Back to the Basics:A Living Knowledge of God

 September 20 2026

Hosea 6:1-7

         One of the things that caught me off guard this year was that my oldest brother, George, had his fiftieth class reunion. Since I am three years younger than he is I know that it won’t be too long until I am celebrating my fiftieth year of out of school. What amazes me most about being out of school this long is that I can remember the teachers I had far more than what they taught me. Doesn’t it surprise you that after taking all of the notes we were told to write down and of course, taking all of the quizzes and tests that we had to study for, that after being out of school for a number of years we do not know much of what we supposedly had learned. I for one can no longer tell you the anatomy of the frog we dissected or the chemicals that make up the periodic table. The only thing I do remember though is a little bit of what I was taught in all of those fun English courses I sat through. The reason why I can remember what I learned about good sentence structure and the ins and outs of creative writing is that I still write a three thousand word paper called a sermon every week. In this weekly exercise of writing a paper what I have learned is that the only way to keep what we have learned, what we can actually say we know, is to allow what we know to become part of our life. If what we know doesn’t become part of our life then it will no longer be known by us. The truth is that we have to use what we know or we will lose what we know.

         Now this important idea that if we don’t use what we know we will lose what we know, is very helpful in understanding just what us the underlying cause of the problems facing the people of God in the days of the prophet Hosea. In the fourth chapter of Hosea, God tells his prophet something rather interesting. God tells Hosea that when he surveys his people what he discovers is that there is no truth, and no loyal love between his people. All God finds is deception, murder, stealing and adultery. God finds that his people break forth in violence so that bloodshed follows bloodshed, a tell-tale sign that his people are quick to seek vengeance against those who wrong them. Now if God were to tell you such a report, just what might be your reason why life among the so called people of God is such a mess? Well, the reason why things are so off kilter among the people of God is this: there is no knowledge of God anywhere to be found in the very land given to them by God. As I read this I found this to be a rather profound conclusion. I mean, God is speaking about people who take great pride in the fact that they alone among all the nations are the ones who supposedly know who the one true God is. The very land where they lived is a gift that this God had promised to their ancestors, that is the whole reason why their nation even existed. Yet, in spite of their long history with this God, and even though they worshipped this God faithfully for thousands of years, God nonetheless tells them that they do not know him. I would think that when the people of Israel heard this accusation they would have been shocked. They would have wanted to know just why God had come to such a conclusion, and God would have told them that the way they lived was proof that they had forgotten that they knew God. You see, they did not take what they knew about God and made that knowledge come alive in their life. When the people of God did not use what they knew about God then they lost what they knew about God, and their everyday life proved this to be true. 

         You see, the people of Israel, were much like us, in that they too understood the basics about the God who desired to be in a covenant relationship with him. These basics as we have learned are first, that God loves us. Everything depends on this basic building block. The second basic idea about God is that he communicates with us. Through the final word God speaks to us from the cross we are to know the truth that we are the beloved of God. God will always faithfully love us, mo matter what, for this is the truth of the cross. Yet, we all fail to return this same faithful love back to God. All of us fail to hit the target of God’s glorious love. So another basic idea that we know about God is that he covers over our failures with his faithful love, forgiving us through the same costly love of the cross. 

         Today then we are going to look at another basic idea about our relationship with God which is the importance of knowing God. God speaks about what he wants us to know about him is found in the sixth verse of the sixth chapter of Hosea, which reads: For I delight in loyal love, a stand-fast love rather than sacrifice, and the knowledge of God rather in burnt offerings. If we look at the context of this verse, we learn in the fourth chapter that the priests in the Temple were encouraging people to offer up sin offerings, but not because in doing so the people will be reconciled to God. No the priests just encouraged the required sacrifices for sin all so they could have more to eat. So the guilty people were never taught by the priests that by offering this sacrifice demanded by God they could come to know the faithfulness of God to forgive their sin. 

This incident with the priest shows how people can abuse the forgiveness of God. A wrong understanding of how the grace of God’s faithfulness covers over our sin, had to be corrected by Paul as found at the beginning of the sixth chapter of Romans. There Paul addresses the question that hangs in the air, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace might increase?” What Paul is getting at is the temptation people have to manipulate God’s goodness for their own ends. They see the faithfulness of God as their easy out anytime they fail at loving others. They begin to see their relationship with God as being nothing more than a way to manage their sin so that it doesn’t get out of control. So life for some people becomes just an endless cycle of failing, asking for forgiveness, failing again, and asking for forgiveness again, over and over again until the end of your life. What happens when life is nothing is nothing more than sin-management, is that instead of controlling sin, people begin to do ever greater acts of evil because if God can forgive the small acts of failure it should follow that he will forgive even the most blatant acts of disobedience.

         You see, the real problem with a life of merely managing one’s sin is that such a life ignores the love of God upon which their forgiveness is founded. God never initiated a relationship with us because of anything that we bring into this relationship. The truth is that all that can be said about us is that we fail to meet the minimum requirement of this relationship which is that we will be as faithful to love God as he has been faithful in loving us. The only reason why we have any hope of a relationship with the God who created us is that he loves us. This love of God is a love which wants the very best for us, something we are sure of when we come to know God. Now if God truly does desire the very best for us then it also make sense that living a life of continual failure is hardly what anyone could call the very best life one could live. So what God is doing by securing our side of the relationship we have with him through covering our failures by his faithfulness, is something more than merely forgiving our sin. No, what God in his love is doing is giving us the best life possible. The very best explanation of what God gives us in our relationship with him is found at the end of the fourth chapter of the first letter of John. Listen close to what John writes and see how it ties in with knowing God: We have come to know and have believed the love which God has in us. God is love and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this love has reached its goal in our lives so that we have confidence in the day of judgment because as Jesus is so are we. There is no fear in love; but the love which has reached its goal in us casts out fear because fear involves punishment and the one who fears is one in whom God’s love has not reached its goal.” What we discover in this passage is that the love which God gives to each of us has a purpose, a goal which it is attempting to reach. That goal of the love of God is that we who have experienced this love might live a life free from fear. When it is said that God desires the very best for those he loves what this is saying is that God desires that we live a life without fear. It doesn’t take much thought to understand just how good such a life would be, does it?

