Dev Ramcharan - Hosea - When Israel was a Child, I Loved Him - Class 1 - Forgiveness and Restoration

Automatically transcribed. Accuracy is good but not perfect, and words are sometimes wrong. Trust the audio over the text.

1. 0:00

   Good afternoon, beloved brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ. If you have had disappointments with your family over the last many years, you’ve tried to raise them in the truth, to guide them in the truth, then this book is for you. If you have trouble in your marriage and it has not turned out the way you wanted it to turn out, if it has its struggles, its heartaches, its feelings of loneliness and isolation, then this book is for you. If you’ve had ecclesial trouble and the sense that the Ecclesia is always on the brink of collapsing trouble assails it on every side, and things are never what they ought to be, and this book is for you also.

2. 1:11

   Now, brothers and sisters, we we won’t start in Hosea. We’re going to start in Psalm 78. So if you’ll turn there with me, we’ll spend a little time in that Psalm before we look at Hosea.

3. 1:30

   And it begins this way. Give here are my people to my law. Incline your ears to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in a parable. I will utter dark sayings of old. Now why would he use this kind of language? And then speak so clearly in the rest of the Psalm about what he wants to talk about.

4. 1:59

   Because for people who are not listening carefully to the word of God, everything is a parable they can’t work out or understand. The implication of everything is a dark saying that is obscure to them. It’s a message for somebody else, not for them. That’s how people who listened to Christ’s parables looked at them. They didn’t understand them because they didn’t reflect deeply on them.

5. 2:39

   They didn’t look to be changed by them. And so these are dark sayings. They’re they’re parables to people who aren’t used to listening to the word of God. He goes on and he says, which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us, we will not hide them from their children. Showing to the generations to come the praises of the Lord and His strength and his wonderful works that he has done for He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which He commanded our fathers that they should make them known to their children, that the generation to come might know them, even the generation which should be born who should arise and declare them to their children. Now you might count the different generations and find 5-6 the number of them doesn’t matter. The point is that what God taught to those he taught his message to had to be cascaded through all the generations faithfully, completely, without omission, without breakage, without gaps and forgetfulness, without any deficiencies. Now did Israel do that?

6. 4:12

   Did they actually do that? But the Psalm tells us 7 The whole intent of the passing on the transmission of the word, the handing on from generation to generation of the word of God, was that the people receiving it might set their hope. Not in arrows, not in bows. Not in tanks. Not in retirement funds.

7. 4:42

   Not in governments of this world. Not in whatever political power people have around them. Not in money. Not in what they drive. Not in where they live. Not in who they know, but in God. And not forget the works of God, but keep His commandments. And might not be as their fathers a stubborn and rebellious generation, the generation that set not their heart aright, and whose spirit was not steadfast with God, the children of Ephraim being armed and carrying bows turned back in the day of battle.

8. 5:35

   Now what is that an allusion to? What is it referring back to in time? Well, it could be referring to that time when the Israelites took the Ark of the Covenant like some kind of nuclear missile with them into battle, thinking that it would have a magical power that would conquer the enemies of Israel, but they had no faith.

9. 6:03

   The priests that were around it was smitten down by God and the old priest who should have passed these things down to his kids so that they were faithful and disciplining them and they were not, fell backwards, broke his neck and died when the ark of the covenant was lost. Because they had no faith.

10. 6:30

    It didn’t matter what they were armed with. They could not deal with the trials that they faced in the battlefield. And brothers and sisters, you know, when all that we have is the strength of our arm and our brain and our friends and have no faith, when certain kinds of trouble come into our lives, we’re like the Ephraimites, fully armed, helpless, unable to deal with the challenges.

11. 7:12

    The narrative goes on and it says they kept not the covenant of God. They refused to walk in His law and they forgot his doings. Now how would they forget the doings of the Lord after everything he had done?

12. 7:35

    How is it that there was a generation in the land so soon after the generation that had fought its way into the land? Who knew not? The Lord knew not Yahweh. How is that prosperity? A generation got into the land, experienced decade over decade of increasing prosperity.

13. 8:07

    Their lives became taken up with the land, its produce, their crops, gold, silver, all those things that they valued. Now I’m a member of a generation that knows what that is, like the baby boom generation. I’m 61 years old. I’m not 12. I look like I’m 15, but I’m 61.

