Married to a Harlot

Scripture: Hosea 1–3 (with Romans 9:25–26 and 1 Peter 2:10)

Before this session, read Hosea 1–3 in full: the marriage commanded, the three children with their dreadful names, the unfaithful wife pursued and stripped and then wooed back, and the prophet sent to buy back his own wife. Read it slowly; it is meant to wound before it heals. Then read Romans 9:25–26 and 1 Peter 2:10, where the apostles take Hosea’s reversed names and lay them on us. Keep your Bible open, and ask: what kind of love would command this?

The LORD said to me, “Go, show love to your wife again, even though she loves another man and continually commits adultery. Likewise, the LORD loves the Israelites although they turn to other gods and love to offer raisin cakes to idols.”

(Hosea 3:1)

A Strange Command

The Book of the Twelve opens with one of the most shocking commands God ever gave a man. When the LORD first spoke through Hosea, he said to him, “Go marry a prostitute who will bear illegitimate children conceived through prostitution, because the nation continually commits spiritual prostitution by turning away from the LORD” (1:2). Read that again and let it land. The Hebrew speaks of “a wife of harlotry”; whether Gomer was already unfaithful when Hosea married her or only became so afterward, the text does not pause to say. The first word God speaks to His prophet is not a sermon to preach or a vision to record; it is a marriage to enter, and a marriage He Himself promises will end in betrayal. Go and marry a woman who will be unfaithful to you. Go and give your name and your bed and your future to someone who will break your heart. That is where the Twelve begin.

It helps to know the world this command dropped into. Hosea prophesied to the northern kingdom of Israel in the eighth century before Christ, in the last comfortable decades before the Assyrian hammer fell. These were boom years: the reign of Jeroboam the Second and after, a season of full barns, expanding borders, and busy sanctuaries. The economy was strong and the religion was thriving, and that is exactly what made the rot so hard to see. A starving, defeated people might have known its need; a fat and successful one was sure it had earned heaven’s favor and could keep one foot in the LORD’s sanctuaries and the other in the shrines of Baal. Into that settled prosperity, where everyone agreed things were going well, God sent a man with a scandalous marriage, because nothing less than scandal could break through the comfortable certainty that all was right between Israel and her God.

We must not soften this into a tidy object lesson, as though God were merely handing Hosea a sermon illustration with no cost attached. Gomer was a real woman, the daughter of a real man named Diblaim, and the marriage Hosea entered was a real marriage with real vows and real children and real, tearing pain. This is the Lutheran realism we will need all through this volume: the covenant of God runs through actual, complicated, wounded lives, not through the smiling figures of a children’s felt board. Hosea did not act out a pageant and go home unscathed. He loved a woman who left him, and he kept on loving her, and it cost him everything a betrayed husband is ever made to pay. The message was not something Hosea said. It was something Hosea suffered.

Why would God do such a thing to a man He loved? Because some truths cannot be preached; they can only be lived where the people can watch. Israel in Hosea’s day was prosperous, comfortable, and religious: the altars were busy, the festivals were kept, the harvests came in. And underneath the religion the nation had quietly given its heart away, chasing the fertility gods of its neighbors, the Baals, while still going through the motions toward the LORD. A people like that does not feel its sin; it has explained the sin away. So God did not send Hosea to argue. He sent Hosea to bleed in public, to stand before the nation as a man whose wife had gone after other lovers, and to say, in effect: now you know how I feel. The prophet’s ruined marriage was a window thrown open straight into the wounded heart of God.

And a word, at the outset, about how we will handle what follows, for it is delicate. Hosea is a book about a marriage and its betrayal, and it does not flinch from the language of the bedroom, of lovers and nakedness and shame. We will not be prurient with it, lingering where Scripture only points; nor will we sanitize it into something safe and bloodless, for the rawness is the whole point. The pain of a betrayed marriage is the very thing God chose to picture His own pain. To file the edges off Hosea is to lose the gospel in it. We read it, then, the way the Holy Spirit wrote it: with sober seriousness, because the thing it pictures (the soul running from its God into the arms of idols) is the most serious betrayal in the world.

