The Message Remix (263 page)

INTRODUCTIONHOSEA

 

We live in a world awash in love stories. Most of them are lies.

They are not love stories at all—they are lust stories, sex-fantasy stories, domination stories.
From the cradle we are fed on lies about love.

This would be bad enough if it only messed up human relationships—man and woman, parent and child, friend and friend—but it also messes up God-relationships. The huge, mountainous reality of all existence is that God is love, that God loves the world. Each single detail of the real world that we face and deal with day after day is permeated by this love.

But when our minds and imaginations are crippled with lies about love, we have a hard time understanding this fundamental ingredient of daily living, “love,” either as a noun or as a verb. And if the basic orienting phrase “God is love” is plastered over with cultural graffiti that obscure and deface the truth of the way the world is, we are not going to get very far in living well. We require true stories of love if we are to live truly.

Hosea is the prophet of love, but not love as we imagine or fantasize it. He was a parable of God’s love for his people lived out as God revealed and enacted it—a lived parable. It is an astonishing story: a prophet commanded to marry a common whore and have children with her. It is an even more astonishing message: God loves us in just this way—goes after us at our worst, keeps after us until he gets us, and makes lovers of men and women who know nothing of real love. Once we absorb this story and the words that flow from it, we will know God far more accurately. And we will be well on our way to being cured of all the sentimentalized and neurotic distortions of love that incapacitate us from dealing with the God who loves us and loving the neighbors who don’t love us.

 

 

From:
Somehow Hosea had no shame admitting to the world that he loved his wife passionately and that it crushed his heart when she went back to prostitution. When she was broke and hungry and had to sell herself as a slave, he bought her back. In a nation driven by image and success, he agreed to a calling of public humiliation.

 

To:
When Hosea started his ministry, Israel was at the end of a long bull market, fat and happy. Over the next thirty years Hosea witnessed a country in freefall. It went through six kings, four of them assassinated by their successors. Personal immorality took down the economy and the government until the nation was ripe for destruction when the Assyrian army rolled in.

 

Re:
About 753-715 B.C. The Greeks had been telling tales of the Trojan Wars for centuries, but they wrote nothing down until they learned the alphabet from seafaring Phoenicians, neighbors of Israel. One or more Greek bards (traditionally Homer) wrote down the poems we know as the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
. The
Iliad
says the Trojan War started when a woman left her Greek husband for a Trojan man. The Greek husband wasn’t quite as tolerant of humiliation as Hosea was.

As Israel imploded, her southern cousin, Judah, watched gleefully. Judah’s King Jotham renovated Jerusalem’s defenses and kept up a stable government and a booming economy. However, his tolerance of debauchery, magic, and unjust business practices left his kingdom vulnerable to God’s discipline. His son Ahaz was worse; he even allied with Assyria to bring down Israel.