Beginning of a new series today, one that I am super excited to dive into together. Over the past month or so, I’ve mentioned a couple times we were heading to one of the minor prophets. My problem was just trying to decide which one.

But then, as I began to study them, I quickly discovered that while we know them as 12 separate books, in the Hebrew Scripture, they’re only one book, usually just referred to as “The Twelve”. And then the light bulb went off—now I get it.

So over the next few weeks, we’re going to be walking through The Twelve together, these last 12 books of the Old Testament, and I’m excited to see what the Spirit will teach us.

Why the Minor Prophets?

I mean, they’re these books that kind of get skipped over, right? They’re kind of just there at the end of the OT, like they didn’t fit anywhere else so they just got shoved in there at the end.

They’re this bunch of little books with difficult names, like Habakuk, Haggai, and Malachi, that great Italian prophet of God.

And how important could they be, anyway, if they’re called “minor prophets”? After all, if I have a choice between going to a minor league game or a major league game, I’m watching the major league! I’d much rather watch the Cardinals than the Miners.

But that’s not what this is—we don’t call them minor because it’s they’re this ragtag team of 12 guys that are not quite ready for the big leagues yet with aces like Isaiah and Ezekiel. They’re minor not in importance or power, but simply because they’re short.

So in one sense, I think the Minor Prophets might actually be just right for our modern attention span that gets shorter and shorter all the time. The aces in the “majors” ones like Isaiah and Jeremiah wrote these long tomes, 50-60 chapters apiece. You could think of the Minor Prophets as more like the the most-read blog posts that circulated around ancient Israel… that also happened to be inspired by

I’ve quoted 2 Timothy 3:16–17 lots of times… and I’m going to again…

All Scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching, for rebuking, for correcting, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

That tells me that The Twelve are there for a reason—those reasons. And I’m trusting that over the next few weeks God is going to use them to teach, rebuke, correct, and train us in righteousness.

Plus, if you are believer, inevitably some day far in the future, when we’re all in the New Heavens and New Earth, you’re going to run into a guy, and he’s going to reach out his hand and say, “Hi, my name’s Nahum. So… how’d you like my book?!” And if you’ve never read it, that’ll be embarrassing and awkward. So let’s save ourselves from all that, you’re welcome. Let’s get to work.

If you have your Bible’s, turn to the book of Hosea. If you find Ezekiel and Daniel, keep going to your right a little more. Matthew, back to the left.

Context

Before we dive in, it’d probably be a good idea to get some context here, to figure out where we’re at in the storyline of the Bible.

In fact, another reason the minor prophets can be confusing is that they are not in chronological order. And so, combined with their small size, it can get a little overwhelming to keep track of what in the world is going on. You might read two or three in one setting, and you’ve jumped backward and forward 200-300 years pages.

So here’s a rough timeline. It may be a little hard to see if you’re watching on your phone, but it at least gives you a little bit of context about where in the story we find ourselves.

You’ll notice that it’s split into two sections. That’s because the kingdom of Israel splits not long after Solomon’s rein ends, in 931. And that split is represented on this timeline so that we can see not only when they lived, but which part of Israel they were primarily called to.

These dates are not all set in stone, with some of these books there aren’t a lot of hints, so it can be hard to tell for sure, but they’re at least in the ballpark, so you can see that The Twelve span a period of over 400 years, from not long after the kingdom split in 931 all the way to after the return from exile in the 400s, (remember we’re counting down, not up).

Since these books are not in chronological order. We’ll check in here every week to make sure we understand specifically where their story fits in the grand scheme of things, starting with Hosea.

If we zoom in on Hosea, you can see that he primarily lived and ministered in the northern kingdom, toward the end of the its existence in 722, and his ministry probably spanned about 40 years.

So there’s some context about where we find ourselves today, and we’ll ground ourselves back here every week.

Groupies

Have you ever met a celebrity? I went to quite a few Christian music festivals as a teenager, and I’d always wait in line to meet the musicians or the band members and get their autograph.

But evens when it’s a B or C level celebrity, a pastor or worship leader, it’s still hard to know how to handle yourself in that moment. Because the reality is you want to totally fanboy or fangirl out. It’s really them! You read their books, listen to their podcasts, like their tweets. And yet you want to be cool, not act like it’s a big deal. You don’t want to act like a groupie.

You know what a groupie is, right? Groupies are people who flock around a celebrity and pay them inordinate amounts of attention to some them, even while the other person doesn’t know or pay attention to them at all.

Some people are like that with movie stars or singers. There’s a lot of young teenage girls today “in love” with Ryan Gosling or Justin Bieber or whatever Youtube/TikTok star—I’m getting too old to know these references.

