Reversal—A Sermon on Hosea 2

Hosea the prophet lives in a time of false security, when his nation manipulates politics to acquire a sense of independent security, and manipulates religion in an attempt to acquire economic stability. Their political/military life and their worship both lead them away from dependence on God, from faith. For both of these he speaks words of judgment, fiery words which call Israel (and now, the church) to see her sin for what it is, and to learn true repentance.We normally think of repentance as being about the past. We avoid it because we think it means a reliving of our worst mistakes, but nothing could be further than the truth. In repentance we confess and name our sin—not as a way of reliving it, but as a way of moving away from it. Repentance is about freedom from the past. Repentance is a consequence of hope. It grows out of two convictions about the future, convictions which Hosea leads us into by sharing God's mind with us.First, God owns the future. God declares the future through Hosea, not because he has some secret power of prediction, but because the future consists of the actions of God. God does not predict sports scores or the playing cards of a magician's trick, but is simply stating what he intends to do, with the knowledge that he can and will in fact do these things. While humans have plenty to say about what will happen in the mean time, the future—the ultimate future—will be as God wills.  And so, God can declare that Israel will be exposed, that they will be stripped of all that they hold dear, that they will be confronted by the futility of their quests for power, security, and independence from him—not because it's a magical prediction, but because God himself will act to do these things.  "I will strip her naked...I will expose her as in the day she was born...I will make her like a wilderness...I will turn her into a parched land...I will kill her with thirst...I will hedge up her way with thorns and I will build a wall against her, so that she cannot find her paths...I will take back my grain, my wine, my wool and my flax...I will uncover her shame...I will put an end to her celebrations...I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees..." God can make these announcements because they are his actions. God is free and powerful to act in whatever way he wills. God owns the future.Second, God wants us to share his future. Hosea's word is ultimately one of invitation—God intensely desires for Israel to join him in the future. All of the judgments issued are for this purpose, and point toward the day of its completion, the day when Israel is restored to God. God acts to provoke a repentant response in Israel, so that she will come to freely love him and live in a covenant with God marked by peace, righteousness, justice, love, mercy, and faithfulness.What's remarkable about Hosea is the kind of language that God uses to describe his passionate desire for Israel to have a part in this future. God won't force Israel into repentance, but he will do almost anything else. Besides the prophetic word of warning, God flirts with Israel, gives her gifts, tries taking them away, exposes her other loves as frauds, finally draws her back out into the wilderness—like a husband who takes his wife back to the site of their honeymoon. He speaks softly to her, whispering, "we can just start over."His goal is the day when she responds with repentance, when she sees that he alone truly does own the future and yet offers her a place in it. His goal is a day of dramatic reversal, when all the pronouncements of judgment find their fulfillment—which is not to say, the destruction they foretell. No, Hosea's warnings only find their fulfillment in the repentance they are meant to provoke, whether or not that occurs before or after the impending calamity. His goal is the day when Israel responds with repentance, and all that is wrong can be made right.Hosea plays off of the warnings of chapter 1 to describe he dramatic reversal, flipping each name from its message or warning to one of hope. The stigma of bloodshed that brought about the name "Jezreel" will be replaced by the word's linguistic meaning—"God sows"—and God will plant the people in the land, establishing her with peace and abundance from his own hand, not as a result of her political or religious manipulation. To those whom he gave the name, "no mercy", he will now have mercy, and to those whom he called "not my people", he will again say, "you are my people." The renaming is completed, not by a word from God, but one from the people, as they finally and dramatically will say, "you are my God." God paints the picture of this future, seeking to inspire hope in Israel—for where hope lives, repentance is possible.Repentance happens in the lives of those who understand that God owns the future, and who believe they have a place in God's future. Reading Hosea now, some 2700 years later, and reading it on the other side of Jesus, we know that God has taken a dramatic step to bring about this future. While we wait for the final scene to begin, God has invited us to share in his future...now!God declares that his rule will be over all the earth, and in repentance we begin to live in that future now; we join God now, leaving the past behind and orienting ourselves by a future that redeems the present.And so it is that within these words of warning there is also a seed of hope, the promise of God's willingness to honor repentance, his burning desire to take back what belongs to him and make right what has been broken. I urge you to heed the warning that the future belongs to God, to take on the hope that he has a place for you within it, and to let it that hope bring forth the repentance by which God may enact his reversal.