God heals us

 

Hosea 14

God reveals himself to us as the Healer of his sin-sick church.  Hosea’s vision of God as our Healer sets before us an invitation with an offer.  In chapter 14 verses 1 to 3 the prophet invites us to return to the Lord, even explaining to us how.  In verses 4 – 8 God himself speaks, offering to heal us of the malignancy of our sins and give us fresh spiritual health.  Hosea helps us see that sin is more than bad.  Sin, because it draws us away from the living God, is also enfeebling.  A worldly church is a decrepit church, hobbling its way into the geriatric ward, even though it may perceive itself as vibrantly youthful.  Such a church is like a cancer victim energetically pumping iron in a gym, admiring himself in the mirror, unaware that he is in fact dying from deep within.  Hosea helps us get in touch with reality by the sharply defined clarity of his categories.  Sin is our disease, God is our doctor and his treatment alone restores the church to health.  Hosea begins with the doctor’s prescription: an undiluted, full-strength dose of repentance.

 

Verse 1

If we want healing from God, thorough repentance is the way to receive it.  Hosea’s wording connotes a kind of repentance that does more than just point a life in the Lord’s general direction.  The repentance implied by his idiom brings that life fully back to the Lord withholding nothing from him.  It is not enough that we see our sins and feel bad about them.  It is not enough even to stop sinning.  True repentance comes all the way back to God, back to our original relationship with him, back to our first love, back to the basics of the gospel, back to the daily disciplines of holiness.  We leave the world behind, including worldly Christianity and go hard after God until we rediscover how to live in his nearness.  The very idea of “returning” tells us to go back the way we came.  Retracing our wayward steps, we must undo what we have done, dismantle our idolatries, own up to our foolish judgment calls, recant our wrong ideas.  Then we reassemble the life, personally and institutionally, that is pleasing to God, according to the Scriptures.  We start to think more carefully about how we live.  We get tough on ourselves and make some long-overdue, hard decisions.  We prize God alone as our great delight and reward. This is real repentance.  It is costly, inconvenient and embarrassing.  But it is the only way to healing.  “return unto the Lord thy God."  We are his covenanted people, chosen in Christ, redeemed at the cross, sealed with his Spirit.  Despite what we deserve, his covenant with us still holds.  He still identifies with us as our God.  We have no true interest or advantage anywhere else.  So we are not being required to grope after some strange, risky, unknown relationship.  God is calling his own prodigals home.  We are his people, set apart to him in the first place.

 

Our problem is not that God is inaccessible or unknowable.  Our problem is with us.  We have stumbled over our sins.  “thou hast fallen by thine iniquity.”  Hosea has in mind here Israel’s steep national decline during his lifetime.  The country was on the skids.  How could they put on the brakes?  The people hoped that their weakening position might be secured through political alliances: “When Ephraim saw his sickness, and Judah saw his wound, then went Ephraim to the Assyrian and sent to king Jareb: yet could he not heal you nor cure you of your wound.” (chapter 5 verse 13)

 

The people of God did not understand that their nation was suffering social disintegration and international diminution for a moral reason, not a political reason.  We can see our symptoms easily enough but we do not diagnose the disease wisely.  And so we apply irrelevant, ineffective remedies.  And we risk antagonizing God even further by treating him as if he were irrelevant.  How dimly we grasp the true relevance of spiritual things for living real life in this tough world!

 

Moreover, Hosea’s generation also felt that economic realities required them to mix in some Canaanite Baalism with their biblical faith.  Portraying Israel as the Lord’s unfaithful wife, the prophet read the nation’s mind. “For their mother hath played the harlot: she that conceived them hath done shamefully: for she said, I will go after my lovers, that give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, mine oil and my drink.” (chapter 2 verse 5)

 

The Israelites saw the good things in life as the pay-off for their dalliances with the rites of Baal worship.  To this the Lord responded “For she did not know that I gave her corn and wine, and oil and multiplied her silver and gold, which they prepared for Baal.” (chapter 2 verse 8)

 

But however the Israelites were rationalizing their compromises, they were not really being driven by material or economic necessity.  The truth was far worse.  Israel was madly in love, flirting with the Baals.  Deep within the national mood there stirred an emotional craving for the exotic, sexy world of Baalism.  And the familiar world of classical biblical faith seemed old and boring by comparison.  This is worldliness.  And the Lord tells us in Hosea 2 verse 13 how he dealt with Hosea’s generation of worldly semi-believers: “And I will visit upon her the days of Baalim, wherein she burned incense to them and she decked herself with her earrings and her jewels, and she went after her lovers, and forgat me, saith the Lord.”

