IS OUR REPENTANCE FOR REAL?
Hosea: Unbroken Love From A Broken Heart
by Doug Goins
A few weeks ago I spent a day with a dear Christian friend I have
known for almost twenty years. He and I traveled and performed a lot of
music together in our early years. But I had had no contact with him for
almost four years because, in his own words, he had been running away from
the Lord, from his family, and from Christian friends. In our time together
he poured out sorrow over having left his wife and filed for divorce. He
talked about how his unfaithfulness to his wife might very well have completely
destroyed their relationship. He talked about cocaine and alcohol use, unbelievable
financial irresponsibility, a damaged relationship with his eighteen-year-old
daughter, and losing the trust of his friends and family. He poured out
much regret and grief.
But my friend told me the good news of his repentance last winter in a drug
rehabilitation program in southern California. He said, "Doug, I've
really come back to the Lord!" Yet there were terrible consequences
for what he had done; virtually nobody in his family or his circle of friends
trusted him at all, and they were suspicious of this turnaround. After we
had talked for several hours, he asked me in a voice choked with emotion,
"Do you believe me?"
It was really a difficult question for me to answer. Have you ever been
personally confronted with sinful behavior, with moral and ethical failure?
Have you ever been called to account by somebody near to you; and although
you told them you were sorry and asked to be forgiven, you were wondering
if you would have confessed if you hadn't been found out? Were you wondering
what it was you were sorry about---just getting caught, or the misery you
had brought into people's lives? Were you just feeling sorry for yourself
and it helped to get it off your chest? Was it just remorse for the mess
you had made of everything, or real repentance?
The passage that we are considering in Hosea 6 addresses the issue of how
to know if repentance, whether our own or somebody else's, is genuine. Verses
1-3 are a clarion trumpet call to repent and return to the Lord:
"Come, let us return to the LORD;
for he has torn, that he may heal us;
he has stricken, and he will bind us up.
After two days he will revive us;
on the third day he will raise us up,
that we may live before him.
Let us know, let us press on to know the LORD;
his going forth is sure as the dawn;
he will come to us as the showers,
as the spring rains that water the earth."
Healing from sin
The first two verses tell us that we need to take the initiative; we must
not wait around for God to soften his position toward us. We are the ones
who need to come back. But the promise is that if we take that initiative,
God is committed to restoring, healing, and giving us back fellowship with
him.
Verse 1 clearly continues the appeal that began last week in Hosea 5:15,
where God called the people to return after having judged them and confronted
them in love; there has been a tearing, and life has been turned upside
down:
"I will return again to my place,
until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face,
and in their distress they seek me...."
The prophet takes for granted the need for authentic repentance of sin and
reconciliation with God. There is the offer in these words of God's healing
and restoring grace, but it is not cheap grace upon which we can presume.
We have to interpret the word "return" in verse 1 in the context
of Hosea's life and preaching, which we have been studying. He has consistently
invited the nation of Israel, and he invites us today, to renounce the ways
of sin---the compulsive, repetitive patterns of resisting God that we have
developed; and to renounce as well the power of evil that seeks to influence
us to worship false gods.
Renunciation of specific personal sin is a central part of true repentance.
We have to think in terms of the deeper causes of what we need to confess
in our lives to save us from superficiality in repentance. Often we want
to escape being specific, so we try to get by with vagaries, generic one-size-fits-all
confessions: "Forgive me for not doing what I should have done,"
or "...doing what I shouldn't have done." Other times our confession
means little more to us than Catherine the Great's flippant expression concerning
repentance: "The good Lord will pardon, that's his trade." That
is not repentance, but presumption on God. In the deeper context of authentic
repentance and renunciation of sin, we have to acknowledge that God has
torn us and stricken us, as verse 1 says. And we have to face the reason
he has had to take such drastic action. Remember, the judgment of God is
always done in love and always has a redemptive purpose. Getting well spiritually
involves recognizing the underlying causes of our sin-sickness.
