SONGS OF HOPE IN VALLEYS OF DESPAIR
Series: Hosea: Unbroken Love From A Broken Heart
by Doug Goins
In Hosea 2:2-13 the prophet preached condemnation in response to
idolatry, the syncretistic blending of Baal worship with the worship of
Yahweh, the true God. Over and over were listed the wages of sin,
the consequences that we suffer when we reject God's word, his love, and
his plan for our lives. The word "therefore" came up several times
indicating a consequence of sin. Look at verse 6 again, "Therefore
I will hedge up her way with thorns." And look at verse 9; "Therefore
I will take back my grain in its time..." We would logically expect
another thundering prediction of judgment in Hosea 2:14-23, because verse
13 promised punishment for sin: "And I will punish her for the feast
days of the Baals, when she burned incense to them and decked herself with
her ring and jewelry, and went after her lovers, and forgot me, says the
LORD."
But the "therefore" in verse 14 is followed by a wonderful surprise.
This is a different kind of judgment sentence than we heard after the other
"therefores." There are beautiful images repeated in these verses
of people singing joyfully in response to God's love and of valleys of fertility
and life. (Keep in mind as you read this passage that the Hebrew verb to
answer can be just as legitimately translated to sing, as in an answering
song.)
We can legitimately interpret this wonderful prophecy of hope two ways.
First of all, we understand it historically as a prophecy for the nation
Israel. It looks forward to a time when that nation will experience great
physical blessing from God. That was partially accomplished when they returned
to the land after the Babylonian captivity, but Israel has never experienced
the quality of life described in this passage, not even since the establishment
of the nation-state in 1948.
The Valley of Achor mentioned in verse 15 is in the West Bank near the city
of Shechem. It is not a place of joyful singing to the Lord today, but a
place of violence and ongoing conflict in the Arab-Israeli dispute over
the land. Verse 18 speaks of living in safety without threat of war or violence.
The nation has never experienced that. The government of Israel that is
now in power is totally secular. They don't have the kind of faithful love
relationship with God that is described in verse 20, that of knowing the
Lord intimately. No, Israel has returned to the land, but they have not
yet returned to the Lord. The complete fulfillment of this prophecy for
the nation Israel will come only in the glorious thousand-year reign of
Christ that is still off in the future, the millennium described in Isaiah
11 and Revelation 20.
But the other way we can legitimately interpret this prophecy is that it
is right now being spiritually fulfilled for each one of us in our relationship
to God through Christ. We saw a wonderful promise of restoration in chapter
1 verse 10 through chapter 2 verse 1, which the New Testament writers similarly
understood in the light of Jesus Christ. They saw the promise of a New-Covenant
relationship that was described by the prophet Jeremiah in 31:31-34. The
apostle Peter quoted verse 23 of this passage in 1 Peter 2:10 to describe
Christians as God's elect. The apostle Paul in Romans 9:25-26 also quotes
Hosea to focus God's calling not only on the Jewish people but also on Gentiles.
Let's look at the promises in verses 14-23. The opening two verses speak
of a restored relationship with God that the nation is going to enjoy.
"Therefore, behold, I will allure her,
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her.
And there I will give her her vineyards,
and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.
And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth,
as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt."
With mercy and longing for things to be right again the way they were before,
God wants his estranged wife to be reconciled to him. (Remember, in all
the threats of judgment in verses 2-13 the goal was restoration. God wanted
to bring Israel back. Though she had forgotten him, he said he would never
forget her. Though she was helplessly entangled, he would help her escape.)
So God is going to convince Israel to follow him into the wilderness, to
be alone with him and get away from the influence of the Baals. The wilderness
is like Israel's youth; the days of lost innocence will be restored. In
the wilderness he will speak tenderly (some versions say "with comfort")
to her. Literally it says he will speak to her heart. This message of comfort
or tenderness is the promise of a new deliverance and the hope of restoration.
The vineyards that were going to be destroyed in verse 12 are going to be
reestablished. Yahweh's goal is not to leave this nation in the wilderness
of the exile to come, but to return her to the vineyards of her own nation.