         You see, what is not understood about living a life dominated by fear is that such a life is not one that is free; no, a life controlled by fear is a life of slavery. In the second chapter of Hebrews, the author tells us that Jesus shared in our flesh and blood life, so that by his death, Jesus might destroy the one who holds the power of death, the one called the devil, and set free all those who throughout their life had been held in slavery by their fear of death. Now how this affects those who think that all the forgiveness of God is for is just to have a way to manage their sins, is found once again in the first letter of John, only this time in the third chapter where John writes, “The one who continues to make a practice of sinning is of the devil because the devil has sinned from the beginning. The Son of God, Jesus, appeared for this purpose, so that he might destroy the works of the devil.” Yes, Jesus came to be the means for the forgiveness of our sins through his death upon the cross. But if this is all you know about Jesus, the perfect Son of God, then you do not know all there is to know about Jesus. The love of God demonstrated by Jesus there upon the cross is the very power that throws out of our lives the fear that holds us captive. If we do not know this truth about the love of God then we are being controlled not by God and his love but rather by the evil one who causes us to fail God because of the fear within us.

         So when we hear God tell us in the sixth chapter of Hosea that he delights in loving kindness rather than sacrifice and in our knowledge of Him rather than burnt offering, what we are to know is that we must go further than just seeking the forgiveness of our sins, as portrayed here in the sacrifices and offerings. We must come to know God and his love for us through his faithfulness to us. When we know of the overwhelming love which God lavishes on us, we are to no longer find fear dominating our lives. This is what Hosea tells us in the first few verses of the sixth chapter, “ Come, let us return to God. For he has torn us, but he will heal us. He has struck us, but he will bandage us. He will make us alive after two days. He will raise us up on the third day that we might live with him. So let us know, let us pursue to know, God.” Hosea knows that we deserve judgment, this being torn by God, and being struck down by God, this is just the honest truth about our sin. Yet this is not all of the truth about our sin because Hosea goes on to tell us that the judgment of God is never the last word of God. No, God goes on to speak of the triumph of the mercy of God, for in his mercy we are bandaged and we find healing. Beyond the judgment, we are found alive, raised up on the third day to live with God. So if we know this about God, then why is fear still dominating our life? This is why we must keep on knowing God, experiencing his love for us, desiring an experience of his love as our most desperate longing. 

         Now the way that we keep from losing what we know about God is that we keep on using what we know about God in our everyday life. Our life is to demonstrate that we do in fact know something about God. When we allow sin to define our life just as the people of God do in the days of Hosea, then God will be right to conclude that we too do not know him. No, if we know that God desires the very best life for each one if us, then we will also know that the purpose of the love shown to us upon the cross is to cleanse our life of fear. When fear no longer holds us captive then the devil no longer will dictate how we live. We will at last be people who can bring delight to the God who loves us because we faithfully will be there for others in need, we will be those who are known for their abundant mercy given to all.

         What is fascinating about this sixth verse of the sixth chapter of Hosea, is that this verse was one of Jesus’ favorite pieces of scriptures. The first time Jesus is heard quoting this verse is in the ninth chapter of Matthew, when he was found to be eating and drinking with tax collectors and sinners. This resulted in Jesus receiving some sharp criticism from the uptight, upright of his day. Jesus responds to this criticism by reminding these Pharisees about what is written in the sixth chapter of Hosea, that God desires mercy not sacrifice, this is why Jesus came not to seek the righteous but instead Jesus came for the sinners, those in need of mercy. Yet the Pharisees were not done in their criticizing Jesus because one Sabbath day they complained that the disciples were picking and eating grain. And once again, Jesus reminds them of the sixth chapter of Hosea, that God desires mercy not sacrifice. If they would have understood what was written in their scriptures they would have been merciful to his disciples who were hungry and in need of food.

         So we should never be surprised by the demand of God that as his people we must be merciful above all else. Yet, while we may be well aware that mercy must be the way we operate in the world, what proves more difficult is the how far we are called to be merciful to those around us. In the eighteenth chapter of Matthew, Peter wants to know just where are we to draw the line in being merciful to someone. Would it be ok, Jesus, to forgive someone, say, seven times? To which Jesus replies, “No, not seven times but seventy times seven.” This is a number so large that most people will eventually lose count for that is the point, that the mercy we give should not be be counted. To help Peter understand the necessity of offering mercy always and forever, Jesus tells him a story of a king who one day wished to settle his accounts with his slaves. The king came across one slave who owed the king a million dollars. The slave didn’t have any means to come up with this kind of cash, so the king ordered the slave be sold along with his wife and children and all of his possessions so that some repayment could be made. Well, the slave upon hearing this, fell before the king and pleaded with the king to have patience with him, so that in time he could pay off his debt. The king felt great love for this man, so he released this slave, forgiving him of all his debt. Well, upon his release, this slave went and found a former slave who owed him twenty bucks. He seized this man who owed him, choking him and demanding payment.This man pleaded with him to be patient and he would in time repay all he owed. But he was offered no mercy but was instead thrown into prison. Well, when the king heard of what his former slave had done, he had this man brought before him. The king said, “You wicked slave! I forgave your debt but now you refuse to offer mercy to one who owes you money?” You shall remain in prison until you pay back all that you owe me. Jesus ends this story by saying, “My Father will do the same to all who do not show mercy and forgive one another from their hearts.” You see, God expects that if we know mercy, then we will show mercy. So let us use what we know about God so that we never lose what we know about God! Amen!