The binding described here is not just putting a Band-Aid over a little
scratch. It describes radical surgery that God has had to perform on our
hearts. But the commitment he makes is that he will attend us all through
the process of our recuperation to bring us back to full health. There is
a progression in verses 1-2 of God's activity of healing us, then binding
us up, then reviving us, and then raising us up on our feet, so that finally
we can live fully restored, healthy lives before him. We are comfortable
with him again. God's healing requires praise for his confrontational love
that forces us to see ourselves as we really are. We need to let him tell
us how sick we really are and how desperately we need forgiveness and healing.
We live now in the age of the Spirit on the other side of the death and
resurrection of Jesus. The Holy Spirit has been given. And God is now committed
to work healing in our lives through the power of the Spirit. But Jesus
doesn't just give healing through the Spirit as if he were a doctor on demand;
he is the Healer who is totally involved in every aspect of life. What doctor
is going to come home with us and sit by us through the whole process of
recuperation? But that is the commitment that the Lord Jesus makes to us
in healing sin-sickness in our souls. As part of that process, the Lord
Jesus will dredge up memories of sin that needs to be forgiven and healed.
He will discern what we need to repent of and guide our confession, freeing
us to admit it and agree with him. Jesus is the only one who has the authority
to say, as he did to the man lowered on the pallet, "Your sins are
forgiven" (Mark 2:1-2). He announces forgiveness with the power of
his own death on the cross.
The key to real growth in Christ
Verse 2 speaks of Jesus' death and resurrection to new life:
"After two days he will revive us;
on the third day he will raise us up,
that we may live before him."
This reminds me of the vision in Ezekiel 37:11 of the valley of dry bones,
where the nation Israel confesses, "Our bones are dried up, and our
hope is lost; we are clean cut off." But in verse 14 the Lord responds
to them, "I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live, and
I will place you in your own land; then you shall know that I, the LORD,
have spoken it, and I have done it." Israel needed nothing less than
resurrection. But even though they did come back to the land, because of
their continuing unbelief God did not impart spiritual life and vitality.
Nor has spiritual life come since their return again in 1948. Spiritual
renewal and healing are still to come for that nation.
But for us today in the New Testament church, verse 2 has immediate messianic
overtones. Like the sign of Jonah, it foreshadows the death and resurrection
of Jesus Christ. And that event is the essence of our regeneration, our
being born again and coming to new life in Christ. True repentance and confession
of faith in Christ must be a death to self and a resurrection to new life.
That is what the apostle Paul focuses on in Romans 6:3-6:
Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ
Jesus have been baptized into His death? Therefore we have been buried with
Him through baptism into death, in order that as Christ was raised from
the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness
of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death,
certainly we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing
this, that our old self was crucified with Him, that our body of sin might
be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin....
That cycle of death and resurrection continues after our initial regeneration;
in fact, it is the key that unlocks growth in Christ. Any hope we have of
living a life of integrity, wholeness, and health is dependent on dying
and rising with Jesus Christ. The more we are willing to die to our tenacious
control of life, the more he is able to resurrect his life in us. When we
surrender our moral failures, our sinful choices to him, he will raise out
of their ashes a brand-new start. When we cry out for help in our problems,
he will give us insight and direction we wouldn't have even dreamed possible.
And when we have challenges that are beyond us, it is his resurrection power
that gives us strength and wisdom. And finally, the more we give over our
worry about the future---the what-ifs, the worst-case scenarios---the clearer
his guidance will become for us. The secret of fullness of life is dying
to our arrogant, willful self and allowing the risen Christ to express his
life through us.
Verse 3 makes it very clear that this process of repentance is a continual
lifestyle:
Let us know, let us press on to know the LORD;
his going forth is sure as the dawn;
he will come to us as the showers,
as the spring rains that water the earth."
The point is that returning to the Lord, repentance, is part of a relationship
of knowing him and acknowledging with our hearts and lives that he is Lord.
We learn to cultivate an ongoing, consistent love relationship rather than
treating God like some sort of emergency relief when we really get in trouble.
