Hosea is primarily a love story, specifically one of redemptive love. The pain Hosea has endured in his marriage to unfaithful Gomer uniquely qualifies him for his prophetic ministry to the Lord’s unfaithful people. Failing to trust the Lord, Israel has sought security in foreign powers and false gods. Yet, as Hosea is eager to show, Israel’s unfaithfulness has not diminished God’s love for them. Hosea paints Israel’s spiritual adultery with vivid images, calling God’s people with both warnings and heartfelt appeals to turn back to the Lord. Failure to repent will result in punishment, but God takes no delight in that prospect. Rather, he desires them to turn from idols to him, their true husband and the only one who can provide for their needs.

—Lydia Brownback  

Content taken from Hosea: A 12-Week Study by Lydia Brownback ©2016. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.  

The book of Hosea is not about Hosea; it’s not about Gomer; it’s not about Israel; it’s about God who graciously, lovingly, righteously, jealously redeems wayward people—and not because they’re worthy or because they have any promise of fidelity in and of themselves. He loves wayward people because he is God. 

—Reuben Hunter

Source: Hunter, Reuben. “Broken Hearted Love.” Word of the Week. Podcast Audio. August 2, 2017. This podcast originally appeared here at The Gospel Coalition.

From Bibles.net: We would strongly encourage you to listen to this full podcast as a family!

Though Hosea is a difficult book, it is also a great book. It is like a tree whose roots go down deep into the Torah and whose branches bear the fruit of a discourse that became the grammar of biblical prophecy. Many of the themes, and much of the vocabulary, of the great literary prophecies of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel originate in Hosea. It is also a book that jolts the reader; it refuses to be domesticated and made conventional. It does comfort the afflicted, but it most surely afflicts the comfortable. It is as startling in its presentation of sin as it is surprising in its stubborn certainty of grace. It is as blunt as it is enigmatic. It is a book to be experienced, and the experience is with God.

—Duane A. Garrett  

Source: Garrett, Duane A. The New American Commentary: Hosea, Joel. Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing, 2011.

Because of the characteristics of (northern) Israel in the mid-eighth century BC, God’s prophetic word could hardly have been predominantly positive. Israel was continuing a history of covenant-breaking, and her Lord had determined to move against his people by unleashing the punishments specified in the law. In the short run, therefore, God’s plan for his people was one that would necessarily seem to them negative. In the long run, on the other hand, God’s overall plan of blessing for his chosen nation would still prevail. Accordingly, the book of Hosea now and again contains reminders to the faithful that God would one day again bring prosperity to Israel. But the vast majority of the oracles God spoke through Hosea were of woe, not weal, and they depend for their substance upon the depository of covenant curses found in Leviticus and Deuteronomy.

—Douglas Stuart 

Source: Stuart, Douglas. Hosea-Jonah. Word Biblical Commentary. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2014.

From Bibles.net: In other words, God had foreseen the failure of Israel years earlier and had prophesied about their moral collapse in the book of Deuteronomy. The judgment God promises in Hosea isn’t a surprise to them—it’s exactly what God told Israel would happen if Israel was unfaithful to him.

Hosea is believed to be the first prophet to use marriage as a metaphor of the covenant between God and Israel and influenced latter prophets such as Jeremiah and Ezekiel. In the New Testament, Jesus quoted from Hosea twice when he said: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” (Matthew 9:13; 12:7). 

—The New World Encyclopedia  

Source: New World Encyclopedia contributors, “Book of Hosea,” New World Encyclopedia, https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/p/index.php?title=Book_of_Hosea&oldid=1112812 (accessed May 26, 2023).

This prophetic book sobers us and fills us with renewed hope. As ugly as Israel’s adulterous faithlessness has been, it cannot extinguish God’s resilient, redemptive love that defies human calculation or annulment.

—James M. Hamilton Jr.

Source: James M. Hamilton Jr., quoted from his article, “The Gospel in Hosea,” published by Crossway Publishers. Used by Permission.

In Hosea, God is by turns ‘cool’ (‘he has withdrawn from them’; ‘Ephraim is joined to idols, let him alone’; ‘They sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind’ [Hosea 5:6; 4:17; 8:7]) and ‘tough’ (‘I will be like a lion to Ephraim’; ‘he will remember their iniquity, he will punish their sins’ [Hosea 5:14; 9:9] ); but above all, ‘tender’ (‘How can I give you up, O Ephraim!… My heart recoils within me’; ‘I will heal their faithlessness…’ [Hosea 11:8; 14:4]).

And Israel? She got it wrong, in the usual human way. God, she reckoned, must be wanting more religion; she would bring more sacrifices. ‘They love sacrifice’, says God. ‘With their flocks and herds they shall go to seek the Lord’ (Hosea 8:13; 5:6). But that was not the way to find him. These were religious things, and he wanted people: converted people, deeply repentant, wholly and forever his.

All the ups and downs of the book [of Hosea], the scathing portraits, dire predictions, ardent appeals, add up to this and the book ends by looking to the fruit of all this agony, when this unequal marriage, like Hosea’s, will be no longer full of tensions and betrayals, but secure and blissful, its long winter over and its spring at last arrived and in full flower.

—Derek Kidner

Source: Kidner, Derek. The Message of Hosea. The Bible Speaks Today. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1984.

Hosea’s calling shocks us…but an important point to make here is that God is not surprised by our sin… He knows every detail about us (the end from the beginning) and He loves us none the less… We choose to love on the basis of appearance, wealth, personality, ability…we do…not so with God. We choose to love on the basis of externals, we say:  ‘I will love you if…when…because…after…’ but God is not like that. In fact it is precisely because there is nothing lovely about us that God has chosen to set his special, saving, covenant love upon us. His desire is to make us lovely through the death of his Son. This is the kind of love God has called Hosea to demonstrate. No calling could be more personally painful and costly than Hosea’s…demonstrating the love of God for (to use New Testament language) his bride the church.

—Reuben Hunter  

Source: Hunter, Reuben. “Broken Hearted Love.” Word of the Week. Podcast Audio. August 2, 2017. This podcast originally appeared here at The Gospel Coalition.

From Bibles.net: We would strongly encourage you to listen to this full podcast as a family!

It might not be an unfaithful spouse, but maybe in his strange providence, as he did with Hosea, God has brought a difficult situation your way in order to work out his purposes through you. You’re not a prophet…but God will be using you through your trials to declare his glory to those around you. Don’t despise your trial, rather seek to see them as a chance to be a visual aid to God’s sufficiency and faithfulness.

This is what Hosea was called to—you may be called to something different. He was faithful to demonstrate, as God called him to, to those around him in his hardship God’s faithfulness and his sufficiency. And it may just be that in your hardship—whatever it is—that God is calling you to also to be a visual aid to those around you of his sufficiency and his faithfulness. 

—Reuben Hunter 

Source: Hunter, Reuben. “Broken Hearted Love.” Word of the Week. Podcast Audio. August 2, 2017. This podcast originally appeared here at The Gospel Coalition.

From Bibles.net: We would strongly encourage you to listen to this full podcast as a family!