And before you roll your eyes, adults, don’t judge too harshly—some of you ladies were you in middle school and were absolutely convinced you were going to marry Donnie from New Kids on the Block. You were going to go to the concert and stand in line with all the other girls wearing tube tops and parachute pants, and when he walked by you’d scream ‘I love you, Donnie!’ and he would turn to you and say, “You got the right stuff, baby, you’re the reason why I sing this song.” And then you were going to get married and live happily ever after.

But unless your name is Kim Fey or Jenny McCarthy, or whoever he is married to now—I admitted last week that I don’t follow celebrity culture—alas, your dreams met the cold hard reality of life. Now you just get to watch Donnie play Danny on Blue Bloods every week and dream of what could have been.

And now you probably look at middle school girls dreaming about Timberlake or the Biebs and you’re think, “Sorry, sweetheart, it ain’t ever goin’ to happen.”

So often we expresses inordinate amounts of love, time, and effort toward people who shows no interest in them at all.

One of the most mind-blowing things in Scripture is that we see God taking this posture with the sinful human race.

Not in the sense that he is enamored with our greatness, but all throughout the Bible we see God reaching out incessantly, over and over and over, to a group of people who pay him precious little attention.

Which brings us to the book of Hosea. Have you found it yet? Hosea gives us the most mind-blowing view of the love of God—one that is almost too difficult to believe.

Because these books are so short, they pack a serious punch. They don’t waste time or mince words, they get right to the point. And that’s especially true of Hosea—just look at the second verse of the book!

Hosea

When the Lord first began speaking to Israel through Hosea, he said to him, “Go and marry a prostitute, so that some of her children will be conceived in prostitution.

Whoah, whoah, whoah, what? Hol’ up. What did he just say?

That has to be one of the worst ministry assignments ever! Because right off the bat, God lets Hosea know that this is not going to be some fairytale romance, far from it. This is the way she starts, and it’s not going to stop after they get married, either.

See if what’s going on in Israel during Hosea’s time is that it was a time of great economic wealth. The world powers that surround them are largely fighting each other and dealing with their own internal issues, so they leave Israel alone for the time being. And because they’re a crossroads of that region, they’re reaping the benefits from both sides. And they’ve made their political alliances with their neighbors, and things seem pretty good all the way around.

But like pretty much every other culture in history, a time of great economic wealth also comes with great spiritual decline. When Jesus says that it’s “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter heaven”, it wasn’t just hyperbole to make a spiritual point. It’s reality, both for individuals and for nations, and history backs His words up over and over again.

So God comes to Hosea, and gives him what seems to be a downright outrageous assignment: marry a prostitute. A man of God, marrying a woman of the night? Shocking. It’s meant to get make you sit up and pay attention.

We’ll see this over and over in these 12 weeks, a primary aspect of a prophet’s job is to do whatever it takes to rouse the people from their spiritual slumber. To spiritually shake their shoulders and go, “Hey, wake up! Don’t you see what’s going on here?! Don’t you realize what you’re doing?!”

But to do that, words are often not enough, people need to see it, to experience it not just in theory but visibly in front of them. And to that end, God tells His prophets to do some wild stuff.

Like having Isaiah walk around barefoot and naked for three years straight, to having Jeremiah go find an iron yoke that you would use for a donkey and wear it around his neck everywhere he went, to commanding Ezekiel to only cook his food over human waste, the prophets often do these physical acts to reflect a spiritual reality.

But that stuff is all just physical. It may be embarrassing at first, especially for Isaiah, but once you get over it, it’s easy enough. With Hosea, it’s different. It’s relational. There’s real love, real pain involved. And that’s the point, look at the rest of verse 2:

“This will illustrate how Israel has acted like a prostitute by turning against the Lord and worshiping other gods.”

So there’s nothing hidden about this from the beginning. God says, “Hosea, I want you to marry her, and your whole life from here on out is going to be a living demonstration of my relationship with my people.”

So he went and married Gomer, daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son.

But Hosea marries Gomer, and he’s not just going through the motions, either. He genuinely loved her and tried to start a family with her. If you read on in chapter one, they have three children.

[!illustration] Gomer Not only is this girl a prostitute, to make matters worse her name is Gomer. The only thing I can think of when I read that verse is, “Shazam!”

I grew up in Lick Creek, 35 miles south of here. Moved to Michigan when I was 17, when I was 19, I was a freshman at Liberty University in Lynchburg Virginia. And despite how proper and sophisticated I am now, I was a little… less so back then, if you can imagine that.

Two people who didn’t know each other say within a couple of days that I reminded them of Gomer Pyle. “Gooo-lleeee!” Scattered around the country are a handful of people who, if I ran into them today, would say, “Hey, Gomer, how’s it going?”

