The Triumph of Grace in Hosea (1)

[An address given at the 2005 Banner of Truth ministers’ conference at Leicester.]

The triumph of grace in the ministry of the prophet Hosea shows itself in a number of ways:

1. In the length of Hosea’s ministry.

The opening words of his prophecy don’t look much, that list of the names of the kings, but it’s saying to us that here is a man from the most discouraging domestic situation who never gave up. This book does not describe the month-long ministry of a Jonah. This book is not like the prophecy of Obadiah, a mere 21 verses. This is fourteen chapters; it includes the key themes of his ministry and the summaries of many sermons. The prophecy opens by telling us that when Uzziah was king in Judah Hosea was preaching then; and when King Jotham followed him Hosea continued preaching; and when King Ahaz followed Jotham then Hosea preached through his reign too, and even when King Hezekiah followed Ahaz Hosea was still there prophesying. How long? Sixty to seventy-five years, with this man’s family history, and those sorts of memories – the grief, the humiliations, the anger of it all. That’s the triumph of God’s grace in Hosea.

Hosea had a roller-coaster ride under these four monarchs. He began his ministry at the end of the reign of King Uzziah who, “when he became powerful his pride led to his downfall. He was unfaithful to the LORD his God” (2 Chron 16:16). For fifty-two years he had been king, and then down and down he went, but Hosea saw restoration under the reign of the godly king Jotham for 16 years, but King Ahaz who followed him for another 16 years made casts of idols and worshipped the Baals. Hosea experienced sixteen years of declension with hope expiring, but they came to an end and he lived to see better days for the kingdom of God. He ended his ministry at the beginning of the reign of Hezekiah who lead the people back to the Lord. Hezekiah reigned for 29 years. Though all these times Hosea served God. That’s the triumph of grace in the man.

I have been a preacher in a small church in a small town in Wales for forty years. My own domestic circumstances couldn’t have been more different from Hosea’s, a loving home, a responsive people, a place in the sun in a pretty university town on the shores of the Irish Sea, the cultural capital of Wales. In this place I have built two churches, my own congregation, and the other one everybody goes to. The grace of Hosea’s Lord has kept me preaching the whole counsel of God, though in no way as long as this prophet was used by God. The same Lord is keeping everyone of us who’ve been overwhelmed by a vision of the Sovereign grace of God and the glories of his word. Another year has flown by and we are at this blessed Banner of Truth conference once again, still in the faith, a year’s march nearer our home. We are men who have wanted to spend our lives serving the Lord of the Word and the Word of the Lord. Thirty years ago I read these famous words of Dr Lloyd-Jones as he mused about the preachers he’d been listening to during a time of convalescence, “This is the thing I have looked for and longed for and desired. I can forgive a man for a bad sermon, I can forgive the preacher almost anything if he gives me a sense of God, if he gives me something for my soul, if he gives me the sense that, though he is inadequate himself, he is handling something which is very great and very glorious, if he gives me some dim glimpse of the majesty and the glory of God, the love of Christ my Saviour and the magnificence of the gospel. If he does that I am his debtor, and I am profoundly grateful to him.” When I read those words I said to myself, “I want to be that preacher to whom the Doctor and men like him are indebted, because that too is what I long for when I hear a preacher.” Hosea was that kind of preacher for sixty years. That is the triumph of grace.

2. We see the triumph of grace in how Hosea surmounted the opposition he met throughout his ministry.

Amongst all the prophets there is scarcely a single one who had the support and understanding of his congregation. They preached into the teeth of an obdurate and recalcitrant people who neither understood their words nor appreciated their spirit. Take the greatest of them, the prophet Isaiah; after years of ministry his lamentation was, “Who has believed our message?” He seemed to have had as little fruit as Noah. There was all that wonderful preaching – Isaiah’s passion and pathos and poetry – yet the people couldn’t understand what he was so excited about. He seemed to be enthusing about a root sticking out of dry ground, a bit of a wood in the desert, sun-dried and wind-blown. That is what the whole message of the grace of the divine Messiah seemed to be like – as far as they were concerned. People said to one another, “Imagine a man of his talent and gifts spending his life getting worked up about something as insignificant as that.” Hardly anyone believed Isaiah’s message except his wife, ‘the prophetess’, and his fellow preacher Micah.

