September 27 2026
Hosea 10:1-13
This year the baby of our family, our son Matt, will be celebrating his thirtieth birthday. I have never felt so old in all my life. People will often tell you that children grow up too fast, yet I can not believe how fast those thirty years have flown by. Matt is somewhat special to us because he was our surprise child. You see, we had our nice little family all planned out. We had our first child, Elizabeth and then right on cue about two years later along came our second child Sarah, just as we had planned it all out. We even built our house with three bedrooms, so that each child would have their own space. And then along came Matt, and suddenly we realized that what we had planned was not what God had planned, surprise, surprise. Now even though Matt was not planned or expected he nonetheless was always loved. And now thirty years later we can not imagine our family without him. He is our reminder that all of our children, planned or not, are special gifts given to us by God.
Now, when Jennifer and I say that we believe that our children are gifts given to us by God, this is, in all actuality, a statement of faith. You see, faith is the certainty that the very reason any of us exist and have life is solely because God desires us to be here. This is the conclusion we must realize as being the truth when we consider the basic truths that we know about God. It might have come as a surprise that we have been looking at the basics of being in a relationship with God for several weeks, yet we have not spoken about faith. What we will discover today is that faith is a realization that comes when we stand back and consider all that we know about God’s love for us. As we have said from the beginning of this series entitled, “Back to the Basics”, the foundational building block of our relationship is that God loves us. God’s love is so certain and unchanging that we can even go so far as to say that God is love for this is his very nature. The second truth we know about God is that God communicates with us, those he created to bear his likeness. God desires that we know that he only wants the very best for all of us. The Bible is the conversation God has with those willing to listen and to respond to him. The third truth that builds from these first two ideas is the truth that we can know about ourselves as being the beloved of God. God faithfully loves us so that we can forever know ourselves as being those who are the focus of the love of God. This truth found in the unfailing love of God for us is our true identity. Now even though God is always and forever faithful in his love for us, we as his people do not respond with a faithful love of our own. All of us have sinned, missing the mark of responding to the love of God with the same faithfulness God shows to us. So, we must depend on the faithfulness of God to cover over our failure, through the gift of the costly love shown to us at the cross. The very blood of Christ was necessary to covered over our sin. Through what God has done for us upon the cross we come to know just how deep, how wide, how long and how high is this tremendous love that God has for each of us. Fear no longer dominates us when the love of God finds a home in us. We know that the love of God is the mercy that triumphs over the judgment and condemnation that were rightfully ours. In this way we are set free from being enslaved by the evil one, no longer bound to failure.
We discovered the importance of knowing God last week in a passage from the fourth chapter of the first letter of John. Yet, what is also in this same passage is something else that we are to have when we become aware of the love God has for us as demonstrated there upon the cross. The passage from First John, the fourth chapter, the sixteenth verse, tells us this, “We have come to know and have faith in the love that God has for us.” So not only must we know the love that God has for us, but we also must now have faith in our hearts where once there was fear. Knowing the love of God throws fear out of our hearts so that now in its place we might have a certainty in our life that is ours though the love of God.
When it comes to our relationship with God, there is nothing more basic to that relationship than faith yet on the other hand, there is also perhaps nothing more misunderstood than this concept called faith. For some who follow Christ, faith means simply that we now have something certain in our life, but faith is in all actuality a certainty about a fundamental aspect about our life. There is no better place to begin to understand what is meant by faith than the fourth chapter of Romans. There, Paul uses the example of Abraham, who Paul teaches us should be the very father of our faith. In the seventeenth verse of this fourth chapter of Romans, we hear Paul tell us that Abraham, our father, “…before the presence of God, this faith of Abraham is a faith that believes God gives life to the dead and calls into being the ones who do not exist.” You see, Abraham and his wife Sarah wished to have a child to be their legacy, yet they were incredibly old, far past child-bearing age. This is exactly how God wanted them to be so that Abraham and Sarah would understand that their becoming parents was solely the work of his hand and nothing else. In fact, even though Abraham and Sarah were quite old when they first met God, God nonetheless made them wait another twenty years before they were ready to believe in what only God would do. What God had to do was to being them to conclude was that their child would exist because of the desire of God and not because of any desire they had to have a child. You see, God was teaching them something very fundamental not just about their own child but about every child and that is that all people exist solely because God desired them to exist.
Faith then is what links God’s love to our life. This is the realization we are to come to when we stand back and mull over what we know about the love of God. What the mercy of God proves to us is that God wants us to live with him. The judgment of God was just to condemn us to death because fear dominates us which is the very slavery of sin. But God in his love, through the mercy he shows to us, gives to us not condemnation, but a life beyond this certain death. Faith as Abraham discovered is the certainty that our God can indeed give life to the dead. Not only does God have the power to give life to the dead, but he also wants to give life to the dead; this is the certainty we realize when we know the love of God. God desires that we live before him as those who receive his faithful love and then return this same love back to him. So, through knowing the love of God we can also know the certainty that we exist and have life solely through the power of God.
