Hosea 11:1-11 The Relentless Love of the Father

God's Pursuit of His People

Welcome to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak preaches from his series on the book of Hosea, a study in God's relentless love. Let's listen in.

Well, good morning and welcome to Recast Church. I am Don Filsak. I'm the lead pastor here and here we are gathered together this morning, gathered together here in this place and in this moment of time to worship our great God in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord through the direction and power of the Holy Spirit.

I just want to point out something that's really kind of cool when you think about it. God has been pursuing us. I don't know if you think about it that way, but God has been pursuing us. I can say that with confidence over us corporately as His church because Jesus came down here to seek and save lost people like we were.

He came to save and rescue His church and as the old hymn says, from heaven He came and sought her, her being the church. So I can say with confidence that Jesus pursues His church. I know that that's for sure, but I also say with a large degree of confidence that He's.

Pursuing you.

He's pursuing you as an individual and my confidence in that statement comes from your.

Presence here.

You are not in this room by accident. We are here by the design of our God who is calling us to trust Him by faith, is calling us to obey Him from our hearts, is calling us to worship Him in community, and is calling us to serve one another in love.

This morning we're going to be looking at an Old Testament prototype of the parable of the prodigal son that Jesus told. I consider that Jesus was aware of this account from Hosea when He told that story in the New Testament, but it's okay if you're not very familiar with the prodigal son and when I say that it doesn't mean anything to you that I can give you a snapshot view of that.

Story.

Jesus told the story of a young man who basically spurned his father and said, I kind of, in essence, I wish you were dead, but can I just have my inheritance now? And if you just give me the money, I'd like to run off and live my life because I know better than you, so I'm going to go live my life the way that I want to.

Did so, father gave him the money, he leaves and he goes off and squanders all of his inheritance on wild and crazy living as you can imagine that somebody, a young man, could spend his money. And he does so and it devolves all the way to the point where his money is gone, his friends are all gone, he's in a foreign land, he's not doing very well and has no money to his name and he takes up working at a pig farm, which as a Jew isn't big, gross, no-no.

And so he's working at a pig farm and he says, and the thought comes to his mind, I wonder how my dad's doing and I wonder if he would take me back. And of course in that story, the father does indeed take the son back and runs to him and embraces him and forgives him of his sins and that's the image there.

Now, there's an older son in that story too, there's not necessarily in this Hosea accounting of this, but that's the prodigal son in a nutshell, the God who will take us back. And Jesus was aware of the history of Israel with God when he told that story and he's very aware of this passage in Hosea 11 and the picture of a father tenderly raising up a son only to have that son reject him to then restoring that son back home is a common.

Theme.

And it's expressed here in our passage in Hosea 11. Hopefully this week serves as a bit of a reprieve from the prophetic fatigue that you might be feeling and experiencing, Hosea being a book that's just wave after wave after wave of judgment and indictment and sentencing for sin and kind of heavy things.

But this one is a little bit, it's kind of unique in the middle of this prophetic book. Hosea 11 shines a spotlight on the tender heart of God toward his people, even toward us. I think that our world has a skewed view of God and there might be a whole bunch of reasons why and maybe some of it is what we convey and communicate, but I think that it's important for us to acknowledge that our God, the Almighty, is not a sadistic, wrathful God delighted in death and destruction, and the world kind of thinks of Him that way.

But we know, even according to the Old Testament, God is slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love and mercy. We need that reminder regularly in our walk with God because it will quite likely be a recurring source of doubt surrounding the life of faith.

How many of you have encountered some things in your life that was like, is God good? Like you've just had to actually literally ask that question, is God good? That question can sometimes overwhelm us when we suffer loss.

Even Satan, by the way, knows this, the evil one knows this, and betrayed a common strategy, betrayed himself really by showing us a common strategy in the book of Job as he pointed out the blessings that Job had experienced as a likely cause of his worship.

Take everything from him, says the evil one, and he will cease to worship you. So see if you can trace the movements of God in this text. I'm going to be reading it here in a moment, and I'd encourage you to follow along and listen and see if you can see this.