There is no preacher who doesn’t meet opposition, nor should we desire things to be any different. Aren’t we engaged in a holy war? Isn’t our calling to endure hardness as good soldiers of Jesus Christ? Do we want something that the Son of God didn’t get? Didn’t Jesus tell twelve preachers, “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (Matt. 5:12). I hope we’ve all got the backing of the majority of the church – what a blessing that is – and that our elders are supporting us; I trust that most or all of our officers are on our side. That was not Hosea’s experience.

Consider his congregation: what did the prophet see around him? Listen! “There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgment of God in the land. There is only cursing, lying and murder, stealing and adultery; they break all bounds, and bloodshed follows bloodshed” (4:1&2). These are God’s elect people. Listen! “A spirit of prostitution leads them astray; they are unfaithful to their God. They sacrifice on the mountain tops and burn offerings on the hills, under oak, poplar and terebinth, where the shade is pleasant. Therefore your daughters turn to prostitution and your daughters-in-law to adultery” (4:12&13). Listen! “The men themselves consort with harlots and sacrifice with shrine prostitutes – a people without understanding will come to ruin!” (4:14). Listen, “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son. But the more I called Israel, the further they went from me. They sacrificed to the Baals and they burned incense to images. It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arms; but they did not realize it was I who healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness, with ties of love; I lifted the yoke from their neck and bent down to feed them. Will they not return to Egypt and will not Assyria rule over them because they refuse to repent?” (11:1-5). Yet for sixty to seventy-five years he preached the word to a recalcitrant people. That’s the triumph of grace in Hosea.

But we also see the triumph of grace

3. In his Marriage to Gomer.

We preach in the face of European indifference and into the apathy of sections of our own congregations and even officers, but there are always our wives, encouraging us, paying attention to our ideas, taking notes from our sermons. We can hear their voices singing the hymns from the congregation, praying for us, teaching our children to bow before God and serve him, pastoring the younger women in the church.

Think of Arthur Pink and his unsung heroine Vera, with her broad Kentucky drawl, the solitary member of Pink’s tiny church. She was his deacon, and his church secretary, and supporter and wife, typing out his handwritten materials on the other side of the table from him where he sat writing articles in that one heated room in their home. We’re persuaded that we’d have had no volumes of Pink without her. Mrs. Vera Pink was essential to him.

Hosea didn’t even have that one church member. God said to him, “Go, take to yourself an adulterous wife and children of unfaithfulness, because the land is guilty of the vilest adultery in departing from the LORD” (1:2). What was forbidden to the priest – to marry a harlot or a divorced person (Leviticus 21) – Hosea was commanded to do. God told him to “Go!’ and do this, and everything that transpired subsequently came from this obedience to God. This is what fortified Hosea through all the heartache of the years ahead. He had only done what God told him to do. Gomer was not a suitable wife for a servant of God, but did Hosea dream of the change that his love for Gomer would work in her life, that she would probably become like our wives, our strength and support, godly and encouraging, but Gomer did not change for a long time; she was an adulterous wife. She ‘took her love to town’ – that is of course, her lust. She became a notch on some adulterer’s stick to boast that he’d had the wife of Jehovah’s prophet. That was the incredible domestic context in which Hosea began his ministry.

There’s a splendid book on holy living written by James Frazer of Alness in Ross-shire, the only one of those 18th century preachers, the so-called ‘Fathers’ in the Highlands, who gained a reputation as an author. The book’s title is “The Scripture Doctrine of Sanctification: being a Critical Explication and Paraphrase of the Sixth and Seventh Chapters of the Romans, and the First Four Verses of the Eighth Chapter.” No catchy titles in those days. Frazer was born in 1700 and died in 1769 and his strength was an awakening ministry which God gave him. John Kennedy says that his preaching was focussed on regenerating and converting sinners and that God continually blessed his preaching to that end for 44 years. The triumph of grace in the life of James Frazer.

