Faithful To The Unfaithful

Hosea spoke to the northern kingdom of Israel, the ten tribes whose capital was Samaria, in the eighth century before Christ. The usual reading places much of his work in the reign of Jeroboam the Second, and that detail matters more than people often realise. This was not a poor, struggling nation. It was prosperous and outwardly secure, and that comfort is part of what makes the book so painful to read. Israel had grown fat on gifts and forgotten the one who gave them. Not long after Hosea’s ministry, Assyria swept down and carried the northern kingdom into exile, and it never returned as a nation.

So when chapter two reads like a court case between a husband and a wife, it is really God speaking to a people who had taken his grain, his wine and his oil and credited it all to other gods. You can see that exact charge a few verses earlier. Hosea is not a gentle book, and it names the unfaithfulness plainly. That is precisely why verse twenty three lands the way it does. The mercy arrives at the very point where, by any fair reckoning, the relationship should have been over.

The whole force of this verse hangs on names, and that is easy to miss in English. Earlier in Hosea, God tells the prophet to give his children dreadful, prophetic names. One daughter is called Lo-Ruhamah, which carries the sense of ‘not pitied’ or ‘no mercy’. A son is called Lo-Ammi, ‘not my people’. Those are not random sounds. They are verdicts walking around in human form, a family carrying the broken covenant in their own names.

Now read the verse again. ‘I will have mercy on her who had not obtained mercy’ undoes Lo-Ruhamah. ‘I will tell those who were not my people, You are my people’ undoes Lo-Ammi. God reaches into the names of judgement and turns them inside out. The negation is simply stripped away.

There is one more verb worth pausing on. ‘I will sow her to me in the earth.’ The name Jezreel, another of Hosea’s children, sounds in Hebrew like ‘God sows’. A word that earlier carried threat is replanted here as promise. What looked like scattering becomes seed put in the ground, with a harvest on the way. God does not only forgive the past. He gives a future and a place to grow.

This is one of those Old Testament verses the early church could not leave alone, and that tells you how much it carries. Paul quotes it in Romans 9:25 to explain something that scandalised his contemporaries: that God was calling Gentiles, outsiders to the covenant, and naming them his own people. If God could say ‘You are my people’ to faithless Israel, then that mercy could clearly reach far beyond the borders anyone had drawn.

Peter does much the same in 1 Peter 2:10, telling a scattered, mixed church that they were once not a people and are now God’s people, that they had not received mercy and now have. He hands Hosea’s reversal straight to ordinary believers and says, in effect, this is your story too.

Underneath both quotations is the shape of the gospel itself. In Hosea chapter three the prophet is told to buy his wife back out of the slavery she had wandered into, to pay a price and bring her home. That is not a tidy metaphor bolted on afterwards. It is the lived parable God gave his prophet, and the cross is where that price is finally and fully paid. The father in Luke 15:20 who runs to meet the returning son is the same heart at work.

I find this verse hardest to believe not in the abstract but in the specific moment, when I know exactly how I have failed and I could name it out loud. It is one thing to say God forgives sinners in general. It is quite another to sit there having broken the same promise for the fourth time and hear him say ‘You are mine’ with no sneer and no small print.

What helps me is that Hosea never pretends the unfaithfulness was small. The book does not handle the wandering by minimising it. The mercy is bigger because the honesty is total. So I have learned not to bring God a polished version of myself. He already knows the Lo-Ammi name I have earned this week, and he is still the one doing the renaming.

The other thing I hold on to is that the initiative here is entirely God’s. Every verb is his. I will sow, I will have mercy, I will tell. Gomer did not climb back into Hosea’s good books. He went and got her. On the days I feel too far gone to make the first move, that is the order I cling to. He comes for the runaway. I do not have to make myself lovely first. I have to let myself be found.

It is easy to read verse twenty three as a sudden change of heart, a verdict reversed out of nowhere. But look at what God says earlier in the same chapter. Before he renames anyone, he describes a wooing. He speaks of leading her out into the wilderness and speaking tenderly to her there, of a day when she will call him husband and no longer master, of betrothing her to himself for ever in righteousness and faithfulness (Hosea 2:19). The place of want becomes the place where the relationship is mended.

That changes the tone of the whole promise. This is not a grudging reinstatement, a wife taken back on probation. It is a courtship begun again. Mercy is not only spoken after the betrayal. It is spoken into it, while the wound is still fresh.

Notice that the verse does not end with God talking. After he says ‘You are my people’, the closing words belong to them: ‘You are my God.’ That small reply matters more than it looks. A covenant was always meant to be two-way, a bond with an answering voice, and Israel’s side of it had gone quiet, or worse, had been spent on other gods.

