God’s Kind of Love

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Transcript:

Hosea chapter 3. This is one of those messages that, well, it’s a good truth from God’s Word, but it’s not always one that’s fun to preach. And not because we’re going back to talking about all the judgment that we’ve talked about in Hosea, but because this tends to be the kind of message where people think I’m talking about them.

And I’ve told you before, one of the things I enjoyed about when I was not a pastor, when I was just doing pulpit supply, was I got to be the guy who would go in and preach, and everybody just loved me, but I didn’t know anything that was going on in the church, so I got to preach whatever I felt like, and nobody thought I was talking to them because I didn’t know anything. As much as I love pastoring and being with the same group of people week in and week out, it makes it a little harder because I know things about you, and I don’t want anybody to think I’m talking about you. I’ve already pulled one of you aside and said, I want you to know I’m not talking about you tonight.

Yes, I am singling somebody out in this message, and that somebody’s me. Tonight we’re going to talk about God’s kind of love. and we’re going to talk about the forgiveness that’s involved in God’s kind of love as we go through Hosea and if I’m talking to anybody if I’m pointing fingers at anybody in this church it’s me because I’ll be the first to admit to you I don’t love the way God loves I want to I know I’m supposed to and even the people and I’ve told you before there are people I don’t like and last time I told you that I got some looks from the congregation like well that’s awful I can’t believe the preacher said, there are people he doesn’t like.

Now I made it clear to you, it wasn’t anybody here. But there are people in the world, come on folks, I’m human. There are people in the world that I don’t like.

Thank you. There are people I don’t like, and that’s, I’m not sure that that’s the right way to be, but that it’s just the way things are. And I look at them and I think, I know I’m supposed to love you.

I know I ought to love you the way God loves you, and I really want to, but I’m not there yet. And yet God has given us this example of the way that we’re supposed to love. And this is from the Old Testament.

I’m not familiar really with the Hebrew words for love, but I know in Greek there are four different words for love. Three of them are used in the New Testament. They all say something different.

And the one that describes God’s love is the word agape, which is an unconditional, self-sacrificial love. And in many places, that’s the word that’s used for the kind of love God expects us to show to other people. What we’re going to see tonight in the book of Hosea, yet again proof that I’m not singling anybody out here, is that preaching through a book, this is just where we are in the book.

We finished chapter 2 last week. We get to chapter 3 and talk about God’s kind of love. If you’ll remember the previous two chapters, what it talks about in the book of Hosea is that God called the prophet Hosea and told him to go and marry Gomer.

And Gomer was a prostitute. Now, we don’t know. There’s debate, I’ve told you, there’s debate over whether she was at the time he married her or if he married her knowing that she would be, but she wasn’t yet.

Now, I tend to, I don’t know for sure, whatever, you know, one day I’ll get to heaven and maybe God will explain it to me. I tend to take the view that she wasn’t at the time because that would have, in the eyes of most of the Israelites, disqualified Hosea as a prophet if he’d married somebody who was already in that line of work. But I believe God knew and Hosea knew that when he married her, that was the road she was going to go down.

And so he told Hosea, go and marry this woman. And Hosea did it. Hosea set himself up for a life of turmoil in his family and did so willingly because God told him to.

And the reason for it was so Hosea, when he would go and carry to the nation of Israel the message that essentially they had God. They had covenanted themselves to God that he would be their God and they would be his people, a lot like the marriage vows, forsaking all others, and that was the relationship that they were supposed to have with God. They were not to have other gods, they were not to add him to the pantheon and have him be one of many.

He was to be their one and only, and they had not lived up to that end of the bargain. And so when God sent Hosea, when God sent Hosea to prophesy against them, when God sent Hosea to straighten them out, God wanted a man who would understand the pain that God had been through, to understand what Israel had done to God. And the only way for him to understand that was through the parallel of having Hosea love this woman who would be unfaithful to him.

And yet God says, God had every right with the people of Israel to say, I’m writing you off forever. Hosea would have every right to write off Gomer forever when she went and ran after other men as we talked about last Sunday night. God had every right to deal with it.