To press on means to chase after diligently, because we know he is life
itself. The first part of this verse becomes our motto for daily living---making
new discoveries about God's nature, desiring to know him better and better
all the time, never settling for sameness in the relationship, never thinking
that we have arrived in knowing God. If we cannot say that we have grown
in knowing him, then we are really backsliding into the future, presuming
on who he is and what he has done. While we need to be childlike and to
trust God as our Father, we are not to be childish and to remain in a sort
of infantile relationship with him. Everything that we learn about him from
the Scriptures and our life experience gets bigger and more wonderful and
magnificent.
The second half of verse 3 talks about his faithfulness, or his absolutely
guaranteed goodness to us. It is eternal; it is like the sun's coming to
us every morning, dividing night from day. You can count on it. The verse
also talks about how he pours rain on us, blessing us supernaturally; he
is ready to pour grace, mercy, and whatever resources we need into our lives
when we come to him in humility. But we must repent and renounce anything
that denies his absolute sovereignty over our total lives.
As this passage unfolds, it seems that Israel wasn't ready to give everything
to God. In verses 4-6 God expresses frustration over the nation's willful
transgression of his covenant love. The people didn't listen to Hosea's
call to return. And whatever response they made, it lacked honesty. It wasn't
true repentance. It may have been more like the remorse that we talked about
earlier.
What shall I do with you, O Ephraim?
What shall I do with you, O Judah?
Your love is like a morning cloud,
like the dew that goes early away.
Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets,
I have slain them by the words of my mouth,
and my judgment goes forth as the light.
For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,
the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings.
Shallow love
These words allow us to see into God's very heart at the struggle he had
as he looked at his children with love but saw disobedience and rebellion.
He was kind of like a frazzled, disappointed parent who says to their child,
"What am I going to do with you? Nothing I try works. What's left?"
This reminds me of Psalm 78:34-37, where Asaph summarizes Israel's history
as one of rebellion and resisting God's love:
"When he slew them, they sought for him;
they repented and sought God earnestly...
But they flattered him with their mouths;
they lied to him with their tongues.
Their heart was not steadfast toward him...."
In verses 4-6 there are four evidences that the repentance that Israel offered
God was not honest. The first was an absence of loyal love. The word appears
twice, in verse 4: "Your love is like a morning cloud," and in
verse 6: "...I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice." The Hebrew
word is hesed, which means covenant love, faithful love, loyalty,
mercy, or lovingkindness. It is one of Hosea's favorite words to describe
the kind of committed relationship that God has to us, and he also uses
it over and over as he grieves over the fact that they didn't know how to
respond to that love. Whole-hearted commitment was not in evidence. What
God wanted from the people was renunciation of past sin and faithful, covenant
love demonstrated toward him. But the people couldn't do it. There were
many tearful declarations of sorrow and contrition, but those passionate
promises the people made to be faithful and obedient and to love God with
all their heart soon became hollow echoes.
The reason for that, and the second evidence that their repentance wasn't
genuine, was that their repentance was based on fickle emotion. Israel's
loyalty was as fleeting and changeable as a morning mist or the dew that
evaporates when the sun comes up There is a clear contrast in verse 3 with
God's absolute faithfulness, demonstrated by the regularity with which the
sun comes up; the commitment of the people disappeared in the face of that
sun. When the feelings of remorse wore off, the commitments to change were
soon forgotten.
Worshiping in spirit and in truth
Another evidence is in verse 5. If we look carefully, we see that it really
speaks of the rejection of biblical truth. The prophets like Hosea clearly
and consistently confronted, evaluated, and judged out of broken hearts,
taking no delight in the message. But the message of confrontation cut people
open and carved them apart, exposing hypocrisy. J. Vernon McGee's paraphrase
says, "I have skinned them alive by the prophets." That is what
truth did. But the people wouldn't stand still for it. In spite of the faithfulness
of these men to tell it like it was, hard and straight; their unrepentant
hearts rejected the correction, the warning, and the tough love. So the
end result was that God would have to judge. Convicting, prophetic truth
was accurate and was meant to lead the people to repentance, but Israel
had managed to duck and dodge the call to loyal love for the Lord.