 

These then were the 2 primary sins that proved to be the downfall of God’s people in Hosea’s time: futile hopes and vulgar desires.  They hankered after the security of worldly alliances and the thrill of worldly pleasures.  They did not really feel that their heavenly husband would either protect them or satisfy them.  And so they were sniffing around where they had no business, caressing their darling sins, trying to get their needs met by others.  The church in every generation is in danger of stumbling over the very same sins.

 

What is it that brings the people of God low?  What is it that obstructs our progress and frustrates our good intentions?  What is it that sets us up to be caught out by unintended consequences? The answer is embarrassingly simple.  We sin: “Your sins have been your downfall!”  And we sin today in essentially the same ways they did then.  But Hosea is showing us the way out: “Bend your will around and go back to the Lord.  Go so far back that you begin to do something very radical, you begin actually, literally, to obey him.  You begin to allow, by faith, that he might just be your all-sufficiency.  It’s your refusal to trust him enough to obey him; it’s not your political weakness, not your finances, not anything else; it’s your sins that have been your downfall.  So go back to God.  Relearn his ways.  There is no healing for you any other way.”

 

How then do we return so fully, so thoroughly to God?  What does he want from us when we approach him.

 

 

Verse 2

God wants to hear from us.  He wants us to approach him with plain-speaking honesty; no evasion, no equivocation, no excuses.  And he wants to hear from each one of us.  In verse 1 “return” was a singular imperative and his pronouns (thou hast fallen … thine iniquity) were also singular.  He was addressing the people of God all together as one corporate whole.  But here in verse 2 Hosea changes to plural verbs when he says, “Take … turn … say”.  He breaks the corporate whole down into its constituent members and speaks to us now as individuals.  Could there be any other way?  Repentance cannot remain a corporate act only and still be real.  You and I must make it our own.

 

Is it not interesting that God wants us to bring to him, of all things, words?  What else might we bring?  We know that we cannot bring him our own merit, as if we deserved healing from God.  Only Christ crucified can bring us back into God’s good graces.  But we might deceive ourselves into thinking that we can present him with religious acts and offerings, with pageantry and spectacle, with programmes and organisations and events, as the church’s trumpets blare and drums beat in triumphalistic enthusiasm.  We might think that is what God wants from us.  It will not work: “They shall go with their flocks and with their herds to seek the Lord; but they shall not find him; he hath withdrawn himself from them.” (chapter 5 verse 6)  We mean well.  But sometimes we do not think, we do not see it through God’s eyes.

 

So what does God want from us?  He wants not display but words: words of brokenness, words of renunciation, words of fresh resolve, words of praise.  He wants a thoughtful, meaningful encounter with each one of us.  We have unfinished business with God and it has to be prayed through.  If we cannot think of anything to say to God, then we may not yet feel with sufficient intensity our need for him.  Maybe we need to suffer some more.  But if we do sense our need and are uncertain that our effort will do any good, Hosea is coaching us in what to say and encouraging us that God really will listen.

 

As we approach God in individual repentance, what are we going to say to him?

 

First we confess our sins, holding nothing back, “Forgive all our sins” – or to paraphrase the force of these words, “Carry off all our sins, every single one of them.  We don’t want them around any more.  We are sorry we ever flirted with them.  They have done us nothing but harm.  Remove all our sins far from us.”

 

God is more willing to forgive us than we are willing to seek his forgiveness.  And God is better able to release us from our sins than we are to get free of them.

 

Is it not significant that, in returning to God for healing, we must first face into our sins?  We must place ourselves under the judgment of the Word of God.  Outward success can seduce us into a spirit of self-admiration: “And Ephraim said, Yet I am become rich, I have found me out substance: in all my labours they shall find none iniquity in me that were sin.” (chapter 12 verse 8)  In other words: “I’m so successful, no one will notice or care about my hidden failings.”  Such boastfulness drives God’s healing presence away.  So it makes no sense to ask the Lord for greater blessing on our unexamined status quo.  We need to be released from what we now are.  That is where we begin.

 

Secondly, we ask God to show us new favour: “Receive us graciously.”  Severe honesty in confessing our sins is not a waste of time.  It opens the way to renewed communion with God.  We are graciously reinstated to the enjoyment of his goodness. 