From God raising up His son Israel. See if you can identify when things take a turn and the son begins his season of rebellion, and then watch the heart of God conflicted as he eventually chooses to restore and to not utterly destroy, choosing to leave a remnant of his people who will in the end respond to his call and come running to him.

All of this study, the sermon series on Hosea, has been talking about God's relentless love. It's not always comfortable, His love is not always giving us everything that we think we want or everything that we think we need, just like a good father doesn't give cotton candy to his kids for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for 10 years, right?

You just can't do that.

You do occasionally, but you don't do it all the time, right? You don't always give your kids everything that they ask for, and there's a good reason for that. But hear me carefully, church, God does love His people, amen?

He does, and He will one day roar like a lion in the east and draw all of His people, drawing all of His people to Himself, and we will be home with Him forever. That's where the text is going to end.

So let's open our Bibles or your scripture journals or your devices to Hosea chapter 11. We're only going to read 1 -11, verse 12 really goes with chapter 12, and we'll talk about that next week. So, Hosea chapter 11, starting in verse 1 through verse 11, recasts God's holy word, what I am confident that He wants to communicate to us this morning.

Follow along and respect it and see if you can get the flow, see if you can see the prodigal son story kind of recapitulated in this. He says, when Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.

The more they were called, the more they went away. They kept sacrificing to the Baals and burning offerings to idols, yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk. I took them up by their arms, but they did not know that I healed them.

I loved them with cords of kindness, with the bands of love, and I became to them as one who eases the yoke on their jaw, and I bent down to them and I fed them. They shall not return to the land of Egypt, but Assyria shall be their king because they have refused to return to me.

The sword shall rage against their cities, consume the bars of their gates, and devour them because of their own counsels. My people are bent on turning away from me, and though they call out to the Most High, He shall not raise them up at all.

How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart recoils within me. My compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my burning anger.

I will not again destroy Ephraim, for I am God and not a man, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath. They shall go after the Lord.

He will roar like a lion.

When He roars, His children shall come trembling from the west. They shall come trembling like birds from Egypt and like doves from the land of Assyria, and I will return them to their homes, declares the Lord.

Let's pray as Dave and the band comes to lead us. Father, I thank you. Thank you. I thank you for your grace and your mercy. I thank you for the way that you call your people, the way that you have been so kind.

What we deserve and what is real over our lives as your children is just shocking. We who deserve your judgment, we who have rebelled against you time and time again, we who have tested the boundaries of your grace, we have tested your mercy time and time again, and you continue to hold us.

You continue to promise a restoration to your children. You promise that a day is coming when King Jesus will arrive with a shout of trumpets and we will respond. We will respond as we were designed to and made to, to heed the call of our King and to go to be with Him forever.

We look forward to that day, and right now we live in this messy, murky world where just even our own morality confuses us. The things that we value are not always evident in our lives, and the things that we say we love we have a hard time pursuing, while the things that we hate and despise and know that you hate and despise are often the very things that come out of our mouths and are the very actions of our lives.

Father, I pray that in this intermediate time we would continue to have a life of confession and repentance, while having great delight and joy in the knowledge of our salvation being secured in Jesus Christ and His sacrifice for us.

I thank you that you are a God who pursues your people like a father pursuing a son who's gone astray, but you are eager for us to run back to you. Father, I thank you for that, and I ask that that would fuel that very nature of that pursuit and your relentless love would be the fuel of our worship this morning.

We've got a lot of things on our shoulders. People have come here arguing in the car on the way here. Some people just heavy loads on their shoulders right now and difficulties that they faced.

This past week.

It seems like wave after wave. Some of us carry little petty annoyances in our hands right now. I pray everything, everything, everything that would war against you would fade into the background, and we would come to you with hands full of these things, and we would leave here with empty hands and rejoicing because we know that the eternity that you have for us melts away the concerns of the day.

I thank you for the hope that we have that you're going to fix this all in the end. In Jesus' name, amen. So the band for leading us, I'm always grateful for them, and I encourage you to get comfortable and reopen to Hosea chapter 11, and having your Bible open in front of you is just going to help you to be able to focus on the things that I'm saying are coming from this text.