Somebody who has been very dear to me for more than twenty-five years made
a choice six months ago to divorce their spouse and leave their family.
They invited me into that experience. We met face-to-face and talked a bit
on the phone. But they made a choice to pursue an immoral relationship and
a commitment to divorce. In an agonized last-ditch effort, I wrote them
a letter. I told this person how much I loved them. I told them that my
wife and I were praying every day for them. And I begged them to reconsider
the choice. I talked about consequences, and about how God is lovingly and
graciously waiting. I have been buried in Hosea and Jeremiah in my teaching
ministries, and I quoted from Jeremiah where God says, "You have a
choice. You can choose life and blessing and richness and fullness. Otherwise
the end result is death," because we can't create life on our own.
The letter I got back this week said this among many other things: "Your
verses from Jeremiah are the real clincher for me. The God I know is the
God of the New Testament. Yes, I believe there are natural consequences
for our actions. [But] I do not believe that God is going to judge me. God
is the God of grace, love, and compassion. I am more than ever assured of
his love for me." It went on to tell me what a harsh, judgmental person
I was. It closed by saying, "You're no friend, you've never been a
friend."
You know, the prophets didn't like their jobs. They told the truth with
a broken heart; they had to deal with rejection. You probably know what
it feels like if you have tried to lovingly confront somebody whose life
you saw going down the tube. But the promise is that if we don't deal with
the Lord on his terms, there will be difficult, painful consequences.
There is a final evidence that Israel's repentance was not honest: the danger
of increasing religious activity that was empty of personal loyalty to God.
"For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,
the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings."
God wanted a relationship with them, not just ritual involvement. Even if
it had been true worship of him unadulterated by the worship of the Baals,
God would have wanted more than compulsive legalism. The sacrificial system,
which was so important in the process of having sin atoned for, could itself
become a substitute for really knowing God. Busy activity doesn't necessarily
evidence a repentant heart. God doesn't want us to placate him in self-justifying
rituals, but to praise him by a sanctified relationship with him. Our life
is to be the evidence. That is what Romans 12:1 says: "I appeal to
you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies
as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual
worship." That is worship lived out twenty-four hours a day, a lifestyle
of praise to the Lord.
For us today, offering sacrifices instead of knowing God is represented
by all that we do to justify ourselves rather than submitting to a personal
relationship marked by the two powerful ingredients that we examined in
chapter 4: intimacy with God and integrity in the way we live our lives.
The things we should do in response to God's loyal love for us sometimes
become our effort to earn it, and subtly they can become a substitute for
knowing God. Often, we can't even be bothered with God. We want to meet
basic requirements and then get on with our own agendas. Our burnt offerings
can include dutiful prayer, regular attendance in worship services and Sunday
School, and even involvement in all kinds of terrific ministries in the
life of the church. But what is to be done in intimate communion with God,
we can end up doing for God and then eventually without him at all, because
we become practiced in doing religious things. Ministry activity is a part
of authentic discipleship, but the danger we face is that we can become
so preoccupied with working for the Lord and our self-justifying effort
that our personal relationship with him becomes perfunctory rather than
primary.
In John 4:23 when the Lord Jesus was talking to the Samaritan woman, he
said that God is seeking worshipers who will worship him in spirit and in
truth. When he was talking to the Pharisees in Matthew 9:13 and again in
Matthew 12:7, he quoted Hosea 6:6 to rebuke the Pharisees for ritual observance
without really knowing God. And when a scribe conversing with him in Mark
12 quoted Hosea 6:6, Jesus said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom
of God" (Mark 12:34). Mark adds an interesting comment in light of
the clarity with which Jesus spoke: The Pharisees didn't dare question him
any further. But the tragedy was that the Pharisees didn't really listen
to him, just as Israel didn't pay attention to Hosea. There was no change
at all.