Children with Dreadful Names

Gomer bears three children, and the LORD names each one, and every name is a sermon of judgment hung around a child’s neck. The first is a son: Name him ‘Jezreel,’ because in a little while I will punish the dynasty of Jehu on account of the bloodshed in the valley of Jezreel (1:4). Jezreel was the valley where Israel’s kings had spilled rivers of blood; the name means God sows (the NET, later in the book, glosses it “God Plants”), and it carries both threat and, buried in it, a seed of hope, for what is sown may yet come up. But on the first child’s birth certificate it reads mostly as a verdict: the bloodshed will be answered.

The second child is a daughter, and her name is worse: Name her ‘No Pity’ (Lo-Ruhamah) because I will no longer have pity on the nation of Israel (1:6). Lo-Ruhamah: “no pity,” “not pitied.” The Hebrew root is the word for a mother’s womb-deep compassion, the tenderness that cannot help but ache over its own child; and the LORD takes that very word and puts a no in front of it and hangs it on a baby girl. Imagine calling your daughter’s name across the yard at suppertime and the name itself means No Pity. That is the law, spoken as starkly as the law can be spoken: the people who had presumed for generations on God’s patience are told the patience has run out.

The third child, another son, receives the most terrible name of all: Name him ‘Not My People’ (Lo-Ammi), because you are not my people and I am not your God (1:9). Lo-Ammi: “not my people.” At Sinai the LORD had summed up His covenant in a single sentence that rang down the centuries: I will be your God and you will be my people (Leviticus 26:12). It was the marriage vow of heaven, the whole relationship in seven Hebrew words. And now, over a newborn boy, that vow is read backward and torn in two: not my people, and I am not your God. The bond is declared broken. This is the covenant unmade, the marriage ended, the divorce spoken over a child’s cradle.

Three children, then, and three names that together spell out the end of everything: the blood will be answered, the pity is withdrawn, the people are no longer His. It is worth pausing to feel the full weight of it, because the names are not only Israel’s. By nature and by our own running, every one of us stands under exactly these three words. Apart from grace we too are children of a broken covenant: the blood of our sin crying out, the mercy we presumed upon spent, the bond with God severed by our own infidelity. No Pity. Not My People. That is the honest verdict of the law over the human race, and if the book stopped at chapter one it would be a closed grave. But the LORD does not name these children in order to abandon them. He names them, as we will see, in order to rename them, and that renaming is the gospel.

The Lovers and the Gifts

Chapter two turns from the children to the wife herself, and the LORD lays out His grievance against her, which is His grievance against Israel, and ours. For their mother has committed adultery … For she said, “I will seek out my lovers; they are the ones who give me my bread and my water, my wool, my flax, my olive oil, and my wine” (2:5). There is the heart of all idolatry in a single sentence. She has decided that her lovers (the Baals, the fertility gods who supposedly made the crops grow and the flocks multiply) are the ones who feed and clothe her. She runs to them with gratitude that belongs to Someone else.

And we should understand what those lovers actually were, because it makes the marriage image painfully exact. The Baals were the fertility gods of Canaan, and the religion built around them was a religion of fertility in the most literal sense. Worshipers seem to have believed that by sacrifices and sexual rites at the shrines (Hosea himself speaks of men who sacrifice alongside cult prostitutes, 4:14) they could rouse the gods to make the rains fall, the fields bear, the flocks and the wombs be fruitful. It was, at heart, a bargain struck through the body: give the god his pleasure and he will give you your harvest. So when the LORD calls Israel’s idolatry prostitution, He is not merely reaching for a vivid insult. Israel had quite literally prostituted herself, in the shrines and in the heart at once, trading the faithful love of her true Husband for a transaction with gods who promised bread and wine. The marriage metaphor is not decoration laid over the sin; it is the plain shape of the sin itself.