We're taking off these first 11 verses here of chapter 11, and I want to start off by stating what I think all of us know to be true, and that's that capital G God is not like the lower G gods. Capital G God is not like the gods because the gods are made by humanity.

They're fictional and they're made up by us, and God is not like humanity in any way. In our fallenness, we are corrupt in our attempts at justice. We are selfish in our greatest loves. We are fragile in our egos.

We are hypocritical in the stern and harsh and severe nature of our judgment over others. Do you know what I'm talking about? We can be pretty quick to judge. Anybody?

I'm the only one.

I think a lot of us would say we can be pretty quick to judge others, and our text follows the history of God's relentless love in pursuing His old covenant people. God has been patient with Israel down through the generations, even as they have continued to reject Him and continue to reject His love, going after the other gods, going after the nations, and in our text, God will speak of His experience using the very common and familiar metaphor of a loving Father.

Now, we're taught by Jesus to pray to Him as Father. We are taught to think of Him through Scripture as Father. Through the parable of the prodigal son, He is the Father in that story, and likenesses, we are like the sons in that story.

And again, this passage has the same vibes as that prodigal son story, and I'd just give you the reference for that. A good place to turn for that is Luke chapter 15, verses 11 through 32. Sometime this week, I would discourage you from doing it while I'm talking.

You might miss some of the things that God wants to say to you here, but I would encourage you to go back and read that this week, and see the parallels there in Luke 15, 11 through 32, with this account here of God and His Old Testament people in Hosea 11.

This reminds me that God has always been about saving a corporate people together. This Hosea passage is about the people of God, and what God is doing in the New Testament is about the people of God as well.

And the pattern of His relentless love toward a people that are returning to Him is the same in the Old Covenant as it is in the New Covenant. He pursued them in love, and He is now pursuing His church, us, in love as well.

So our outline follows the historical work of God with His people, and we're looking at the Old Testament, but man, it is very easy to apply this passage to us here today in the New Testament era under a new covenant of His grace.

But man, there's a lot of parallels here. So the first movement in the text is God's TLC, His tender loving care, verses 1 through 4. The rebellious years, verses 5 through 7, and then the promised return, verses 8 through 11.

Again, a pretty good outline of the parable of the prodigal son, and a good outline of chapter 11 of Hosea. So our text begins with God's tender loving care for Israel. The passage contains some of the most tender descriptions of God's love for His people found in the Old Testament.

And it's interesting to find it in the middle of a book that exists to warn them of His impending judgments, His impending discipline, their impending invasion and exile by the Assyrians. But I just want to point out that this is exactly what sin does.

Sin breaks relationships.

It destroys things. It is a wrecker and a destroyer of all love and all good things. And so how in the world in the middle of this book about impending judgment can God be talking about His love for them?

And it's because He genuinely loves them. But sin is indeed a barrier. Sin wrecks real relationships. A husband and wife that once stood by an altar and said forever, I've observed them over the years multiple times, fight tooth and nail over resources and the kids as they plunge headlong into divorce.

A mother refuses to speak to her own daughter for years. And some of you could testify to stories that you know about that happening. I've encountered it myself over the years. And people wave their one-finger salute out car windows at complete strangers, despite the fact that both of them are having a really bad day, right?

Nobody stops to say, are you having a bad day? I just noticed it. No, no. We just belligerently go through our days sinning and breaking relationship, even with those we barely have a relationship with to begin with.

So we start here with a father-son metaphor in the text when Israel was a child, and you see that there in the text right away in verse 1 of chapter 11. Israel is a young child and God loved him and called his son out of Egypt.

Now that's a phrase that's actually that calling his son out of Egypt is a phrase that's used in the New Testament. This is actually quoted in the New Testament Gospels for Jesus. And the New Testament wants us to notice something that's pretty simple.

It's not crazy profound, but there's a parallel at the start of both of the covenants, the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. Both involved God's care over his son, calling him out of Egypt. In the Old Covenant, he called Israel, his metaphorical son, out of slavery in Egypt.

In the New Covenant, he called his literal son, Jesus Christ, as a young child out of Egypt where he spent many years in exile with earthly parents. So in one sense, Israel was a political exile to Egypt and enslaved there.