14. 8:36

    The baby boom generation had one foot firmly planted in the truth they did, and the other foot firmly planted in the world and all it had to offer. It’s entertainment, it’s prosperous lifestyle, It’s fancy neighborhoods, it’s brand name everything. All of the expensive holidays a person could want and have. The best schools, private schools, not one car, two cars, sometimes an SUV on top of that.

15. 9:21

    Not a three bedroom house, a six bedroom house, a three or four car garage. It it was a generation afflicted with upgrades of everything. Upgrade itis nothing was ever good enough. For very long now, we raised a generation of kids thinking that they would be OK.

16. 9:49

    But what our kids saw was mom and dad equally in this world and enjoying it and attached to it and in the truth and trying to support the ecclesia. That split, that conflict in our lives, led to many of the children we raised. Stepping away from the truth. Turning away from God.

17. 10:25

    Turning away from the difficult life that a life of a believer is really all about. Turning away from a place that celebrated things so humble and glorious at the same time with people they didn’t necessarily want to rub shoulders with.

18. 10:52

    And so it wasn’t that we wanted to harm the generation after us, it’s that we were too in love with the world, the step away from it, and to keep our kids fully connected to and involved in the truth and the ecclesia and the life of the ecclesia.

19. 11:21

    How is it that Israel lost the truth as the generations went on? Because for them, when they looked at the religion of the things that I worship in this world that make me feel good and eclise your life, I think the world makes more sense for me. That was the rationale many of our kids went through. In their minds, it’s a hard and sobering truth for us to think through.

20. 11:59

    For many in this room, you didn’t have that experience, but many of you did have it, and you do know what I’m talking about. And then we look at that cascading effect, the visiting of the sins of the fathers upon the children, the the outflow and consequences of our mistakes to the children that come after.

21. 12:22

    And we recognize our children as they go through the generations, continue to make some of the mistakes that we made. And so when we read this Psalm, it’s not about those people over there in quaint and ancient times. It’s about people in this room today, right now.

22. 12:52

    So it goes on and it talks about what it was ultimately that Israel was doing. It says though he took care of them in verse 17, they sinned yet more against him by provoking the Most High in the wilderness. And they tempted God in their heart because that’s where the battle against God starts. In all of the darkness of the human heart, they tempted God in their heart by asking meat for their lust. Yeah, they spake against God and listen to what they said. Can God prepare a table in the wilderness? Be only smote The rock and the waters gushed out and the streams overflow.

23. 13:37

    But can he also give bread? Also, can he provide flesh for his people? What does all that mean? It means I want flesh. I want something that God hasn’t given me. God’s given me manner, but I’m tired of this old manner. I want more than that. I want something bigger, better, tastier than that.

24. 14:06

    Brother, in your life, in your career, when you want that promotion more than anything else in your life, you’re obsessed with that step up that might be flesh that God doesn’t want you to have. As though Israel wanted flesh. And and and the way that they wanted it cast a terrible insult on God who had so generously provided for them and was with them. In Western life today, we’re not satisfied with a humble and quiet, downsized and downscaled life. Many of us we struggle with the same kind of wanting that Israel struggled with.

25. 15:06

    We look at them with a gimlet eye, condemning them for their mistakes without always realizing how close they are to our own. And so it says, they spake against God saying these terrible things. Verse 22, because they believed not in God. They trusted not in his salvation. God was saving them. He was saving their lives, literally walking with them, the Angel of Yahweh, the pillar of cloud in a pillar of fire protecting them, his armed warriors around them that they couldn’t see, fighting beside them as they fought with their enemies.

26. 15:58

    But but they didn’t appreciate those things. They wanted what they didn’t have. They wanted what they couldn’t get, what God felt was not necessary for them, and they trusted not in his salvation. So a fundamental question you and I have to ask ourselves is this. Do we trust in the salvation of the Lord? Do we believe in it with all our heart? Do we want it more than anything else? Do Are we playing for praying for the equivalent of of of flesh that God has not given us?

27. 16:52

    Or are we praying for knowledge, for understanding, and for wisdom, so that we can live with joy, anticipation, and contentment in this life, so that it could be said of us? Godliness with contentment is a great gain, and so Israel was not contented, and they were not godly. He gave them what they wanted, but he gave it to them in anger, and it came with rebuke, it came with pain, with trial, with with an outbreak amongst them. Verse 30 They were not estranged from their lust. Verse 32.