If you’re looking for biblical names for your daughter, I would not put Gomer be very high on your list!

But it’s not very long into their marriage, Gomer returns to her old ways. Look at was she says in 2:5:

“I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.”

And eventually, she doesn’t just go after them, she stays with them. She leaves Hosea, abandons her children, and is shacking up with some guy.

Hosea pleads with her to come back, but she refuses. And worse yet, all that stuff she thinks she’s getting from this man because he loves her so much? What she doesn’t realize is that it’s Hosea who’s actually providing it. He’s still making sure that she’s taken care of, even when she’s living with someone else.

That’s seems like it’s about as bad as it can get, doesn’t it, leaving your husband and kids for a so-called lover? You’d think so, but that’s not the bottom for Gomer, it gets worse.

By chapter 3, this lover she just had to have, that she was looking to for all her fulfillment and satisfaction, has gotten bored with her, and he’s selling her back into the sex-slave trade.

And here’s where the story gets even more startling. God gives a second assignment to Hosea, and it’s basically the same as the first. 3:1:

“Go again; show love to a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress…

Now, we’re reading this story 3,000 years later, but let’s keep in mind here that Hosea is a real person, just like you or me. What had to be going through his mind? “What? You want me to go the public marketplace, in front of all the people who know that I’m your prophet, and you want me to bid against them and buy her back? After all she’s done to me, to the kids? She’s made it very clear over and over that she doesn’t care, doesn’t love me.”

But remember, this wasn’t really about Hosea and Gomer. It was, but it was also an illustration being played out in real time. God was using this situation to make a point…

…just as the Lord loves the Israelites though they turn to other gods and love raisin cakes.”

That sounds like an odd bit of trivia there at the end, but the raisin cakes were part of the worship rituals of the pagan gods.

So Hosea finds someone to watch their three kids, gathers up every bit of money he had, and heads to the town marketplace.

Can you imagine the pain he was feeling, how his heart must have been pounding out of his chest as he made his way there. It’d been a while since he’d seen her, and the last time she had pretended he wasn’t there.

He arrives, makes his way through the crowd, to the place where the local slave trader was set up. And through the crowd, the people there to make purchases and the guys just there for the extra scenery there just for the scenery, he gets a glimpse of her in the back.

The time away has not been kind to her, and neither have the men she left him for. He knows her so well, he can see the whole story by the way she’s sitting, head hung low.

Gomer would have most likely been stripped completely naked so that all the potential buyers could see exactly what they were bidding on. Half of them already knew, because they’d seen it before. And here, in the midst of a crowd of men who only want to take advantage of her, stands Hosea, who wants nothing more than to love and cherish and protect her, to give her a life and a home and be a family again.

Which leads to the first thing I want us to see from the prophet Hosea this morning.

1. God’s love is scandalous.

Any of us in Hosea’s situation would have felt perfectly justified in walking away. This woman has broken his heart, abandoned her kids, made a mockery of their relationship, and yet he still purchases her back.

Sometimes we wonder things like how God could have the audacity to judge us, as if God’s anger toward our sin is too harsh.

But any time we are put into a position similar to what He is in, we rage with righteous anger. And yet God kept coming for us.

What Hosea was doing, by the way, was not required by Hebrew law—in Leviticus 20, God had said that a man in that situation could divorce his wife, even have her stoned for her unfaithfulness! It was a divinely appointed loophole.

But Hosea wasn’t looking for a loophole, because neither was God.

Later on in Hosea, God is speaking about His love for His people, which remember, is what this story is meant to show us. And in 11:8 we get a glimpse of His heart toward the people He loves.

“Oh, how can I give you up, Israel? How can I let you go? My heart is torn within me, and my compassion overflows.”

To you hear the tone of God’s voice in that verse? If you’ve ever heard a person who’s loved a person that betrayed them, then you’ve heard it. It’s the cry of love that has been rejected, but still remains. The kind of love that refuses to let go.

God, in his infinite mercy, has bound up his happiness in ours. Not because He needs us, but because He loves us, and that’s the price you pay for love—you’re opening yourself up to the worst kind of pain. You’re not okay unless they’re okay.

Parents w/ children, you know… that is what God feels for you.

[!quote] J.I. Packer By his own free voluntary choice, God will not know perfect and unmixed happiness again till he has brought every one of his children to heaven.

2. Sin is way worse than just breaking rules.

If you’ve been watching alone every week, it seems like we’ve been talking a lot about how in God represents Himself as the husband of His people. In the Old Covenant with Israel, and in the New Covenant with the Church.

The reason He talks about it in terms of marriage is that he wants a relationship with his people that is so intimate, so personal, so honest and open, that the closest human relationship is marriage. Actually, Ephesians tells us that marriage itself is the metaphor, God’s relationship with His people is what it’s meant to portray.