Back to The Basics: An Unfailing Security

 September 13 2026

Hosea 3

         With the arrival of fall not too far away, it won’t be long until we will be seeing people setting up their fake deer in their backyards or for others not so fancy, a bale of hay with a bullseye on it. Those who hunt deer know that they have to get out their weapon of choice, their compound bow, crossbow or shotgun and begin to sight it in. Every good deer hunter knows that they can’t expect to head for the woods and hope that everything is just going to work like it should. No, the ones who are successful know that they have to practice a little to see if there are any issues with sighting their weapon in on the target. Now I have never got into deer hunting but my Dad and many of my cousins have all hunted deer and have been successful at bringing home some great bucks. Now when they tell their stories after their day of hunting, one thing you rarely hear these hunters say is that the reason they failed to bring home a home a deer was the fault of the deer that they were hunting. All good deer hunters know that their success or failure lies in their own abilities and readiness and not in finding a deer that will stand still long enough for them to take them down.

         Well, what might surprise readers of the Bible is that this image of aiming a weapon and using it to hit a target, just like deer hunters do, is found in many places throughout the scripture. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that what is written of in scripture is an image of an archer shooting off an arrow and missing their target. This is the interesting picture behind the very common idea of sinning. When the writers of the Bible wanted to define just what is meant when a person sins, they decided to use this very common image of a person who takes his bow, and sets his arrow off in the direction of a target and ends up missing that target all together. Now this gives us an interesting way to wrap our minds around what we mean when we say that we all sin. Take for example the well known verse from the third chapter of Romans. If we put this verse in its original meaning it would read, “For all people have aimed at the target of God’s glory and every single one them have fallen short of hitting that target.” So what we to know about ourselves is that we are a bunch of terrible hunters when it comes to trying to hit the target God desires us to hit, the target being his glory.

         Well, it might surprise people that they are even to supposed to be hitting a target, and that the target that they are to hit is something called God’s glory. To know what we are to be aiming at we first have to know what is meant by the glory of God. Well, in the twelfth and thirteenth chapters of the gospel of John, Jesus tells us that the glory of God is found at the cross. So this helps us understand that when we speak about God pledging his love to us, the love communicated to us at the cross, this faithful love is the very glory of God. As we have studied Hosea we learned the truth that we are indeed the beloved of God. We know that this is our true identity because of the truth communicated to us at the cross. There, Jesus the perfect Son of God, gave his life for us as the greatest act of love. It is at the cross where God pledged himself to us in the truth of his unfailing love, a love which is righteous and just, a love that stands with us, and a love which is merciful to us. This is why the cross, with all of its awful ugliness is still to be known to us at the place where the glory of God is most clearly seen by us.

         So when we are told by Paul that all of us are like archers who continually miss when we shoot at the target of God’s glory, what this means is that we fail miserably to love God faithfully with the same faithful love that he always demonstrates to us. You see, the image of God that we find in the second chapter of Hosea is one of a man who betroths himself to his bride-to be. This image helps us to understand that when God enters into a covenant relationship with us, our relationship is much like a covenant relationship of marriage. As in marriage, our relationship with God begins with a promise from God to be faithful to love us always. As we know all too well, relationships have their beginning in trust, for if the two people within a relationship do not trust each other then there is not much hope of there being any relationship at all. God’s announcement to be always true in his love to us is backed up through the payment of his costly love shown at the cross.

         This pledge of God to be true in loving us always means that now we can  know ourselves as forever being the beloved of God. Yet what is not heard as the second chapter of Hosea closes is a declaration by the people of God that they will be betrothed to God, pledging to faithfully love God at all times, no matter what. No, as we enter the third chapter of Hosea such a pledge is strangely absent. Instead our attention is once again on Hosea and the marriage that God told him to enter into with a prostitute, a woman named Gomer. As we remember from the first chapter of Hosea, God told Hosea to do such a disgraceful act in order to demonstrate to his people, the people of Israel, the terrible shape of their covenant relationship with him. They were like the woman Hosea married because they had many lovers, false gods, which they worshipped. Yet in spite of their chasing after many other false gods, the one true living God desired to be in a covenant relationship with his people. In the third chapter then we again pick up the story and Hosea and his marriage to Gomer. What we discover is that Gomer has done the unthinkable act of committing adultery. We can only imagine how devastated Hosea must have been. He had gone and taken Gomer out of a life of prostitution, and he married her and they had three children together. Yet in spite of his great love for her, she nonetheless, goes and finds another man to love. Hosea would be justified at this point to divorce Gomer, yet once again, God speaks to Hosea, and tells him to once again to bring her back into his home. If the people around him whispered about his state of mind when Hosea first married Gomer, they must have really shook their heads in disbelief when Hosea found Gomer at her lover’s house and took her by the hand and once again brought her to live with him. What the people of God did not realize though is that this is exactly the sense of shame that they should have had about their relationship with God  for they were the ones who had been unfaithful in their relationship with him. I mean, could they not understand that as his people, they were doing the very same act with God that Gomer had done to Hosea? God had pledged himself to faithfully love his people always so that they would forever know themselves as being the beloved of God, and their response to this pledge of love was that they went and found another lover to share their life with. 

         Now what Hosea does next is also rather unthinkable for we are told that he paid fifteen shekels of silver and a measure of barley for Gomer. What we are to know about this gift is that this was the bride price that would have been paid by the groom-to be when he asked the father of the bride-to be for his daughter. What God wants us to understand is that he is willing to pay the cost involved in loving his people not just when he enters into a relationship with them but God is also willing to pay the costly price of his love when his people desired to return to him after being unfaithful to him. This gift of God’s love given to his people when they break their covenant relationship with him is the gift that is implied in the for-gifting of God. When we miss the target of loving God with the same faithful love which he first demonstrated to us, God does not abandon us as he is well justified to do. No, when we fail in our love of God we find that God begins again with us by offering us the same gift as when we first began, the gift of his costly love for us.

