Hosea 1:1-2:23
In Hosea’s day, there was only one thing you led someone into the desert for, and it wasn’t building sand castles. Hosea goes to the shockingly inappropriate fringes of everyday conversation in order to communicate the intensity of the Lord’s passion for his people. He wants to be a husband to us, he wants to honeymoon with us, he wants to make love to us. That was what the desert trip was all about. When a nomadic man allured you and led you into the desert you came back with a smile on your face and sand in your hair. This isn’t just about obeying the law of Moses, this isn’t even just about performing the justice of Amos. This is about tenderness, this is about intimacy, this is about two beings becoming one flesh. To suggest such a thing between the LORD Almighty and his people borders on the sacrilegious. But it’s what Hosea does, and it is what Jesus does with his bride and bridegroom imagery and its what Paul does in Ephesians 5:32. It should make us squirm a bit. But hopefully it also inspires us into worship. It inspires us into exposing ourselves to God. It inspires us into breathlessly yearning for him and reaching out to him with the full and ready expectation that he’ll receive us. For Hosea tells us that He was wooing us first. He was the one leading us into the desert; it wasn’t the other way around. He has pressed us up alongside himself. Oh, what a thing that we can call him our husband.
Romans 6:1-14
“Count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus”. It’s an important word that ‘count’. Paul has walked us through the mechanics of our salvation. We were living in Sin’s house, chained and constrained, unable to prize open any door or find any means of escape. Death was our only way out. But then Jesus took a wrecking ball to that stronghold. He smashed open the way to freedom, to living right and to eternal life. He broke the chains on our wrists and led us into the light. So we stand in a resplendent plain of grace. Our loving, empowering and restoring Father God is looking us in the eyes, willing us to embrace him. Our choice and our conduct should be obvious. But Paul knows the tale of the sin of Adam. Paul knows of the wife of Lot. He knows the twisted nature of mankind that prompts us to turn away from the gaze of the divine and to go back and pick over the disgusting and debilitating remains of Sin’s lair. He knows our perverse propensity to try back on the ball and chain that held us captive in that domain. Paul knows that all to well. So ‘count yourselves dead to sin’ he pleads. No longer regard that prison as your home. That was a different being who lived there - it was not you - that one has died! No, rather look around at this resplendent land. Soak up the sun and feel the Father’s embrace. Accept that this is where you were born. This is the country of your birth and you have no allegiance to another place. And then offer yourself as an ambassador for this place; live out the grace that is rightfully yours.
Psalm 87:1-7
What an amazing hope - that all the nations would say they were born in Zion. Let that be the prayer of our church again today.
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