And then comes the line that turns the grievance into tragedy: she has refused to acknowledge that I was the one who gave her the grain, the new wine, and the olive oil; and that it was I who lavished on her the silver and gold (2:8), the silver and gold she then spent on Baal. The Hebrew says it more simply still: she did not know. Every good thing she had (the grain on her table, the wine in her cup, the very silver she melted down to make her idols) had come from the hand of the LORD, her true Husband. He had been the faithful provider all along, quietly filling her storehouse, and she had taken His gifts to the altar of another and said, these came from you. This is idolatry exposed for what it always is: not merely worshiping a false god, but crediting the true God’s gifts to the wrong giver, thanking our money, our cleverness, our luck, our lovers, for what the Father’s open hand has given.

So the LORD acts, and His action is severe, and it is mercy wearing a hard face. I will soon fence her in with thorns … I will take back my grain during the harvest time and my new wine when it ripens … I will put an end to all her celebration (2:6, 9, 11). He blocks the road to her lovers with a thornhedge. He takes back the gifts she had abused. He brings her parties to an end. To the wife it feels like cruelty; in truth it is the only love that could save her, for as long as the road to the Baals runs smooth and her hands are full of stolen pleasures, she will never turn around. This is the strange work of God we spoke of in the introduction: the law that wounds in order to heal, the thorns that fence us off from the thing that is killing us. Sometimes the kindest thing the LORD does for a runaway heart is to let the far country go bitter.

We dare not read this only as a word about ancient Israel, for the first commandment is, at bottom, a marriage vow, and we break it the same way she did. Luther put it with his usual bluntness in the Large Catechism: whatever your heart clings to and relies upon, that is your god (LC I). The heart was made to cling to the LORD as a bride to her husband, and it will cling to something; if not to Him, then to money, to security, to romance, to reputation, to the approval of others, to the bottle or the screen or the self. Every one of those is a Baal that promises to give us our bread and our wine. And every one of them, in the end, takes the credit that belongs to the Giver of all good gifts. Hosea holds up a mirror, and the face in it is not only Gomer’s.

A Door of Hope in the Valley of Trouble

And now, in the very middle of the judgment, comes the turn that makes Hosea one of the tenderest books in all of Scripture. We brace ourselves for the sentence to fall, and instead we hear this: However, in the future I will allure her; I will lead her back into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her (2:14). The NET smooths the first word into However, but the Hebrew word is laken, “therefore,” the same word that introduced the thorn hedge in verse 6 and the taking back of the harvest in verse 9, and it should stop us cold. By every human reckoning this therefore should introduce another punishment; she has earned divorce and worse. But God’s therefore introduces a wooing. He will allure her (the word is the language of courtship, of a suitor winning a heart), and He will carry her back out into the wilderness, the honeymoon country where He first fell in love with Israel after the Exodus, and there He will speak tenderly to her, literally speak to her heart. The God she betrayed sets out to win her back as if He were courting her for the first time.

There is a whole history folded into that word wilderness. It was in the wilderness, after the Exodus, that the LORD and Israel had their honeymoon: the years when, for all her grumbling, she followed Him through a trackless waste with nothing to live on but His daily provision and His pillar of fire, wholly dependent and, in her best moments, wholly His. The prophets remembered it as the springtime of the marriage; Jeremiah would have the LORD say, I have fond memories of you, how devoted you were to me in your early years. I remember how you loved me like a new bride; you followed me through the wilderness (Jeremiah 2:2). So when God says He will bring His wayward wife back into the wilderness, He is not threatening to abandon her in a desert; He is proposing to start the marriage over from the beginning, to strip away the false abundance that had ruined her and bring her once more to the place where she had nothing but Him and found Him enough. Sometimes grace looks like being led back out into the wilderness, where the idols cannot follow and the heart can hear its Husband speak.