         Now what we are to learn through God’s forgiving us when we miss the mark is that our security is found only here in God’s willingness to forgive us for our failure, in his offering to us his costly gift of love when we fail to faithfully love him. It is God’s willingness to pay the price for our failures that gives us the space to own up to those failures. When we accept that we are people who miss the mark of of the glory of God and accept the forgiveness of this sin, then we have the assurance that our failures do not have to be fatal. 

         When we rightly understand the forgiveness of God then we are set free to be honest about ourselves before him. One of the biggest detriments to receiving the forgiveness God offers to us when we fail him is that instead of being honest about our failure to faithfully love God, we instead blame someone else for our own refusal to love. This blaming of others is a crucial part of what the church calls original sin. As we may remember, when God confronted Adam and Eve when they ate of the fruit that was forbidden for them to eat, both of them refused to own up to their own wrongdoing. When God asked Adam if he had eaten from the tree that God had commanded him not to eat, Adam replied, ‘The woman that you gave me to be with, she gave to me from the tree and I ate.” The simple answer Adam was supposed to give was, “Yes, God I did eat from the tree”. Instead, Adam implied that God was somewhat at fault because God had given Eve to Adam, and it was this Eve who had given the fruit to him. Eve, in all fairness faired no better in telling the truth of her failure, for she replied to God, “The serpent deceived me and I ate.” What Eve could not own up to is that she had listened to the voice of another who deceived her instead of listening first and always to God. It was not that the serpent had spoken to her but rather that Eve had listened to his voice and obeyed that voice, this was the problem. Yet what was lost in Adam and Eve playing the blame game was that they never learned that God was willing to forgive their failure. They could not know the faithfulness of God that is found in his forgiveness simply because they refused to own up to the fact that they had failed to faithfully love God. If we put it in terms of missing the mark, we might say that the reason we fail to hit the mark is always squarely on us and our failure can never can be blamed on the target. We must learn to own our failures before God so that when we fail to love one another we never blame our failure to love on the person we are supposed to love . The real reason why we fail to love anyone else, is always found in the fact that we are people who cannot faithfully hit the target of the glory of God, which is his faithful love witnessed at the cross. 

God is always willing to forgive our failure but only if we are willing to confess that we have failed. As we hear in the first chapter of the first letter of John, “If we say we have never missed the mark, we are just fooling ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess when we have missed the mark, when we have failed to love as God first loved us, then God is faithful and just to forgive us all of our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned we make God out to be a liar.” The danger of playing the blame game is that we will not be willing to confess our failure to love, and in doing so we will never learn the security that is found in the willingness of God to forgive us anytime we admit that we have failed.  

         So as we consider the basic building blocks of being in a relationship with God, we began first with the fact that God loves us. Everything else about our relationship builds on this foundational base. The second basic building block is that God speaks to us, or better we might say, that God communicates to us. God communicates to us so that we might know that what he loves most is us. What is on the mind of God is his desire to do the very best for each and every person. This is why we can know the truth about ourselves as being that we are the beloved of God. It was on the cross that God pledged to be faithful to love us with this costly love that he has for all people. There on the cross we witnessed how Jesus the innocent Son of God, stood with all innocent victims. Jesus suffers with all of them in their suffering which is the very definition of mercy. Yet Jesus also stood with all those who caused his suffering, setting aside the righteous demands of justice, and instead offering even these who desired his death the very mercy of God when he cried out, “Father forgive them for they know no what they do”. So while it is true that God calls us his beloved, it is also true that we are those who fail miserably in being faithful in responding to this love of God with a love of our own. So another basic building block is that we are people who depend on God’s forgiveness for we need God’s faithfulness to cover our failures . 

Our failure to faithfully love God is found in the fact that we are prone to chase after other love interests just like Hosea’s wife Gomer had done. These other love interests are the subject of a story found in the eighteenth chapter of Luke. There we read of how a ruler came to Jesus and asked him, “Good teacher, just what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus replies, “Why do you call me good, for no one is good but God alone.” Jesus then asked this man if he knew the commandments and the man stated that he had kept them from his youth. When Jesus heard this, he said to this man, “There is one thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and give it all to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven, and come and follow me.” When this man heard this he became very sad for he was extremely rich. In this story we find that one of the main ways people attempt to be secure in this world is through power and riches. People know that if they can control the actions of the people around them, the definition of power, and if they can accumulate enough worldly wealth to eliminate any hardship, then they can convince themselves that they have achieved some sense of security. This is what we see here in the figure of this rich, ruler who came to Jesus. Yet, it does not take much thinking to realize that such a security dissolves right at the moment of death. So this rich, ruler came to Jesus to find an eternal security he sensed was missing from his life.  What Jesus tried to make this man understand is that through his finding his security through power and wealth, he had never come to know that God alone is good, as found when Jesus corrected him. Yes, this man knew the commandments of God but what he did not know is the good God who gave him those commandments.Since he had never entered into a relationship with the God who pledges to faithfully love his people always, he could not know of the security found when this same faithful love covered over his failure to respond with a faithful love of his own. The only solution was for Jesus to tell this man to rid himself of any security otherwise than the goodness of God and his faithful love which is always willing to forgive our failures..This man needed to experience the ever faithful love of God and to discover that when he failed to faithfully love God that God was willing to forgive him if he was willing to confess his failure. In this way, this man could realize that the treasure of heaven, the costly love God, is the true riches we are to pursue. Yet, tragically this man went away unable to leave his other loves behind which serves as a warning for us all. I pray that when we are faced with finding a true security that we will chose the forgiveness of God, now and always. To God be the glory! Amen!                   

