Hosea Research Paper

5. The Centrality of Love in Hosea 3
Gomer had merited a sentence of death as recorded in Deut 22:22 ‘If a man is caught lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman as well as the woman. So you shall purge the evil from Israel’; Cf., Lev 20:10)-that was the law. But God, through Hosea is not bound by these rigorous legal stipulations, not even his (God’s) own laws. He shows mercy, or gospel, that goes beyond the law. For law is what regulates the affairs of men according to the ordinarily sensible rules that men have devised to regulate their polities. Grace is a vastly different thing.
The story of Hosea’s marital and family experiences is remarkable for the insights it offers concerning the …show more content…
When by all standards, he should have ceased to love Israel, still God loves relentlessly, pursuing through the years those in whom the flames of love have long since died; like in the case of Gomer. In the chapter under study too, the account of Hosea’s experience demonstrated further the many faces of love; the word love is used four times in 3:1. Hosea is to love the woman, as God loves Israel; but the woman is loved by other men, and she herself appears to love theraisin cake (which is associated with Baal worship).
Love designates that which is most important to us: it may be a deep relationship with another person, or a petty preference for food or trinkets. In our case, the tragedy of Gomer is not the object of her love, the dainty raisin cakes, but the shrivelling of her capacity to love. Gomer having abused the capacity to love for so long, she was no longer capable of true and deep love for persons. Peter C. Craigie succinctly puts it thus:
As the muscles of the legs will shrivel if we do not walk, so too will the muscles of love shrink if they are not exercised in the true and profound forms of loving. We know what true love is, in these verses, when we reflect on God’s unrelenting love for Israel; like Hosea, we are called upon to love as the Lord loves (Hos.

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