10.17.24
This week we are looking at God’s attribute of love. And what we’ve seen is that God’s love is far richer and deeper than we at first imagine. Because his love is based on a relationship with us and not on our performance, his love is fixed in his nature. And because our definitions of love are based on typical human performance, we have skewed pictures of a God who loves us more when we live in obedience and less when we don’t. And so we desperately need to have our understanding of his love stretched.
This week we will look at several aspects of that love. And so far we’ve seen that his love is like a Father’s love, in that it’s too sophisticated for our childish minds to understand. Like any Father, he knows more and sees more and has a broader perspective than any child would.
We’ve also seen that his love is more involved than we typically imagine. Because he doesn’t just enter into our world to live and die for us. That would be amazing enough in itself. But God actually tells us that he has made himself vulnerable to us - so vulnerable that his joy is bound up in our joy - his happiness is bound up in our happiness. And God’s full expression of joy will not be complete until the day we are made fully new in his presence.
Today we look at a third aspect of his love. And that is the costliness of it. We all know that when it comes to having to love difficult people (like Gomer…like us) that it’s easier to take the cheap path toward love. And the two cheap options available to us are either to support the person, but never confront their actions. Or we can choose to give up on them and walk away. But God shows us here a costly path to love. He calls Hosea to go and buy her back. And this is a direct picture of how God loves us. He buys us back from our rebellion by paying the price for our waywardness. The cost to Hosea was great (money aside, opening himself to that level of trust again). But the cost for God to love us was even greater. It cost him his own life.
Like Hosea, God could have purchased our debt and turned us into slaves. Or he rightly could have given up on us. We deserved that! But like Hosea, he calls us back as his cherished bride - as his adopted children. He calls us into a relationship where there is no reminder of our outstanding debt. There’s no guilt over our past failings. There’s only the love of a Husband/Father who adores us and is ravished by us.
God is not only picturing here his deep love for us, but he is also modeling the kind of love that he wants us to have with one another. And that’s hard sometimes. There are people who have hurt us - even abused us. And opening ourselves to that kind of risk is costly. But this story also pictures for us how we can find the strength to pay that price. Remember that it was you up there naked and for sale in the market place. Remember that it was you up there that he put clothes on - his own righteous robes. Remember that it was you up there that he led home. Remember that is was you that he could have made into a slave, but lovingly called you a son/daughter/bride. The more you let that sink into your heart, the easier it will be to love hard to love people.