Some of you have felt the pain of adultery, and I’m so sorry. But almost all of us know someone who has. But if you can imagine for a moment the emotions that come flooding in, you’ll quickly realize that this goes way deeper than breaking some arbitrary rules. It’s breaking a heart, betraying every promise that you’ve made, everything that you’ve been to each other.

And throughout the Scriptures, the primary biblical illustration of sin is spiritual adultery. It’s a gripping analogy, because few things tear your heart out as much as adultery.

But when the person you love the most, the one you’ve committed your very life to and they promised to do the same, when you realize that they’ve been in the arms of someone else, that’s different. There’s righteous anger there, yes, but also the worst kind of pain, hurt, abandonment, rejection.

They’ve been finding in someone else’s arms what they were only supposed to find with you. And one of the primary sins God identifies in Israel is that she looked to other nations for help instead of God, making alliances.

Our primary sin is that we’ve let other things take the place God is supposed to occupy in our hearts.

For instance, more and more common for professing Christians to be living with someone they are not married to. If people who are not believers are doing it, that’s not surprising at all—if they don’t claim to be following Christ, why should they do things His way?

But for those who are believers, it’s ultimately an issue of trust in God’s goodness. They don’t want to do it God’s way, so they’ve taken matters into their own hands. The primary immortality here is not the premarital sex, it’s the refusal to trust God with your future.

Where do you turn when you’re stressed? Alcohol? Shopping?

The primary sin is not in the drunkenness or not handling your money well, but in the fact that you’re looking for your comfort somewhere else besides the One who literally called Himself “the God of all comfort”.

God is to be our joy, our delight, our confidence, and our trust! But God’s people, then and now, sought those things in something or someone else, just like this prostitute.

The message that the whole OT, and in particular Hosea, is screaming at us, is that our disobedience cuts way deeper than breaking some abstract rules, because this is a relationship we’re in. Our sin is not a misdemeanor in a court of law, but a mistress at the local hotel. And you can’t understand the impact on your God until you understand this picture.

  1. God’s love is scandalous.
  2. Sin cuts way deeper than breaking some rules.

3. God’s love persists, no matter the cost.

Gomer started by selling herself, now she’s the one being sold. That’s the way sin, idols always work. Now she’s on the block.

Notice that from Hosea’s love came the power to set her free, not the other way around. It’s the same with us… God’s unconditional love toward His people—you and me—that’s the power that liberates us from our captivity, not the reward for having liberated ourselves.

Hosea, and God, are not waiting around home going, “She knows how to get here. If she wants to come back, she’ll come back. But I’m not going after her, that’s for sure.”

Oh, no. That’s not the way love works. Not God’s love. He pursues us. He provides, even when we don’t acknoledge it. And he pays the ransom to set us free from slavery.

When we realize what our sin does to him, the look of hurt on His face, the tear in his eyes, and when you realize that he paid the price to purchase what was already his in the first place, that’s where the power to come home is born.

[!quote] Martin Luther The only ones who get better in the Christian life are those who know their acceptance does not depend on them getting better

Purchasing Gomer this second time evidently broke Hosea financially. Here’s how we know: thirty shekels was the going price of a slave in those days. The fact that Hosea could only come up with 15 and had to pay the rest in barley indicates he didn’t have the rest.

This pointed forward to Jesus, who was not financially eviscerated, but literally eviscerated to save us. He poured out his own blood so we could be restored.

This is the reoccurring theme in the book of Hosea, God saying, “Go again! Trust me, I know all to well how badly you’re hurting. I know the sleepless nights. I’ve heard your prayers, seen your tears. But don’t you give up on her, Hosea, because I’m not going to give up on my bride, either.”

“Go again, Hosea. Let’s show the world what I’m like. Go get her. Go again. Go again. Go again, Hosea, because that’s what I do with you every time.”

Every time we sin, the Father is saying through the Son to the Spirit, go again. Go again. I’ll leave the 99 to find the 1, and all heaven will rejoice.

Imagine the story, Gomer at the marketplace…

The only way to respond to this love is total. You can either reject him as a phony and fraud and walk away, or fall down on your knees in adoration and surrender.

The only thing you can’t do is be bored with it, which is where a lot of church folk are when it comes to the love of God.

This is the kind of love that demands a response, you can’t just patronize this kind of love-at-all costs with half-hearted commitment or lethargic worship. His love is worthy of more than that.

Maybe you are Gomer. You know you’ve turned your back on God, and just like her, you’ve been selling your soul to anybody or anything that offered a moment of satisfaction. When in reality, they will all leave you bitter and broken in the end. And true love, satisfaction, lasting joy is waiting for you at home.

It’s time to renew your vows with Him today.