Our faith then, changes the way that we live in the world. The biggest transformation is that when we have this certainty about life then God declares that we are righteous in his eyes. Again, from the fourth chapter of Romans, Paul, quoting from the fifteenth chapter of Genesis, tells us, this, “If Abraham was made righteous by anything he had done, he would have something to boast about but not before God. For what does scripture say, “And Abraham had faith and God considered him to be righteous.” Now to understand what Paul is teaching us here we must first understand what is meant by this idea of righteousness. Righteousness throughout scriptures means that we as the people of God will make right and good judgments in our dealings with others. What God calls us to do is to consider just how our faith affects the decisions we make in our dealings with others. Well, if we believe that God desires that we live before him to receive his love and then respond to him in love, then we must also believe that this is the very same way God is with everyone else. Every person is someone that God wished to exist because they exist through his power. This means that everyone is someone who has been someone God has loved even before they were born. This is the meaning behind what Paul tells us in the eighth chapter of Romans when he says that we were predestined to become like Christ. God had a destination for all those he causes to exist, even before they have life, and that place where God desired for all to live is there before him in a relationship of faithful love just as Jesus demonstrated to us.
Now if this is the truth which the love of God causes us to realize, then it is not difficult for us to see how such an understanding tempers how we live with others. The people in our life are not there primarily to serve us and our needs. The people in our life are not commodities to be used and then discarded. No, they are people who exist because God desires to be in a relationship of mutual love with them. So, we must be careful to communicate to all that we meet that God indeed loves them. This means that they need to know the love of God. When we know the basic idea that knowing the love of God throws fear out of our life, then we will be opposing this idea if we cause others to be afraid. Instead, we should look to do what we can to help others to not be afraid and when others wonder why we do so, we can tell them that this is what knowing the love of God has done for us. For others to discover the love of God through us is the ultimate goal of our righteous behavior.
We have had to think long and hard about the basics we have learned about being in a relationship with God so that we realize just what such a relationship is to produce when we live life with the people around us. You see, the people in the days of Hosea the prophet forgot the truths that their forefather Abraham once knew. They no longer had faith as Abraham once had. Without such a faith, the people no longer lived in awe of the God who had given them life. The abundance that their land produced was not used to help those in need. No, all that their fertile fields produced was people who worshipped false gods all so that they might have even more than they already had. The people were never satisfied because they no longer knew the God who loved them, so they lived in fear believing that if they just had a little more then their anxiety and worry might no longer plague them.
Without knowing God and the love he had for them, then not only did they lose their faith in him, but they also became people who could not be trusted. Hosea writes that the people of his day uttered mere words without any intention of doing what they had promised. They were those who made empty promises which resulted in worthless covenants. The judgments they made were just like the poisonous weeds which would spring up when they plowed their fields, quickly made and deadly to those those who came under them. So, God told his people that they would be carried away to a foreign nation. They and the idols they worshipped would soon become the property of the Assyrian king. All the altars and shrines they erected to worship their false gods would become overrun with thorns and thistles. On that day when their wicked ways ended, Hosea tells his people that they will cry out for the mountains to cover them and plead for the hills to fall on them. This is the same warning Jesus would repeat in his day for those who refused to listen to his plea for peacemaking. So, when the day of destruction came for the people in Hosea’s day, they would find themselves crying out for the mountains and hills to cover over them so that they would not have to face their destruction.
Now none of what is written here sounds very much like the love of God, yet what God states he is doing by allowing other nations to sweep down on his people and take them into exile is that he is disciplining them. As we learn in the twelfth chapter of Hebrews, all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant but later, those trained by such discipline find that it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. You see, God had warned his people before they ever set foot in the land he had promised to them that they would forsake his ways, and then he would allow the nations to scatter them far from their home. Yet God would do so for a particularly important reason, as we hear at the beginning of the thirtieth chapter of Deuteronomy. There we hear Moses tell the people of God that when they find themselves in the nations where the Lord your God has driven them, then if they, “…return to the Lord your God, you and your children, and obey his voice in all that I command you, and do so with all of your heart and mind, then the Lord will restore your fortunes and have mercy upon you…” Just as we have previously learned, the judgement of God is never the final word of God. God always holds out his mercy. The people of God would find mercy when God placed them in a situation of great fear called the exile. You see, in times of great uncertainty we are to recall how when we knew the love of God this is when our hearts cast out their fear. In the certainty that we have that God desires that we live before him in a relationship of love we know that we can once again turn back to God. This is where the discipline of God is to bring us, to return to God with our whole hearts, ready to be cleansed of fear, and our whole life, ready to live in love before him.
The hope of God is that his people would once again turn and seek him. This is why God is certain that one day his people would live as he created them to live. God knew that when his people would seek him, then he could again cleanse their hearts of fear and restore their lives so that they could once again live before him in love. When this would happen God would cause right judgments to rain down upon his people. Instead of sowing their fields for an ever-greater harvest to chase away their ever-nagging fears and anxieties, his people would sow for themselves righteousness. His people would once again have the certainty that all people have life because of the love of God and are therefore people created to know the love of God which casts our fear. They would then use their abundance to eradicate the fears and anxieties plaguing the lives of the people around them. To those who were afraid of going hungry, food would be given. To those afraid their well would run dry, water would be shared. To those who feared the cold, clothes and shelter would be offered. And to those who were sick and afraid, they would find that people would. come and sit with them so they would not have to face their fear alone. In this way the righteousness of God’s people would result in a shared life of steadfast love that would be known by all. Such is a certainty when we live by the certainty found by our faith in God. To him be the glory!
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