 

In other words, God does not merely remove our defect.  He restores us to something better.  He not only takes away our problem but he also does us good (“receive us graciously”).  God’s moral calculus is factored very much to our advantage.  It is God who decides how to answer that prayer.  And he is wise enough to know just what to do in each of our lives.  Our part is to welcome his renewed favour, however it comes to us, with a sense of undeserved privilege.

 

Thirdly, we pledge our renewed devotion to our Lord: “so will we render the calves of our lips.”  Thorough repentance is a new way of living, a moment-by-moment responsiveness to God’s goodness.  It’s a sensitive, personal engaging with God, rendering back to him thanks for what we receive from him.  This is so because true spirituality is circular in design.  God sends blessing to us, and we offer the blessing back to him in praise.  All good begins with God and returns to God.  Our lives are not to be graves, where blessings go to die, but altars, where blessings are returned to God in thanksgiving.

 

Verse 2 charts for us a positive new course by showing us what to turn toward.  But God does not intend that we merely add pious ornamentation to the surface of otherwise unchanged lives.  So verse 3 now adds depth and texture to our rededication by showing us what to turn away from.

 

“Asshur shall not save us; we will not ride upon horses: neither will we say any more to the work of our hands, Ye are our gods: for in thee the fatherless findeth mercy.”

 

When we lay hold of the “solid joys and lasting treasures” of our God, we also let go of the stylish mythologies of the world that disappoint us.  Hosea articulates for us a twofold vow, followed by an affirmation of confidence mingled with relief.

 

Our vow renounces all vain hopes through self-help.  We resolve to live in complete dependence on our Lord alone.  How?  First, we swear off all alliances with the AssyriaNs and Egypts of our day (Asshur shall not save us: we will not rise upon horses).  Hosea’s Israel had turned to these powers for national security: “Ephraim also is like a silly dove without heart: they call to Egypt, they go to Assyria.”  (chapter 7 verse 11)  “Ephraim feedeth on wind, and followeth after the east wind: he daily increaseth lies and desolation and they do make a covenant with the Assyrians and oil is carried into Egypt.” (chapter 12 verse 1)

 

Now what is wrong with this picture?  Simply put, the people of God feel nervous if all they have is God.  So they are fawning before the bullies of worldly power; that is what is wrong.  Today we profess that we have taken refuge in the King of kings and Lord of lords.  At the same time we sometimes stoop to curry favour with politicians and earthly powers, as if the safety of the church depended on human protection and political favour.  Do we demonstrate confidence that the Lord himself, and the Lord alone, is our power, our security, our boast?  Human politics is an honourable calling, of course, but we dishonour our Lord if we feel naked when surrounded with his care only.

 

The people of God in Hosea’s day gambled their future on placating worldly powers.  They not only discredited their witness to the world; they also antagonized God.  But the repentant people of God find their hearts saying, “What really matters is not what they decided about us in the Assyrian throne room but what God decides about us in the heavenly Throne room.  That is where our future is really determined.  So we will put our hope in him, come what may.”

 

The second way we reaffirm our faith in God alone is to swear off the gods we have devised (“We will never again say, “Our God” to what our own hands have made”).  In Hosea’s day idolatry was laughably obvious: “And now they sin more and more and have made them molten images of their silver and idols according to their own understanding, all of it the work of the craftsmen: they say of them, Let the men that sacrifice kiss the calves.” (chapter 13 verse 2)  The idolatry of the modern world is more subtle than that, but it is still possible to invest unrealistic power in the works of our own hands and expect very little from God himself.  The dreariness of a prayer meeting, contrasted with our gushing enthusiasm over the latest church technique, reveals where our confidence really lies.  The church scene today is crowded with temptations to venture little on God.  And because God has no intention of supporting human ideas, methods and standard, his power withdraws.  We are then left with our own programmes still to fuel, but little of the divine Presence.  So we look  even more desperately to the works of our own hands, although we may continue to describe ministry outcomes in the pious terms of “our God”, the old term of covenant endearment.

 

A repentant church has abandoned itself to God alone.  It risks everything on the promises of God.  It is on its face before God.  It understands that our ancient confession of faith, that he is “our God”, makes a difference in our practical execution of ministry and church development.  A repentant church understands that methods are never value-free but always reveal where our trust really lies.  Therefore methods are placed under the judgment of the Word of God.  And repentant people rediscover the experiential reality of “our God” so that they never again want to go back to their own plastic substitutes.