28. 17:43

    For all this they sinned still, and believed not in his wondrous works. And they remembered. And they remembered only after he slew them, only after he broke out against them in correction, in discipline, when he slew them. Then verse 34, they inquired after him, and they returned and inquired early after God. And they remembered that God was their rock and the High God their Redeemer. Nevertheless, they did flatter him with their mouth, and they lied unto him with their tongues. In this country and in countries around the world, when the Six Day War was going on, ecclesial halls were packed with people who hadn’t been to meeting for 20 years. Two weeks after the Six Day War was over, they stopped coming. That’s the mentality right there. When they were when they were corrected in this way and disciplined in this way, when they saw the the hand of God mightily in evidence and manifested, then they were all interested in God.

29. 19:03

    And then it waned. As quickly as it has come up, it went away and God himself saw through what their level of interest was and said they were just flattering me. They didn’t really mean it. It wasn’t from the heart. They were not people who were changing, Verse 37 says. Their heart was not right with him, neither were they steadfast in his covenant. But, and look at the heart of our God after working with generation after generation after generation, disappointment after disappointment after disappointment. It says that he being full of compassion, forgave their iniquity and destroyed them.

30. 19:53

    Not. Yeah, many a time turned he his anger away, and did not stir up all his wrath, for he remembered that they were but flesh, a wind that passeth away and cometh not again. My father is 85 years old, Worked hard. He and my mother accumulated whatever they accumulated through the years. Property investments, scrimped, saved, put their kids through school, got to a point of prosperity.

31. 20:34

    I asked my dad. All that work, all that saving, all that you have, does it make you happy? And my dad, who’s done the truth, said no, it doesn’t mean a thing to me. When you are 85 years old, you see the true value of everything you thought was important and a value and significant outside of God’s truth.

32. 21:10

    And a Christadelphian brother or sister in his or her 80s or 90s understands all that is truly important. Is the Kingdom God, the Lord, Jesus Christ, our relationships with each other. Now, I know when you’re 16 or 20 or 30, that’s a stretch for you because you’ve got a laundry list of all the important things that you want to be able to accomplish. I need to meet a girl, I need to meet, need a boy, meet a boy. I need to get married, I need to have children, I need to have a house, I need to have a job, etcetera, etcetera, services, all the things.

33. 21:53

    And then there comes a point in time in your life where you have all those things and and if most of your time has been spent on those things alone. If you truly ask yourself, am I happy? You know the answer is going to be not always or not really. Because unless God is at the center of your life, unless ecclesial life is supremely important to you, unless the word of God is your guide, is your light in the darkness of this world, you’ll never be truly happy no matter what you have.

34. 22:42

    Because because by by by any worldly standard, the happiest people on the earth should be billionaires. Is Donald Trump a happy man? No, he is not. Jeff Bezos is desperately investing in life extension research right now because he can feel the merciless uncoiling of death in his withering husk. He knows it’s coming for him, and he doesn’t have any way to stop it.

35. 23:30

    But you and I might be desperately I’ll might have a bucket full of problems, might have all kinds of trouble and heartaches. But if we have the truth and we have faith, we have all we need. And the more you live, the longer you live, the more you see that to be true.

36. 23:54

    Now we’re going to come back to Hosea, then Hosea Chapter One. And so many of the things that will be said this weekend are simple. Work a day, obvious, the things that everybody knows. But it’s the things that everybody should know that we do not pass on through the generations that caused the problems we just read about in Psalm 78. So Hosea begins the word of the Lord and stop right there. The word of the Lord is at the center of our life in the truth. If we are not reading the word of the Lord, if we’re not reading it every day, then it’s it’s like the life sustaining medication you need to take that you just stop taking. If you do that as an older person and you you take a heart medication, you know what’s going to happen if you’re a diabetic and you stop taking your insulin or what other medications you may need to have. You know what will happen to you if you’re in Stage 3, cancer and you say to the doctor, look, I’m not interested in any kind of treatment, You know that the next thing that’s coming for you is palliative care and getting ready for death and pain management.

37. 25:32

    That’s all you’ve got. Now, you might think I’m young. I’m in my 20s. This old people talk is really getting on my nerves. You’ve got a chronic disease that’s killing you right now. It’s called human nature. It’s in you right now, killing you, every one of you young people. And the only, the only medication that we have is the word of God, and we need to take it in every day. You know, for years I didn’t do the readings consistently. I didn’t.

