There’s no particular reason why I haven’t preached through Hosea before through the course of 20+ years of ministry – there are other parts of the bible I haven’t covered either. The only reason I’m doing it now is the personal impact it has had on me in recent months and the way that is has ‘turned up’ everywhere. Sometimes passages, chapters and themes just do that: they turn up and your attention is drawn.
Hosea is a heart-punch to the reader. And if that’s how much it impacted me, the reader, imagine being the initial recipients of the message? Hosea is told to marry an unfaithful woman and Gomer fits the bill in many ways. God is making a living parable of the unity of his faithful man and an unfaithful woman. It is pointing us prophetically towards the perfect Bridegroom, Jesus Christ, and his one-day perfect Bride, the Church (see Rev 19; Eph 5).
I can only preach this out of a deep sense of conviction responding to the truth that I have not always been a pure, faithful part of the Bride of Christ. My heart has wandered and likely my actions in numerous ways again and again, and I’m pulled back into grace that I really don’t want to be cheapened by my weakness. I don’t want to tarnish the Bride’s pure white linen. God, have mercy in all the times where there should be none apart from grace.
Preaching on chapter one was easy in only one sense: God reiterates his promised to his covenant people. There is something stronger than the sin and spiritual whoredom: God’s mercy. But before he would come close to dispensing mercy, he tells them there is none in this particular moment – the only way through this situation is exile and some hard restorative justice.
Hand on heart, as I consider the collective life of the church in these days, I weep. I weep for my pathetic part in it, but I weep for the stains on its wedding garments. In a world where dirt is called clean and clean is called dirt, the church has in so many was capitulated to ‘the world’. I’ve seen the ways in which, millimetre by millimetre, centimetre by centimetre, I’ve experienced the ‘drag’ of the world too, and we do it without a consideration for the implications. Israel’s troubles didn’t start in the time of Hosea – it was a long slippery slope.
We need to ask serious corporate questions beyond the limits of our own individualist faith. We also have to get out from the denominational or congregational rut that says ‘well, we’re alright…but them down the road…!’ No – in the same way that there was only one covenant people of God in the Old Testament, there is only one genuine body of Christ hidden amongst so many things that go under the label ‘church’ or ‘Christian’. We’re in it together. We’re also the Church of Gomer in many ways although we’re supposed to be Christ’s.
For me this throws up lots of challenging questions. How do we stop using grace as a cover-up for worldliness? How do you play your part in calling out, healing and restoring corporate sin and corruption by God’s grace? How do you speak across denominational ‘lines’? If it calls itself a church, do we really have to believe that it is so when the evidence goes in a different direction? What exactly does ‘come out from among them’ mean in the context of our complex set of 21st century idolatries that set themselves up against God and his Word?
In addition, even if you have a sense that there’s something deeply wrong, it’s very unpopular to call it out. Like Hosea’s prophetic marriage, our weddedness to Christ should fly in the face of a compromised Gomer Church. Returning to the Lord in repentance is a key to the renewal of God’s people, and this has a direct relationship to the return of Christ and him taking his Bride.
Plus, every one expects that faithful and/or prophetic preaching will be ‘nice’, mainly because we’re caught in the nicey-nicey age where preaching of the gospel is reduced to nice stories or self-help massages of conscience, where we’ve all been de-radicalised into limp ineffectiveness where we are no longer a threat to the enemy of Christ.
It is so hard, humanly speaking, to be faithful and raise your head above the parapet. May the spirit of Hosea, Elijah, Joel, Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist and of Jesus Christ be upon us as we ‘prepare the way for the Lord.’
Andrew S M Clark 