You may ask yourself what can the world of Hosea a prophet who lived in the 8^th century BC possibly have to do with our world and our lives.

We are much more concerned with the problems of today, as we’ve seen a decline in church attendance we‘ve seen a rise in crime and a society that seems to be obsessed with money and possessions. We look to our leaders and find that often there doesn’t seem to be much difference between any of them, each seems to be as bad as each other, with their transitions to power marred by in-fighting. We look at the world and wonder just where we seemed to lose some of the values in society.

The world I’ve just described was Hosea’s world too. Hosea lived during a dark period of Israel's history, the time of the Northern Kingdom's decline and fall in the 8th century BC.   

Hosea was a no-nonsense, tell it like it is, Northerner, he was called to prophesy during this period of societies decline, trying to tell the people and their leaders that they should focus on the important things that were wrong with society instead of other distractions.

As with many of the books of the Old Testament, there are different ways of reading this book, it may be a historical record – or you may choose to read it for its symbolism, whichever you choose there is still a strong message for us all.

The Lord spoke to Hosea and asked him to do something extraordinary, compared to the fantastic events that you would find related in say Jonah, it may seem quite un-dramatic, but for the man, for the world he lived in it was quite a challenge.

God told him that he should marry a woman called Gomer. She was a lady with a past, a lady of the night – can you imagine the outcry? It would make the story of a senior politician dumping his wife for one of the Cheeky Girls look pretty tame!

By rights no fine upstanding and righteous man would have married Gomer, we can look at her today with hundreds of years of hindsight and feel sorrow for her, trapped in a world of prostitution, she was most likely a slave and to release her from this life Hosea would probably have had to buy her like a piece of livestock.

His friends and his family would have gone barmy; many of us will know what it felt like the first time we brought home a partner that our families disapproved of.

But Hosea was following God’s instruction and despite the fear of ridicule, despite the fact that some people would no longer talk to him or that every time they went to worship there would be snide remarks – he did as god had called him to.

Hosea prophesied about the world he lived in, and he used his experiences from his troubled home life to hold up a mirror to society. These were God’s chosen people; they knew their past and the way God had brought them out of slavery in Egypt, but instead of staying loyal to what they knew to be true, the promises made to them which had brought them into their own promised land, they became complacent and started to worship in other ways.  Imagine if you will that you woke up one morning and found that half the city had suddenly become Scientologists.  You’d look around and wonder and despair that suddenly otherwise sensible people had now started to believe they were possessed by space-aliens.

When he looked out of his window, I guess that’s what Hosea saw and his emotions would have been the same mix of incredulousness and sadness.

His world had begun to worship a range of pagan idols generically referred to as ‘Baal’ thinking that this would bring them prosperity and fertility.  There’s nothing wrong with an enquiring mind and being a spiritual seeker – but these people already had the answers.

Hosea’s family life was not a happy one, no rags to riches, ‘My Fair Lady’ story for poor Gomer – after they were married she continued in her trade and so was unfaithful to Hosea, many, many times. Their children were given telling names which meant ‘unloved’ and ‘not my people’ and eventually they separated. Perhaps Gomer felt like she didn’t deserve to be happy, she’d been treated as less than a person for so long that she came to believe it and so couldn’t break out of her chains. Whatever the reason, whatever the motivation – she ended up selling herself again.

Hosea used this example from his troubled home life to say, this was what was wrong with the world as well. Just as had been rescued from slavery, so too had they as a people been made free by the one true God.

And sadly, just as Gomer had strayed so too had the people of Israel. Hosea understood with alarming clarity what was wrong with society because he had lived it – instead of staying loyal to their relationship Gomer had fallen prey to the seductive lures of money and sex, so too had their society and Hosea could see what was coming.

Hosea warned that by turning their backs on what they knew to be true and by worshipping every idol that came along that their world would start to decay. Eventually this would come to pass as the Assyrians invaded and occupied their land, just like Gomer they would fall back into their old ways and become slaves again.

But then and odd thing happened, despite Gomer’s unfaithfulness, despite the fact that the law allowed him to divorce her or have her stoned for adultery, God instructed him to take her back.

Regardless of how much we love someone, be they family or partner, from time to time we all fall out. We end up behaving in lots of different ways, and we transform into different people, perhaps you recognize some of them...

We came become the Hulk – stamping around and making lots of noise

We could become the Ice Queen and sustain long and cold silences

Or we could become Road Runner and run away and hide from it all

God’s instruction for Hosea to take Gomer back meant that he did something different, he had to go and search her out and call her back to her home life to give her another chance to escape. Not ignoring blindly what had happened, but offering her another chance in spite of what she had done.

And here in this act, Hosea saw the character of God shining through, God really wasn’t happy with his people, the language used suggests all three of those characters, Hulk, Ice Queen and Road Runner; but even in the midst of all of this, God makes a promise to take them back.

Here hiding away in a small book of the Old Testament we hear the promise that God made to them and still makes to us today.

No matter how far we have strayed from the path, no matter what we have done, no matter how deep in sin we feel we are, God will seek us out and invite us home. We may find the Old Testament hard to read sometimes, but the message of Hosea is the same one that we read and celebrate in the New, in Romans we are reminded that “neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Hosea’s story reminds us that, whether we can see it immediately or not, our actions carry with them consequences. There is no way to separate responsibility from the relationship we have with God. We have the freedom to choose, the freedom to set certain courses of actions.

Is our relationship with God that of a loving marriage, if so then we need to accept and embrace our responsibility to it, to put the relationship first – Hosea looked at the world and saw a world that was ‘playing away from home’ and not thinking that in the same way that such a revelation can taint a relationship, it would be hurtful to God.

There is a world out there with people who think they have been given the same names as Gomer’s children, ‘unloved’ and ‘not my people’- they need to hear that they can answer to a different name, ‘children of the living God’, regardless of gender or colour or anything else that society chooses to separate people with – God is calling to them, and through our lives, our examples and our ministry we have to let our voices become His voice.

Come Home.