Videoblog: Hosea – God’s Relationship With Us Is Like a Marriage

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJOhF_PAmXs

Hosea was asked by God to marry a prostitute!

What if you were asked to marry a prostitute? Every Friday night you would come home from work and you wouldn’t know where she was. You would go to the city, to the streets, only to catch her getting out of some sleaze balls car or you would find her with some guy in a club. What if she told you she was pregnant, but you knew that the baby probably wasn’t yours? This isn’t some song or movie; this is the opening of the book of Hosea

God chooses to represent our relationship with Him, through the concept of marriage. God choose the deepest, most intimate relationship on planet earth to illustrate the closeness He has with His people. This idea flows from God like a wedding dress flows from the shoulders of a bride. It is beautiful and full. God loves us the way a husband loves his wife. There is no deeper way to express love for His people! With this however comes a God who actually cares what His people / bride does! God is a jealous husband and he does not tolerate His people going to other lovers or going to other gods!

What I find interesting is that God uses the marriage relationship to explain the relationship with Him, but also other relationships too. For instance we think of Jesus as our brother and as our friend. We think of God as our Father. We think of God as our master and king. The Holy Spirit is our teacher! Jesus even teaches that the way we treat our neighbors is the way we treat Him. So in a way we know God as a neighbor!

We cannot escape from a God who is completely relational. God wants to know us and us to know Him. He will not remain distant. He will not remain unknown or unknowable. So when we talk about God, from the book of Ezekiel, we see a distant mysterious God. But in Hosea, we see a God who wants us to love Him like we are married to Him. We see a God who gets crazy jealous over who we love and who we spend our time with. We see a God who loves us as a husband who has fallen head over heals in love for a woman who is less than faithful and less than worthy of a husbands love.

Then our gaze turns towards our end of the relationship and in every relationship we have toward God, in every metaphor we have spoiled something. We are enemies towards God, until we come to Jesus. As brothers we are like Cain, murdering Jesus! As friends we are like Judas or Peter, selling or being ashamed to talk about Christ! As children we are like the prodigal constantly turning away from our loving Father. As members of the Kingdom we are treasonous, betraying our King and living for the world. And as students we talk out in class and are always being sent to the principles office! As a wife to our king we have committed adultery!

I say all of this not to shame your or to proclaim who good I am but to admit and confess to you that I need my God to rescue me from my adulterous life. I need my God to come and take me away from those other lovers so much less wild. I need my God to buy me and keep me from every other god and distraction. I need to love God half as much as He has loved me. I have wept over this, because I am not as faithful to God as He has been to me!

I want to encourage us to stay faithful and true to our God!

Ezekiel + The Dry Bones

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOWguZP-yx4

     Ezekiel and the Dry Bones is an unbelievable story from the Bible. God brings dead, dry bones back to life. Putting together bone to bone than bringing on the flesh and the skin, then breathing His very breath into these dead bones.  One of the most paradoxical parts of this story is the lack closure!  What happened to the skeletons?  Did they go back to their respective families?  Did they go back to battle?  Did they live happily ever after?  When you ask these questions you can either doubt God and the legitimacy of this story or you can realize that God’s miracle is not dead bones coming to life.  That is a no-brainer for God.  He did that already when He created us

      The miracle is that God does for our spiritual beings what He did for these skeletons! We are dead in our sin. We are powerless in our actions. We try for good, but we are continually bad. We are depraved. We are as dead in our spirits as those dry bones. We follow every distraction clicking along to the next page or signing up for the next big thing. We think half-heartedly about our souls and our spiritual condition and expect God to dispense Grace like a vending machine. But God doesn’t want to just give us our whim and fancy; He wants to make us alive. He wants to breath the Holy Spirit into our very souls to revive our hearts and minds. He wants to take us who were dead and make us living to Him.  

     This is the miracle that isn’t just for Israel, but for all people that God is calling!  And for those of us who are alive, this is an invitation to live that life out fully and to put aside the gods of distraction, and to worship God alone!