38. 26:12

    I’d be doing Bible study. I’d be reading portions of Scripture. I was studying to get ready for this or that. But the actual doing of the readings every day, I didn’t do. I wish I could go back and recapture every one of those years and do them over and over again every single day that I lost.

39. 26:39

    So the one thing we need to encourage ourselves in is the word. Without that word, alive in our everyday experience, something is dying in US. The process of death of that thing is speed up. Our faith dwindles, it Withers. It falls apart and we fall apart. In God’s truth. We may have our moments of strength.

40. 27:13

    We may wait till Sunday. We might have a midweek Bible class and attended consistently or inconsistently and find that we have a bit of a boost and we think that’s enough. It isn’t enough. It’s not even barely enough. But the daily reading of the Word of God opens up parts of our brain that are not usually used by people in this world.

41. 27:45

    And the more we read the word of God, the more we know it is the Word of God, because we begin to see patterns, themes, threads, ropes, rivers of connections from the beginning through to the end that are inexplicable aside from this being the inspired word of God. Now, don’t we all know this?

42. 28:12

    Yes, we do. But do we act like we know this? Not if we’re not reading scripture. If we pray to God, and sometimes our prayers are perfunctory, wizened little things. If we pray to God, that’s A1 sided conversation. Don’t you want to hear the other side of the conversation? Sisters, You all know men like that. They’re good at talking at but not listening to. It’s not a thing they’re born with. They have to work at it.

43. 28:50

    Don’t look at your husband, smile at me that way. But you know what I mean? So we can have A1 sided conversation where it’s just me talking to God, but I don’t have the time or the energy or the space in my life to listen to him. And this is where he talks to you in his word. Now as we’re reading it, we ask ourselves, OK, what is it stating?

44. 29:23

    What does that mean in the passage, historically or in the context of the chapter or the book? And then the third piece, speaking brethren, take note. So easy for us to state and explain and sit down. We have to state, explain and apply. How does this apply to my life today? The word comes at the beginning to Hosea.

45. 29:54

    Now Hosea writes, inspired by God, about the different kings whose reigns he worked in, and it starts off. And Hosea, by the way, is a prophet in Israel, not Judah, Israel. But he starts off and he he’s talking all about kings of Judah. And one of the things we bring to scripture is questions, questions, questions. Why would it say it that way?

46. 30:24

    Why wouldn’t it say he was a prophet during the time of the kings of Israel and list them and then maybe say to help people orientate themselves who the kings of Judah were? Why? Why do you reckon? Because perhaps it is to imply the kings of Judah, for all their problems, were the legitimate Kingdom.

47. 30:52

    The Kingdom of Israel started on illegitimate grounds and was an illegitimate Kingdom starting with the worship of the calves and leading down, down, down as the people descended from one level of ignorance, down into the depths of gross darkness and unawareness of the God of Israel, who was their God. They had a kind of religion that was intermingled like the feet of Daniel’s image, partly of the worship of Yahweh and partly the gods and goddesses of the world. Sounds like a thing we struggle with sometimes, doesn’t it? I know our presiding brother this, this this afternoon talked about having tears in the heart that need to be sutured after. This is intentional from the word of God. I know we always want to have a a happy message that comes out of everything, but we’re given these messages so that we can reflect deeply and grow and become better believers. He worked for a long time.

48. 32:14

    The estimates are anything between 40 or 50 years, all the way up to 70 years. 70 years of people not listening to you and not wanting to hear what you have to say.

49. 32:30

    Sisters, that’s 70 years of raising a teenager. That’s what that is. Now if someone did work and worked in the Ecclesia and didn’t get a thank you and didn’t see a result, didn’t see an improvement, only saw things going like a Corkscrew down down into the earth, it was Hosea, a Jew in Ecclesia life. Are you the thank you man who needs to be thanked and praised for the work that you do?

50. 33:03

    And then if you don’t get that praise, you sit and have a bit of a pout because you didn’t get the praise, or your work wasn’t appreciated, or you got some criticism from Brother X or Sister Y and then you’re not doing it again. Don’t ask me again if you can do a better job than you do it.

