INTRODUCTION WEEK 6: The Gospel and Sin
READ:
Hosea 2:5-23
ASK:
1. How would you define sin?
2. How could you try to replace God in your life? In our worship?
3. Using the marriage metaphor, how would you describe your present relationship with God: a.)Getting acquainted?, b.)Good friends? c.) Engaged? d.) Newlyweds? e.) Having problems or unfaithful? F.) Growing old together?
REFLECT:
As we began to explore last week, sin and shame are two of the main obstacles to centering our lives and worship on the gospel. We discussed how shame distorts our understanding of God and ourselves last week and this week we begin to discuss sin by exploring our vocabulary (or lack of vocabulary) about sin.
As we define sin we usually come up with answers such as ‘breaking God’s law’ or ‘missing the mark’, and those are not bad definitions, just incomplete. Breaking God’s law is important in scripture, but only as part of a much larger problem of broken relationship with God. We can see this in Hosea 2:5-13, which echoes the prophesies of Jeremiah and the other prophets:
She said, 'I will go after my lovers, who give me my food and my water, my wool and my linen, my oil and my drink. 'Therefore I will block her path with thorn bushes; I will wall her in so that she cannot find her way. She will chase after her lovers but not catch them; she will look for them but not find them. Then she will say, 'I will go back to my husband as at first, for then I was better off than now.'
She has not acknowledged that I was the one who gave her the grain, the new wine and oil, who lavished on her the silver and gold— which they used for Baal. "Therefore I will take away my grain when it ripens, and my new wine when it is ready. I will take back my wool and my linen, intended to cover her nakedness. So now I will expose her lewdness before the eyes of her lovers; no one will take her out of my hands. I will stop all her celebrations: her yearly festivals, her New Moons, her Sabbath days—all her appointed feasts. I will ruin her vines and her fig trees, which she said were her pay from her lovers; I will make them a thicket, and wild animals will devour them. I will punish her for the days she burned incense to the Baals; she decked herself with rings and jewelry, and went after her lovers, but me she forgot," declares the LORD."
Here we see God not solely as a judge passing down sentence on a guilty lawbreaker, but as a husband betrayed by his unfaithful wife. The narrative is about Hosea, the prophet, who is called by God to marry Gomer, a prostitute and ‘loose woman’, to show God’s love for Israel. Gomer betrays Hosea over and over again by turning to other lovers, just as Israel betrays God by worshipping other Gods. Gomer had a problem not uncommon in relationships…she was unsatisfied with Hosea. He was just not enough for her, so she went looking for other men who would fulfill her needs….though in the end she would only beaten and abused.
For Gomer, Hosea was not good enough; she thought she needed something else to feel fulfilled and loved, though nothing would ever fill the void and she would always come crawling back, beaten and abused, to her husband. In this prophesy God is telling the Israelites that they are doing the same things; they are running to other God’s because they think that their God is not enough, though they only get hurt in the end.
God shows a remarkable vulnerability in this prophesy and others. He is not depicted as a emotionless, perfect, wholly other God, but a passionate, frustrated, betrayed lover, who has just been rejected by the ones he loves the most. All of us know the sting of betrayal and rejection, and we all know that betrayal or rejection by someone we love hurts the most. And here we see that God feels that same betrayal when we disobey him or choose another God before him.
This passage illustrates that sin is not so much breaking the law of God but breaking the heart of God, putting ourselves or some ‘thing’ in God’s place, which breaks the loving God’s heart. God is a lover, and He desires an intimate, loving connection with his children, likened throughout the scriptures as a marriage. But we, like the Israelites, want God AND something else……God and success, God and my art or my music, God and money, God and my wife. We can expose these other gods in our lives by asking ourselves honestly the simple questions: what can I not live without? What would devastate me and throw my life into turmoil if it were taken away? What defines my worth and value in the world? As we answer those questions we begin to see that at times we place our hope and worth in other places than God. So at the core sin is nothing but a God replacement program, and when we do this we don’t just cause break God’s commandments, earning his wrath, but we break God’s heart, betraying the one who loves us most.
This is a startling way to look at God and it changes our understanding of our own sin and how we are to lead worship. We firstly understand that often we promote the idea of God AND something else in worship…..God and spiritual gifts, God and great worship or preaching, God and the church building, God and excellent music, God and great spiritual prowess or righteousness, etc… And secondly we often forget that God is a passionate lover and wants to connect with us in worship….often worship becomes about getting something and not just getting God. Just think about what it feels like to meet someone you deeply love……when was the last time we felt like that in worship and how do we promote that connection with God in worship? Lastly, in worship we always remember that the loving God has always responded to his own betrayal and frustration at our idolatry with self-sacrifice, compassion, mercy, and grace. As God writes through Hosea, about Gomer, but also about Israel and all God’s people:
"Therefore I am now going to allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her. There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor door of hope. There she will sing as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt. "In that day," declares the LORD, "you will call me 'my husband'; you will no longer call me 'my master.' I will remove the names of the Baals from her lips; no longer will their names be invoked. I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you in righteousness and justice, in love and compassion. I will betroth you in faithfulness, and you will acknowledge the LORD.
The word ‘allure’ in verse 14 literally means “to deceive, to mislead, to go astray, to persuade”. So, though Gomer deserves punishment, Hosea will not give her as she deserves. He will literally go as far as to trick her or persuade her, to get her away, and then to tenderly remind her of his love. God never gives us as we deserve, but always seeks us, and instigates relationship with us, though we try to replace Him. In worship we can trust that God is alluring all people into the desert so that he can speak tenderly to them and transform them in His love. Sin breaks God’s heart, but God responds to sin with amazing grace. This is the gift of the gospel and the message we are called to proclaim in word and song every week.
ADDITIONAL SCRIPTURES (to read throughout the week):
Jeremiah 3:6-25, Psalm 25:1-10, Isaiah 1:18, Luke 15:1-7, Romans 5:1-11, Hebrews 4:14-16
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