And yet God said, I’m going to pursue Israel. God said, I’m going to go and redeem Israel. I’m going to be reconciled to Israel.

There’s going to be a restoration and a reconciliation here. And God sent Hosea to run after Gomer as well. Folks, that takes incredible forgiveness.

I said it earlier that if my wife cheated on me, at the very least, I’d set her car on fire. And I really wouldn’t because my name is the only name on the car loan. So no, I would not set her car on fire.

Now that I think about it. See, it’s good to think about things before you do them, isn’t it? Anyway, it took an incredible amount of forgiveness for Hosea to do what God told him to and chase after Gomer.

And yet that’s what he does. Folks, it took an even more incredible amount of forgiveness for God to forgive the people of Israel. After hundreds of years, thousands of years of engaging in idolatry.

You know, when God was setting up the Ten Commandments, it was the prohibitions on idolatry that he set up first. The first commandment, thou shalt have no other gods before me. The second commandment, thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image and bow before them. When God made up his top ten list of commandments, the first two were about idolatry.

If you want to look at it that way, maybe they were the most important. Because when you’re in a right relationship with God, the other things kind of seem to take care of themselves. But they had broken God’s first two commandments.

And every time God had heeded their cries, every time God had forgiven them, they had just gone back and done it again. And yet God continued to love these people with a love that I can only aspire to. And what we’re going to talk about tonight is God’s kind of love.

Five verses in Hosea chapter 3. Then said the Lord unto me, Go yet, love a woman, beloved of her friend, yet an adulteress, according to the love of the Lord, toward the children of Israel, who took to other gods and loved flagons of wine. He tells Hosea, you know, Gomer had run off.

I told you last week after they’d been married, she bore three children to Hosea. All of a sudden she ran off with other men. And God used that to teach the people of Israel a lesson.

Well, now he says, go and chase after her. You need to still love her. Go yet, love a woman beloved of her friend.

And by friend, he means, you know, I believe he means the way I would say friend is a euphemism. Somebody’s other man, other woman, their friend. Beloved of her friend, yet an adulteress, according to the love of the Lord toward the children of Israel.

In other words, you need to go and love this woman the way that God has loved Israel. Folks, I don’t know that I could love anybody the way God loves Israel, who look to other gods and love flagons of wine. So he’s not talking about he loves Israel because they’ve got their act together, so he loves them again.

As a matter of fact, for Israel to be restored, for Israel to be reconciled to God, God was going to have to do everything that was necessary for the reconciliation. Just like when it comes to us being reconciled to God in spite of our sins, It’s not because we meet God halfway. God had to do everything for us to be reconciled.

And so we’re not seeing here that God loves Israel because they deserve his love. We’re not seeing that Hosea loves Gomer because she deserves his love. We see love here being a choice and a commitment that we look to those around us and we say, I’m going to love you whether I feel like it or not.

And ladies and gentlemen, I’m not just talking about a marriage relationship. I’m talking about our relationships to one another, talking about our relationships to people outside of here. And sometimes in a church, as happens in a family, and a church should be like a family, when you get in close quarters with each other, you spend a lot of time together, you get to know each other, warts and all, sometimes conflicts arise.

And in a church, just as in a family, folks, we need to be committed to love each other whether we feel like it or not. There are going to be days that you don’t like me all that much. And there might be days, there haven’t been so far, but there might be days when I don’t like you so much.

And yet love is not a feeling. As I talked about at Senior Saints, love is a commitment and a choice that I’m going to act in a certain way toward you, whether you deserve it or not. And I know for a fact there are days when I don’t act like I deserve my wife’s love, and yet she loves me anyway.

And there are days when she doesn’t act in a way that’s deserving of my love, and yet there’s a commitment there that we’ve said, I’m going to love you, and I’m going to act in a certain way toward you no matter what. Folks, the marriage relationship is, I think, the highest picture of that in terms of human relationships. But we’ve also got our relationships in the church.