The metaphor of a door of hope in the Valley of Achor is very significant.
The Valley of Achor was the last place that Israel would have expected to
have an access to hope. The name Achor is synonymous with moral failure.
Joshua 7 records a humiliating event that took place when the ancestors
of these people were following the leadership of Joshua in taking possession
of the land God had promised them. The first major campaign was to take
the city of Jericho. It was a long process, but God won a decisive victory.
And the instructions had been very clear before the battle that all the
spoils of the city belonged to God; they were sacred and nobody was to touch
any of them. But a man named Achan, one individual out of the entire nation,
chose to be disobedient. He took some shekels of silver, a bar of gold,
and a robe for his own use, and buried them under the floor of his tent.
Immediately after the battle of Jericho, not yet knowing about Achan's sin,
they went to do battle against the very small city of Ai. It should have
been an easy victory, yet they lost. Joshua knew that there was something
wrong between God and the people because God didn't bless them in the warfare.
He put on sackcloth and ashes and begged God to show him what the problem
was, and God revealed Achan's sin. Joshua and the leaders took Achan and
his entire family, executed them in a valley, and buried them there. Joshua
named that valley Achor. It means trouble, or violating a ban. This story
of humiliation, failure, and shame was burned into Israel's national memory.
It would be like our shameful memories of the Me-Lai massacre of the Vietnam
War in which American soldiers slaughtered innocent South Vietnamese families.
Now in this context Israel's idolatry, corruption, and rejection of God
have created their own eighth-century BC Achor of humiliation. And every
one of us somewhere in our history has a Valley of Achor in our memories
of sin and failure. These valleys are dark, shadowy places of haunting regret,
self-condemnation, and remorse.
In all my years of pastoral counseling, some of the most anguished people
I have cared for have been single women, as well as some married women with
their husbands, who were struggling with the memories of babies they had
chosen to abort, whether recently or many years earlier. Each of those people
lived in dark valleys of despair. But in our community there is a vital
ministry of reconciliation that God has given the Crisis Pregnancy Center
to such women. And there is a great word of hope spoken in this passage
for people struggling with those kinds of memories or whatever memories
we wrestle with of our own moral failure before the Lord. This was a word
of hope to the nation of Israel; God promised to transform Israel's repetition
of Achan's sin into a doorway of hope out of tragedy.
The liberating news for us this morning is that the same God who offered
a door of hope to Israel came to be that door for us in Jesus Christ. Remember
what Jesus said with divine authority in John 10:9-10: "I am the door;
if any one enters by me, he will be saved...I came that they may have life,
and have it abundantly." The apostle Paul describes the person who
has passed through Jesus Christ in this way as a new creation (2 Corinthians
5:17). When we accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, we go through
the door to new life, right now and for all eternity. And all through our
lives the door to repeated forgiveness stands open, as many times as we
need to go back through to be cleansed.
God predicts in these two verses that Israel will respond to his amazing
love and will sing the answering song in the last two lines of verse 15.
He longs to hear this from us as he did from Israel. In response to God's
wooing, Israel's heart will be won over and she will respond to his love.
And the response is going to be more than songs; it will be a commitment.
His offer of redeeming love always requires an answer from each one of us.
So the metaphor also extends to the door of our own hearts, which have to
be opened before we find any motivation or the will to go through the door
of hope, so that Jesus can rule from the throne of our hearts. The Lord
Jesus spoke to John in the Revelation and said to each one of us, "Behold,
I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door,
I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me."
The second half of verse 15 also remembers the days of Israel's youth, a
time of willing obedience to trust him, follow him, and love him. This is
a reference to the liberated, joyous singing of the people after they had
come out of the bondage of Egypt and crossed the Red Sea (Exodus 15:1-18).
It is a great hymn of salvation thanking God, praising him, and confessing
absolute loyalty to him. This was before they got into the wilderness and
became stubborn, resentful, and bitter; and of course before the people's
later syncretism with the Baals. This new song that will be given back to
Israel continues and swells.
