Special Saturday Edition
Ethan Barton, Pastoral Resident, Tallowood Baptist Church
It was one of the most central and frequently-mentioned promises God made to his people in the time of Moses: “I will be your God, and you will be my people.” God had promised to preserve and protect and love his people as long as they lived. But now he’s saying the very opposite. So what happened since?
Betrayal happened. Israel had a responsibility in the covenant as well: to remain holy and loyal to Yahweh their loving Savior. But like Hosea’s promiscuous wife Gomer, they unfaithfully forsook the love for which they were set apart and sought that love in places that could not provide. Many of us have been afflicted by infidelity. It’s a horrendously painful thing to deal with. Such is the affront unto God when Israel betrayed him, or when we do today. Sin is no small thing; it is a crime of cosmic proportions.
Unfaithful Gomer bore children named Not-Loved and Not-My-People. (Imagine that on your business card.) Similarly, the result born from Israel’s unfaithfulness was separation from God, his covenant, and his loving protection. We often get so wrapped up in a mindset of New-Testament forgiveness that we forget God’s attribute of perfect justice. For him to punish infidelity and step away from a people that disobeys is entirely just and entirely good.
Yet the astonishing part of this passage in Hosea is that after each of these two prophecies, God promises to forgive and restore the Israelites that forsook him! Why would he do that for them? Why, after they have run so far from him and dishonored him so deeply, would he ever again call them “children of the living God?” In fact, why would he do that for US?
Because the God of perfect justice is also the God of perfect mercy. O how he loves us! O how he loves us! In spite of our abhorrent infidelity and the fact that by all rights we deserve to be severed from God and receive the full weight of his wrath, through Jesus he has forgiven and restored us anyway. He has given us the name Loved and the name My-People. Praise God for his perfect justice and his perfect mercy!