We’ve got our relationships with our kids. We’ve got relationships with people outside these four walls that God tells us we are supposed to love other people. Folks, even more so when they don’t deserve it.

He says, even while Israel looks to other gods and loves flagons of wine, So I’ve loved Israel, and you need to love Gomer that same way. So I bought her to me for 15 pieces of silver, and for a homer of barley, and half a homer of barley. So a homer and a half of barley.

How many of you know what that is? It’s between 12 and 13 bushels of barley. And on top of it, 15 pieces of silver.

It says he bought her. Now all I can imagine is people have said, well, maybe she was in captivity to these men. I’m thinking the earliest forms of human trafficking, I don’t know.

What I can only imagine is in her line of work, she gets paid for showing affection. Maybe he’s paying her for a certain amount of time and saying, here, here’s some money for you to live on. Here’s the food for you to live on.

Here’s all these things that otherwise you would be paid during this time. Can you just remain faithful during this time? I imagine it kind of like paying earnest money, if that makes any sense at all outside my mind.

In earnest money, when you put an earnest deposit down on a house, they in essence take that house off the market temporarily. You’re paying them to take it off the market. As I see this, he was paying her to take herself off the market.

He was giving her the provision that he would have given her had she lived at home as his wife. As her husband, he would have provided for her needs. He would have provided food for her.

He would have provided the money that she needed to pay her accounts and debts. He would have done all these things. And he’s giving her the things that she needed.

And I said unto her, thou shalt abide for me many days. Thou shalt not play the harlot. Thou shalt not be for another man.

So will I also be for thee. So he’s saying, if you will during this time be faithful, so will I. Now, Hosea has been faithful all this time.

And yet he’s telling her, if you will demonstrate your faithfulness during this time, so will I. He’s covenanting with her again. He says, thou shalt abide for me.

He doesn’t say abide with me. What he’s talking about here is not that he took her back in and immediately everything was fine, all the consequences of her actions were over, but in this he’s showing her kindness honestly that she did not deserve. And it didn’t mean the consequences of all her actions went away.

And folks, by the same token, when God forgives us of our sins, it doesn’t mean that all the earthly consequences of it go away. If somebody murdered somebody else and then got saved and ask forgiveness of God. As far as God’s concerned, the slate is wiped clean, but God also set up earthly consequences for those things that need to be dealt with.

And so what he’s doing is extending her forgiveness, but we shouldn’t assume it means that everything’s going to be exactly the same way it was to begin with. For the children of Israel shall, at least not immediately, for the children of Israel shall abide many days without a king and without a prince and without a sacrifice and without an image and without an ephod and without teraphim. Afterwards shall the children of Israel return and seek the Lord their God and David their king and shall fear the Lord and his goodness in the latter days.

What we saw at the beginning of the book of Hosea in the first two messages I preached on this were that God was going to allow the Assyrians to come in and take over the country, that the Israelites were going to be scattered, all of these awful things were going to happen. Well, when we get to this point, God is, in a sense, restoring Israel. He’s going to protect them.

He’s going to provide for them. But it’s kind of a probationary period here. Kind of like when Hosea was paying Gomer’s accounts and expenses, and yet they’re not living together as husband and wife.

Here God is giving protection. Here God is giving provision to Israel. He’s saying that he’s going to do these things.

But at the same time, Israel’s in a probationary period. He tells them in verse 4 that for many days, they’re not going to have a king or a prince. Again, that’s one of the things he took away in Hosea chapter 1.

He took away their political protection, military security. He took away the kingdom and says for a time, they’re not going to have a king or prince. They’re not going to have sacrifices.

They’re not going to be able to go to the temple and do their sacrifices. You know, for many years, they had been going to the temple regularly and doing their sacrifices anyway, and then they’d walk out of the temple and go worship false gods at the same time. They’re not going to have an image.

They’re not going to have an ephod without teraphim. And so basically, God is going to watch over them, but everything is not exactly the same as it was before. And the question is here whether Israel can for a little while demonstrate their faithfulness.