Verses 16 through 20 are a wonderful expansion of all the blessing, benefits,
and resources that God wants to give his people when they surrender to him
in love and trust. Verses 16 and 17 pick up the marriage image again to
describe this new relationship of trust that they are going to have in God
in his identity as their husband:
"And in that day, says the LORD, you will call me, 'My
husband,' and no longer will you call me, 'My Baal.' For I will remove the
names of the Baals from her mouth, and they shall be mentioned by name no
more."
Remember, the worship of Yahweh had disintegrated to the extent that
the names of Yahweh and Baal were so confused that they were used
interchangeably. They had lost God's clear, unique identity. But here Yahweh
looks forward to a new day when Israel will no longer look for security,
meaning, and worth in what the Baals have to offer. She will again recognize
God's role as her husband.
The idea of God being our husband is very significant. It suggests two things
about husbanding: the intimacy, love, and endearment of the relationship
with God into which he had drawn his people; and also his leadership and
sovereignty. They had given those up when they went looking for the Baals
and had given allegiance and loyalty to them instead. The promise is that
they will learn to trust God's leadership as a husband, his loyalty to them,
and his shepherd and servant heart toward them. That should be easier for
you to understand if you are a wife than if you are a husband, because you
know how hard it is to trust your husband's leadership, to really believe
that he is committed to your best and that he will act on God's behalf in
your marriage relationship and in your family.
The good news here is that the nation will learn to joyfully submit themselves
to the leadership of God as their husband. This song of commitment will
be on their lips, and you probably know from experience that as the Bible
says, out of the heart the mouth speaks (Matthew 12:34). This song of devotion
represents a total transformation of the heart, a new creation, a new inner
nature. Not only will pagan Baal shrines and worship be removed from the
land physically, but they will also cease to be an inner distraction to
the people.
Can this really happen? Can human nature really be changed? Can we really
be liberated from false gods to make an unreserved commitment to the one
true God? If you look at the history of Israel, sadly it didn't happen for
them. This could not be accomplished until Christ came with the transforming
power of his redemptive work on the cross and in the resurrection, until
the life that a living, glorified Savior offers came into effect. The apostle
Paul says in Ephesians that out of that a new man was created. The change
of human nature that allows us to trust God completely is nothing less than
a miracle of God through Jesus Christ. He elects us, calls us, gives us
the faith to accept his love and forgiveness, and fills us with his Spirit.
This beautiful image of a trusting love relationship in marriage is expanded
in verses 18 through 20 to include the covenant that God makes to reverse
the earlier destruction (which we saw in verses 2-13):
"And I will make for you a covenant on that day with the
beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the creeping things of the
ground; and I will abolish the bow, the sword, and war from the land; and
I will make you lie down in safety. And I will betroth you to me for ever;
I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love,
and in mercy, I will betroth you to me in faithfulness; and you shall know
the LORD."
This picture of harmony in the physical world---humankind at peace with
the animal world and with the environment, and a world without war or violence---will
be fulfilled ultimately in the millennial reign of Christ that is yet to
come. But it also focuses our thinking on the greater spiritual safety and
serenity offered to us in the New Covenant. The language in Jeremiah 31:31-34
picks up all the same images of this paragraph, 110 years later renewing
this promise that God would establish a new spiritual relationship with
his people. Through reconciliation with God through Christ's blood we experience
lasting peace and safety. It is the peace of forgiveness. It results in
trust and the absolute assurance that God will provide exactly what we need
to face each hour; he will fill our longings. Peace is the gift that is
given in the valley after we go through the door of hope. The conflict between
us and God, within ourselves, and between us and other people is gone through
the gift of Christ. Peace is knowing that we belong to God forever; it says
in verse 19, "...I will betroth you to me for ever...." It reaffirms
the length, depth, and height of God's commitment to us in love.
There are five words in verses 19 and 20 that describe God's character and
form a foundation on which we are able to build this hope. First, he is
a God of righteousness. This means that he is integrated within himself
or, or whole. He is not dysfunctional in any way. He is always consistent
with his own nature.