You say, “What has that got to do with the prophet Hosea?” Much every way, not only that they served the same God but that they lived in similar domestic bleakness. John Kennedy says that Frazer’s wife was an “unfeeling, bold, unheeding, worldly woman” who was actually to outlive James Frazer. He never sat down to enjoy a favourite meal because she refused to cook for him at all. He was only sustained by members of his congregation who prepared food for him – Frazer took regular walks and food was left for him at a certain place. Further, his wife wouldn’t allow him heat or light in his study throughout the Highland winters. To get away from her sharp tongue and temper he was compelled to spend his evenings in his study where he was reduced to walking up and down in the freezing blackness hour after hour to keep warm – through forty winters; his hands were held out before him to warn him of the approaching walls. In the end he had worn two holes in the plaster at each side of the room. Yet he continued to speak well of her though everyone in the church and presbytery had experienced her sharp tongue. This was a man of God who preached like an angel, his sermons were full and clear, close and searching, tender and wise. He encouraged believers and he awakened unbelievers in an age when such preaching was rare – it was a time when the moderates ruled the church and occupied most pulpits. Yet he preached into the contempt of his own wife. Hundreds and hundreds of men and women were converted under Frazer’s ministry throughout those decades while he lacked in the Manse what we’d all consider to be something indispensable, the support of a godly loving wife. That is the triumph of grace in James Frazer.

I sometimes wonder if I had to make a choice whether I would rather be Arthur Pink with a congregation consisting of one person, my dear wife who totally supported me, or James Frazer with a congregation of hundreds of people saved under my preaching but with a wife who totally opposed me. What a tough choice I would be most surprised if there was one man here whose domestic arrangements were anything like Arthur Pink’s or James Frazer’s. I am saying to you that you can certainly cope with your own trials; you can be more than conqueror; grace can also triumph through you in everything God has given you to do.

4. We see the Triumph of Grace in the Depths his Marriage Plumbed.

Gomer was not immediately change through Hosea’s love any more than Israel changed under his preaching. She was a woman who had an “adulterous look on her face” (2:2), brazen, hard and seductive, one who “went after her lovers” (2:5), chasing after them (2:7); she was paid by her lovers (2:12). This was Hosea’s wife, and remember that this was no symbolic marriage; this was not a prophetic drama lived out in street theatre before the people. They were man and wife, and they had children together, and God said to him, “Go, show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another and is an adulteress” (3:1). God didn’t say, “Stone her!” Jehovah didn’t even command him, “Love her!” He told Hosea, “Show your love to her. Display your deep affection for this heartbreaker.” That is the challenge of the love of Christ. Love your enemies! Don’t overcome evil with evil but overcome evil with good.

When Dr. Joel Beeke was growing up the neighbour living on one side of their house couldn’t bear their family. He hated the Beekes; he hated their religion and everything about them. He despised the children and snarled and yelled at them at any and every opportunity, but Mrs. Beeke loved him. This man would turn his back on them if he were in the yard when the family came out, but if Mrs. Beeke spotted him she would go over to him with his back turned on them, and come around him until she was looking up into his face and she’d smile with pleasure at seeing him and ask him about his family and health. She refused to stop loving him. That’s the triumph of grace.

Hosea was to show his love for Hosea. What is love if it is not shown? It is no love at all. Love without works is dead. God displayed his love for us sinners by doing things, by sending his beloved Son for us, to drink the cup for us, and hang on the tree for us, and enter the anathema for us, and taste death for us. That’s the triumph of grace in loving the unlovely. You consider that Hosea’s congregation was a congregation of slaves. Gomer had become a slave. She had thought that her life away from Hosea was going to be full of fun and frolic, but she ends up in debt to sin and a slave.

Do you see Hosea’s congregation? These people are like the crowd that walks out of the brothels at closing time, and to them is your commission, to go to them in love in the name of the Lord, in the glory of his person. You speak in the name of the great Shepherd who seeks for the lost sheep. You approach them in the name of the Holy One who smote the fig-tree, the one who called the Pharisees whitewashed sepulchres, and King Herod a fox. To the mighty Christ, the Lord of angels, the one before whom they cover their eyes and cry “Holy, Holy, Holy!” – he is the one you serve, and you love them in his name, men and women smelling of their adulteries, and Gomer the head of the line, the betrayer of her husband, the one who sold her favours and seduced men with her brazen face.

