Love Lab 101

Love Lab 101

Remember those science classes in school that had a lecture and a lab? In the lecture, you heard the theory and hopefully took good notes. In lab, you put those theories to the test. Examples became experiments. Facts became findings. Learning was “fleshed out” in the lab.

There are hundreds of places recorded in history where God’s lectures were brought to life in the lab of human experience, but few are as dramatic as the story of an Old Testament prophet named Hosea. His life-altering course of study could have been called Love Lab 101.

What a command God gave to Hosea: “Go, take to yourself a wife of harlotry” (Hosea 1:2, NASB). What an experiment! What happens when you mix the love of a good man with the repeated straying of an unfaithful woman?

In this love lab, Gomer was more than Hosea’s harlot wife. She’s you and me. She’s anyone who belongs to God and cheats. Hosea felt that pain. God chose for him a bride who was flawed, fallen, and human. And that bride did what flawed, fallen, and human persons are prone to do: she spurned the love of her good husband and gave herself away to strangers instead.

But while Gomer was out with other men, her brokenhearted husband was quietly moving on her behalf. At God’s direction he built a fence around her to keep her from destroying herself. Hosea protected and provided for her during her very public indiscretions. Then he did an even more unthinkable thing: he wooed back his cheating wife! He didn’t allow her back; he determined to win her back!

Just like Hosea, God doesn’t drag us cheaters to the woodshed—he lures us to the wilderness, where undistracted and alone, he can win our hearts all over again. He invites us out of the crowded ballroom of life and onto a quiet balcony, where he can whisper sweet, forgiving things in our ear.

That is the gospel. We are more desperately wicked and lost than we could ever imagine. And he is more loving and merciful than we could ever hope. You’ve heard the lecture. Maybe you even believe it. But have you taken the lab?

There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. We love, because He first loved us.

1 John 4:18-19, NASB