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Here’s
where something not normal takes place and the Book of Hosea
breaks new ground: it’s not because he has pity on her as a
decent man would pity a wounded creature, but wonder of wonders,
he still loves her. This disheveled wreck is only the empty
shell of the beautiful girl he once fell in love with; there is
now no beauty or charm to attract him. She is in fact repulsive;
but Hosea’s love has never died in spite of her infidelity and
insults. Hosea is a captive to a love that he cannot forget. He
has remained single — for him love is what Abraham Lincoln told
Mary Todd, incribing in her wedding ring the words, “Love is
eternal.”
What did Hosea’s undying love finally accomplish? There’s a
surprising ending, with lessons therein that the Seventh-day
Adventist Church needs to understand.
When you truly
love a woman who loves you and commits herself to you, and then
she betrays you, your heart is broken. The sunshine goes out,
and the darkness is a bitterness almost like hell.
To lose a loved
one in death is painful, but rejection in love is more cruel,
like having a limb wrenched from your body. Friends can
sympathize in physical or material pain, but rejection in love
is intensely private. A thousand faces cannot replace the
beloved’s.
The
question we ask is, Can God feel such pain? And does He?
Hinduism,
buddhism, Islam – yes, Christianity in general – have long
assumed, that the answer is No. He is impassible, imprevious to
the heart-pain we feel.
The horrors of
the 1260 years of persecution could never have taken place
except for this popular “Christian” doctrine. If God cannot feel
pain, why should we be concerned with the suffering of others?
Could the Seventh-day Adventist Church be dwelling in that
twilight zone of the impassibility of Christ? We may rejoice
that He “is touched with the feeling of our infirmities,” but
can we be touched with the feeling of His pain?
Christ’s message
to Laodicea stabs us awake. Here is a divine Lover who suffers
rejection, based on the vivid scene of the girl who rebuffs her
lover in Song of Solomon 5:2.1 But the Song may not
have been understood at the time of its writing. Hosea (about
785 B.C.) invests it with meaning, the first portrayal in
Scripture of a divine Husband enduring rejection by the “woman”
to whom He is captive in His love. Like Hosea, the heavenly
Husband cannot forget the one He loves and replace her. He is
held in a deathless thralldom of devotion.
God permitted
the hapless Hosea to suffer this crowning human pain because, He
says, “this will illustrate the way My people have been untrue
to Me.”2
Was Gomer
always a prostitute?
When we read
that the Lord told Hosea, “Go and marry a woman who is a
prostitute,” we need not conclude that Gomer was already such a
derelict. How could a pure, good man bring himself to fall in
love with a depraved woman?3 But we read expressly
that he did truly love her, for later (he says) “the Lord said
unto me, Go, and get your wife again and bring her back to you
and love her, even though she loves adultery.”4
One doesn’t “love” lile one chooses a used car based on a check
list. You love because … well, you love.
It is a part of
our God-given human nature to “fall in love,” to sense some
mysterious “chemistry” where heart answers to heart and love is
exchanged and ratified. Surely Gomer was wooed and won, and the
evidence in the story must indicate that she was at first
sincere in her love to Hosea, for he was ever afterward a
heart-captive to his love for her. What made possible the pain
he felt was the realization that she had at one time truly loved
him; one doesn’t feel pain when someone else’s limb is wrenched
from his body – you feel it when yours is. Hosea and Gomer had
been married and had become “one flesh” in love. And then she
turned perfidious. That’s why Hosea hurt so badly.
God has X-ray
visions of our souls. He saw what Hosea could not see in his
courtship – the prostitute-to-be was secreted within the heart
of the engagingly attractive girl he was doomed to fall in love
with.
Probably she
herself did not fathom what was in her. The sin which comes to
fruition tomorrow is a seed of lust not yet “conceived” in us
today, hidden deep from others’ eyes (perhaps from our own as
well) until it “has conceived” and “is full-grown.”5
We see Hosea loving and marrying an apparently pure girl, only
to suffer anguish as he watches her become hard-hearted and
faithless, like watching something precious sicken and die. Even
in his presence she flirted with her paramours. What pain! But
he couldn’t find a new “love.” He didn’t even want to. He loved
her with a human love that reflected God’s divine love
for Israel.
