Love’s Choice

So Hosea married Gomer.   Hosea 1:3

Over the years a number of folks have told me, with great sadness, that if they had known the pain that the future would hold, they would never have gone through with their weddings. Of course, none of us who have made a marriage vow knew when we said “for better or worse” what the future would hold.

But Hosea did know, and his extraordinary decision to marry a woman he knew would repeatedly break his heart gives us a great insight into the love of God. God is telling us, “This is what I’ve done. I’ve made a covenant with my people in the full knowledge that they’ll be unfaithful and bring me indescribable pain.”

God knew before the beginning of time that men and women would choose the knowledge of evil, and that delivering us from it would involve God himself taking human flesh, entering our world, and being rejected by it. This would lead to unspeakable suffering and pain in the heart of God, but he did it anyway.

God knew from the beginning that Israel would turn to idols, and yet he set his love on these people. He had said to them, “I will be your God, and you will be my people” (Leviticus 26:12). He invited them into an exclusive covenant relationship with him, knowing that they would be hard-hearted, stubborn, and faithless.

God has shown the same love to us. Doesn’t it strike you as amazing that God pledged his love to us in Christ in the full knowledge of what we would be like? He knew how slow, selfish, and stubborn we would be, and he loved us still.

That is why there is a profound sense in which you can never disappoint God. He loves you, even in the full knowledge of the deepest and most consistent failure of your life. God does not wait for us to sort out our lives before he takes us on. “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8, NIV).

For further reading, see Romans 5