Jesus was also a political exile in Egypt and he was brought out just like the Israelites.

Were brought out.

And that's what the New Testament quotes this passage in light of that, wanting to draw.

That parallel.

But Hosea didn't, I don't think Hosea knew any of that from his perspective. He was writing what he was writing by the direction of the Holy Spirit and it's obviously used now in the New Testament to clarify some of those other things.

But his point of recording this for us is the tender love of God in his response to the cry of his people under the heavy burden of slavery in Egypt back in the Exodus. And there's some parallels to the Exodus story in this love that God has for his people.

You see, God's love for Israel was shown by his deliverance and rescue of them out of.

Egypt.

But he loved them before he even did those things. And I think it's important for us to wrap our mind around, he did this for them in the Exodus. But long before that, he chose Abraham and Isaac and Jacob to be the foundation of a people that he said he would love and that he would further bless all the nations through the offspring of these guys.

But consider that God's love and salvation of people flows out of his rescue and salvation flows out of his love. Where does it come from? What character quality of God most expresses and defines how he saves, or why he saves, or that he saves.

And it is his love, his love expressed is what causes our salvation. The very foundation and bedrock of our salvation is found in God's love. And it's impressive when you think about it because we have rejected him.

Humanity as a whole has rejected him, but we've all played our part. We've all done our things. We've all done this stuff in thumbing our nose at the Almighty. We have all to a person sinned against the holy God.

And that makes him, it's good for us to think this way, it makes him the offended party in our sin. Like we have offended him. He is the one who is the victim of our sin. He is the one that we have affronted when we sin.

And yet our rescue starts with his tender compassion and love for us. How often in your relationships that you're the offended party, the other person has sinned against you, and you're the first one to make the first move.

I just love you.

You just go up and give him a hug, right? That's what God is doing here. That's not natural for us, is it? They sinned against me. How many times have you put your foot down and said, I'm right and you're wrong?

But here God, the offended party, extends love and grace to us. And that's where his salvation begins. Keeping with the theme of young children, verse two tells us that the more that God called them, the more that they ran away.

Look at verse two.

The more they were called, the more they went away. They kept sacrificing to the bales and burning offerings to idols. The picture and image here is a common picture that I've seen at the grocery store.

I've seen it all different kinds of places. I've seen it play out in my own backyard when my kids were little. Picture a toddler laughing with glee as his dad is chasing him and saying, come back here.

And the more that dad calls, what does the child do?

Run faster.

Try to get away, right?

And it's, there's giggles involved in that and there's sometimes laughter and there's sometimes cuteness. It's mildly cute, right? Like when you see that. It's less cute when it's your own kid, okay, right?

But it's still mildly cute. It's a little less cute if the kid is trying to run out in the road, right? Little less cute. And it's even a lot less cute if it's a 20-year-old doing the running while dad is pleadingly calling him to come back, right?

Little less cute there. And it even gets much more stern and severe when it is the Almighty pleading and calling with warnings and deep concern for the impending judgment of His people. Boy, that illustration started cute, but it didn't end that way.

They want to run away from Him and He is calling them back to Him because He is where. Safety.

Is found.

He is the only place of safety for a human soul that has been in rebellion against Him, that has sinned against Him. He's the only place where reconciliation can take place. And so He calls and calls and calls, but they keep running.

What do they run to?

They run to the bails. They run to pornography. They run to alcohol. They run to all kinds of things, their own way, doing things their own way, to their own business dealings with the nations and all kinds of things that are grabbing them.

And I want to point out, God is not a big meanie in His call when He says to you, come.

Back to Me.

That's not meanness. That is His love. He is a loving Father who knows that our fundamental need is a saving relationship with Him. Reconciliation with Him is the fundamental need of every human heart.

And without heeding His call and without responding as He calls us to come back to Him, then if we keep running and we keep running and we keep running, He will eventually let us go into the arms of our other loves to our own destruction.

Have you seen that pole in your life? Destructive things calling to your heart, calling you away from the Almighty as He says,.