So the restoration here is not only that God changes how he speaks about his people. It is that they can speak again. They can turn and call him their own.

I find that hopeful on the days when I feel I have nothing to bring. Mercy does not only soften how God sees me. It loosens my tongue to answer him, to say back the one thing that was always true.

I have heard this passage reached for in exactly the wrong room. Someone’s husband or wife has been unfaithful, and a well-meaning friend reaches for Hosea, because Hosea took Gomer back, so surely that is the pattern here too. It is not. Hosea’s marriage is not a manual for what a wronged spouse owes an unfaithful one. It is God dramatising, at enormous cost to the prophet himself, what it is like to love a people who broke covenant with him. Turn it into relationship advice for two ordinary people and you ask a hurting person to carry a weight the text never puts on them, and you can quietly pressure someone back towards a marriage that is not safe. If you are ever tempted to use this story that way, stop and ask what God is doing here, rather than what he is supposedly telling a betrayed spouse to do.

The second misuse is quieter, and I have made it myself. Because Paul applies this line to Gentiles (Romans 9:25), it is tempting to preach it as though God had swapped one people for another and closed the account with Israel. Hosea says nothing of the sort. The people being renamed in verse twenty three are the covenant people who broke the covenant, and the whole force of the promise is that God did not close the account. How Paul’s use and Hosea’s first hearers fit together is argued over by people far better read than we are, and I would not settle it from a pulpit in one confident sentence. What you can say safely is what Hosea actually says: the renaming falls on the guilty party, not on a replacement.

If you are teaching this passage, do not start at verse twenty three. Read verses twenty one and twenty two first, where God describes an answering that runs down in links: God answers the heavens, the heavens answer the earth, the earth answers the grain and the new wine and the oil, and those answer Jezreel (Hosea 2:21 to 22). Each link waits on the one above it before it can move. Nothing grows until heaven answers, and heaven does not answer until God speaks first.

Once a congregation has seen that chain, verse twenty three carries its full weight. The sowing it describes is not one more promise among several. It is the last link, the point where everything set moving above finally reaches the ground and becomes seed. Preach verse twenty three on its own and you have a lovely line. Preach it as the end of a sequence running all the way down from the sky, and you have shown people why God’s mercy to a faithless nation was never a separate department from his running of the weather and the soil that fed them. Israel had credited the grain and the wine and the oil to Baal. God answers that charge by taking the whole chain back into his own hands, and the last word it reaches is a renamed people.

This verse earns its place at a harvest service more naturally than almost anywhere else on this page, because of that one verb, sow. A congregation gathered to thank God for a crop can hear, in the same breath, that he does agriculture with people: scattering what looked lost, expecting a harvest of belonging where there had only been a verdict. It also sits well in a service welcoming someone back after years away, or a confirmation where you want language for being renamed and claimed, or a Sunday built round 1 Peter 2:9 to 10 for a mixed congregation who need reminding that Peter’s “not a people” describes actual faces in the room.

I would not reach for it at a wedding, despite the marriage language sitting right there in the chapter. The story underneath is betrayal, exile and a wife bought back out of slavery, and however true the ending is, it is not the note most couples want ringing under their vows. Guests who know Hosea well may hear a warning where a blessing was meant. Keep it instead for the service where a church is trying to say plainly, to people who feel they used up their welcome long ago, that they are still called his.

Read Hosea 2:23 on its own and it sounds like the last word. The wandering wife renamed, the verdict lifted, the case closed. Shut the book there and you would think the unfaithfulness had been dealt with for good.

Turn the page and it has not been. From chapter four onwards the charge sheet comes straight back out, and it gets harder to read, not easier. Priests accused of feeding on the sin of the people (Hosea 4:8). Kings set up and pulled down with God never once consulted (Hosea 8:4). The calf of Samaria mocked as a thing a workman knocked together, no god at all (Hosea 8:5 to 6). Ephraim called a cake left on the griddle and never turned, burnt one side, raw the other, no use to anybody (Hosea 7:8). Ten chapters of the same argument run again, louder, on the far side of the loveliest promise in the book.

For years I read that as the promise failing to take. God said a beautiful thing, the people carried on regardless, and 2:23 sat there like a card nobody opened. I think differently now. Mercy spoken is not the same as mercy received, and Hosea will not let you pretend otherwise by stopping at a good line. Only at the very end, in chapter fourteen, does the voice go gentle again, pleading with them to come back and promising to heal the waywardness itself (Hosea 14:4). Between here and there is a long middle where nothing has changed yet. I have lived in that middle. Most of us are in it now.