Can you see the scene, these sinners are coming to this Shepherd whose face shines like the sun, the one before whom Saul of Tarsus on the road, and John on the island fell as if they were dead. This trashy crowd are leaving the red light area and coming to the Lord of light! See these debauches walking along, not brazen now, heads down now, limping and groaning a bit now, slowing down now, wondering what sort of response are they going to get, pitiable people, but they are still coming, and getting nearer God’s messenger. You see the scene described in Hosea 3:5, “The Israelites will return and seek the LORD their God . . . They will come trembling to the Lord and to his blessings.” Think of this sight which the angels are spectating. Aren’t they muttering, “No hope for this crowd. These are the citizens of Sodom, and you remember what the Lord did to Sodom? Not a chance for this bunch. They are going to the pit”?

But they are not merely a bunch of sinners, they are a crowd of slaves on the way to the slave mart. Who is going to buy this lot? Who is going to take responsibility for them? Gomer is up for sale, and her price is fifteen shekels of silver and about a homer and a lethek of barley (Hos. 3:2).

Then you see something utterly amazing; the angels see the God’s servant bidding for them, out bidding every one else. He keeps back nothing to buy them; he offers his costliest treasure; he spares nothing, not even his only begotten Son. He gives him freely that he might have this bunch of slaves for his own. He outbids all the cosmos that Gomer, a slave of sin who’s lived in nature’s night, might be his bride. He has redeemed her, and do you see him now moving to her and her fellow slaves, coming down from the midst of his throne, and he is going towards them. The angels see him increasing his pace as the crowd is slowing down. They see his arms outstretched towards these sinners, and he is now actually running towards them. He is like the father of the prodigal son, filled with compassion, an old man breaking into a run, on old arthriticky legs, staggering a bit, keeping his balance only just, and running and running, and smiling and smiling so brightly, arms outstretched in welcome them to his heart. He comes to that skinny bedraggled boy smelling of pigs coming from the distant city, looking so wretched, shame and fear written all over his face, and to that girl Gomer, stinking of all that is sensual and fleshly, full of guilt and failure, and he comes right up to them and he shows them his love. He wraps his arms around them, and he hugs them and wets their cheeks with his tears of joy, his hot tears, as his strong arms hold them to his heart. “I’ll never let you go again.” God rejoicing over a bunch of slaves, over this pack of dogs who’ve been eating their own vomit. God embracing a herd of pigs wallowing in the mire. God saying, “These are my children; they were all lost but now they are found; they were dead but now they’re alive.

He doesn’t say, “What have you been doing all these nights away from home? How did you get into this mess?” He doesn’t say to Gomer, “Don’t you know what shame, what disgrace you’ve brought on me and the kids? Don’t you know you’ve made me a laughing stock? How could I go on preaching with you behaving like this?” There is none of that in Hosea. Everything is forgotten in the joy of restoration. There is reconciliation. There is life from the dead. There is renewal.

I wonder how your children view God? What mental image they have of him; is he like an old man, kind and good? That’s a good image, but there are better pictures of God. God is like a young man kneeling down before a group of silent younger men and one by one he washes their feet, getting all the donkey dung off them, and drying in between their toe with his towel. That’s God. God is like a man who lets a women kneel before him and sob convulsively at his feet because though she’s done everything wrong in her life she’s been forgiven, and she dries the Lord’s feet with her hair. She worships him because he’s her loving Lord. That’s God. He’s like an exhausted shepherd climbing another ridge, descending another valley, going to the top of another peak in the wind and rain, to find an unappreciative resisting mangy sheep and carrying it back home on his weary shoulders. That’s God. Or he is like a husband who loves a wife who’s a swinger, who fools around with other men, and yet he takes her back and he forgives her 70 times 7. That’s God. He is like a King who refuses to spare his own son from the cross that slaves should become his children and his heirs.

