Tag Sin

God Loves His Unfaithful People

Todd R Leave a comment

The story of the prophet Hosea can be a controversial subject.  In only the second verse of the book, we learn that: “When the LORD first spoke through Hosea, the LORD said to Hosea, ‘Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom’” (Hosea 1:2a).

A common interpretation of the “wife of whoredom” is “prostitute,” but it doesn’t necessarily mean that.  However, it certainly means a wife who is not faithful to her husband.  An adulteress, as Hosea’s wife Gomer is described in Hosea 3:1.  Gomer has 3 children in the story, and the last 2 may have been illegitimate.

Is it scandalous, is it even believable, that God would command His own prophet Hosea to marry this way?  The God who demands that we be holy.  Could He ask one of His spokespeople to “become one flesh” with a woman like this?  What kind of lesson can we take from this?

It only really makes sense when you realize why God did it.  The full verse of Hosea 1:2 says, “When the LORD first spoke through Hosea, the LORD said to Hosea, ‘Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the LORD.’”

Photo by Worshae on Unsplash

Because of the word “for,” there’s a connection between the unfaithful wife and the people of the land: God’s people Israel.  It’s as if God commanded this marriage because Israel was unfaithful.  God had something to say about that.  While Hosea’s marriage was real, it was also a symbol meant to give a message: that, like Hosea marrying Gomer, God is willing to love unfaithful people.  After all, there is no other kind of person.  We all fit the description, yet He is willing to love us so much that the church is called the bride of Christ, like Gomer was the bride of Hosea.

While some think God’s command to Hosea is too scandalous to have really happened, it is no more scandalous than God choosing sinners to be His bride in Christ, which He did.  From the beginning of time God knew that His people would be unfaithful to Him, yet He designed and implemented a plan to bring those same people back into a right, intimate relationship with Him.  This plan meant taking on human flesh, being abused, and dying horribly for His people, but then being raised from the dead and taken back up into heaven.  This was the cost of restoring sinners to fellowship with their Maker who loves them.  And He thought it was worth it.

So, what is the lesson of God’s command to Hosea?  That there is no limit to who or how God can love.  Nobody deserves God’s love because all are unfaithful, but in spite of that, God loves His unfaithful people.  Why?  Because in His love He chooses to.

Praise God that He does!

Amen.

“The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come.” And let the one who hears say, “Come.” And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price.” – Revelation 22:17

Fighting Our Passions

Todd R Leave a comment

The Christian life is hard.  From a worldly point of view the Christian life is unnatural, and when given a choice, the right one is often the tough one.  As long as we live on this earth, we struggle to please God even when we have already been saved by Jesus through faith.  In 1 Peter 2:11, the apostle wrote about our difficulties:

“Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.”

There are several important truths in this one verse, but the first is that we can’t ignore “the passions of the flesh” or pretend they don’t exist.  The apostle Paul wrote in Romans 7:18-19, “For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.  For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.”  In the surrounding verses, Paul separates the spiritual, redeemed part of us from the flesh, or the “sin that dwells within me.”[1]  The sinful flesh wants what it wants and isn’t concerned about what God thinks of it.  Our passions do not have our eternal soul’s destiny in mind, only the near-term reward.  Following the “passions of the flesh” is like saying this world is just fine rather than knowing it is fallen and needs redemption, yet even Christians do it anyway.

Photo by Антон Дмитриев on Unsplash

3 other parts of the verse are important, and I’ll take them in reverse order.  Peter wrote that these passions “wage war against your soul.”  This means that defeating them won’t be easy; and that the enemy must be taken seriously.  We are soldiers in this war against the flesh and defeat is harmful to our souls.  Once we are redeemed, sin can’t take away our salvation, but it can make our lives miserable, hobble our witness, and even affect our rewards in heaven.[2]  We are all susceptible to different sins, and none of us are immune from any of them.  We must “wage war” against what is at war against our souls.  This is no picnic.

However, Peter encourages us in the other 2 parts of the verse.

