THE STORY OF AN UNFAITHFUL WOMAN

No matter where you are, you are never too far from the love of God. You don’t have to understand it, but you do have to accept it to have peace .....He is worthy of our love and faithfulness.

Having the heart of a prophet; for me there is no other book that draws me to it's pages more often than the book of Hosea. For there is no other book that teaches us about the love of God in the Old Testament from a human perspective than this book. The Book of Hosea is a prophetic account of God’s relentless love for His children. Since the beginning of time God’s ungrateful and undeserving creation has been accepting His love, grace, and mercy but finding it ever so hard to refrain from consistent wrongdoing. Hosea takes this act of unfaithfulness to a personal level as he is told by God to take a prostitute in marriage and show love and compassion to her even though she will be unfaithful to him. Through Hosea’s hard life’s experiences in his marriage to an unfaithful wife he learns firsthand how love can once again be restored in a marriage as well as to the children of God and how their misdeeds are forgotten with a repentant heart, from those that follow after Him.

The Book of Hosea assures us of God’s unconditional love for mankind. But it is also a picture of how God is dishonored and hurt by the actions of His children. As we look at how the Israelites turned their backs on God we need to look no further than the mirror in front of us to see a reflection of those same Israelites and how we too at times take God off the throne of our hearts and allow something else to take its place. There is a lot to be learned from Hosea’s life….so let’s get started!

Hosea was a prophet in northern Israel. During this time the Kingdom of Israel was destroyed by Assyria. He lived in a time when Israel’s spiritual condition had become so vial that God could no longer stand it. Their time of repentance was running short and God was about to do some stern speaking and spanking and chose to use a simple man’s personal pain and experience to communicate His love for them through a warning of change or expected disaster. Hosea uses his personal life story metaphorically as the relationship between God and His people. While Hosea suffered the pain of an adulterous wife, God suffers the pain of an idolatrous people. While God desires to forgive… He insist and reminds us that there are repercussions to following after other gods…so it’s best not to ever do it to begin with...For Israel, He had warned that they would be overrun by other nations and would be dispersed from their land if they continued on the path that they were on….and as we know, they ended up being dispersed from their land and the repercussions of their turning away from God was very costly.

Like the prophet Amos, Hosea did not ask for the burden that he had to bear, yet God saw fit to give it to him. Many times I, have wondered and ask God to show me why a certain thing has come into my life… and no matter how I struggle with it, I can not always get a clear fix as to what I had done to bring it about. Yet I know in time if I will but trust the Lord….He and I will look back together to view the whole picture, as He meant for the end result to be and how it all played out in the end. Our lives are somewhat like a canvas that starts out blank. As the painter works to manipulate the colors with oils, paint thinners and brushes, so God must move and manipulate circumstances in our life to paint the picture He wants to complete. When we do not work with Him… we become hard to shape or work with to attain the end result that He wants. And yes that does mean, that even though God is God…He will not force us to do what we are unwilling to do. He gave all mankind a free will to choose,and while He never gives up on trying to change us into His likeness, He will not make us change.

The scripture does warn however in Revelation that He will take us home early if we abuse who we are in Christ and the new life that He provided by bringing Him shame and dishonor by our lifestyles….so it does go without saying that if we belong to Him (and I do believe strongly that the Word of God teaches) that we will change at some point. He died to give us life more abundantly by changing us …and change will only come as we release our will and accept His.

More often than not, we wrestle with God over what’s best for us….and the wrestling only comes about when we struggle and wiggle to have our own way. If we could just learn to be gliders and allow the breeze and Presence of His Holy Spirit to direct our paths, the struggles that we must face would not be so hard to bear, nor so long.

Some Christians will spend all their life being broken and remolded, never hearing, and never learning. That was Israel’s experience as a whole….it was only in those times after they had been in bondage, did they turn back, bow and say, “You are the only God…in You, only will we trust and follow”. Hosea did exactly as God commanded. He married Gomer, and in the course of time three children were born. As each of the children was born, they were given names by God, and each of their names symbolized some aspect of Israel’s relationship with God. The first child was named; Jezreel a city and territory in the heartland of Israel from which much of the wickedness associated with Israel’s sin and rebellion came from. The second child was named Lo-ruhamah which means, “to have no pity”. Through this child God would say that He had put up and tolerated the sin of His children as long as he was going to…enough was enough! The third child was named Lo-ammi, meaning “not mine”. At some point it appears that Hosea came to the realization that Lo-ammi was not his true son but a son born to Gomer out of her harlotry. While Gomer was blatantly going after her lovers that offered her the things that she sought after in chapter 2, Israel was seeking to satisfy their own worldly desires by looking to other channels, avenues or gods to meet their needs. God was saying to them both…go ahead go after them, and I will distort them all (meaning all your avenues and other gods).

Because of Gomer’s unfaithfulness, her marriage fell apart. Though Hosea was broken hearted he still chose to love her. Even after her separation from Hosea, Gomer continued her adulterous life and eventually was scarcely different from an ordinary slave, she had worked herself into a situation of bondage that she could not get out of on her own. But Hosea still loved her in spite of her unfaithfulness. To rescue her from her lovers, he sought her out and purchased her freedom.

Like Hosea, God chose Israel and entered into a covenant relationship with them, but Israel had been unfaithful to that covenant; they had forsaken the one to whom their loyalty was pledged and went after other gods. Our best understanding of God’s nature can be understood by analogies drawn from how God structured the family relationship. These are appropriate symbols for indicating the very Character of the His deity.

As parents, the end result of chastisement is not to punish our children and be done with it, but to restore them through their wrongdoing. God has taught me this many, many times. The story in the book Hosea is about how God, who found Israel to be stubbornly faithless and spiritually rebellious, had to allow them to experience the consequences of their waywardness. God didn’t let this happen because he stopped loving Israel, or because he ran out of patience—he did it as part of a plan for the redemption of his people. God is very patient, and His plan is still being worked out even today with His people Israel and it will not come to completion until Israel comes to faith in Christ, which the Bible says will happen in the last days—that is, the last days prior to the second coming of Christ. While He is still drawing Israel as a whole because of the first covenant He made with Abraham for the coming promised Messiah. He completed that promise under the new covenant through Christ, and through Jesus He has grafted in and accepts all who come to Him in repentance as well.

So you see, all God’s children must learn and live in a state of repentance. Sweet friend I have no idea where you stand in your relationship with God today. For me, I am struggling and striving to draw closer to Him as never before… in these days that we are facing. I long in my heart to once again hear the prophets of God preach and proclaim to us His children with warning and strong reminders that we are accountable to God for the way that we live before others. People need the Lord…and we are His light to them….but we can not shine unless we are willing to live and behave as His nature in us longs and calls us to do. May I tell you that the world does not need another worldly friend, but they need someone who can lead them out of the darkness that they are in to find Christ who will set them free. I know this because He has set me free…so therefore I have the credentials to tell others that whomever He sets free is free in deed. For the backslider the Lord tells us in 1 John….that we (His Children) are not to sin…but if we do, we have an advocate…Jesus Christ. We need to run to Him….cry out and be sorry for our sin….go the other way! It is not because of all the lost reprobates that God’s children need revival….but because of the disgrace that we His children are bringing Him by our lifestyles… by being candles without flames….no fire in us…no burden! I tell you the truth…God is Able….but are we willing?

Precious Friend…pray with me …pray for me….that we will see…. our great need for personal revival in our churches and homes everywhere! "Oh Father….may it start with me"!

I love you and have prayed for you today!

Bren