Come back to Me. Don't run so far. There's fast traffic out in that road. Come back to Me, pleads the Almighty.

But He will let us go into the arms of other loves if we persist. To be apart from God in the end, to be running from Him in the end, is to be under His righteous judgment, and that is rightly defined as hell.

To be allowed to go our own way as He has pled and pled and pled for us to come to Him.

He keeps calling.

They keep running away like the prodigal son. And yet He was the one, this is beautiful in its pictures of tenderness and love, the tender loving care of the Father. He was the one who taught them to walk in the first place.

The way verses 2 and 3 come together make a poignant statement. I taught them to walk, He says, and then as soon as they were proficient, they walked.

Away.

Or another way to state that, I taught them to walk and they walked out on Me. And again, the tenderness of a father holding his young child up by the arms, trying to teach them to walk is the image of verse 3.

You can see it and look at it there. And then further he goes on, when they fell or face planted, God says, I was the one who healed you. I was the one who picked you up and scraped you off. I was the one who, back in the, anybody, I'm old enough to have, I've got the iodine treatment.

Anybody raise your hand if you've got the iodine treatment. Does anybody even know what I'm talking about? That stuff burns. It's like, worse, I'd rather get in another bike accident than have iodine put on those.

Cuts.

Okay?

Anyways, so, I don't know how, that's not in my notes, but he's the one who applied.

The iodine.

He's the one who gave them the Band-Aid. He's the one who has fixed them up. And what parent in this room cannot remember healing and fixing up your kid after they stumbled and scruffed their knee or stayed up all night with them sick?

Those are not fun nights. Most kids don't even remember those nights or those Band-Aids and often do not give thanks.

For those things.

And here, he's tapping into something that all of us fundamentally know, and that's that we're not a very grateful people. We're not very thankful. And he says, I healed them.

I fixed them.

I taught them to walk, and they have not come back to me in thanks. And spiritually, metaphorically, God has healed His people, has He not? He has restored them. He has restored us.

He has drawn us close.

And His people have not given Him, as of Hosea, have not given Him an ounce of credit for the way that He has blessed them and healed them. So let's pause here for a moment and just put it into application.

We can do this right now. I love it when there's an immediate thing that we can do from the pages of Scripture. And right here, right now, in the quiet of your heart, I encourage you to literally do this.

Give thanks to God for loving you. If you've experienced salvation in His Son, Jesus Christ, thank Him for calling you. Thank Him for taking you up in His arms, and thank Him for healing you. Thank Him now.

Thank Him tomorrow. Never get over thanking Him. And make your entire life an ongoing thank you for rescuing me and calling me into your family. If He is indeed your Heavenly Father through faith, then our love must begin with thankfulness for what He has done for us in the past that gives us strength and purpose in the present and hope for the future.

Amen? Give Him thanks. Give Him thanks. Give Him thanks. As His people grew, He says further, there's other things in His tender love that He has.

Offered to His people.

He led them with cords of kindness, with bands of love. Now the idea of leading people by a leash has made many want to break out of the metaphor of a father and son into animal, an animal metaphor, some kind of farming thing or whatever in verse 4.

And it certainly does indeed use the word yoke in the Hebrew language here, which is a farming implement. But I think that it begins to confuse things if we jump and skip metaphors. I think God is saying something more profound here in verse 4 about the way He grows and.

Leads His people.

He leads His people with kindness. He guides and leads us chained by His love. Now does God capture people? Does God enslave people? Is that a bit of an extreme statement to say God enslaves people? He captures them and then leads them by a leash?

Church, I would tell you our God has captured me. Our God has chained me. He has enslaved me and He has enslaved me to Himself. But hear me carefully, the leash is His kindness. The chains are His powerful and unshakable, relentless love toward me.

Why am I bound to Him? Why am I glad to be enslaved to Him?

Because the thing that holds me to Him is His love.

It is His mercy. It is His grace. It is His kindness that binds me to Him.

Are you getting it?

And I'm convinced that that doesn't seem at all an extreme metaphor if you are His. If you're His, you're like, I'm gladly His. I am glad for Him to lead me. I am glad that He doesn't let me go. I'm glad that He holds me firmly on a cord that He will not let me get far from Him.