 

The sweet brokenness we sense in this verse shines forth most clearly in the last line: “for in thee the fatherless findeth mercy.”  Is that not what we are: needy, hungry, penniless orphans, stumbling around in life desperate to find love?  A repentant church rests in the truth of this and delights in the living reality of it.  They feel that they have “come home”: in from the cold, hostile, foreign atmosphere of worldly alliances and self-worship, back to where they belong.  We are far better off with our heavenly Father than with the illegitimate children of our own idols.

 

The very length of the vow here in Hosea 14 verse 3 tells us something: true repentance aims at vital dependence on the Lord in all areas of life.

 

God wants us to know that if we will draw near to him with real repentance, he will draw near to us with a generous outpouring of healing power.

 

 

Verse 4

If we sinners had to fear that going back to God he would only slap us around and scream at us and humiliate us, we would never approach him.  We would safely keep our distance.  But that is why verse 4 is here: it assures us that God’s kindness leads us to repentance.  God receives broken sinners.  He has a soft spot in his heart for them.  He pours out his favour on the penitent.  So we have nothing to lose and everything to gain.  Who would refuse his offer of healing?  What sin could be worth the wounds it inflicts.

 

Verse 4 brings us to the gravitational centre of this entire passage.  Now God speaks to us.  We have declared our intention to take the courageous steps of true repentance.  Now God declares what he will do for us: “I will heal their backsliding.”

 

The covenant people of Hosea’s day were lying at death’s door.  With herdlike conformity, his generation had veered off into a persistent pattern of unreasoning but fashionable alternatives to obedient confidence in God.  Their hearts were so hard they viewed the ways of God with an “Anything but that!” mentality.  Running every which way but toward God, “My people are bent to backsliding from me.” (chapter 11 verse 7)

 

But here Hosea shows us that God’s commitment to us is even more profound than our apostasy from him.  Our crises do not overthrow his mercies.  God can take us back at our worst and heal us. 

 

Sin is a soul-destroying disease, draining us of spiritual vitality and appetite and joy.  Original sin is like a congenital birth defect, and acquired sins are like self-inflicted wounds.  But God is able to perform radical surgery on his deformed and injured patients, with miraculous cures.  In ourselves we are beset with “the demented proclivity for rebellion and against return to Yahweh.”  But his healing touch is able to restore us to the spiritual life that can only be described with the lavish poetic imagery of verses 5 – 7.  Under God’s care, but nowhere else, our prognosis for a full recovery is encouraging.

 

Hosea 14 verse 4 should give us pause before we completely write off our more wayward denominations today.  Hosea’s generation was just as bad.  So how do we know?  Maybe some mainline denomination will lead the parade into God’s glorious kingdom.  Maybe he will do something like that just to highlight his grace all the more wonderfully.  And if so, then there might be room there for you and me as well.

 

God’s therapy for his sick people is love, not condemnation.  We must come clean about our sins (verses 1 to 3).  We must move over and take God’s side against our own sins.  But when we do, God’s answer is not more reproach but help (“I will love them”) and that at no charge (“freely”).  He has within himself all the motivation and resources he needs to work with us, to transform us, to see us through.  He does not wait until we are healthy.  He only waits until we are repentant.  His Son declared, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.  I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” (Luke 5 verses 31 and 32)

 

If we will only put away false appearances and admit how weak and sick we really are, how pathetic compared with verses 5 – 7 so that we check ourselves into God’s hospital and place ourselves under his care, he promises to heal us by loving us freely.  The eternal Word of God is calling to us today as much as he did to Israel so long ago.  He wants to draw us to himself with an offer of his free, spontaneous, abundant love, so that our generation of the church comes alive with new life and real growth – despite the fact that we have so often spurned his love.  Why do we punish ourselves one moment longer?  Why do we not run back to him?

 

Our sins do incite his disciplining anger.  That is a solemn truth.  But his anger is not his final word to us (“mine anger is turned away from him”).  God’s ultimate intentions for us are merciful, because he is merciful.  If we were to dig through all the attributes of the person of God, if I may put it that way, we would hit bedrock at his mercy.  We could dig no deeper.  So, while we are by nature inclined to turn away from him in apostasy, he is by nature inclined to turn toward us in mercy.  It is simply his way.  That is why he himself is all our hope.  So what can the power of God’s love actually accomplish for his penitent people?