         

 

Back to the Basics: Being Known as the Beloved of God

 September 6 2026

Hosea 2 

         Can we all agree that the rapid rise of the use of artificial intelligence has really begun to impact our every day life? I mean, just the other day, an ad popped up on my social media feed, and I watched it but didn’t pay much attention to it. Well, when it got to the end, a little disclaimer popped up and said that the people in the ad were all generated by Artificial Intelligence. Now I was a little shocked because I could not see anything about the people in the ad that would give me any clue that they were not indeed real live people. I thought that if we can be deceived so easily in the early days of this rather new technology, how in the world will we be able in the future to figure out just what is the truth and what is merely an illusion? Already on social media it is a challenge to tell what statements are the truth and which statements are falsehoods. We can only imagine how very difficult it will become to figure out just what is true when artificial intelligence begins to create a world of made of images to add to the confusion.

Well it goes without saying that one of the basic concerns we have as people is to know just what is the truth. Everyone knows how dangerous it can be for someone to tell a lie and to have that lie be spread around until it becomes so well known that no one remembers that it is in fact not the truth. For us who follow Jesus, the truth is the very sacred ground of who we are. The gospel of John is filled with so many different well known sayings of Jesus concerning the importance of the truth. How can we forget what Jesus teaches us in the eighth chapter of John, where he states that if we know the truth, the truth will set us free? Or what Jesus says at the beginning of the fourteenth chapter of John, where Jesus states clearly that he is the way, the truth and the life. And when Jesus stood before the judgment seat of Pontius Pilate, Jesus tells Pilate that the very reason why he came into the world was to bear witness to the truth. Pilate replies to this by asking Jesus, “What is truth?”

So when we understand that knowing the truth is a very basic part of being in a relationship with God, we should not be surprised that here in the second chapter of Hosea, we are confronted by the truth. Now as important as it is for us to know the truth, whenever someone tells us that they know the truth about us, such a statement can cause us to be rather uneasy. I mean, do we really want the whole world to know the whole, unvarnished truth about who we are? Yet, the scripture that we read from Hosea today, we do hear a statement about the truth of who we are, at least in relationship to God. In the nineteenth verse of the second chapter of Hosea, we hear God tell his people that he will betroth himself to us forever. The word, “troth”, as in the word we hear spoken here, “betroth”, comes from the same roots as the word we know as, “truth”. So when God says to us that he will betroth himself to us, this means that God has pledged himself to be true to us, for all time.

Now, what is also interesting about this statement of God is that, as we heard last week, God through Hosea, tells his people that he has entered into a covenant with his people which is to be understood as being much like a marriage. Yet, as most of us know, when a person in olden days became betrothed to another, this was equivalent to our modern understanding of a man and woman becoming engaged. So when a man and a woman love each other and decide to marry, they first enter into a time, when, just like what God speaks to us, they pledge to be true to each other. It just makes sense that a relationship marked by commitment such as marriage is supposed to be, must have its beginnings in the truth. Without a pledge to be true to one another there can be little hope of that either person will trust each other, and without trust there simply cannot be a relationship at all. 

What God is doing here in the second chapter of Hosea, is reminding his people that the beginning of their relationship together was God pledging himself to be true to them. Now one more aspect about this time when a couple becomes betrothed to one another is that in Biblical times, the man was to offer the father of his betrothed, an agreed upon financial gift. It may seem to be a little odd to us to do such a thing but at least the bride-to-be knew that she was valued by the one who loved her. Well, we need to understand that a gift was expected to be given whenever a man betrothed himself to a woman, so that we understand what God declares when he betroths himself to us. God does not give a financial sum in order to enter into a relationship with us but instead he offers something far more valuable. God tells us that he pledges himself in the truth of his righteousness and in justice, in his stand-fast love, and his mercy. Now if we remember what we have previously learned, what God speaks to us here builds upon the basic building block of our relationship to him which is that God loves us. What God is doing in pledging himself in truth to us is that he is saying that here is the truth about his love. The truth is that the love of God is righteous and just. The justice and righteousness of God is based on the equal treatment for all people. In other words, God does not play favorites. The way God loves one is the very same way that God loves all. And the way of this love by which God loves is first that God stands fast with us. This means that we might walk out on God but God will never walk out on us for his love is an enduring love. Then to these qualities, God goes on to say to us that his love is merciful. So we must define just what do we mean by mercy? Well,  perhaps mercy is best described as being when ones hearts is distressed at the distress of another. When one’s heart suffers an account of another persons suffering then they are to be moved to make another person’s suffering their own suffering. The best description, of course, is the story Jesus told of the Good Samaritan. The story begins with a man going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. As he was going, this man came upon some robbers who stripped him, and beat him and left him half dead. By chance a priest and a Levite came to him, but they passed by on the other side of the road.  But a Samaritan came to where this half dead man was, and when he saw this man, the Samaritan was moved, and had mercy for the man. The Samaritan went to this man, and he bound up his wounds, pouring on them oil and wine. Then the Samaritan set him on his animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him. The next day he gave the innkeeper two days wages and told him to take care of the man, and if there were any more expenses, he promised to pay them when he returned. 