51. 33:25

    What if you had 70 years of having no liberty to pass it off on to someone else or to pout, but you just had to keep going? That’s what a brother in Christ does. He doesn’t give up. He doesn’t check out. He doesn’t stop serving. Because if he does that in ecclesial life, guess where else he’s going to do that?

52. 33:55

    In his family? In his job, in all areas of his life, we can’t be people who are doing what we do to be thanked. We do what we do to give thanks. It’s work we do in thankfulness to God for what he’s done for us with his son.

53. 34:27

    So Hosea does this work, and it says, when the Lord spake at the first by Hosea, he said to him, Now if you have a young married, that is your child or grandchild, I want you to look at what God said to this man and ask yourself, would you give this advice to your child? Go take unto thee a wife of whoredom, and there will be children of whoredom that she will have. There was no more difficult life than the life of a prophet. Their job was to take a message from God that no one wanted to hear except a tiny remnant.

54. 35:22

    And sometimes it was so tiny or so silent you didn’t even know they were listening and that they were there. To the extent that you might say, like Elijah, I only am left. There’s no one else left. And God had to say to him, listen, no, there are many thousands that have not bowed the knee to bow.

55. 35:43

    You still have work to do. So get up and get working. What are you doing here, Elijah? And so he goes back to work.

56. 35:52

    God says to this young man Hosea, So now I’m going to bring a pain into your life that is excruciating. I’m going to have you marry a woman that you will love deeply,

57. 36:18

    who will be utterly and completely unfaithful to you. Now I know one or two of you, given the size of the crowd, has got a child that’s gone through that. You know as a parent what that felt like for you to pray for them, to cry for them to have that anger towards your son-in-law or daughter-in-law that you did because of the unjust treatment of your child and the things that that child had to go through. You may be going through a trial, brother or sister that you are barely able to cope through. You feel like you’re held together with the weakest of glues and that you’re right on the brink of falling apart. That trial is in your life, and God is at work. And in that trial out of your life, God will bring a gigantic compassion and empathy and understanding and wisdom that apart from that pain, apart from that loss, apart from that destruction of what you held dear, you would never have otherwise.

58. 38:10

    This prophet of all the prophets, aside from the Lord Jesus Christ, was able to understand the heart of God in a way that brought him right into God’s hurt and his love, his disappointment, his desire to save in spite of the gaps, in spite of the failings of a wayward wife.

59. 38:45

    But his life and it’s heartache must have been indescribable. So he marries a girl, Her name is Gomer. She’s the daughter of de Blime, which conceived and bare him a son. She bare him a son. Then it goes on to say after that she bare a daughter. And then it goes on to say after that she bare a son.

60. 39:16

    But you notice the word that’s missing in those two other instances, Him. It doesn’t say she bear him that second son. It doesn’t say she bear him the daughter. So those children more than likely were not Hosea’s children.

61. 39:42

    So not only did he have to contend with the heart fragmenting waywardness of his wife, but babies that were not his. And it goes on. It says the first child is to be called Jezreel, first child is to be called Jezreel. That name is full of echoes, isn’t it? It reminds us of what happened with Jihu, The pursuit of Ahab’s descendants and the destruction, all the blood and gore that occurred, the hands and the scowl of wicked Jezebel, the destruction of all of the priests and the worshippers of Baal.

62. 40:40

    Though there must have been some kind of survival of that religion, because it’s still referred to in Hosea, and we know about all that bloodshed. We know that God said to him that he had done what he wanted him to do. But we know also that a lot of what drove Jihu was about personal ambition, settling of scores, vindictiveness, and that there’s an autocratic, tyrannical approach that he has to the rest of his reign. And he kept the false religion going. He knew God.

63. 41:17

    He knew who he was. He knew that God had delivered Israel into his hands, and he didn’t have enough faith in him to stop the false religion. Now we look at these men and we’re we’re astonished that these men in the presence of Yahweh, spoken to by his prophets, blessed in the outcomes of what he asked them to do, would still not fully and completely fulfill His will and need.

64. 41:51

    I said we just need to reflect on that in connection with our own individual struggles. We all struggle. Every one of us, every one of us, has got something that our mind is engaged in, Our hearts are tied to and attached to. That is, that is totally foreign to that is as repugnant as an idolatrous religious artifact to God, as as as the things that Jihu and Israel was attached to were repugnant to him.

