If there was a wedding, it had to be one of the most awkward ones in history.

Plenty of marriages begin blissfully and then crash into misery years in (maybe even months), but this was different. This marriage wasn’t destined for disaster; it was a tragedy before the dress touched the aisle. The whole town knew what kind of girl she was. Many of the men knew firsthand. As the groom said his vows, “I take you for better or worse . . .” the idea of worse, even at the altar, seemed like some dreadful understatement. And the idea of better, like some naive fantasy.

As he stood there, he knew exactly what he was getting into. He knew tears were waiting to be shed. He knew how many long nights he might sleep alone, wondering where she could be, whether she was safe, what man might be holding her in his arms. He knew the excruciating conversations he might have to have with their children. He knew — and yet he married her anyway. He took her to be his. Why?

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.” So he went and took Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim. (Hosea 1:2–3)

Bitter Paradox

We don’t know whether Hosea and Gomer had a typical Hebrew ceremony, but their marriage would have received lots of attention. It was meant to. As the two became one, God was seizing the wandering eyes of his unfaithful people.

When God told Hosea to take this loose woman as his lawfully wedded wife, he was making a statement — a loud and offensive statement. “Why her, Lord?” Hosea might have rightly asked. “Because the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.” Their love toward me has grown cold and complacent, they take my grain and wine and protection for granted, and they’ve crawled into bed, again and again, with the gods of this world. Not just whoredom, but great whoredom. They worship passionately at the altars of carnal pleasure, of plenty, of comfort, of pride, and then dare to come home and offer me whatever little they have left.

And God had warned them. But they would not listen, so he painted them a picture instead — a dark, shameful, and painful picture. He planned a wedding no one would want to attend. He held up a mirror and made them want to look away. He sent Hosea to love and cherish Gomer, “a wife of whoredom.” A bride who could not be trusted. A bitter paradox.

The Kind of Whore He Loved

What made Gomer such a whore? We’re not told much, but we meet her through the adultery of God’s people.

Wayward Israel shows us that Gomer was the kind of woman who says, “I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink” (Hosea 2:5). In other words, I’m not getting what I want at home, so I’ll look for a man who will give me what I want. She was the kind of woman who took what her husband provided and used it to attract and please other men (Hosea 2:8; see James 4:3). She was the kind of woman who gave other men credit for all her husband had done for her (Hosea 2:12). She was the kind of woman unworthy of a good man.

And yet he loved her. Hosea chose her, sought her, bought her, and loved her. “So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and a homer and a lethech of barley. And I said to her, ‘You must dwell as mine for many days. You shall not play the whore, or belong to another man; so will I also be to you’” (Hosea 3:2–3). Can you hear the sermon God had prepared? Israel, let me show you who you really are — and let me show you who I really am. If it were not for the devotion of Hosea, their marriage, like so many marriages, would have only preached worldliness, selfishness, and alienation. It may have painted sinful Israel well, but it would have been graffiti across the love of God.

The relentless love of a faithful husband, though, made the whore into an emblem of mercy, and their marriage into a miracle of grace.

Heaven’s Wedding Homily

Their wedding would have been jarring not mainly because of Gomer’s bruised and tattered history, but because of the strange and unexpected brightness in his eyes, eyes that were shadows of the loving eyes of heaven. Feel the sudden contrast halfway through these verses:

I will punish her for the feast days of the Baals     when she burned offerings to themand adorned herself with her ring and jewelry,     and went after her lovers     and forgot me, declares the Lord.

Therefore, behold, I will allure her,     and bring her into the wilderness,     and speak tenderly to her. (Hosea 2:13–14)

She dressed up for another man. She slid off the ring I bought for her. When she left, she walked right past our kids. And even when the other man would not have her, she chased him. She spent it all to have him. And she forgot me. Therefore . . . what? How would you finish that sentence in the wake of such betrayal?

“God wants the wife no man would want. He woos the woman most men would have deserted.”

Therefore, I will allure her. That’s the climax of this sermon called marriage: God wants the wife no man would want. After all she’s done to make him leave, his love burns warm. He woos the woman most men would have deserted. And he will have her, even though it will cost him in the worst way possible. One day soon, his Son would come and bear the name No Mercy (Hosea 1:6), so that we, the wife of whoredom, might be called beloved.

Scandal of Betrothal

As God watches the bride he saved out of slavery plunge herself into adultery, he knows full well he will one day bring her home. He promises to find her, rescue her, and woo her.

I will betroth you to me forever. 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. (Hosea 2:19–20)

He repeats himself three times because he knows how inconceivable, even scandalous this love would be: “I will betroth you. . . . I will betroth you. . . . I will betroth you. . . .” The repetition drives a stake of hope into all our fears that God might not forgive us. “I can forgive. . . . I will forgive. . . . I will love you as if you had never left.”