He sought her
out again at the slave-market. Seeing the disheveled figure
sitting with downcast eyes, he felt something more than mere
human pity: he discovered he still loved her with the love that
first had led him to her.
Realistically,
Hosea does not force us to believe an impossible marital bliss
suddenly reinstated. “You must live alone for many days,” her
husband told her, not because she must atone for her sins, but
simply because heart-healing takes time. “I will wait for you,”
he says.6 The Good News implicit in the inspired
story is that success came; there was healing. The Bible
is not so cruel as to tell the sad news of a love that must
remain violated for ever. “Love is strong as death,… Many waters
cannot quench love.”7
Is Christ
a captive to His love for His remnant church?
A church is a
“woman,” good or bad, a corporate body of believers. If the
object of Christ’s love plays false to Him, can He simply shrug
His shoulders and replace her with another “object [of]… His
supreme regard”?8 Hosea couldn’t, and neither can
Christ. Offshoots of the Seventh-day Adventist Church
proliferate because of a failure to understand this divine
mystery of love. They assume that Christ’s outrage at her
infidelity prompts Him to choose another to take her place.9
But this can never be!
It may be hard
for us to picture a grieving husband who not only loves his
faithless wife but, greater still, also has the wisdom to “save”
her. Such was Hosea; and such is Christ. Not only a “husband” to
her, He is also “the Saviour of the body.”10 The glad
news is that Hosea actually redeemed Gomer to a new life of
purity and fidelity, and we are entitled to see them walking
off-stage hand in hand in a love that is fulfilled, secure at
last in each other’s fidelity. We can be sure that the Lord
would not withhold from Hosea the vindication of his earthly
love which was so prophetic of His at-last-vindicated divine
love.
Gomer returned
to Hosea “trembling, submissive,” repentant, rejoicing the heart
of the one who had loved her all along, as surely as Israel was
to return at last to the Lord. Let all listen who may doubt that
a husband’s love can win over a wife’s infidelity!
Jeremiah
provides an insight that there was a reciprocal love on Israel’s
part which made God’s pain so real. Sympathizing with God, Hosea
could have remembered Gomer’s once-sweet devotion: “I remember
the unfailing devotion of your youth, the love of your bridal
days, when you followed me in the wilderness…. Israel then was
holy to the Lord.” “She will answer as in her youth, when she
came up out of Egypt.”11
His “Great
Disappointment” – 1888
In her early
days in the “wilderness,” Israel was devoted to the Lord;
and in the early days of the Seventh-day Adventist Church there
was also a sweet devotion on “our” part to the Lord who had led
“us” through the “wilderness” of the Great Disappointment of
1844 and in later years vouchsafed to “us” the proofs of His
electing love. It was exciting. The healing of our Great
Disappointment was delicious because fellowship with the Lord
grew deeper in our understanding of the sanctuary message and
“the blessed hope” it gave us. Then came His “Great
Disappointment” – 1888. We have yet to appreciate the pain He
felt, and does feel. “The disappointment of Christ is beyond
description.”12
Encouragement for tired, perplexed Seventh-day Adventists
The prophecy
implicit in Hosea has to be Good News for a remnant church that
a century later is enmeshed in a vast worldwide lethargy, torn
with dissension, suspicion, and offshoots. As surely as Gomer at
last responded to Hosea’s undying love, so surely will the
corporate church respond at last to Christ’s undying agape.
Christ gave Himself in death for this church; His sacrifice
cannot prove a failure; a repentant humanity cannot remain more
faithless to Him than was the repentant heroine of the Book of
Hosea to her earthly husband; God has faith in us that must not
prove futile.