Can Israel live up to their end of the bargain? Now, you may think that sounds an awful lot like earning salvation. Not at all.

Because even for God to give them this second chance, for God even to give them the protection, for God even to say the relationship is here again, is something they couldn’t have earned or deserved. As a matter of fact, they’d done everything to deserve the opposite. And we can look at the relationship between God and Israel in the book of Hosea and really throughout all of the Old Testament and say, if God said he would love them like a husband or God said he would love them like a father or God said he would love them like a shepherd, and he used all of these symbols and more to demonstrate his relationship with them, if God was going to love them like that, how could God let the Assyrians come and take them over?

How could God let the Babylonians take them over? How could God let them be oppressed by the Philistines? How could God let earthquakes happen?

How could God allow this to happen? And we focus on the wrong end of the question saying, how could God be so cruel to allow these bad things to happen to Israel? When the question we need to ask is, how could God be so merciful for the things that he didn’t have happen to Israel?

For all the good that he gave to Israel, how could God be so merciful that he allowed that to happen? I’ve had things happen to me in my life. Y’all have had things happen to you in your lives that we could look at it, and we talked about this in Sunday school this morning, talking about asking God why.

And I could very easily say, God, why did you let this happen? God, why did you let that first church that I pastored, why did you let things fall apart there? God, why did you let my first two children die before they were born?

God, why did you allow things to deteriorate between us and Christian’s family. God, why did you allow, folks, any number of many of the same things you have gone through, I have gone through as well. And we could all ask the same questions.

God, how could you allow this to happen? But I realized a few years ago, a much better question is, God, how could you be so merciful to have given me that heartbeat that I just had? Because quite honestly, I don’t deserve it.

It’s all by his grace and goodness. God, how could you be so merciful to let the sun come up in the morning? You realize we’d be in big trouble if we didn’t have the sun.

We’re within a degree or two of life on earth not being able to exist. And people say it all happened by accident. I don’t have that much faith. There’s a book written, I think, called I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, and I agree with that premise.

God, how could you be so merciful to give us the things that we need? God, how could you be so merciful to have let me found somebody as good as a Christian? God, how could you be so merciful as to have led me to this church?

And the list could go on. Any good thing I have, ultimately I do not deserve because I was a rebel against God from the time I was born. I was born to rebel against God.

Our whole species has been in rebellion for 6,000 years. We don’t deserve a bit of good that God can give us, and yet out of his own goodness, he gives abundantly. And rather than ask the question, God, how could you treat Israel in such a way if you profess to love them?

Better yet, God, how could you love Israel at all after the way they’ve treated you? I keep wanting to say Homer. I guess it’s like Brangelina when they add the names together in the tabloids.

Hosea and Gomer are Homer. Now, I think it’s because, what is it, the Homers of Barley? Yeah, that may be where I’m getting confused.

And I was studying for school this afternoon, and they were talking about the differences between the New Testament manuscripts and how old they are and how many copies. compared to some of the ancient Greeks like Homer. Anyway, much more evidence for the New Testament than there are those others, but that’s neither here nor there.

Gomer, or Hosea, how could you treat Gomer this way? How could you say, you don’t get to come live with me for the time being, you don’t get to come home, everything’s not going to be just like it was for now. When better, the better question would be, Hosea, how can you be so loving as to even give Gomer a second chance?

Folks, I don’t know that giving her a second chance or a second thought or a second look was Hosea’s first idea. I have no doubt that that was something God instructed him to do and God enabled him to do. Because that takes an awful lot of forgiveness.

It takes an awful lot of love to be able to forgive that way. And so God sent him and said, you need to love her and you need to forgive her because your love for her, your forgiveness for her, will be a picture of my love and forgiveness for Israel. See, God wanted somebody to go and take his message to Israel who could understand just a little bit of what God had been through.

And the first thing, I’ve already kind of reflected on it a little bit tonight, but the first thing that we can learn about God’s kind of love from this passage is that God’s kind of love forgives those who do not deserve it. God’s kind of love forgives those who do not deserve it. You know that almost everybody, you know what, I’ll say that everybody that we should forgive, Out of everybody we should forgive, probably not one of them deserve it.