Notice he says, “I will betroth you,” not just, “I will take you back.” Ray Ortlund presses on the wonder of this love:

The mystery of grace revealed here is a promise of covenant renewal — although even the word renewal is weak, for this oracle promises not merely the reinvigoration of the old marriage but the creation of a new one. . . . The ugly past will be forgotten and they will start over again, as if nothing had ever gone wrong. (God’s Unfaithful Wife, 70)

The wife of whoredom was received like the epitome of purity — like the most desirable bride. The night of forgiveness and reconciliation was as a wedding night. No matter what she saw in the mirror, his eyes now told her she was new and irresistible, his “lily among brambles” (Song of Solomon 2:2). When Hosea went to the altar and resolved to delight in his adulterous wife, he preached a text that had not yet been written:

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. (Ephesians 5:25–27)

Premarital Counseling of a Prophet

What might Hosea’s love for Gomer mean for marriages today? While we are not prophets commissioned to marry prostitutes, our marriages are prophetic in their own way.

Like Hosea’s countercultural love, every faithful Christian marriage resists and confronts a world in love with sin. Every loyal spouse is a foil for the ugliness and destructiveness of our mutiny against God — and a lighthouse alluring more sinners into his mercy. Every vow that holds, despite all the reasons to leave, tells someone that real Love exists, that forgiveness is possible, that there’s more to life than Satan can offer.

“Who might see your marriage and be shaken free from worldly and empty ways of living?”

We don’t know how many in Israel saw Hosea, realized the pitiful thinness of their earthly lives, and went deep with God again. Who might see your marriage and be shaken free from worldly and empty ways of living? Who might finally meet God because you stayed, loved, forgave, and pursued your spouse?

If Hosea and Gomer teach us anything about marriage, though, it’s that the love of God shines brightest through us when marriage is hardest. Can you bear to believe that? Happy, flourishing marriages may sing the gospel in big, bright major chords, but the minor chords of difficult and devoted marriages are often all the more arresting. Their beauty is haunting for being so much harder to explain.

The uniquely challenging aspects of our marriages really can become the greatest stages for true love — for displaying what it means to be chosen, forgiven, and treasured by God through Christ. This is the glory of the marriage covenant, and its beams are strongest when they shine through our marital weaknesses and struggles.

Audio Transcript

Good Monday morning, everyone, and thank you for listening to the podcast. Well, is it sinful to fall short of excellence in our work? This is a great question, relevant for businessmen, for stay-at-home wives, for volunteers, for students — for all of us. And the question comes to us from a listener named Dylan.

Here’s what he asks: “Pastor John, hello to you, and thank you for taking my question! In Colossians 3:22–24, Paul exhorts his readers to ‘work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.’ Does this mean that any work not done in excellence is sin? How do we apply God’s view of work to cleaning our house, writing a paper for school, or working a nine-to-five job? I have been feeling guilty about the way I handle these things for months now, and I’m not sure if I’m just being self-righteous, or if I am being disobedient to the Lord. Is Paul describing a type of excellence in all that we do?”

Let me begin with an illustration from my ministry from about thirty years ago. We were wrestling at the time in our church with how to think about expectations of excellence in music, in worship services. And there was one group that stressed technical excellence and quoted 2 Samuel 24:24: “I will not offer burnt offerings to the Lord my God that cost me nothing” — which, being applied in our situation, meant, “I will not offer God any music in our worship services that has not cost me an extraordinary effort of practice so as to make it technically excellent, even flawless.”

Then there was another group, or maybe I should say there was me. I appreciated that commitment to excellence; however, my gentle pushback to this emphasis was that, in the Christian church, God not only cares about whether we are excellent musicians, but also cares about whether we are excellent forgivers. That’s the way I stated it — whether we are excellent in patience, excellent in long-suffering. For example, whether we show patience and forgiveness if someone’s musical effort was not flawless.

“When it comes to excellence in the Christian life, we dare not ever limit it to the way a person does a skill.”

In other words, when it comes to excellence in the Christian life, we dare not ever limit it to the way a person does a skill or the way a person does a craft. We must always take into account excellence in attitudes, excellence in emotions, excellence in relationships. God has lots more to say in his word about whether we are angry in our attitude than he does about whether we’re competent in our skill.

Undistracting Excellence

The way we finally worked this out among our people, among our leaders, was to use this phrase as our goal: undistracting excellence. In other words, there is something bigger and deeper and more important going on in this service than the technical quality of music. It’s not unimportant; it’s just not most important. The aim here is to know God, meet God, love God, treasure God, trust God, enjoy God.