First, Peter reminds us that we are “sojourners and exiles.”  We live here, but don’t belong here.  Our time in this world is temporary, and we are just passing through.  People say about our worldly goods that “you can’t take it with you” but what we also won’t take with us are the harmful “passions of the flesh.”  While they are natural to our earthly bodies, they will not be natural to our glorified bodies.  If we grow weary of fighting this war, it helps us to know that the war is temporary.  God will see us through it in His time and help us each step along the way.[3]  We don’t need to give in.

Also, Peter says at the beginning of the verse that we are “Beloved.”  God loves us, and He doesn’t stop loving us because we regularly fail against “the passions of the flesh.”  We remain His “Beloved” even when we sin, because He has chosen to love us, knowing everything about us, past, present and future.  Even after repeated sin, He will not turn away from us.  As Jesus said in John 6:44, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.”  He will always call us back and in the end, He will raise us up.

So, in our battles with “the flesh,” we must remember who we are.  We are beloved by God, we are not of this world, and we are soldiers in a serious battle.  Here, we will fight hard and experience repeated failure, but in eternity we will not fail at all.  We will perfectly reflect the character of Christ.

But in the meantime:

“Beloved, I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul.”

[1] Romans 8:20
[2] 1 Corinthians 3:15, also the “Parable of the talents” in Matthew 25:14-30.
[3] 1 Corinthians 10:13

Barbs in Our Eyes

Todd R Leave a comment

As Israel was preparing to enter the Promised Land of Canaan after wandering in the wilderness, God gave them many instructions through Moses about how they were to live when they got there.  One of the instructions was to eliminate all of Canaan’s inhabitants.  Part of the warning not to ignore this comes in Numbers 33:55, which says:

“But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then those of them whom you let remain shall be as barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall trouble you in the land where you dwell.”

What this is communicating is the urgency of getting rid of anything that could influence us to sin, and this applies as much to us as to ancient Israel.  In Israel’s case, the nations they were to remove from Canaan were under God’s judgement for centuries of worship of false gods, which included practices like ritual prostitution and child sacrifice.  God knew that His people would be tempted by these foreign gods and practices unless all trace of them was eliminated.

For us, God also wants to protect us from false gods and harmful practices and habits, and the phrase “barbs in your eyes” is a picture of the urgency for us to get rid of anything that would tempt us.  Think about it: If I had a thorn in my eye, I would drop everything and not be able to do anything else until I got it out.  Until the thorn was gone, it would be my one and only priority.  In modern times, God doesn’t tell His people to attack other nations in judgement, but He does want His people to attack sin with the same zeal.

So when I read “But if you do not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you, then those of them whom you let remain shall be as barbs in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall trouble you in the land where you dwell” it leads me to ask the question:

Do we remove sources of sin from our lives as urgently as we would a barb in our eye?

Jesus is Indignant – Those Who Mourn #3

Todd R 1 Comment

Today is part 3 of a series on the second Beatitude from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” – Matthew 5:4.  The first two are here and here. We begin with story of the resurrection of Lazarus by Jesus:

“Jesus said, ‘Take away the stone.’ Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, ‘Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days.” – John 11:39

Before this dead man Lazarus died, Jesus got a message that he was ill.  Lazarus was in Bethany, near Jerusalem, and Jesus was about a day’s journey away avoiding the Jewish leaders who sought to stone Him to death for claiming to be God (Jn 11:30 and elsewhere).  After saying “this illness does not lead to death”[1], Jesus stayed away for two more days and after the time it took to travel to Bethany, He found Lazarus already “dead four days.”

Martha and Mary, sisters of Lazarus, were deep in mourning, along with many others who had come to mourn with them.  Then “Jesus wept” (John 11:35).  Reading this we might assume Jesus’ reason for weeping was the same as everyone else’s.  However, pastor and author Tim Keller notes that: “Both verses 33 and 38 say that while He was weeping with grief He was also snorting with anger.  Jesus could not have been weeping for Lazarus because He knew he was about to raise him from the dead.  What, then, was He so grieved and angry about?  He was furious at the sin and death that had ruined the creation and people He loved.”[2]

Jesus knows that “sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Romans 5:12).  Since Adam and Eve, mankind has been facing, and mourning, the consequences.  From the repetition of “and he died” in the genealogy of Genesis 5 on, we are reminded of the result of missing the mark of God’s righteousness.  Nobody is more aware of this than Jesus.  As God, He understands our loss more deeply than we do, and He is indignant, consumed with righteous anger.

