Hosea

Overview

God tells Hosea to marry a woman who will be unfaithful to him, and to take her back after she is. The marriage is the message: this is what Israel has done to God, and this is what God intends to do about it.

The rest of the book alternates between charges and pleading. Israel is a half-baked cake, a silly dove, a bent bow — and also a child God taught to walk and cannot give up.

Background

Hosea prophesied in the north through its last good years and its collapse: six kings in roughly twenty-five years, four of them murdered, and an alliance-hunting foreign policy that ran to Assyria and Egypt by turns.

Baal worship had been absorbed into the nation’s religion, which makes the marriage image sharper than it first sounds — Israel was crediting her harvests to another god.

Key themes

• God’s covenant love holds when His people break faith.
• Knowing God matters more than religious performance.
• Sin has natural consequences: sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
• Judgment is real, and mercy is God’s last word.
• Repentance is possible — come, and let us return unto the LORD.

Outline

1. A marriage as the messageChapters 1–3

   Gomer, three children with names that preach, and a wife bought back.

2. The chargeChapters 4–7

   No truth, no mercy, no knowledge of God in the land; priests and kings both named.

3. Sowing and reapingChapters 8–10

   Calves at Samaria, alliances that fail, and a harvest of what was planted.

4. A father’s heartChapters 11–13

   When Israel was a child I loved him — and how shall I give thee up?

5. ReturnChapter 14

   Take with you words, and turn to the LORD, who will heal their backsliding.

Key passages

• Hosea 1:2 Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms.
• Hosea 3:1-2 Hosea buys Gomer back for fifteen pieces of silver.
• Hosea 4:6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.
• Hosea 6:6 I desired mercy, and not sacrifice.
• Hosea 8:7 They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.
• Hosea 11:1 When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt.
• Hosea 11:8 How shall I give thee up, Ephraim?
• Hosea 14:4 I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely.

Christ in Hosea

Matthew takes 11:1 — out of Egypt have I called my son — and applies it to Jesus returning from Egypt as a child. Jesus twice quoted 6:6 against men who kept the rituals and missed the point. And the husband who buys back a wife who left him is a picture the New Testament never stops using for Christ and the church.

Reading it

• Read chapters 1–3 first and let the marriage frame everything after.
• When the charges pile up, notice how often God speaks like a wounded husband or father.
• Read chapter 14 aloud; it is one of the gentlest invitations in the prophets.