 

Verses 5 – 7

After the plainly stated incentives offered in verse 4 – and “clarity is vital to the anxious and conscience-stricken” – now the poetry takes wings and flies.  Hosea’s imaginative language is describing what a renewed, healthy church looks like in real life.  The prophet heaps metaphor on metaphor to enforce one overall point: how the church, restored to health, flourishes a miraculous quality of life. God’s love inspires the wholesome growth of godliness, not the rank growth of licence.  Freshness (dew), depth (cast forth his roots as Lebanon), beauty (beauty … smell), influence (they that dwelt under his shadow shall return), abundant life (they shall revive as the corn and grow as the vine) and prestige mark the character and ministry of the healthy church.  The church explodes with life!  No longer is an insecure church nervously craving the approval of the world, unwittingly stifling its own vitality.  Now the world comes to the church, seeking shelter under its ministries and ordinances.

 

We bless the world when we aim to please not the world but our Lord.  Why?  Because it is his life in us that makes us attractive.  And he infuses his life into us when we set our hearts on him alone.  After all, isn’t the world looking for an alternative?  Why should they show any interest, beyond passing amusement, in a church that is just a religious version of the values and beliefs they already live by?  The salt of the earth is effective because it is different.

 

God puts into our hearts a new desire that he would “take away all iniquity and receive us graciously” (verse 2).  We take these simple words to God in prayer.  And what does he grant in response?  He transforms the church into a Garden of Eden (verses 5 to 7).  How largely, how imaginatively, God answers our prosaic little prayers, as the dew of God falls on us so that we blossom like a lily!

 

Finally in verse 8 God stretches out his hands to us in appeal, as it were.  Having stated his case, he does not leave it there.  God appeals to us one more time to see how sharply incompatible our idols are with his own glorious reality.  He offers himself to us and confronts us with a decision.

 

The vision of divine healing in verses 4 – 8 should have one powerful effect on us.  By now we see God’s love and power as unspeakably superior to the alternatives clamouring for our allegiance.  “What have I to do any more with idols?” is a way of saying “the issue has now become clear.  I am your God, your Father, your Healer.  I alone am your all-sufficiency.  Your idols bring nothing but corruption and death.  How can any confusion now linger in your minds?  How can any hesitation linger in your wills?  The time to be decisive has now come. So choose!”

 

Hosea’s image of God as a luxuriant evergreen implies that the normal experience of the church is a life of rich fruitfulness.  The living God does not produce a dead, dry church.  Abundance may be expected of a people in vital union with such a God.  And when it comes, we must not fear it.  We must not push it away in suspicion.  We must not perceive it as aberrant.  God’s grace is by its very nature extravagant.  How could it be otherwise, given our deep sinfulness and desperate illness?  A meagre supply of grace is not even conceivable, if the all-holy God is to heal sinful people like us.  Our part is to open our hearts in genuine repentance, welcoming the flow of grace until it rises to fill us all.  But this will not happen automatically.  We must turn from our idols and cast ourselves on the living God.

 

Baal can be manipulated but not God.  So God forces the issue of our personal engagement with himself.  The words “I” or “me” appear conspicuously in each line of this verse.  Why?  Because God is not a genie to be stroked; neither is he a mere doctrinal abstraction to be recited.  God is a person.  And here he is calling us to fix ourselves on him, on him personally, him alone.

 

Where else can we go?  There is a God in heaven, our prayer-hearing God (“I will answer you”), our devotedly conscientious God (“I will care for you”), who will be there for us when it counts, as no one else can ever be.  The only logical choice (if our minds have been cleared of the idols’ hoopla), the only helpful course (if we consult our own best and truest interests) is to go back to our God and never let go again.  Everything we most hope for in life comes from him alone, our ever-luxuriant God.

 

To wait on the Lord, to live the life of prayer, to abide in Christ, to walk in the Spirit, the modus operandi of the open bible with the open heart, is a way of doing the business of life that does not come naturally to us.  If in real life it is true that “your fruitfulness comes from me”, then we must allow for mystery.  Our methods are not ultimate.  God accomplishes his work by his own means, at his own pace, for his own ends, and we cannot manage him.  God does not need you or me to be his nanny.  Our part is humbly to cling to God as God and let God be God.  We must neither seek our fullness from other sources nor resist the real thing when God grants if, for “your faithfulness comes from me.”

 

The venoms of our sins are running in our veins.  But God, who made the soul with all its hidden capacities also knows the soul.

 

Will the weak and sick church of today trust the Great Physician enough to submit to his healing care?  Let it be our aim, our message, and our own practice for his gospel to be our clinic every day, for life is in Christ and nowhere else.