“I will sow her to me in the earth” reads like pastoral decoration if you have never lain awake wondering where you will be living in five years. It was not decoration to the farmers standing in front of Hosea. Land in Israel was inheritance, pegged by law to tribe and family, never really a father’s to sell off for good (Leviticus 25:23). Think of Naboth. Ahab offers him a fair price for the vineyard, or a better vineyard elsewhere, and Naboth will not have it, because the ground came from his fathers and for him that ends the conversation (1 Kings 21:3). He dies for that answer. That is how tightly a family and its few fields were tied together.

Land was also the exact thing the covenant put on the table. Break faith and you are pulled off it, scattered among the nations, the fields left desolate behind you (Leviticus 26:33). Those words were not a rumour. They were read out, part of the deal, and by Hosea’s day a man who could count knew which side of that ledger his own generation was standing on.

So when God says he will sow her in the earth, he is not just being agricultural. He picks up the thing they dreaded most, being put out of the ground, and turns the dread round on itself. The soil that was going to spit them out is where he plants them, deliberately, tending it, expecting something to come up. And here is the ache in it: a promise about one specific patch of hillside, made to people who were about to lose that exact hillside.

Here is the piece I cannot tidy away, however much I would like to. Assyria did to the northern kingdom what Assyria did to conquered peoples: deported them, mixed them in among other subject nations, and moved foreigners onto their fields (2 Kings 17:6 and 17:24). As far as the biblical record takes us, they never came back as a people the way Judah later came back from Babylon. No restored northern kingdom. No register of names walking home. Whatever happened to them one by one, the “her” this verse was spoken over goes quiet, and Scripture does not follow her.

I will not pretend that is a small thing to admit on a page about how lovely the promise is. Read verse twenty three as a pledge that this people, on that hillside, would be gathered and settled again as a nation, and the honest answer is that it did not happen in the frame the first hearers would reasonably have expected. I believe what Paul and Peter later did with the line, and I am glad they did it. But believing that does not touch the other question, the one that gets me at midnight: what was it like to be the farmer who heard “I will sow her to me in the earth”, told his children about it, and then watched the soldiers come over the hill? Some promises get carried forward into something bigger than the ground they were first spoken over. That does not un-happen the decades when, to every single person living through them, it looked like God had simply not kept his word.

“Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” gets sung in churches that have never once had Hosea preached from the pulpit, and it makes this chapter’s whole argument without borrowing a syllable of it. “Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love.” A congregation stands up and admits that out loud, together, and then in the very next breath asks to be tied down: “here’s my heart, Lord, take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above.”

Seal it. Not help me try harder. Hold on to me, because I am not safe left in my own keeping.

That is Gomer in two lines, and Hosea’s answer to her as well. Nobody singing it expects the wandering to stop being a pull. What they ask for is to be kept anyway. I can rarely get through it without something going in my throat: a room of perfectly decent people, none of whom would ever let the word unfaithful anywhere near their own name, quietly owning up that underneath they are the woman in this chapter. They arrived there without the story. Hosea only gave it a marriage, a price, and somebody’s actual wife.

Hosea is not the only prophet who draws Israel as an unfaithful wife. Ezekiel does it at greater length and in far harder detail, and holding the two together taught me something neither says alone. Ezekiel sixteen is roughly the same story: a girl found, loved, dressed in everything, then unfaithful past counting. God restores her there too. But the ending is not Hosea’s. She remembers, she is ashamed, she never opens her mouth in her own defence again, and that is the very moment he says he has forgiven her all she did (Ezekiel 16:63).

Hosea does not do that. The names simply get turned over. Lo-Ruhamah into mercy, Lo-Ammi into my people, and not one word about keeping the old name in view as a reminder of what she cost him.

Both are true of being forgiven, and I have lived in both. Some weeks it is Ezekiel: restored, grateful, and unable to open my mouth about anybody else’s failures because I remember precisely what mine were. Other weeks, the better ones, it is Hosea: the old name is gone and nobody, God least of all, is fetching it back. I would not want to be shut in only one of those chapters for good. I need Hosea to believe I can be forgiven at all. I need Ezekiel to stop me pretending that forgiven and never-happened are the same word.

• Where in my life am I quietly living under an old name like ‘no mercy’ or ‘not wanted’, and what would change if I really believed God had renamed me?
• Israel credited its blessings to other gods. What good gifts in my own life have I started crediting to anything other than the giver?
• The whole movement in this verse is God coming towards the unfaithful. Am I waiting to feel worthy before I turn back, or will I let myself be found first?
• Who has earned the name ‘not my people’ in my eyes, and how does this mercy challenge that judgement?

If you want to keep sitting with this, you could read more from Hosea or find verses gathered around how you are feeling today on our feelings page.