Hosea 11:4
I led them with cords of compassion, with the bands of love, and I became to them as one, who eases the yoke on their jaws, and I bent down to them and fed them.
Many people are intimidated by the portrait of God in the Old Testament. Not a few modern readers fancy that he is simply a terrible and powerful old man who gets angry on a fairly random basis and that there is really no telling what he might do next. Hosea, however, learned by painful experience the great secret of his God: he is a jilted lover who will not stop loving. Hosea married a woman named Gomer who spent a good deal of time cheating on him. He went through all the anguish that any normal husband or wife endures upon discovering that his trust and love had been bitterly betrayed. But he saw in his own experience a deeper insight by the grace of the Holy Spirit: he saw that this was precisely what God had suffered for centuries at the hands of his beloved Israel. He saw further that God’s love was so deep that despite Israel’s betrayals and prostitution to other gods, God was not willing to abandon the marriage. In today’s verse we find a sort of choking and bittersweet reminiscence by God about the time he rescued his beloved from slavery in Egypt, protected them in their travels, and gave them the land of Canaan as a gift. He did it out of pure love for Israel and received profoundly impure love in return. But, as is the way with God, he did not give up. For God knew what Israel was made of all along and was, even in the midst of Hosea’s struggles, preparing the way for the true Son whom he would “call out of Egypt” (Hosea 11:1; Matthew 2:15). It was this Son who would in turn call Israel out of bondage, not to Egypt, but to sin and marry a new kind of Bride “that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (Ephesians 5:26-27).