Then comes an image that should take our breath away: I will … turn the “Valley of Trouble” into an “Opportunity for Hope” (2:15). The Hebrew names the place, the valley of Achor, and promises to make it a door of hope. The valley of Achor was a cursed place. Achor means “trouble,” and it was the very spot where, generations earlier, Achan’s sin had brought disaster on Israel and where he was judged and buried under a heap of stones (Joshua 7). It was Israel’s valley of shame, a place you would not want to walk through after dark. And the LORD says He will take that valley of Trouble and make it a door of hope. He does not go around the place of judgment; He turns the place of judgment itself into the doorway of grace. Here, far in advance, is the deepest pattern of the gospel: that God makes the very site of the curse the gate of blessing, as one day He would take the cross, the ugliest instrument of trouble and shame the world ever built, and make it the door of hope for the whole human race.

And the renewed marriage will be different in its very nature. “At that time,” declares the LORD, “you will call, ‘My husband’; you will never again call me, ‘My master’” (2:16). Behind the NET’s “My husband” and “My master” stand two Hebrew words, Ishi and Baali. A wife could use either of her husband, but they carry different weather. Baali, “my master” or “my owner,” is the language of a master over a servant, and it even sounds like the name of the false gods she had chased. Ishi means “my man, my husband,” the word of intimacy and love. The LORD is saying that the restored relationship will not be the cold service of a slave toward a master, but the glad love of a wife toward her husband. He is not taking her back to put her to work; He is taking her back to be loved. This is the difference the gospel always makes: turning slaves into a bride, fear into affection, Baali into Ishi.

What is the name of the love that does all this, that woos back the wife who fled, that turns the valley of trouble into a door? Its name is hesed (the NET renders it “steadfast love” in 2:19), and it is the great word we will carry through the whole of this volume. Hesed is the LORD’s steadfast covenant love, His loyal, unbreakable faithfulness to a people who have broken faith with Him: not a feeling that comes and goes with the beloved’s behavior, but a committed, vowed devotion that keeps covenant precisely when the other party has not. It is love that has bound itself, love that will not be talked out of itself by the unworthiness of the one it loves. Human love mostly loves what it finds lovely; hesed makes lovely what it loves. Hold that word. Everything tender in the Twelve, and everything tender in the gospel, is finally a matter of the hesed of God.

I Will Commit Myself to You Forever

All of this rises now to a climax that ranks among the most beautiful promises in the Old Testament. The LORD does not merely take His wife back; He marries her again. I will commit myself to you forever; I will commit myself to you in righteousness and justice, in steadfast love and tender compassion. I will commit myself to you in faithfulness; then you will acknowledge the LORD (2:19–20). Commit myself renders the Hebrew ‘aras, the word for betrothal, the pledge of a fresh engagement, full of the joy and the promise of a first marriage: not a grudging, teeth-gritted reconciliation, but a new bridal covenant entered with delight. And it is forever: this marriage will not fail again, because this time its permanence rests not on her faithfulness but on His.

And the betrothal ends on a promise that reaches past law into the deepest intimacy: then you will acknowledge the LORD (2:20). The Hebrew verb is yada’, to know, and to know the LORD, in the language of Scripture, is not to have correct opinions about Him; it is the knowing of a marriage, personal and covenantal and whole, the same word used when a husband and wife know one another. The fruit of this new betrothal is not merely a wife who behaves, but a wife who at last truly knows her Husband and is known by Him. This is the very thing the new covenant would one day promise in full (For all of them, from the least important to the most important, will know me … For I will forgive their sin, Jeremiah 31:34), and it is the thing the Lord Jesus came to give, that we might know God not as a stranger or a master to be appeased but as the Husband who has bound Himself to us forever. The marriage produces, at the last, true knowledge of God; and that knowledge, Hosea will insist again and again, is the one thing Israel most lacked.

Look closely at the dowry He brings to this wedding, for it is the gospel in miniature. He betroths her in righteousness and justice, in steadfast love and tender compassion … in faithfulness. These are not qualities He demands she produce before the wedding can proceed; they are the very gifts He brings to her and clothes her in. The harlot is not slowly rehabilitated over years until she is at last respectable enough to marry; she is betrothed in righteousness that is given to her, a righteousness from outside herself, draped over her shame like a wedding gown over rags. This is justification, and it is declarative: she is declared righteous, named righteous, made a bride by the word of the Bridegroom, not by the gradual mending of her own character. The verdict comes first; the new life follows from it.