And we pour into Hosea and Gomer all the passion and the totality of God’s love for his bride. We see here all the agony involved in the love of God. “I’m a jealous God,” he says, a possessive God, one who is sensitive to the people’s exclusive love and loyalty. He is a God passionately committed to his people.

There is nothing more marvellous in the whole universe that to stand before a congregation in our frailty and immaturity and mortality, burdened with all our personal inadequacies, to tell sinners that the one living and true God is offering himself to them that moment to be their Saviour. He is ready to forgive them. He will wash every stain from their lives. There are those great anchor chains that bind them to their sinful past, and God does a wonderful thing to those chains, he snaps them. God can deal with everything they’ve done so that henceforth the only way they can think of the old ways is this, “Those are my forgiven sins.” He’s ready to be their teacher, and husband, and lover, and friend for ever and ever. He’ll be their comfort and strength and high tower, and all in all. He’ll open the front door to them. He’ll open the bedroom door to them. He’ll take them on board, with all their liabilities and hang-ups; he’ll take away all their sins, every spot and wrinkle and every such thing. From now on he’ll provide for them like a caring husband. “Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her.” His love is like a great pure river flowing to us, irrigating, refreshing, reviving, washing, and never leaving a man in the same way as he found him. In his sight his wife will be as if she’d never sinned, and he’ll give her every spiritual blessing. He’ll keep back nothing. That’s the triumph of grace.

Have you heard some ministers in their conferences talking about the way people in their congregations have behaved towards them? Have you heard it over late night coffee? It’s almost bragging: “Do you know what a member said to me . . .?” “That’s nothing, do you know what they did to me? What a shame that the name of the Lord and the reputation of the church are dragged through the mud like that” – so they say, but everyone is feeding on that dessert, savouring every mouthful. Men and brethren, terrible things actually happen, things are spit out in anger, those cruel words, the dismissive comments, the throwaway remarks, the put-downs and the snubs. I am so sorry that you have been victimized in that way, but it does no good to tell others about it; it does much harm. Hosea saw this behaviour in the priests of the land: “They exchanged their glory for something disgraceful. They feed on the sins of my people and relish their wickedness” (Hos. 4:7&8). Are you going to be telling us next what your wife once said to you when she lost her temper? Are you going to glory in your shame?

I counsel you not even to dump onto your wife those cruel words from a church member so that you can turn over and sleep while she can’t, and she becomes bitter to members of the congregation. Suffer quietly. Take it to the Lord! Listen, “if you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God. To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. ‘He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.’ When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly” (I Pet. 2:20-23).

Gentle answers turn wrath away. You overcome evil with good. Pull up that root of bitterness; pull up every root. I was preaching one Sunday in Louisville, Mississippi and on the Monday morning I went to visit a friend of mine, a Baptist deacon who runs a furniture shop in the middle of town. I went to the furniture shop and talked with him there. I was not preaching till that night. There is not much going on in a little Mississippi town and he told me how he had the previous week met up with an old friend, a black Christian, and they were talking together in the main street. Then up to them strutted some horrible white man, a racist, who stood and listened to their conversation for a while and then he turned to the black man and he said something utterly unacceptable, something unspeakable. My friend turned to him and said, “You shouldn’t say things like that. You apologise to him now for saying that.” This racist replied, “You won’t find me apologising to a black epithet,” and off he strutted. My friend was crushed, he wanted to apologise for the whole white race and all the ugliness of what he had seen and heard. “I am so sorry,” he said, “so sorry.” “It’s alright,” the black Christian said, “It is alright . . . You know I would like to get my revenge on that man . . . and this would be my revenge. I would be driving back to Louisville late one night at eleven o’clock and I’d see his car at the side of the road. He’d got a flat tire and he didn’t have a jack and I’d stop my car and I’d get out my jack and I’d jack up his car and I’d change his tire for him, that would be the revenge I would like to have on him”. That is the ethic by which we live our entire ministries. Don’t overcome evil with evil, but overcome evil with good. If your enemy hungers, feed him, if he is thirsty, you give him a drink, you pour coals of fire on his head.