This is the very same manner is which God has mercy upon us all. God does not stand at a distance when we suffer but instead he enters into our suffering so that our suffering becomes the very suffering of God on our behalf. Such a love from a God who has no good reason to do so, proves difficult for his people to fully comprehend. As we learned last week, another basic understanding of God is that we must know that God speaks to us.Yet, it might be better to say that God communicates to us, because communication, by its own definition, means to bring about a common unity of understanding between two or more people. So, in order for God to communicate to us that the truth of his love is that his love is a love marked by justice and righteousness, as well as being a love that stands with us, and a love defined by mercy, God became one of us, and lived among us, and then died upon the cross. This is the truth, that God took on flesh, and walked this earth as the one we know as Jesus. And there upon the cross, Jesus as the innocent Son of God, demonstrated his mercy by uniting himself forever with all those who suffer at the hands of others. Jesus there communicated that he forever stands with those who have been broken and crushed under the cruelty of this world. It was the body of Jesus which was broken for us. Yet this was not all, because Jesus also continued to stand with those who inflicted their cruelty upon him, standing with all those who cried, “Crucify him, crucify him”. This is why Jesus also asked his Father to forgive them, to set aside his righteous demand for justice. It was the blood of Jesus shed for us. Jesus offered his life to these who desired his death, because mercy demanded that even those who opposed him receive life instead of death. You see, when God spoke of how he pledged himself to his people, to all people, with righteousness and justice, with a love that stands with us, and with mercy, these mere words could never communicate the depth of the cost that such a pledge was to God. These words could never be known in all of the truth that they convey until we stood before the cross and witnessed for ourselves the richness of God’s love for us. When God tells us that he pledges himself to us in faithfulness, it is the faithfulness that we witness at the cross, this is the image of faithfulness which communicates to us the fullness of the love that God has for us.

So the truth of who we are is discovered when we know the truth about God and his love for us. We are to now know ourselves as being the beloved of God, as those whom God has pledged himself to in the truth of his righteousness, his justice, in his love which stands with us, and in his mercy for us. Thus we know that God knows the truth about us, the truth of the depths of our suffering as well as when we are the cause of the suffering of others. God knows all about us and even so, God’s love for us never waivers, it never changes, for the cross remains the final word about the love of God.

Now as we also learned last week, when God initiates, or begins his relationship with us through his pledge of love for us, then all we are called to do is to respond to what God has first done for us. In the first chapter of the book of Romans, Paul writes that when we come to know God, then the right response to his love will be that we do two actions. The first action is that we will adore God. This means that we will love God with a sense of wonder and  respect and devotion, the very definition of worship. Yet this is not all, for we will also respond with an attitude of thankfulness and gratitude. The word that Paul uses to describe the gratefulness we should show to God is a Greek word that has two parts, the first is the word, “good”, and the second means, “a favor granted to us”. So what we acknowledge is that God has granted to us his good favor, the fullness of his love and mercy. This gratefulness is not just for what God has done for us at the cross but for all that God has given to us. As Paul states at the end of the eighth chapter of Romans, “If God did not spare his own Son but delivered him over for us all, how will he not, along with his Son, give us all things?” So, the cross creates in us a heart of gratitude for everything God has given to us.

You see, when we know what God expects when his love has been communicated to us, then we can grasp the depths of the wrongness of the people of Israel. In this second chapter of Hosea, the people of Israel, God’s own people, boast “I will go after my lovers who give me my bread, and my water, mywool and my flax, my oil and my drink.” It isn’t hard to hear the sheer ungratefulness of such a smug statement. The emphasis is all on what she believes is her’s not on what has been given to her. What this tells us is that she no longer knows the truth about the God who loves her, the truth of the that very costly love God desires to communicate to her. As Paul also says in the first chapter of Romans, the truth is suppressed by unrighteousness. The unrighteousness of the people of Israel was that they chased after other lovers, which meant that they worshipped false gods. Paul tells us again from the first chapter of Romans, that the worship of false gods happens when we exchange the truth about God for a lie, when we adore and serve the creature, ourselves, rather than the one who created us. As we hear in the eighth verse of this second chapter of Hosea, God’s people no longer remembered that it was God who had given her the grain, the wine, and the oil. They forgot that it was God who had lavished all of this abundance upon them. They did not even recognize that it was God who had given his people their silver and their gold, the very same silver and gold which they then used in their worship of their false gods. 

In light of his people’s blindness to all that he had done for them, God is justified in acting harshly with his people. Just as God had given to his people all of their abundance, he could just as well, take away those very same gifts. This is what we learn that God intended. In verse nine God tells his that he was going to take back their grain in its time and their wine in its season. God was going to take away their wool and their flax. God had to bring hardship upon his people so that they might learn that their false gods would never be able to rescue them. So in their hardships, the people would find themselves terribly exposed and vulnerable having no one to cry out to save them in their time of need. God also tells his people that he was going to take away all of the feasts and holy days that he had commanded them to observe. The reason why God did so was that these sacred times were given to them so that they could express their thankfulness and gratitude to God for all that he had given to them. Since they now no longer gave God any credit for what they had, what good would such sacred days be to his people? Yet in taking away these sacred days in which the people could praise their God for his providing all that they needed, the people also tragically lost something profoundly important to life, which is the gift of joy. Joy springs from the thankful hearts of those who know the gifts of God as evidence of his never failing love for them. So in their rejection of the love God had for them, God’s people not only began to realize their vulnerability but they had also had lost their source of joy in their life. They were left as worried, anxious people who had to pursue a happiness of their own making, a wearisome life all because they rejected the beautiful love of God.

What was ultimately lost by the people of God was their identity as those who were to know themselves as being the beloved of God. They had followed the ways of the world when they rejected God as king, and desired to be like all of the rest of the nations and have a human figure to rule over them. So they looked to their king for their identity, desiring to be like him, better and greater than all the rest, always having abundance, able to rule over others. In doing so they forgot the truth about themselves which is that their true identity is that they had been created in love by the God who will never cease to love them even if they reject him. This is the truth that Jesus came to witness to, that all people are to know themselves as being the beloved of God. At his baptism, Jesus heard the voice of the Father say to him, “This is my beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” And when Jesus calls us to remember him as we meet around his table, we are to remember him as being the beloved of God because as he was the beloved of God, so are we. So as we rise from the table we go forth knowing whose we are and who we are, for we truly are one who is beloved of God. This is the truth which will keep us from all unrighteousness. Amen!               