Those are all acts of the heart and mind. Everything else is subservient to that in this service, helping people get to that, including the excellence of our performances — whether it’s music or the sound system or lighting or heating or air conditioning or preaching or the clothing that we wear. Everything is to remove obstacles — undistracting — and to serve knowing God, meeting God, loving God, treasuring God, trusting God, enjoying God. We captured that goal by putting the adjective undistracting in front of the word excellence.

It implied that not only might shoddy work distract from meeting God — the person continuing to make mistakes. Everybody’s going to be embarrassed; they’re going to be distracted — that’s not going to work. But also, excessive finesse might distract from the spiritual reality of encountering God. And I’m thinking of this in preaching, not just music. A sermon can be so shoddy in its order and clarity that it doesn’t help. And it can be so rhetorically refined that it distracts and doesn’t help. So the criterion ceased to be an abstract view of technical excellence and became a spiritual goal of removing obstacles from people seeing and savoring Christ.

Working from the Soul

Now, Dylan is asking about Colossians 3:22–24 and how it calls us to excellence. So here’s the text:

Bondservants, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, not by way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord. Whatever you do, work heartily [it’s literally ek psyches, “from the soul”], as for of the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.

I think Dylan is right to draw principles for all of us from these verses, even though they are directed to slaves and masters. And I say that because Colossians 3:17, just above this paragraph, says, “Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus.” And I think Paul is simply applying that global principle for all of us to the slave-master relationship so that all of us can learn from his application. I would point to three things that he says.

Avoid Hypocrisy

First, don’t just try to be outwardly pleasing to people while your heart doesn’t care about the people and doesn’t care really about what quality of work you do, as long as they think it’s good. It’s “eye-service”; that’s man-pleasing. In other words, don’t be a hypocrite.

If you’re going to give the impression outwardly to your boss, or your teacher, or your spouse, or your friend that you are doing something to please them, then do something really to please them. Don’t be a hypocrite. Don’t be a double-tongued or a double-behavior person who outwardly wants to have a sense of being pleased with their eyes, and deep down you haven’t done good work at all, and you’re concealing it from them. That would significantly affect the quality of work you do if you had that mindset. And Paul says, “Don’t have it.”

Work for Jesus

Second, whatever job you have and whomever it is that you are working for as a Christian, always think of Jesus Christ as the one to whom you will give an account for the quality of your work and the quality of your attitudes in the work. Colossians 3:24 says, “You are serving the Lord Christ” — meaning, whomever else you’re serving, you are really serving Christ in serving them. So, whatever quality of attitude and quality of work you would do if Christ were your immediate supervisor, do that work with that attitude.

Look to the Reward

And third, Paul says, “Keep in mind that your reward for the good you do will come from the Lord, even if it doesn’t come from man.”

“Always think of Jesus Christ as the one to whom you will give an account for the quality of your work.”

So clearly, Paul is implying, (1) knowing that we shouldn’t be hypocrites or deceitful men-pleasers, and (2) knowing that ultimately our supervisor for this homework or housework or job work is the Lord Jesus himself, and (3) knowing that our reward comes from him, not primarily from the teachers or spouses or bosses — all of that will exert an influence on the quality of work we do, and the good attitudes with which we do it.

More at Stake Than Excellence

And then Dylan asks, “Does this mean that any work not done in excellence is sin?” And if that question is to be answered with precision, I would say the answer is no, not always. It’s not always sin. It’s not that simple.

For example, if you decide to paint your own bedroom rather than hire a professional painter, because you think God wants you to give the several-hundred dollars you might pay the painter to some missionary friend, and yet you are not a very skilled painter, how will God look upon the exactness of the line between the beige wall and the white ceiling where they meet each other up in the corner?

I’m speaking from experience here. A skilled painter gets a little bead (I’ve seen him do this) of paint on the end of his brush, and he drags it — this perfect little bead — along that line with such amazing precision that the line between the edge, between the beige wall and the white ceiling, is perfect. Now my lines between the beige wall and the white ceiling are wavy. Here’s my answer: God will not view my wavy edges as sin. He won’t, even though they are not technically excellent, like a painter could make them. Bigger things are at stake, in other words.

But if I advertise myself as a painter, with my present skill, and I go into somebody else’s bedroom, and I paint their wall with wavy edges of beige on the wall and white on the ceiling with a wavy line in between, hoping they won’t see it and how shoddy it is compared to what a
real painter could do, that will be sin.

Do Your Best

The same thing applies to so many situations. It’s not sin to make a B in algebra class instead of an A if you work hard and do your best. It’s not sin to make five sales this week instead of ten if you’re doing your best.

And I would define “your best” like this: “your best” is defined as a fallible effort to take into account all relevant factors, like sleep (when you sleep) and health and family and my age and energy and gifting and other relationships that need to be attended to. And then, when all is said and done, you entrust yourself to the grace of Christ, who died for you so that you could enjoy his excellent forgiveness.

http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15632318/we-act-gods-miracle-of-love