Hosea also teaches us that.
So, what does all of that mean? How does knowing the depth of our sin, and the depth of God’s covenant love for us lead us to? First, it should lead us to repentance. We should regularly repent of our sins because ultimately they are a big deal. They aren’t small enough to just shrug off, and they aren’t insignificant or negligible just because the grace of Christ covers them. We should be a people that regularly and brokenheartedly repents of our sin. It should also lead us to worship! We should praise the Lord of the universe who loved us when we didn’t love him—who chased after us and paid our ransom. Finally, it should lead us to cling to the Gospel. Again, like Paul says in Colossians, the we are to stand before God holy and blameless “if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard”. If our sin is really that big, and God’s love is really that steadfast, we need to desperately grab hold of the hope that we have been given in the Gospel, because it is the only thing that has reconciled us to a God who is holy and set apart.
In light of Hosea, where do you need to take your sin more seriously as an offense against God?
How does acknowledging our sin lead us to a deeper and richer experience of worshipping the Lord and understanding the Gospel?