Back to the Basics: Begin With the Love of God

 August 30 2026

Hosea 1

         As Jennifer and I witnessed the marriage of our daughter Sarah to her fiancé, Jesse this past weekend, I thought that here was the very best of our human experiences. Here on display was genuine love between two people, so evident in every smile and gesture they gave toward each other. Here too was a commitment to each other as evident in their vows spoken to each other and the ring placed upon their fingers. This signified that their love was an enduring love which would see its way through all off the ups and downs life would throw at them. And here too was joy, the joy of their discovering the one with whom they would share their life with so that now the story of their individual lives would be forever entwined together. This joy overflowed out to all those who shared in this wonderful day resulting in laughter and dancing and the sharing of food and drink in celebration by all those who had witnessed this glorious day. Yet this was not all, because there was there was also this sense of family that was forming as they become bound together as one. They both knew that those who witnessed their ceremony included Sarah’s grandparents who will celebrate their own seventy years of marriage. And out of their marriage came forth the more than forty years of marriage of Jennifer and I. So now Sarah and Jesse have the hope that one day they also might witness the marriage of their children and grandchildren.

         It is when we remember how marriage represents the very best of our human experience that we are struck at how very awful the foundational premise of Hosea really is. Here it is again if you missed it when it was read the first time: When God first spoke through Hosea, God said to Hosea. “Go, take for yourself a wife of harlotry and have children of harlotry….”. So much for a marriage founded on the mutual love of a woman and a man; no, this marriage was an act of obedience to God’s command on the part of Hosea. And the beauty of two people pledging their commitment to each other is immediately called into question when God insists that Hosea seek out one who is known for one thing, their lack of commitment to one man. We must also wonder just how much joy there was at the formation of this union as well. I mean, we can only imagine the reaction of Hosea’s family when they discovered that he was planning on marrying the girl with the worst of reputations. The very girl they knew had brought such sorrow and disgrace upon her own family was now about to do the same to the family of Hosea as well. And yet despite all that we perceive as being terribly wrong about this union, Hosea still never wavered in his obedience to God which seems to be the only silver lining around this very cloudy situation. 

         Now even if this call of Hosea makes all those who read of it rather sick, this book of prophecy has remained the first of the twelve minor prophets for as long as the scriptures have been compiled. We must wonder, just why is it that this book, above every other book of prophecy, is chosen to be the one to set the tone for all the rest? The reason, I believe, is that the book of Hosea is the one which describes the basic issues facing those who desire to believe in God. Many times after Jennifer sits through the hearing of the sermons that I preach, not once but twice, she often will give me her honest opinion about what she has heard. More often than not she will tell me that they are a good enough message but she also seems to end by telling me that what people need more than ever is just the basics. So like many teachers do at the beginning of the school year, I think it might help to go over the basics once again and there is no better place than to start than right here in the book of Hosea. 

         Well, we must begin with this strange command that God gave to Hosea, that he should go and take for himself a wife of harlotry. What in the world is this all about? What we are to know is that in this situation, Hosea is assuming the part of God. Just as marriage is to result in a union between a man and a wife, so too God desires to be united with us, the people that he created to bear his image. So the most basic building block in our relationship with God is that God desires a relationship with us simply because he loves us. God initiates every part of our relationship with us; all we are ever called to do is to respond to what God, in his love, has first done for us. Anytime our relationship with God seems to be in doubt we must go back to square one which is that God loves us. God’s love for us must be certain in our hearts before we can ever move forward in our relationship with him.

         So God in his love makes the first move and like Hosea, God searches for us in order that he might be united with us in a bond of love. Yet, as God commanded Hosea, the one God loves is not one who is known for their love of him, far from it. No, the one God loves is always one known for their unfaithfulness. The people that Hosea was addressing through his prophecy were the people of the nation of Israel. Israel was a nation that God had brought forth by his own actions. It was God who had rescued them from slavery at the hands of the Egyptian pharaohs. It was God who then led them to the land that he had promised to them. God alone had established them as a nation, and he was the one who had given them a perfect law in which they were to be governed by. Even so, the people of Israel became one of the most evil nations on earth. We are left wondering then, just what was the purpose of God singling them out from all of the rest of the people on earth? Well, the reason for God establishing the people of Israel was that they were to be an example for all of humanity. Through watching their relationship with God, all of humanity can realize why entering into a relationship with a God who loves us can be so difficult.

         The difficulty, as the marriage of Hosea points out, is that all of us begin as people who are in love with many other lovers other than God. God tells Hosea that it is the land that is the source of the unfaithfulness of his people. Now, this seems rather odd, doesn’t it? Yet what we must understand that it is the land which was the source of the wealth of the people of Israel. Instead of seeing that the land’s abundance as a blessing from God, his people instead used their abundance to store up worldly wealth which they treasured more than their relationship with God. This is exactly what Jesus warns us about, in the sixth chapter of Matthew. There he tells us to not fall in love with worldly wealth because it is so easily lost. You see, the problem with worldly wealth is that it becomes a false and fickle god which we end up worshipping. This is what the philosopher, Giorgio Agamben observes. He states that money becomes for us a god; it determines value, commands obedience, shapes desire, and organizes social life. What religion is to provide as the supreme source of meaning, authority, discipline and faith can also be performed by capitol and the market. This idea that wealth becomes a god which competes with the one true, living God is one that is proven true by the communal life of the people of Israel. In the eighth chapter of Amos, the prophet describes how the people could hardly wait until the Sabbath was over so that they could once again to sell their wheat. Amos says of them that they had no problem cheating others with a deceptive scales  so that they could buy the poor for money and the needy for a pair of sandals.  Such is the way of those who make money their god.