You know why? Because if they deserved it, they wouldn’t need it. If I hadn’t said that awful thing to you, you wouldn’t have any reason to forgive me because you wouldn’t be mad at me.

And yet, it’s to those who don’t deserve it that we’re instructed to give forgiveness. It’s to those who don’t deserve it that God desired to give forgiveness. I think I mentioned this morning the verse in Romans that says, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

God didn’t say, get your act together, and then I’ll show some kindness towards you. Get your act together, and I’ll throw a few blessings your way. When you break it down in the Greek and the grammar and all the tenses, what that means is while we were in the process, in the action of sinning, while we were red-handed, so to speak, we were right there involved in it.

Christ died for us at that point. Mankind had not come to some point after 4,000 years that we had come to terms with God a little bit and cleaned up our act. After 4,000 years, mankind was as wicked as it had ever been.

Well, I can’t say as wicked as it had ever been. It says in the book of Genesis in Noah’s day that every thought of every man’s heart was only evil all the time. But mankind hadn’t gotten better.

We hadn’t fixed ourselves, and at that point, God decided to forgive us. While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. When we deserved it least, Christ died for us.

And yet I have the audacity not to forgive when people wrong me in petty little ways. And I’m here to tell you, there are, as I said, there are people in this world I don’t like. I do try to love everybody.

I say that all the time. I love people and I like people and there’s a distinction. Well, there are people I don’t like and I try to love and fall very short of it.

But there are people who have done things to me in my past that just to this day, when I think about it too much, it’s like an open wound right here. There are people who have done and said things to me that I hear their name and it just raises my blood pressure. And you know, the Bible says I’m supposed to forgive them.

Oh my goodness. But that woman never apologized to me for what she did. It doesn’t matter.

We’re to give forgiveness to those who don’t deserve it. Now again, just like in this picture of forgiveness, Does that mean that everything is supposed to be exactly the same as it was before? Not necessarily.

But God’s kind of love and the kind of love that God expected Hosea to exemplify on his behalf, and honestly, I don’t think we represent God any less than Hosea other than the fact that he gave him specific targeted messages for people. I don’t think we represent God all that much less than Hosea did. The kind of love that God expected Hosea to give and I believe expects us to give is a love that forgives those who least deserve it.

Some of y’all may think I’m meddling now, but I’m just talking to myself. Y’all just happen to be here for the conversation between me and me. God’s kind of love forgives those who do not deserve it.

He points out that she is yet an adulteress. Points out of Gomer, she is yet an adulteress. She is still in her adultery.

Points out of Israel, they still, it doesn’t say they looked to other gods in verse 1. It says they look in present tense, even now, they look to other gods. and yet God was willing to extend forgiveness to them.

Second of all, not only does God’s kind of love forgive those who do not deserve it, but God’s kind of love demands a high cost of the giver. Now, in this case, it doesn’t sound like a whole lot. It was 12 to 13 bushels of barley and 15 pieces of silver.

I think we could probably get all that for less than $1,000, I’m guessing. I don’t know about the silver price. I think it’s somewhere around $20 an ounce.

Last time I heard, I could be wrong on that. It goes up and down. Brother Alfred might be able to tell us the price of grain because I know he’s got calves that he has to feed whether it rains or not.

But to us today, in our world, to say all this barley and a few pieces of silver, it really is not all that much. I mean, I don’t have it in the monthly budget, but it’s not my life savings either. And yet for them, in a time where they’d just gone through, they were constantly going through turmoil.

They had countries trying to invade them. There were famines. They weren’t like us where if it doesn’t rain here, we can still buy food from other countries.

They might not get to eat, but we just deal with higher prices here. But we don’t suffer. In their day, if it didn’t rain, if the crops weren’t right, they didn’t eat.

And so it was a rough time to live, a rough way to make a living. And this idea that this poor prophet was going to give her 15 pieces of silver and all this barley to feed herself, folks, that cost him something. And to love like God loves, to love like God loves costs us something.