Luther saw this with unmatched clarity, and he reached for exactly this image to explain the whole gospel, in the picture Lutherans have long called the joyous exchange. In The Freedom of a Christian he pictured the soul as a poor, wicked harlot and Christ as the rich and royal Bridegroom who, astonishingly, marries her. And in that marriage everything passes between them. Her sins, her debts, her death become His, for what belongs to the wife belongs now to the husband; and His righteousness, His life, His glory become hers, for what belongs to the husband he shares with his wife. So the harlot wakes up married to a King and finds her debts paid and a crown on her head, having brought nothing to the marriage but her ruin. That is the joyous exchange, and it is precisely what Hosea 2 is singing. The LORD betroths the harlot in His own righteousness. He takes her shame and gives her His name.

And with the new marriage come new names, for the curse-names of chapter one are now reversed one by one. Then I will plant her as my own in the land. I will have pity on ‘No Pity’ (Lo-Ruhamah). I will say to ‘Not My People’ (Lo-Ammi), ‘You are my people!’ And he will say, ‘You are my God!’ (2:23). No Pity is pitied. Not My People is called My People. The torn marriage vow of Sinai is mended and spoken forward again: You are my people! … You are my God! And back in chapter one the same reversal had already been promised: Although it was said to them, “You are not my people,” it will be said to them, “You are children of the living God!” (1:10). The Hebrew says “in the place where it was said,” and Paul keeps that phrase in Romans 9:26: the very ground where the verdict of rejection was pronounced becomes the ground where children are adopted. God’s last word over the children with the dreadful names is not their dreadful names.

And here the apostolic guardrail does its work, for we are not left to guess how far this promise reaches: the apostles tell us, and they aim it straight at us. Paul, marveling that God should call Gentiles who had never been His people into the family, reaches for these very verses: I will call those who were not my people, ‘My people,’ and I will call her who was unloved, ‘My beloved.’ … there they will be called ‘sons of the living God’ (Romans 9:25–26). And Peter, writing to scattered Gentile believers, presses Hosea’s names onto them with unforgettable tenderness: You once were not a people, but now you are God’s people. You were shown no mercy, but now you have received mercy (1 Peter 2:10). Do you hear it? We Gentiles, which is to say most of us reading this study, are Lo-Ammi made Ammi, the not my people who have been named my people. We are Lo-Ruhamah made Ruhamah, the no pity who have received mercy. Hosea’s harlot bride, renamed and betrothed forever, is the Church; and the Church is us.

Bought Back at a Price

Then chapter three, the shortest and in some ways the costliest of the three. The LORD speaks to Hosea again, and the command is, if anything, harder than the first: Go, show love to your wife again, even though she loves another man and continually commits adultery. Likewise, the LORD loves the Israelites although they turn to other gods (3:1). Go again. Gomer has done exactly what God foretold: she has gone after her lovers, and somewhere in that ruin she has, it seems, fallen into another’s possession, whether as a slave or as a debtor’s pledge the text does not say, so that she must now be bought. And Hosea is told not merely to forgive her from a distance but to go and show love to her, and to do it as the LORD loves (the Hebrew reads, “like the love of the LORD for the Israelites”), with the same loyal, wounded love with which the LORD loves a faithless Israel.

So Hosea goes down to where she is held, and he buys his own wife back. So I paid fifteen shekels of silver and about seven bushels of barley to purchase her (3:2). Sit with the indignity of it. A husband stands in the marketplace and pays good money (silver and grain scraped together) to purchase the woman who left his bed for other men’s. He had every legal and moral right to wash his hands of her; the law would have backed him; the neighbors would have understood. Instead he counts out the price and leads her home. There is no romance in that scene as the world counts romance, and yet there is more love in it than in all the love songs ever written, for this is love that buys back what it could justly have abandoned. Likewise, says the LORD: this is how I love.

