The costly love of God - July 2, 2023

NewLife Christian Fellowship's Podcast

This morning, I am continuing in the sermon series “The power of one life,” looking at minor Biblical characters and what we learn from them about God and our relationship with Him. Today I want to look at a woman named Gomer, who is found in the book of Hosea. Hosea was a prophet, the last prophet to prophesy to the northern kingdom of Israel before it fell to the Assyrian Empire in 722 BC. The role of a prophet was to be a covenant mediator. At Mt. Sinai, God had made a covenant with Moses and Israel – I will be your God, and this is what it means to be my people. Whenever the people of God were breaking the covenant and were in danger of bringing upon themselves the curses found in the covenant, God would raise up a prophet who would speak His words of warning to the people. Chief among God’s expectations was not to have any gods before Him, and not to make or worship any idols. In Hosea’s time, as was the case throughout much of Israel’s history, they were guilty of worshiping foreign gods, most notably Ba’al, the Canaanite fertility god, who the Canaanites believed lived with his consort Anath. The Canaanites believed that Ba’al was responsible for giving the water and fertility to their crops. Their method of “prayer” and worship was to stimulate him to acts of fertility by having sex with the sacred shrine prostitutes. Naturally, many Israelites came to believe that they needed to honor the local god, Ba’al, in order to have a rich crop.

Perhaps you can understand why God commanded them to drive the Canaanites out of the land, lest they be a stumbling block to them.

So that is the setting. God’s people are falling into idolatry and worshiping other gods, compromising their sexual purity in the process. They are violating their covenant with God and are in danger of bringing upon themselves the curses. And into this scene, God raises up a prophet named Hosea, and gives him a unique calling.