How great is God’s love for His people? To what can we compare the love of God? What are the limits to God’s mercy for our mistakes? These are some of the questions that we see Hosea addressing in his prophetic work. In the process, I think that we learn that he, and thus in many ways God, is a hopeful romantic.
Certainly, Hosea has some difficult words for the people of Israel. He does not sugar coat their shortfalls nor God’s response to those deficiencies of faithfulness. Israel clearly assumes that what they have is theirs or that it has come from humans. They have lost sight of the source of their provision that ultimately is from God, the creator of all things, even when it is used in ungodly ways for idol worship.
They have come to trust in their own military might to protect them and to give them a sense of security, when ultimately it cannot. Only God has the power to protect them. It is only in God that they should place their trust. And so Hosea declares on behalf of the Lord that difficult lessons are coming down the pike.
Yet ultimately in Hosea’s message and especially in his life example of modeling faithful love to an unfaithful wife, we gain a profound glimpse into the love that God has for us. It is a love that is compared to marriage love. But this is not the shallow hopeless romantic love that so many in our society are infatuated with, the kind that quits at the first sign of incompatibility and ends for so many in irreconcilable divorce.
God’s love for us is that of a hopeful romantic that sees beyond our failings and our shortfalls to continue to love us in spite of those things. It is a love that is able to look beyond our poor choices and to love us into a life of a hopeful future, of something more than the empty narrative myth of accumulation that our culture provides.
Though there is judgment, there is also immense mercy offered to us as God’s people. There is an abundance of deep love that should point us to a new narrative within our lives of faith. It is a narrative of a God who loves us with such great hope that we too should become hopeful romantics that take seriously our roles of sharing that abundant love with a world that has bought into the narrative myth of scarcity. Though there is much to lament in our world today, Hosea teaches us to be hopeful romantics that pursue a loving God and live into God’s reality.
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