Would you have blamed Hosea, God’s holy prophet, for freezing Gomer out of his life? He was charged to preach righteousness and repentance to the nation, but everyone knew how his wife lived. Did men somewhere at the back of the crowd shout out to him at the end of a sermon, “How’s Gomer today? Was she home last night? Pretty wife you’ve got!” The mockery Hosea had to endure, and you can imagine the build up of anger and his frustration when she didn’t come home night after night. You can see it reflected in the first half of the second chapter. God reminding sinners that this is a moral universe, and what a man or woman sows that he or she must also reap. God shows the spirit of rectitude and a just reward that faces every sinner. Consider these eschatological judgments; “I will strip her naked and make her as bare as on the day she was born” (2:3). He’d really humiliate her for all she’d done to him. “I’ll expose her lewdness before the eyes of her lovers” (2:10) “I won’t show my love to her children” (2:4). Notice it’s ‘her children’ not ‘our children’. He’d walk past them as if they weren’t there. “I’ll wall her in so that she can’t find her way” (2:6). Lock her up! “I’ll ruin her vines and her fig trees” (2:12). He’d take her vineyard – her business – from her. “I’ll punish her” (2:13).

And all the world applauding Hosea if he had acted like that. That’s how you treat an unfaithful wife. You stone her. You shoot her and plead a crime of passion. It’s happening to women all over the world today. Who’d have blamed Hosea if his frustration had exploded like that? We see the anger in Jesus’ disciples early on; the rejection by the Samaritan village. “Who do they think they are, treating us like that? Let’s call down fire and nuke the place. We’re not taking this from anyone. We’re the servants of the Son of Man. Don’t mess with us!”

5. Love Triumphs over Our Sins.

But it didn’t end there with Hosea nor with the Lord he served. The Spirit triumphs over the flesh. Listen to the triumph of grace:

“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 a door of hope. There she will sing as in the days of her youth” (2:14&15). I’ll say to her, “Let’s go out for a walk. Let’s go somewhere quiet.” And then he starts talking tenderly to her: “You remember when we first met? You had that blue dress on – it matched your eyes. It really suited you. I thought you were the loveliest girl I’d ever met. I was amazed that you were happy to stay and talk to me. What would you see in someone like me? But we got married. Hasn’t God been good to us all these years? Three great kids. I want you to have that vineyard back; I was wrong to take it from you. No one can grow vines like you. I want to hear your voice again around the house and in the fields. I love to hear you singing.” That’s how he speaks to this unfaithful woman, and a door of hope begins to open.

And when we feel the force of that love from heaven that has gripped us, and forgiven us, and blessed us, then we stop asking how far we should go, and we cease judging how frequently we should forgive. We don’t measure how much pain and abuse we should endure, what sort of sacrifices of comfort and conveniences are we prepared to make. We don’t say, “Well I’ve got my rights too, to this, and to that, and the other.’ My father Adam’s fall disqualified me from all my rights and so have my own sins. Paul was anxious to complement in his own body what was lacking in the sufferings of Christ. Shouldn’t he too suffer for Christ’s church? He’d spend and be spent for her, just as his Lord had spent himself, and given his life for her.

Maybe when we began the ministry we had very little knowledge of the road we’d have to walk, the direction it would take, and the depths it would plumb, the periods of despondency, the years of disappointment, the frustration and pain and sorrows. And in those times we can’t tell anyone, not even our wives, that we are in the valley of the shadow, because the moment we start to think that we say, “So was He in the valley,” and we say, “So is He.” For when I’m there, “Lo Thou art with me; thy rod and the staff they comfort me.” There was no rod and staff to comfort him when he hung on Golgotha, but for me I always have him with me in all his comforts.

Christ loved the church and gave himself for her, and love endures all things. Sometimes there is unbearable disappointment; love endures all things. I want to say two contrasting things, first that there can come no point at which preachers can say with a good conscience, “I will stand it no longer. I will endure this no further.” Love endures all things, and perhaps the greatest danger we face as churches just now is not a departure from orthodoxy, but a lapse into emotional disengagement from the work that God has given us to do, allowing a cold weariness to come in. As someone said, God’s people are often difficult to live with, but they were difficu