How can we let
Hosea be more successful than Christ if Christ risked everything
in His sacrifice. Unless His church does overcome at last in
order to become His repentant and faithful Bride, His sacrifice
will be in vain. The reasons for hope are apparent:
1.
Seventh-day Adventist doctrine gives a new dimension to this
crisis. We do not accept the pagan-papal doctrine of natural
immortality. We believe the righteous do not go to heaven at
death, but wait until the resurrection. But that cannot take
place until Christ Himself returns in glory; and He cannot
return until His people are ready, otherwise they would be
“destroy[ed] with the brightness of His coming.”13
The antitypical crisis foreshadowed in Hosea sets everything in
suspense. The success of the entire plan of salvation must
therefore depend upon its final hour – Laodicea’s repentance.
The alternative? Accept “Babylon’s” false doctrine that sends
all the “saved” to heaven at death.
2. Gomer’s
repentance foretells Laodicea’s. Christ “shall see the
travail of His soul and be satisfied.”14 “The church
may appear as about to fall, but it does not fall. It remains,
while the sinners in Zion will be sifted out – the chaff
separated from the precious wheat. This is a terrible ordeal,
but nevertheless it must take place.” “They will look on Me whom
they have pierced; they will mourn for Him.” There will be a
response from “the house of David, and… the inhabitants of
Jerusalem.”15 It’s a sin for discouraged Adventists
not to believe the Good News in Hosea!
3. Speaking
through Hosea, the Lord assures faithless Israel of a happy
reunion: “They will return to the Lord their God, and to the
Messiah, their King, and they shall come trembling, submissive
to the Lord and to his blessings, in the
end times.”16 Since agape is a love that
creates value in its object, not dependent on its good
qualities, it will create repentance within the church where
self-centered fear or hope of reward have failed.
4. Although
Israel’s infidelity was atrocious, God’s grace to her was
greater: “The Lord has filed a lawsuit against you.… Don’t
point your finger at someone else, and try to pass the blame to
him! Look, priest, I am pointing my finger at you.… My
people are destroyed because they don’t know me, and it is all
your fault, you priests.… O Ephraim and Judah, what shall I do
with you? For your [conjugal] love vanishes like morning clouds,
and disappears like dew.… I don’t want your sacrifices – I want
your love; I don’t want your offerings – I want you to know me.…
You refused my [husbandly] love.… I will cure you of idolatry
and faithlessness.”17
5. Gomer
represents the remnant church. Of all the woman of ancient
Israel, surely she, sitting in the slave market “miserable,
poor, blind, and naked,” must have been the most pathetic. In
filling out the story, Scripture hints that Hosea had come from
a “princely” family.18 If so, he must have given her
“fine linen, and covered [her] with silk” as the Lord cared for
Israel, and “decked her with ornaments and … put bracelets upon
[her] hands, and a chain on [her] neck.”19 Yet now
she sits on center stage in rags. Not an earring left.
6. Again, Hosea
is prophetic of Laodicea’s poverty. What a contrast with
what “the third angel’s message in verity” should have meant to
our world at large, long before now! What the Lord intended was
that the Seventh-day Adventist message should have lightened the
earth with the glory of the everlasting Good News gospel, the
magnificent fruition of the dreams of all the ancient prophets.
In the 1888 message of Christ’s righteousness were those “fine
clothes” and “ornaments” of truth that would have sparkled in
gospel “glory.”20 But that most precious message was
resisted and in a great degree was “kept away from our own
people” and “from the world,” as Gomer despised the gifts her
husband gave her.21
7. And not only
have we suffered a tragic loss, we have grieved the heart of
Christ. Hosea sweeps back the curtain to reveal what was
hidden from us – His pain. We treated Him despitefully as the
Jews treated Him, and as Gomer (in type) treated Hosea. We
“insulted” the Holy Spirit. “The course pursued at Mineappolis
was cruelty to the Spirit of God.”22 And Jesus, being
still human as well as divine, intensely feels that “cruelty.”
Yet He is to become the wedded Husband to His corporate church!
Hosea has
injected a new note into prophetic consciousness.