         Well, we are left wondering just how will the one true living God, take us who are so prone to love the wrong things and make us those who become committed in love to the God who first loved us? The answer, I believe, is found in the names that God requires Hosea to give to his three children. Once again, it is somewhat offensive to our modern sensibilities, that God would command Hosea to give his children strange names in order to speak to the people of Israel. For most of us, the naming of our children is something we have given great thought to. Yet, these names give us valuable insight to the relationship we have with the God who loves us. When Hosea had his first child, God told him to name him Jezreel. This name means, God plants, or sows seeds. After hearing this meaning we are left wondering, what is it that God plants? Well, what scriptures tell us is that God desires to plant his word into our hearts. Here again is another basic building block that goes along with knowing that God loves us. We must know that God speaks to us. As people, we alone among all of the creatures God created have the ability to hear God speak to us. God speaks to us his promises which prove his faithfulness to us. Through our knowing the faithfulness of God we then begin to trust the way he tells is the right way for us to live. At the end of the third chapter of James, we find that the wisdom that results from the word God speaks to us is a life which is pure, peaceable, considerate, submissive, merciful, and good, and faithful. 

         When we know that the word of God is to produce in those who hear it a life marked by mercy and peace toward all people, then when we hear of blood being shed by the house of Jehu, the king of Israel, we know that something is terribly wrong. The answer to what has happened is found in the first book of Samuel, the eighth chapter. There we learn that people of Israel have rejected God as being their king. They desired to be like all the rest of the nations and have a visible human ruler to reign over them.Through Israel being ruled by a king the authority of the word of God was replaced by the authority of an earthly king. Where God rules through the power of love and life, earthly rulers establish their authority through the power of death and violence. Even though God told the people of Israel that they were not to seek revenge upon those who had wronged them, the king of Israel named Jehu refused to obey this word of God. When he took the throne he took revenge upon the people associated with the king he replaced, King Ahab. In a fertile valley named Jezreel, the place where God plants, King Jehu violently slaughtered all of King Ahab’s family along with all of the officials and priests who served King Ahab. Jehu had allowed his vengeance to consume him which resulted in much blood being shed in a place that spoke of God and what he was trying to establish in the world. So when God commanded Hosea that the was to name his first born son, Jezreel, he did so as a reminder to his people that it is his word, a word which results in righteousness and peace, this is what was to be found in their hearts, not a longing for vengeance and violence.

           Well, Hosea’s family continued to grow and we hear that he went on to have a baby girl. Once again, Hosea and his wife were told by God that this baby’s name would be, Lo-ruhamah. This is a combination of two Hebrew words, lo, the Hebrew word for not, and ruhamah, a word which speaks of a mother’s love which begins when she carries her child. This is a love which is marked by a deep compassion, a tender love, and even pity. The reason God insists that Hosea name his daughter such a strange name is that the people of Israel have allowed the king to have authority over them so that they now have become violent people who refused to be compassionate to those who stood in need of mercy. It is their refusal to be compassionate and to show pity to the hurting people of their day, this is why God is telling them that they would no longer be receiving mercy from him. To understand this shocking statement we must go back to the basic building block which is that God loves us so that we do not believe that God will ever withhold his love from us. We must remember also that the marriage of Hosea and his unfaithful wife also communicates to us is that through his uniting himself with us, God desires to create a family where his love is shared by all within that family. When the people of Israel followed in the violent and destructive ways of King Jehu, they were stating that they no longer desired to be part of this family God was creating. What we learn from the people of Israel is this: there simply is no way for us to be distant from God in how we act and expect God to be close to us when we suddenly find ourselves in need of his loving kindness. As God tells Hosea, he will have compassion on the kingdom of Judah. The reason why this is so is that God knows that the people of Judah will return to him so that he might save them. The salvation of God we are told, will not happen through the destruction of Judah’s enemies by means of bows, sword, battle, horses or horsemen. No, God will save Judah through his merciful compassion which will cause them to return to him so that they might be saved.

         Well, when Hosea’s daughter had become a little girl, we are told that Hosea once again became a father. This time Hosea had a son and once again, God had a name for this child as well. The name this boy would bear was Lo-Ammi. Just as we learned with the daughter named, Lo-Ruamah, Lo in Hebrew means no, or not. The word, “ammi”, in Hebrew means people. So what God is telling the people of Israel is that because they refused to allow his word to be planted in their hearts, and because they refused to follow in the ways of God being compassionate and merciful to others, then they simply could no longer be considered to be the people of God. What this says to us is that to say we are in a relationship with God requires us to do something. We simply cannot say that we are part of the family of God and then refuse to hear the word God speaks to us. And we cannot say that we are part of the family of God and act in destructive and violent way in our dealings with each other. If we do not allow the word of God to become planted in our hearts so that we live by his wisdom and if we do not love others just like God first loved us, then we should not be surprised if God one day tells us that we are in fact not part of his family, not one of his people.

         As harsh as this might seem, this is not the final word of God. What God speaks to Hosea after his third child is born gives us a great hope. God tells Hosea that where God once said about the people of Israel, “You are not my people”, it will be said of them that they are the sons of the living God. One day God will unite all people, the people of Judah and the people of Israel to name a few, and he will set over them one head. In that day God promises they will go up from the land, leaving behind their worship of the wealth the land produces. Yes, great will be the day when the word of God becomes planted in the hearts of all people. From this promise it is not difficult to know that God is promising the coming of our Savior, Jesus. He is the one we learn in the gospel of John whose life is one where the word of God is seen living in him.  It is Jesus whose life is marked by the tender mercy displayed so wonderfully at the cross. And it is through Jesus, the one who is our head of the body of Christ, who unites us with God so that we can know ourselves as being indeed children of God. So let us live by his wisdom, the wisdom founded on God’s eternal love for us. Amen!