65. 42:34

    So we go on and God says, I will avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the House of Jehu. I will cause to cease the Kingdom of the House of Israel. And that is exactly what happened. Jehu’s house came to an end with the assassination, followed by multiple kings and assassinations, some of whom lasted barely any time at all, something between 19 and 21 kings in the history of Israel over what, 208 years? That is a ridiculously large amount of kings because they kept hacking each other to death, being an ungodly people, worshipping idols with inadequate faith in Yahweh. And then he says in verse 7, after the the children have been named.

66. 43:32

    And then reading. That was done beautifully for us this afternoon. We don’t even have to translate them, because the ESV translates the meaning of lo ruhamar and lo AMI. Those names are translated from what we heard in the reading, Not my people not loved. And then he goes on. He says, after all the discipline that Israel and their kings will experience.

67. 44:02

    But I will have mercy on the House of Judah, and will save them by the Lord their God, and will not save them by bow, nor by sword, nor by battle, by horses, nor by horsemen. Think of think of Israel today. We love them for the Father’s sake. But that is one of the nations of the Kingdom of this world. That’s what the government is.

68. 44:33

    That’s what they’re system of government is. It’s a part of the Kingdom of this world. And and if you think it isn’t and if that feels like a thought that you’re backing away from, shying away from, is that government going to survive into the Kingdom? No it will not. It’s going to be done away with.

69. 44:57

    It’s going to be done away with. We love Israel not for their government, not for their civil system, not for anything that they have in their over reliance on the power of their arm, their bows, their arrows, their nuclear missiles. We don’t love them for that because we know that’s all the wrong headedness of this people we see described for us in Hosea Chapter One. We know that looking at it, and that’s something that they have always been afflicted with.

70. 45:34

    And so the God says, I’m not going to save Judah with nuclear missiles, with arrows, with bows and brother and sister. Your family in its trouble, your marriage and its problems, you and your crushing, humiliating heart aches and challenges. God will not save you with bows, with arrows, with peeled stakes. You know how he’s going to save you through the tears that you cry as you wrestle with his Angel and he puts your hip out and you feel that pain upon pain.

71. 46:32

    But you know that God is with you and that he loves you and that through all of that pain, through all of that trouble, God is saving you. And so, brothers and sisters,

72. 46:56

    verse 10, God says, after all of these rebukes, and all of these threats of what he is going to do, yet the number of the children of the of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured nor numbered. And it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye and not my people, there shall be said unto them, ye are the sons of the living God. Who’s that talking about?

73. 47:28

    Israel? Yes, dispersed, then, regathering. But who? Who? Who? Who does Paul apply that to? Israel. Only there was a people that dwelt in darkness and saw a great light, and they’re sitting in this room right now.

74. 47:56

    Everyone of you, we who were not God’s children, grafted in from lands, never called the land of God, not a people low army. Lo Ruhama, who God gave his beloved Son, For that every Gentile one of us might have hope, the hope of life in his Kingdom, and our number with Israel. All of us together, spiritual Israel, Jew and Gentile, united, will be without number. We see us singing together in Revelation, chapter 5, all of us to that worthy lamb.

75. 48:51

    Ye are the sons of the living God, then that shall the children of Judah and the children of Israel be gathered together, and they shall come up out of the land, for great shall be the day of Jezreel. This is a picture that God gives to a wayward, disobedient nation in which he says at it’s heart the following change and giving you time to change.

76. 49:27

    Change before it is too late, because you’re going to lose everything. Change because I love you and I want to save you, but I need you to reach out and take my hand that is stretched out to you. Listen to these words, painful though they may be. They don’t entertain you. They don’t make you delighted, but these are words of love.

77. 50:00

    They come from a place of intense commitment. They come from a place of a father’s heart, of a husband’s heart. And they set an example for every husband in this room. You have a wife at your side. Thank God for your wife, brother. She’s still with you after all these years, in spite of who you are and all of your inadequacies.

78. 50:36

    Thank God for her every day. You could be without her and alone. And where would you be then? Be grateful for her. She’s not the weaker vessel because she’s more sinful to you or less than you, but because physically her frame doesn’t have the strength that yours does or did. So take that into account and don’t overburden her. And should your wife be like Gomer or what do you do? Walk away and say good riddance?

79. 51:16

    Is is that what God did to his wife? Is that what Hosea is allowed to do with his wife? Well, we’ll look at that in a little bit more detail in the next session.