When Jesus got the message Lazarus was ill, He could have healed Him on the spot from a distance as He did the official’s son in John 4:46-54.  Instead, Jesus delayed in coming to raise Lazarus “so that the Son of God may be glorified through it” (John 11:4b).  The miracle convinced many, but not everyone: “the chief priests made plans to put Lazarus to death as well”[3] because so many were later believing in Jesus that they plotted to bury the evidence[4].

However, Jesus used the miracle to increase His disciples (and our) faith, particularly in times of loss and mourning.  Jesus taught Mary to replace her “if” statement “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died”[5] with His statement “I am the resurrection and the life.”[6]  As man, He feels as we do, and in compassion for us He weeps.  He steps right into our suffering with us – the odor of death does not deter Him.  He knew He would have to die to save us from our suffering, and He willingly took it on.  “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.” – Hebrews 4:15

Just as He could have healed Lazarus before he died, Jesus could return right now and take us to heaven, but He waits until His purpose (not ours) is fulfilled so that He may be glorified.  For now, we can know as Mary did that He is “the resurrection and the life,” rather than wonder “if” He could have come sooner.  Therefore, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” – Matthew 5:4.  In time, Jesus will fix it all.

[1] John 11:4
[2] Keller, Timothy.  Making Sense of God (2016).  P. 164-5.
[3] John 12:10
[4] See also this earlier post
[5] John 11:32
[6] John 11:25

Mourning Has Value – Those Who Mourn #2

Todd R Leave a comment

Today is part 2 of a series on the second Beatitude from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” – Matthew 5:4. In the first post, I wrote about how mourning logically follows our awareness of needing Jesus because we are poor in Spirit.  When we mourn this way as Christians, we deeply acknowledge that we aren’t happy with the consequences of having sought our own way.

Many religions and philosophies see no value in sorrow.  Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers hated it and strived to avoid it.  Eastern religions sometimes deny its reality and seek to live above it.  On the other hand, in Christianity and Judaism stories like those of Job are highly valued, and verses like these from Ecclesiastes 7:2-4 are common –

“It is better to go to the house of mourning
      than to go to the house of feasting,
for this is the end of all mankind,
       and the living will lay it to heart.
Sorrow is better than laughter,
       for by sadness of face the heart is made glad.
The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,
       but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.”

In Christianity, mourning can have value, helping sanctify us, making us more like Christ.  Mourning can be a form of confession – a way of saying the same thing about sin that God does.  When we mourn doing wrong things or neglecting things that should have been done, we agree with God on what is “wrong” and what “should” be done.  It is not the same as repentance but is often a preceding part of it.

The framework of the series of posts on Matthew 5:3 – “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” – shows many ways living outside the kingdom of heaven fails us and others:

  • Times we were too proud or ashamed to act (Post 1)
  • Times we thought earning God’s favor was more important than loving Him and our neighbor (Post 2)
  • Times we thought our own sins were ok because we thought they weren’t as bad as someone else’s (Post 3)
  • Times we failed privately because we couldn’t see the consequences or the point in trying (Post 4)
  • Times we didn’t love someone because they weren’t like us (Post 5)

Therefore, we should mourn!  Emotionally reacting to these things means that knowing we are “poor in spirit” is more than just an intellectual or logical idea.  Sin needs to mean something to us, deeply.  However, this mourning is not the same as despair, depression, or meaninglessness.  In the words of J.R.R. Tolkien, spoken through the wizard Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings: “Despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt.”  Only God can see the end, and there is more to come!  In Christianity it is but part of a journey, or in the case of the Sermon on the Mount, part of a sequence of Beatitudes.

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” – Matthew 5:4

In the next post of the series, I plan to talk about Jesus’ reaction to death and the consequences of sin, focusing on John 11: 33 and 11:38.  He knows more about it than we ever will, and He cares deeply.

This post continues a series on the Beatitudes. To start at the beginning, click here, and for the next post click here