The lifestyle of the unrepentant
What God wanted was for the nation to exhibit the true fruits of repentance
mentioned in verse 6: steadfast love and knowledge of God. But it didn't
happen. Verse 7 begins, "But they...." There is a sharp contrast
between what God wanted in terms of a love relationship and what the nation
offered to him. Listed in the next three verses is a series of offenses
against him because Israel resisted faithfulness and knowledge. Verses 7-9
describe the lifestyle of the unrepentant. They look at three faces of national
sin. In verse 7 it is personified as Adam in the Garden. Then there are
two representative places mentioned in verses 8 and 9, the city of Gilead
and the city of Shechem.
But at [like] Adam they transgressed the covenant;
there they dealt faithlessly with me.
Gilead is a city of evildoers,
tracked with blood.
As robbers lie in wait for a man,
so the priests are banded together;
they murder on the way to Shechem,
yea, they commit villainy.
The first problem was the sin of Adam. Like Adam, the nation was challenging
God's goodness and provision. This is defined in verse 1 in terms of faithlessness,
or not trusting in what God said. The relationship that Adam had with God
was a covenant relationship that involved intimacy with God as well as God's
expectation that Adam would obey God. Genesis 2:15-17 speaks of how God
placed Adam in a garden that was perfect---pleasant to the sight and good
for food. The tree of life was in the middle of the Garden, as was the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil: "The LORD God took the man and put
him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the LORD God commanded
the man, saying, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but
of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in
the day that you eat of it you shall die." There was a relationship
of communication and intimacy. There was total, abundant provision from
the Lord; everything Adam could need for life. And there was the requirement
placed on Adam that he trust God and not touch this one area of life that
God said would kill him.
But Adam began to relate to God in mistrust, in the fear that he was being
cheated out of everything that life had to offer. The sin initially was
buying into this lie of Satan. So Adam and Eve rebelled and then rationalized
the rebellion, looking for someone else to blame. When God showed up and
said to Adam, "What have you done?" Adam said, "The woman
that you gave me, she made me do it." And when the woman was called
to account, she said, "The serpent made me do it." The implication
was ultimately, "God, it's your fault."
Remember, the first word we were called to in Hosea 5:15 was the need to
acknowledge personal responsibility for sin. As long as I can blame somebody
else, it's not sin anymore but dysfunction. "It's somebody else's fault---I'm
a victim." And that too is the sin of Adam. We must be willing to acknowledge
our guilt, and the nation was unwilling to do it.
Verse 8 describes another tragic consequence of being unwilling to repent.
Instead of healing other people, we end up wounding people. Gilead was a
city of evildoers tracked with blood. Gilead was known for its production
of aromatic gums and resins used for making healing balms and ointments.
Their effectiveness was praised throughout the nation. The prophet Jeremiah
in 8:22 makes reference to the balm of Gilead as he grieves over the sin-sickness
with which the nation of Judah was diseased. Knowing that exile, the punishment
from the Lord, was coming, he cries out,
"Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?
Why then has the health of the daughter of my people
not been restored?"
Verse 1 says God is a healer to bind up wounds. His people were called to
a ministry of healing, and Gilead was a metaphor of that healing. But that
isn't what was happening. Bloodshed was endemic in Gilead; wounding instead
of healing. In us, lack of repentance of sin results in our wounding those
around us. Instead of being life-givers and peacemakers and reconcilers,
when sin is not dealt with in our lives, we are harmful and destructive
in our relationships.
It gets even worse in verse 9, which talks about the sin of Shechem. There
is robbery and murder even by the priests. The tragedy is that Shechem was
one of the cities of refuge that Joshua had designated during the days of
conquest. Of all the cities in the nation, it was to be a place of security,
safety, and sanctuary where people could go and know that they would be
protected. But that wasn't the case in Hosea's day; the highways leading
into the city were dangerous, and the times were so evil that even the religious
leaders had joined with robber bands to plunder and even murder the helpless
population. The defining sin in the last word in verse 9 is villainy. Your
Bible may say outrage or lewdness. The latter may come the closest, because
that word in Hebrew carries a connotation of violent sexual sin.