He is a God of justice or fairness. All through the Scriptures he is called
the judge of the whole world; a God who maintains order by his just, fair
decisions.
He is a God of steadfast, loyal love. His is a purposeful, focused love.
He always works to maintain the relationship that he has established with
us in his covenant. And that covenant stays steadfast and immovable; in
the words of the prophet Isaiah, God says, "I will hold fast my covenant"
(Isaiah 56:4,6). It can never be broken. His love is totally reliable.
He is a God of mercy. We saw this word in chapter 1. It speaks of the kind
of love that parents have for their infants because of their helplessness
and innocence. As a parent you can't describe these feelings inside for
your child. That is God's merciful, pitying love for us as vulnerable children.
Finally, he is a God of faithfulness. His character is constant. In what
he says and does he is not fickle or capricious. That faithfulness is set
in direct contrast to the unfaithfulness of Israel, the wife in Hosea's
prophecy.
These five words are God's own self-revelation through Hosea; the prophet
didn't think up these things. God is saying to his people, "This is
what I am like and what you can always count on me to do for you."
All five of the words are rich with meaning. They communicate how Yahweh
will act in any time or circumstance. We can stake our lives on these things
that he has said about himself.
The capstone of all the attributes is given in the last phrase of verse
20, describing the relationship we can have with God if we will surrender
ourselves to him: "You shall know the LORD." We'll talk more about
what it means to know God when we get to chapter 4, but it is much more
than understanding information about him, knowing theology, or even having
a personal acquaintance. The Hebrew verb implies intimate personal relationship.
I could say to you, "I know Bill Walsh," the head football coach
at Stanford. I knew him for years when he coached the Forty-Niners and when
he was a TV analyst for football. I even have a "nodding acquaintance"
with him. My daughter Kathryn and I were at the Stanford basketball game
against Cal last Thursday night, sitting two rows up from the floor, and
Bill Walsh and his wife Jeri walked right in front of us. I caught his eye
and smiled and nodded, and he smiled and nodded back. But I don't really
know Bill Walsh; I'm no intimate of his. I just know a lot about him. But
it is personal involvement that God created us to experience with him, as
he promised, "You shall know the Lord."
Verses 21-23 continue to expand this vision of God's miraculous intervention
and restoration. The metaphor of singing in the valley shows up again in
the valley of Jezreel:
"And in that day, says the LORD,
I will answer the heavens
and they shall answer the earth;
and the earth shall answer the grain, the wine, and the oil,
and they shall answer Jezreel;
and I will sow him for myself in the land.
And I will have pity on Not pitied,
and I will say to Not my people, 'You are my people';
and he shall say, 'Thou art my God.'"
Again, God is declaring his supremacy as the source and sustainer of life.
Jezreel represents the nation of Israel, who has cried out for nourishment
in the time of drought and agricultural privation that was predicted in
verse 9. The Valley of Jezreel is the image of rebellion and violence against
God. But the promise now is that the valley is finally going to live up
to its true name---God will sow life there. These verses are an affirmation
that God is totally in charge of every aspect of the natural world, meeting
all the material needs that we could ever imagine. It reminds us again that
God is totally adequate to provide all our physical, emotional, and relational
needs.
The amazing thing to me is that here even in the valley of Jezreel, a valley
of resistance, faithlessness, and self-assertion, God sovereignly chooses
not to bring the deserved retribution, but by grace to bring incredible
blessing. Have you ever thought about what you really deserve from God?
Think in terms of God's tabulating the judgment you deserve for sin. What
if we had to pay for our sins and failures? I have memories that are anguishing
for me of the failures in my past. And yet when I read a passage like this
that shows how God is committed to restoring us, I'm overcome by the wonder
of his grace in my life and things that I never suffered for that I should
have. The debt was paid in the blood of Christ.
I was thinking too of all the times I have experienced God's goodness to
me when he stepped in to give me supernatural strength, insight, and courage.