Even the price may tell a story, though here we must hold our reading loosely. Fifteen shekels of silver was half of thirty, and thirty shekels of silver was the sum the law named as compensation for a slave gored by an ox (Exodus 21:32), the very sum that would one day be weighed out to betray a greater Husband. Many interpreters have reckoned that the barley, the coarse grain of the poor, made up roughly the other half, so that Gomer was bought back at about the price of a slave. The text does not do that arithmetic for us, and we should not build doctrine on it; but if the reckoning is right, there is no flattering way to read those numbers. They measure exactly how far the beloved had fallen and how little the world now thought her worth. And even without the arithmetic, the scene makes its point: the husband does not buy back a prize; he buys back a wreck, at the wreck’s own pitiful price, because his love is not a response to her value but the cause of it. So it is with us. We are not redeemed because we were worth the blood of the Son; we are made priceless because that blood was spent on us. He set the value by what He was willing to pay.

And now we see Whom Hosea’s costly love pictures, for there is a greater Husband behind this one, paying a greater price at a darker slave block. The Lord Jesus is the Bridegroom who came down to where His adulterous bride was being sold under sin and death, and who bought her back; she was ransomed, Peter says, not by perishable things like silver or gold, but by precious blood like that of an unblemished and spotless lamb, namely Christ (1 Peter 1:18–19). The price Hosea paid in silver and barley, the Lord Jesus paid in His own blood. Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her, Paul would write (Ephesians 5:25). The Church is Gomer. You are Gomer, bought back from the slavery of sin at a cost you could never repay, by a Husband who had every right to let you go and would not. And the story that began with a betrayed marriage in chapter one ends, at the last, in the marriage supper of the Lamb.

Hosea’s final word looks down the centuries to that very end. The bought-back wife is to live quietly for many days, neither playing the harlot nor yet fully enjoying her husband, a season of waiting, and then: Afterward, the Israelites will turn and seek the LORD their God and their Davidic king. Then they will submit to the LORD in fear and receive his blessings in the future (3:5). Turn is the great prophetic verb, shuv, to turn back to the God you fled. And notice the One they return to: not only the LORD their God, but their Davidic king. The Hebrew says simply “David their king,” and David, by Hosea’s day, had been dead and buried for two centuries. The prophet is not pointing to David but past him, to great David’s greater Son, the King who would rise from David’s line, the Lord Jesus Himself. The faithless bride’s homecoming, in the end, is a return to her Husband-King, to the throne of David, which is the throne of Christ.

Gathering the Threads

Stand back and take in the whole of these three chapters. God commands His prophet into a marriage He knows will break his heart, and through that broken marriage He preaches the most personal sermon in the Old Testament. The children are named with the verdicts of the law (the blood answered, the pity withdrawn, the people unmade): No Pity, Not My People. The wife chases her lovers and credits them with her Husband’s gifts, and He fences her road with thorns, not to destroy her but to turn her around. And then, where we expected the sentence, we got the wooing: the allure into the wilderness, the valley of trouble made a door of hope, the slave renamed a bride, the harlot betrothed forever in a righteousness given to her, the curse-names reversed to Pity and My People, and at the last the unfaithful wife bought back at the husband’s own expense. Law and gospel, set inside a marriage, as raw and as tender as the Old Testament ever gets.

And every line of it is the Lord Jesus and His Church, which is to say, every line of it is about you. You are the harlot whom the royal Bridegroom married; in the joyous exchange He took your shame and debt and death, and clothed you in His own righteousness like a wedding gown. You are Lo-Ammi renamed Ammi, the not-my-people made the people of the living God, just as Paul and Peter say. You are the wife bought back from the slavery of sin, not with silver and barley but with the precious blood of the Lamb. This is the emotional and theological key to the entire volume, and it sounds here at the very first note: the LORD is a God whose hesed will not let His people go. He loves what is not lovely until it is. He keeps covenant where we break it. And His last word over a sinner who returns to Him is never the dreadful name, but the new one He gives at the wedding.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

1. God’s first word to Hosea was not a sermon to preach but a marriage to suffer (1:2). Why might God choose to preach to a comfortable, religious nation through a prophet’s broken marriage rather than through an argument? What does it cost us, and gain us, to insist that Gomer was a real woman and the pain real?

