Despite Gomer, Hosea’s wife, being unfaithful, Hosea is encouraged and told to go and be faithful.
In this story, we are not Hosea, the benevolent, humble, obedient servant of the Lord. We are Gomer. We have sold ourselves to the passions of the flesh. We read in Hosea 2.5,
For their mother has played the whore;
she who conceived them has acted shamefully.
For she said, ‘I will go after my lovers,
who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.’
She needed to be ransomed and redeemed out of that life, out of that way of thinking.
We needed to be ransomed and redeemed too. She was bought for for fifteen shekels of silver and a homer and a lethech of barley in 3.2.
Hosea didn’t really need to “buy” His own wife, to hire her as a prostitute. She was his wife! But as a display of love and commitment, he went the “extra mile,” beyond what was reasonable or expected from him (EnduringWord).
In doing this for his own wife, Hosea also showed her, “I can give you what the others can, I can give you what you are looking for, all those different men, you can find it all in me, everything you are looking for in your life, all the satisfactions, all the fulfillment, all the desires, you can find them all in me. You don’t need them. You need me, your faithful husband. Let me show you how I can provide for your needs.”
Are you with me here? There is more going on than a great marriage lesson, isn’t there…
Buying her out of her sinful life…buying back something that meant a lot to him.
Do you know what price was paid for us?
1 Corinthians 6.20 tells us that we were bought with a price, and Acts 20.28 that Jesus bought back His people with His own blood.
Despite our fallen, sinful, unfaithful nature, Jesus came and He was, and He is, faithful. He purchased us. Not with silver and some food, but with His own life.
What do we do with this?
We realize that in our own power, our repentance and our worship and our efforts at righteousness and faithfulness will never be good enough.
However, God knows this. God knows this and God did something to rectify this.
So this week, and any day, when we find ourselves slipping inevitably into unfaithfulness, when our weekly worship doesn’t match our worshipful week, when our actions don’t match our words, we turn to the Faithful One. God knows that alone we will never do this, and God did something to address our fallen condition.
He sent the most faithful person of all time. He sent the only truly faithful person of all time; faithful in every thought, word, and deed, He sent Jesus, the faithful witness.
James Montgomery Boice said this, our prayer for today,
Remember His faithfulness and determine that hereafter you will always be faithful to Him. Ask Him to seal that love, keeping you and perfecting you until the day when you will stand before both Him and His Father at the great marriage supper of the Lamb.
James Travis 