The sin of Israel
was more than disobedience to the law. It was the profound
sin of heart-alienated, spiritual adultery. There was a
mysterious forsaking of love itself, a hard-hearted cruelty to
the Divine Spouse, a flippant unconcern for Hid pain, a callous
breaking of His heart. Such is also the dark hue of
Laodicea’s sin, a trifling with His total heart-devotion
that led Him to His cross. In Hosea’s day, their sin was
Baal-worship; in ours, says Ellen White, “The prejudicies and
opinions that prevailed at Mineappolis are not dead by any
means.… Baal, Baal, is the choice. The religion of many among us
will be the religion of apostate Israel.”23
Baal-worship is the worship of self, disguised as the worship of
Christ – the most subtle and deadly infidelity there is, so
insidious, and so widespread in the corporate body.
So far, 150 years
have passed since the sweet “espousal” of our denominational
girlhood. Yes, there was love for Jesus! It was
delightful.24 But we have repeated Israel’s
alienation. We can’t understand the crudity of their idol
worship. But it mirrors our own worldly self-devotion, an
inability to feel for the pain that Christ feels. Gomer can
flirt with her lovers while her anguished husband watches
helplessly. She has no feeling for him, no inner sense or horror
at “what-am-I-doing?”
What
can cause such infidelity?
She was married to
the only man who had ever truly loved her, and who had ever
awakened in her heart a true love itself. In the corporate
bride-to-be of Christ, that sin must be greater than even
Lucifer’s. To turn her back on the true love of a faithful Lover
whom once she loved, is there not a tragic poignancy
involved? In 6000 years the Lord has had no problem as serious
as His with Laodicea today.
But a change of
heart is possible, and in the light of Hosea, it is certain. A
much more abounding grace must be seen in the light of the
cleansing of the sanctuary. The Good News is that the coming of
Christ is contingent on that repentance. “Let us be glad and
rejoice and give Him glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has
come, and His wife has made herself ready.”25
Some have concluded
from the painful facts of our past and current history that the
Lord has cast off this denominated, organized church.
But they forget (or
have they never understood?) the kind of love portrayed in the
Book of Hosea
___________
1) Revelation 3:20 is a direct
quotation from the Septuagint (LXX) rendering of Song of Solomon
5:2;
2) Hosea 1:2, Living Bible
(LB);
3) Commentators divide into three
interpretations: (a) Gomer was a known prostitute when Hosea
married her; (b) the entire story is only imaginary; (c) the
view we take here;
4) Hosea 3:1, LB;
5) James 1:14, 15;
6) Hosea 3:2, LB;
7) Song of Solomon 8:6, 7, (NEB);
8) Cf. TM 49;
9) Before we blame the offshoots
and “independent ministries,” we must remember that “we” have
programmed them to a separation-mentality. We have “in a great
degree” kept from the world church the knowledge of agape-love
inherent in the 1888 message and the delay in the “wedding”
occasioned by the 1888 unbelief. In a blithe and carefree way we
have “insulted” the Holy Spirit and have not communicated to the
church the pain it has caused Christ. Thus an egocentric mindset
has permeated the church;
10) Eph. 5:23;
11) Jer. 2:2; Hos. 2:15, NEB;
12) Review and Herald, Dec.
15, 1904;
13) 2 Thess. 2:8; Heb. 12:29;
14) Isa. 53:12;
15) UL 356; Zech. 12:10—13:1;
16) Hosea 4:5; LB;
17) ¤:1-6; 14:4, LB;
18) Cf. Hosea 1:1; 1 Chron. 5:6;
“Beeri” may have been “Beerah,” a “prince.”
19) Ezek. 16:10; Hos. 2:13;
20) See TM 63—69, what might have
been;
21) 1 SM 234, 235;
22) TM 393; MS. 13, 1889;
23) Hosea 2:8, 13, 17; TM, pp. 467,
468;
24) 1 T and EW are evidence enough;
25) Rev. 19:7.
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