2. The three children are named Jezreel, Lo-Ruhamah (“No Pity”), and Lo-Ammi (“Not My People”), reversing the covenant vow of Sinai (1:4–9). How do these names function as the law, the honest verdict over a broken covenant? In what sense does that verdict stand over all of us apart from grace?

3. Israel “refused to acknowledge” (the Hebrew says simply “did not know”) that the LORD had given her the grain, wine, and silver she carried to her idols (2:8). Luther said whatever the heart clings to and relies on is its god. Without naming anyone’s private struggles, what are the common “lovers” a heart credits today for gifts that really come from God’s hand?

4. The LORD betroths the unfaithful wife in righteousness (2:19–20), a righteousness given to her, not produced by her. How is this declarative justification rather than gradual self-improvement? How does Luther’s picture of the joyous exchange (the King who marries the harlot, takes her debts, and gives her His righteousness) open up what is happening here?

5. Paul and Peter take Hosea’s reversed names and apply them directly to us: You once were not a people, but now you are God’s people. You were shown no mercy, but now you have received mercy (1 Peter 2:10; see Romans 9:25–26). How does it change your sense of yourself to hear that you are Lo-Ammi renamed Ammi? Why is it such comfort that the name comes from God and not from us?

6. Hosea buys his adulterous wife back and is told to love her as the LORD loves Israel (3:1–2), and the Lord Jesus ransoms His bride not with silver or gold but with His own precious blood (1 Peter 1:18–19). How does the scene of that purchase show us the cross? What does it mean for daily life to know you are a wife bought back, not a slave kept on for her usefulness?

Looking Ahead

We have met the wounded, faithful love of God in the rawest form the Old Testament knows: a marriage. In the next session we move from the marriage parable into the long indictment that fills the heart of the book, Hosea 4 through 11, where the LORD spells out Israel’s unfaithfulness in painful detail and we hear the anguish of His heart over a people who have earned His judgment. There we will come upon one of the most astonishing lines in all the prophets, the cry of a God who will not give His people up: How can I give you up, O Ephraim? … All my tender compassions are aroused. (11:8). And there too the LORD will speak a word that the evangelist Matthew lifts straight out of Hosea and lays upon the infant Christ carried down into Egypt and back: When Israel was a young man, I loved him like a son, and I summoned my son out of Egypt (11:1), which Matthew hears fulfilled as I called my Son out of Egypt (Matthew 2:15). The son called out of Egypt is, in the end, the Son.

Before the next session, read Hosea 4–11. It is a long, hard stretch of indictment, so read it in one sitting if you can, to feel its weight, and watch for the places where the LORD’s anger keeps breaking into grief. Then read Matthew 2:13–15, where the holy family flees to Egypt and returns, and see how the evangelist hears Hosea 11:1 fulfilled in the child. Ask what it means that the history of faithless Israel is taken up and made good in the faithful Son.

Closing Prayer

Almighty God and Father, we confess that we have been the faithless bride of Hosea’s book: that we have chased after other lovers, and have taken Your good gifts to the altars of our idols, and have not known that every good thing we hold came from Your open hand. We have earned the dreadful names: No Pity, Not Your People. We have no dowry to bring You but our ruin.

And yet You would not give us up. In Your steadfast love You allured us back, and made the valley of our trouble a door of hope, and betrothed us to Yourself forever, not in any righteousness of our own, but in the righteousness of Your Son, our Bridegroom, who took our shame and debt and death upon Himself and clothed us in His own life. We thank You that He came down to the slave block where we were sold under sin, and bought us back, not with silver and gold, but with His precious blood; and that He has had pity on us and named us Your own people. Keep us faithful to so faithful a Husband, calling You no more a distant master but our Husband and our God; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.