The church of Jesus Christ today is to be a place of sanctuary, a community
of faith where people know that they will be safe and secure. But our headlines
are full of discoveries that pastors, counselors, and priests are repeating
the sin of Shechem: sexual assault or emotional violence carried out against
vulnerable people who come to them out of a deep sense of need, admitting
weakness and desiring to be cared for spiritually. But now the public religious
leaders admit that they are guilty of sexual abuse against children and
women. So the word outrage is appropriate today.
A harvest of judgment for horrible sin
At the end of our passage, the bottom line is that God won't let us get
away with it. Look at verses 10 and 11:
In the house of Israel I have seen a horrible thing;
Ephraim's harlotry is there, Israel is defiled.
For you also, O Judah, a harvest is appointed.
Verse 10 summarizes all the accusations of verses 4-9, which were equally
true of both kingdoms, Israel in the north and Judah in the south. They
are also true of individuals and of the church of Jesus Christ today. God
looks closely and sees our unwillingness to repent and renounce our sin,
and he sees the behavior that results. And he says that it is a horrible
thing. Do you view your sinful rebellion against the Lord as a horrible
thing, an abomination to him? Most of us don't. We rationalize and compartmentalize.
But God sees the horror that it represents to him and to other people.
This verse echoes Hosea 5:3, where God said,
"I know Ephraim,
and Israel is not hid from me;
for now, Ephraim, you have played the harlot,
Israel is defiled."
He knows us inside out. If we are unwilling to deal with the sin in our
lives, the result will be a harvest of judgment. It would take the form
of exile for Israel and Judah. And they would end up in complete bondage
to sin; they would be inundated with sinful, idolatrous influence. They
would not be able to get out.
Remember the story I began with of my friend who ended up trapped in bondage
to sin? He began by secretly dabbling in little things. He sowed to the
wind and ended up reaping the whirlwind in his life. I was thinking of the
words of Romans 6. My friend claimed that he had died to sin while he was
still living in sin, thinking that he could control it. But finally it ended
up controlling him.
Remember, he asked me, "Even though most people don't trust the genuineness
of my repentance, do you believe me?" I told him that I really did
believe him, because agape love, the supernatural love of God that
is poured into our hearts through the Spirit, does believe all things and
hope all things, according to 1 Corinthians 13. "I'm called to be hopeful
and optimistic about what God is doing in your life," I told him.
But I also said that my optimism was more in the Lord of restoration and
healing than in his words of commitment and promise. I warned him of the
danger of facile words of repentance that are really flattery and lies.
I told him about the message of John the Baptist to the Pharisees in Matthew
3:8. He called them to show some fruits, or evidence, that would reveal
that their hearts were repentant before the Lord. "You know, it hasn't
been very long," I said, "and there are many years of destruction
and violence that God has to heal and restore. It takes awhile for the fruit
to become ripe and ready to eat."
But I encouraged him with the good news that God was completely committed
to the process of healing him, binding him up, reviving him, raising him
up, and giving him back his life. God wanted that more than either he or
I did. I can report that my friend has begun the painful, lonely, and difficult
process of making restitution and setting relationships straight. People
don't want to listen to him one more time; they don't know whether to trust
him or not. But so far, seven months down the line, it looks as if there
is a process of restoration going on. The Lord appears to be standing him
back on his feet, enabling him to look his Father God in the face again
and gradually restoring his human relationships.
I really want you personally to hear the words of Hosea's invitation,
"Come, let us return to the LORD...
Let us know, let us press on to know the LORD...."
That invitation may be just what you need right now. The good news is that
it is never too late to turn in repentance. There is nothing we have done
that is irreparable or irredeemable, because the God of the universe is
committed to healing and restoring us.
Catalog No. 4396
Hosea 6:1-11a
Eighth Message
Doug Goins
May 29, 1994
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