Wow! How Great is Our God! (Part 1)

I have, in the past the past few days, been doing some reading through a few passages of the Bible, and I have been pierced through my soul with some powerful word- images in them. God sure knew what He was doing when He inspired this stuff. This post I will break up into two parts, the first being on a sermon I heard; and the second, to come some time this week, on a passage in Job. Then later on this week, I should post my study on the "unequally yoked" issue. But for now, this is really rocking my world!

I came across this while studying up on the whole marriage/unequally yoked issue that I’m doing now. It’s from a Matt Chandler sermon, which I highly recommend. I will email it to you if you would like me to, or you can get it at iTunes (The Village Church – Sex, Part 3.) He does a much better job of telling the story.

In Hosea 1, God tells Hosea to go and find a prostitute and marry her and have kids with her. Hosea does so and finds this woman named Gomer, marries her, and starts a family with her. First off, God told him to marry a whore, and to have kids with her? Does this not seem a little off to you? But God is out to make a point with them; he is going to use them as a symbol of Israel’s idolatry yet again. So Gomer gives birth to a boy and God tells Hosea to name him Jezreel, which means “God will sow vengeance.” The names of the kids are of a great importance to this story. By naming the boy Jezreel, God is telling Israel that I am going to crush you. Then Gomer gives birth to a daughter and God tells Hosea to name her Lo-ruhamah, which means “no mercy.” God is saying that He will have no more mercy for Israel, that he would “ever forgive them.” Then she gives birth to a third child, a son, and God tells Hosea to name him Lo-ammi, which means “Not My People.” So God is saying that Israel is not His people, that He is not their God.

On a further note, Gomer, while being married still to Hosea, keeps selling her body, and at one point find herself sold into slavery. And in an act that can only be described as Love (God had put it in Hosea’s heart to truly love Gomer) Hosea goes down to the market and buys her back. Imagine the shame, imagine the humiliation of this prophet of God, going into the market to buy back his wife because she can’t keep her body to herself and Hosea. STOP and think of the imagery here. How many times do we whore ourselves like Gomer, even after we have found our true love, one who loves us in the truest sense of the word. We still go back and seek pleasure and profit. And even after going so far as being sold into slavery, God comes back, into the filth of this world, endures all of it’s filth and shame and the humiliation of the cross, and buys us back, the whore of a wife, the scum of the earth. Can you fathom the amount of shame Hosea had to endure, his wife naked, men bidding on her. And He Buys Her Back! He does not leave her, he does not condemn her, and he does not shun her, He Loves Her.

Now we skip to Chapter 2:14 which has God saying I will allure her (Israel) into the wilderness. God just got done saying that he will have no mercy on Israel, that He will destroy her, that He is not their God, and here in 2 He’s talking about luring her into the wilderness. God didn’t kick her out, he didn’t cast her into the wilderness to fend for her own, he didn’t say ‘Go and see what lesson you learn.” He’s saying, “come here with me, come her and follow me, I’m with you.” God is not about punishing his people. He is about scolding them for the purpose of bringing them back from their idols. The wilderness is coming for all of us. What ever it is it is coming. When it does we have two choices, to hate God for it, or to know that He’s there with us, that He’s leading us into it.
Sometimes I have run from it. Sometimes I go through the wilderness because of my idolatry, because of my sins of submitting to a lesser love. And when I’m confronted with those sins, I run. Either out of pride or out of shame. But think about Christ, while he was here on the Earth. The whore at the well; Jesus calls her into the new Life. The woman with the perfume at the dinner, or the woman caught in the act of adultery, or tax collector Zacchaeus. Jesus responds with mercy and compassion, if we just turn form our idols, and turn to Him, acknowledge that He is our true love. Another great story is in Song of Solomon 1 where the king finds the bride hiding. She says she’s not pretty enough. And she runs and hides up in the mountain. But the kings does not turn around and goes to find another wife, but he chases her, and yells up to her enchanting, loving words of encouragement. He’s letting her know that he’s with her, even as she hides up in the cliffs. As I said the other day, again this book is yet another image of God and His love for His people, as well as how an earthly marriage should be. Solomon doesn’t turn away; he chases her, seeks her, and calls to her, shouting up words of love to his bride. Hosea, doesn’t turn around and goes on with his life, he goes to the market, slips past the guys with coins in their hands, ready to buy his wife for a day's wage, edges by the bystanders who stare her naked body down with envies eyes, and makes his way to the front, and says, in front of everyone, I’ll but her, I’ll pay what ever I have to, but I’m going home with her, my love, my wife, my life.

And so when we turn to Him, when we are so compelled to come back home, He brings us back into the vineyards. We see that the wilderness was not in vain, that they served a purpose, and we see that we were not alone, that He was there with us leading us, calling us.
At this we become aware of everything, we become acclimated to his grace. We see and remember the days of old, when we were young, when he first brought us out of Egypt. His love we can see, and our idols are cast light on for what they really were, hollow figurines, and gold painted stone and wood, quartz instead of diamonds. We see that all along He was with us guiding us from the time we fled Egypt, crossed the Sea, the Wilderness, the Promise Land, the Idolatry, the Captivity and back to Jerusalem again.

We will see the massive Sea, we will feel the heat of the desert, and the sand will lash at our skins, we will see our city walls torn down and our hands in shackles. But we will remember that He parted the sea, that He fed us bread and sprung up water to drink, and that He freed us and returned us to our home.

And here’s the best part, while we’re in the wilderness, while we are walking in circles, while we are bleeding pleading to him, as the sun wears on us, and the heat dries our mouth, we will slowly lose grip of those idols, and discard them along the way. And in that time God says something truly miraculous will happen, something truly amazing, something divine, something very spiritual to its core. Vs. 16 – “And in that day, declares the Lord, you will call me My Husband, and no longer will you call me My Baal (God)” He’s not talking about something earthly here. He’s talking about the three Hebrew words for Love, (raya, ahava, dod.) In the baking sun we will get the “raya” down. We see how strong His “ahava” his. And so we get all this worked out here in the wilderness, and then when we get out, when we get back to the vineyard, then we will have “dod.”

Our hearts will crave His love, and our minds and our flesh will forget our idols.
“For I will remove the names of the Baals (our idols) from her mouth, and they shall be remembered by name no more.” Vs. 17.

Lord, I pray with an earnest heart, help me to drop my idols, help me to look to You. May I see You in the wilderness and become more acquainted with You. May I not run with shame to the mountains tops, may I embrace You.