Today's text from the ESV Study Bible: Hosea 1-7.
One of the most excruciating circumstances one can find themselves upon is to see one's bride, the love of your love, in the arms of another lover.
It will absolutely tear your heart out, and leave you screaming in the night with pain.
Yet, amazingly yet, try to imagine what kind of love can endure this torture, swallow the immense pain, and have the forgiving strength to start over again at the very innocent beginning.
How can you enjoy the rapture of the first kiss after such betrayal? How can you again enjoy the first ecstasy of the wedding night?
The book of Hosea is about exactly that.
Israel, God's metaphorical wife, has become the harlot, and has been found in the bed of another man (the false god Baal, and many idols).
We have seen a great deal of Holy God's judgment as he has dealt with his wayward bride Israel, but I can't think of an episode where we are privy to such a tender display of God's heart.
And to help the Prophet Hosea understand this, most surprisingly God instructs him to marry a harlot so that he might have his heart torn asunder, and only then clearly understand the message that God will deliver through him.
I can't read these pages without weeping.
Dear reader, you can not understand God's love unless you understand his searingly painful marriage to the harlot.
Here is how God lovingly responds to his harlot:
“Therefore, behold, I will allure her,and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her.
15 And there I will give her her vineyards
and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth,
as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.
16 “And in that day, declares the Lord, you will call me ‘My Husband,’ and no longer will you call me ‘My Baal.’ 17 For I will remove the names of the Baals from her mouth, and they shall be remembered by name no more. 18 And I will make for them a covenant on that day with the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the creeping things of the ground. And I will abolish the bow, the sword, and war from the land, and I will make you lie down in safety. 19 And I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. 20 I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the Lord." (Hosea 2:14-20)
I stand mute, and weep, as I gaze upon this manner of love.