Amen? I'm grateful for that. The chains that He leads us with, the cords that bind us to Him are His unshakable and relentless love and His tender kindness toward us. Are you being led by His kindness?

Are you chained to Him by His love?

And are you okay with that?

I believe that if you're His, you'll be great with that. You see, in His love and in His kindness, He has lightened our load, hasn't He? The truly burdened life is one without freedom in Christ. But for Israel, He lightened their burdens by literally freeing them from slavery in Egypt, taking the yoke of slavery from their shoulders.

But for us, He has set us free from slavery to sin. Amen? At the end of verse 4, there is a reference to what is likely His feeding of His people, manna in the wilderness, bending down, stooping down to feed them.

And now Jesus feeds us now in this new covenant spiritually in His body and in His blood. Each week we participate in the Lord's Supper, and we do so as a reminder of the sustaining work of His sacrifice, of His body for us.

We remember that with taking a cracker and the sustaining gift of His blood shed, and we commemorate that with a cup of juice. But we're reminded that it is only in our partaking of Him, Jesus, and His saving work that we are spiritually healthy and spiritually nourished.

He has indeed stooped down to feed His people. And those who drink of that life-giving fountain will never thirst again, and those who eat of the bread of life will never hunger again, spiritually speaking.

God's tender loving care over His people is extraordinary. It's amazing. It's incredible. And I'm sure you could heap on some adjectives there. It's nearly unimaginable what He has given in order to win your heart and mind.

Do you know that? What He has given to win your heart. It's extraordinary. And then we rebel. And then we rebel. Verses 5 -6 show the next movement of Israel in the story of their relationship with God's love.

It highlights the rebellious years in verses 5 -7. See, Israel refused to return to the Lord their God. Look at the end of verse 5 to see it. They shall not return to the land of Egypt, but Assyria shall be their king because they have refused to return to Me.

They don't want God to lead them, and so they have run to Assyria and Egypt for aid. But God directly states that they will not be going back to Egypt. Nope, you're not going back to slavery there.

They probably go, whew.

No, but you will be in Assyria. Assyria will be your new daddy. Well, God led them with cords of kindness and bonds of love. I wonder what kind of cords Assyria used when they chained the young men of Israel together and force marched them across the wilderness into exile.

Do you think they bound them with love? Do you think they bound them with kindness? And church, this is a good point to ask you. What cords does your sin bind you with? Grace and mercy and kindness and all kinds of frivolity and fun and rejoicing?

I don't believe it for a second. Alcohol is a terrible taskmaster. Pornography and sexual sin is a terrible taskmaster. Do you know what I'm talking about? The gossip, the gluttony, whatever it is that grabs a hold of your life and won't let go, lying, maybe you're a perpetual liar and that's what draws you in.

It does not bind with kindness. It doesn't enslave you with love. It enslaves you to your destruction. It is harsh. Their rebellion is made clear by God's tender loving care and their ongoing refusal to return.

And so he keeps calling, they keep running, running to pagan gods, running to foreign nations for aid and protection. Israel knows better, you know, and they think they know better than their father. What does father really know?

I can figure this out on my own, says Israel. I don't need anyone to tell me what to do. God, you're not the boss of me. And so the quite natural consequence of choosing Assyria over God is that Assyria will come with a sword to rage against the city and the sword will actually find its way into the city through the bars, the text tells us poetically.

The rebellion of God's people is spoken of frequently as turning away from him. You can see that in verse 7. My people are bent on turning away from me, and though they call out to the Most High, He shall not raise them up at all.

Turning away from God involves often a turn to something else. People don't give up God without something else drawing them. And the way that verse 7 hits in the Hebrew language has Eugene Peterson in his translation saying this, My people are hell-bent on leaving me.

Like there's this one focus, got to get away from God. Israel's committed to a trajectory away from the Almighty and consider for a minute whether or not a person can pretend to be with God but actually be running from Him.

I don't think that everybody who is running from God looks like they're running from God. Do you know what I'm talking about? You can't see it on the outside, but a person could be running from God and we wouldn't know it.