You realize more and more how great God's goodness and his overwhelming
provision in your life are when you consider the problems and the difficulties
that he has unraveled. There really is no limit to what he is ready and
able to do through us and in the people we're concerned about, if we're
willing to give him the glory and trust him for the results.
I had an amazing experience a few years ago with Carl Gallivan in a women's
prison in Mexico. We preached the gospel to about fifty women who were incarcerated
there, and a number of them responded to receive the Lord. Then our hosts
lined all the women up in two lines, and two of the Mexican hosts went to
each end of one line, and motioned to Carl and me to go to the opposite
ends of the other. I realized that these women wanted me to pray for them.
I don't speak Spanish, and I didn't have a clue what their needs were. I
prayed, "Lord, help me. I don't want to waste their time or be a phony.
I want to know what to pray for." And with every woman that I put my
arm around, incredibly, I did know what to pray for. I saw husbands who
were struggling with illness, children who were estranged, families in financial
distress, and so on. God provided so that I was able to minister. I can't
explain it; all I can do is thank the Lord for raining down blessing and
using me in that way.
But what about the times when we can't respond that way? Instead we worry
when we're faced with difficulty and overwhelming circumstances. That worry
is really rooted in lack of trust that God is going to provide. Worry can
become a habit. We can get so used to being anxious that we can actually
be uncomfortable without it. It's like a narcotic; we can become addicted
to fear so that we can't exercise faith in God as our security. That was
the anxiety that led Israel to put her trust in Baal, and the apostasy that
resulted edged Yahweh and his righteousness out of first place in
her life. We ought to be able to empathize with that. Think how desperately
we try to hang onto security on our own in relationships, material resources,
and emotional support; and how easily we're willing to compromise.
Verse 23 is great good news because it talks about how totally God is committed
to having a people who will put him and his righteousness above all lesser
loyalties. He promises to sow us and grow us up as a people in the land,
who, in the words of Proverbs 11:30, will produce "fruits of righteousness"
out of our lives and relationships. After Yahweh's disciplining judgment,
Israel receives mercy and is restored to a love relationship with him. The
names of Hosea's three children are again reversed, so that instead of scattered
Jezreel will be a place where God sows life, Not pitied will be changed
to Pitied, and Not my people will become My people. There is an answering
song of faith and obedience that is sung back in the last phrase of our
passage: "Thou art my God." So the song in the valley is antiphonal;
God sings, "You are my people," and we respond "You are my
God." The valley of moral failure becomes a door of hope; and the valley
of faithless fear becomes the place where God ransoms us, heals us, restores
us, and forgives us. We end up singing songs of hope and worship in those
valleys of despair.
I was part of a service like that a year ago on January 30, 1993. It was
a worship service for a group of wonderful women who had gone through the
Crisis Pregnancy Center's post-abortion recovery series of Bible studies.
It was an amazing service focused on God's character and activity first
of all, as our passage has been, and it was a service of memorial as those
women with great courage remembered their unborn babies whom God had lovingly
gathered to his bosom through those abortions. They knew their babies were
secure with their heavenly Father, and they thanked God for his saving activity
in the lives of those little ones. It was a service of closure for the spiritual
and emotional healing that they had experienced in those months together.
These were women of God who had accepted his forgiveness, and they knew
through the ministry of that group that they had been fully reconciled to
their heavenly Father. They had taken hold of the healing process, and they
affirmed that God himself was at work in them through his Spirit. Finally,
it was a service of celebration and joy, laughter through tears, a time
to thank God for his renewing work in their lives. They knew the truth of
the passage we have just worked through. They expressed gratitude that they
were now walking in spiritual victory through this process of recovery.
The first verse of the hymn Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven (by
Henry Lyte, based on Psalm 103), beautifully summarizes the truth of our
passage and provides our own answering song:
Praise, my soul, the King of heaven,
To His feet thy tribute bring;
Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven,
Evermore His praises sing;
Alleluia! Alleluia!
Praise the everlasting King.
Catalog No. 4391
Hosea 2:14-23
Third Message
Doug Goins
January 23, 1994
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