God knows a little something about that. Because when I say to love like he loves costs us something, it costs God something to love us. You realize that?

It cost him his only begotten son. God could have looked at us and collectively patted us on the head and said, yeah, I love you, I love you so much, and let us die and go straight to hell. But folks, God’s kind of love was words backed up with action.

And it cost him something, not just to say he loved us, but to actually demonstrate it and do something about it. As John chapter 3 says, For God so loved the world. God loved the world in this way, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him would not perish, but have everlasting life.

Folks, he gave the ultimate gift. Do you realize, think about this, again, one of these many things I bring up that will make you head hurt if you think about it too much. Jesus Christ, God in human flesh, God himself gave his life.

God died on the cross. Now, I don’t mean to sound like some of the liberal theologians who tell us, oh, God is dead. God the Father, still alive.

God the Holy Spirit, still alive. The Son of God, spiritually alive. But in physical form, he laid down his life and died on the cross.

The God of the universe gave his life for you and me. He didn’t just give his life. He gave it in one of the most humiliating and excruciating ways possible.

He suffered. It cost Jesus Christ something. It cost God the Father something in watching his son, who he loved, there in anguish on our behalf.

God’s kind of love will cost us. Now, I can’t tell you specifically what the cost is to you, because I don’t know how God’s telling you specifically to love those around you. But I know sometimes it costs us money to love the way God loves, because there are people around us who need help.

and we may have to part with a little bit of our money. Folks, even harder, we have to part with our time sometimes to love the way God loves. Sometimes it costs us, folks, sometimes it costs us even more than that to love the way God loves.

I’ve been reading, I’ve told some of you, I’ve started reading Tortured for Christ by Richard Vermbrand, who was a, if you’ve heard of Voice of the Martyrs, he was the founder of Voice of the Martyrs. He was a Romanian Jew who was converted to Christianity and became a pastor in communist Romania and writes in the book about how he was tortured, hence the name of the book, Tortured for Christ. It talks about being tortured in a communist prison. And they would witness to their guards.

They would witness to their torturers, even though they realized it was going to cause them to be tortured even more. But such was their love for these other people. Folks, any one of us, I can almost guarantee you, if we were tortured in a prison, we would hate the people who did it to us and we would want them dead.

And yet he said, such was the love of the. . .

And, you know, I can’t, maybe I’m wrong to say that because these people were Christians too. And maybe God would give us the capacity to love the way they did. I’d like to think so.

But these people were so filled with love for their captors and wanted nothing more than to see their salvation, that even though it cost some of them excruciating pain and cost some of them their lives, they would witness to these men who tortured them. Folks, to love the way God loves costs us something. God’s kind of love demands a high cost of the giver.

And third of all, God’s kind of love, folks, God’s kind of love does not leave hearts unchanged. He says at the end in verse 5, after he talks about Israel’s probation, if you want to call it that, in verse 4. In verse 5, he says, Afterward shall the children of Israel return and seek the Lord their God and David their king and shall fear the Lord and his goodness in the latter days.

Folks, at some point, Israel was going to come to its senses because God had loved Israel, because God’s love got through to them. There’s a verse in Romans that says it’s God’s, I think it says it’s His goodness that leads us to repentance. Folks, by experiencing the love of God, our hearts can be changed.

Even as a believer, I’m not just talking about at the moment of conversion. Even as a believer, I could tell you stories of times I’ve been angry with people and thought about what I would do, and then I’ve read something from the scriptures or God has called something to my mind about his kind of love and it has softened my heart in a way that I can’t explain because I wanted nothing more than to get back at whoever just did that to me. And some of you have probably experienced the same thing, that God’s kind of love has not left you unchanged.

And folks, the world around us, God’s love will not leave them unchanged. Now that’s not a blanket promise from me to you that everybody we love, everybody we demonstrate love to is just going to become nice and wonderful and they’re going to love us back and they’re going to get saved and we’re going to live happily ever after. But ultimately, the love of God, when it’s demonstrated, will lea

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