Faithful Love in a Broken Covenant

A couple of weekends ago was a very special weekend.

It's probably six weeks ago.

It was the annual event of the World's Strongest Man.

I know you know this stuff.

One of the lesser known interests that I have is following strongmen.

And these strongmen competitions are guys that are big and they do weird things.

Probably seven or eight times a year, they'll get together.

Maybe 20 of them, 30 of them.

And they do things like lift huge logs above their head.

Stones on the platforms, even pulled trucks.

There's quite a community of them.

And like any interest you have, now there's social media and you sort of get to know some of the characters.

Now if you go back to the picture of the men, I won't say who, but one of those guys is a Scottish man, the most lovely bloke, most lovely bloke.

And he married to this nice woman and they had a child and it was this sort of public celebration of this son they had.

And last year, that guy committed adultery at a Strongman event and it sort of rocked the whole community.

And there were different people responding.

In that group, there's also a guy who is the top of the world in the last two years.

He's a Canadian and he has a brand called Lift Heavy Be Kind.

He's always on about justice and doing right.

And unfortunately for him, he thought he needed to speak out.

And so he spoke out against his competitor and just said, what he did was wrong, committing adultery, what he did was wrong.

And he actually said, I could never do that.

I could never do that because family is just too important.

And publicly, he had celebrated the fact that winning competitions is one thing, but it's nothing to family, to his wife, to his love of his new daughter.

He has a baby on the way a couple of months into pregnancy.

About a month ago, a month before World's Strongest Man, he committed adultery himself.

And so you imagine the response, the stone throwers wanted to sort of bring him out into the marketplace and say, heretic, heretic, hypocrite, hypocrite.

It's an ugly scene, isn't it?

And it reminded me that, you know, no matter whether you're a Christian or certainly like religious or particularly moral, we value faithfulness, amen?

When someone is unfaithful, particularly when there's a child on the way, it's like it's a bad taste in people's mouths, no matter whether you're religious or not.

I think what you realize when you hear really sad stories like that is that we're all sinners, aren't we?

And that guy, he has now publicly said I was wrong in bringing my righteous condemnation on my teammate, on my colleague in Strongman.

I'll keep my thoughts to myself from now on.

Today we start a sermon in a very complex book.

It seems simple, but the poetry is some of the more complex Hebrew poetry you'll find in the Old Testament.

It's a book about faithfulness, the faithfulness of God.

And it's a book about the unfaithfulness of Israel.

And we will easily connect with Israel more than God when we think about faithfulness and unfaithfulness.

It's a challenging book.

Hosea is asked to do some rather strange things.

And we will work that out as we come through the text.

One of the points we would see from the start is that the text reminds us we live in a world of broken promises.

I think we all know what it's like to experience promises that are broken and to break them ourselves.

But it's a world of broken promises.

Let me read again.

If you have your Bible there, please be open to Hosea 1, verse 1.

The word of the Lord that came to Hosea son of Beeri during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and during the reign of Jeroboam son of Jehoash, king of Israel.

When the Lord began to speak through Hosea, the Lord said to him, Go, marry a promiscuous woman and have children with her.

For like an adulterous wife, this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the Lord.

So he married Goma, daughter of Dibleim, and she conceived and bore him a son.

The text says the land is guilty of unfaithfulness.

It seems like the way the people live stains the land.

The land is guilty of unfaithfulness.

Perhaps the clearest modern example of broken covenant promises that we're really familiar with is the promise, for better or worse, in sickness and in health, until death do us part and then marital unfaithfulness.

But covenant promises get broken at all sorts of other areas of our lives.

We see political betrayals, don't we?

And public hypocrisy.

Politicians swear oaths to serve with integrity but fall prey to corruption, moral failure, power hunger.

People who once professed faith, they made a covenant promise to serve and follow Jesus.

They deconstruct their truth through maybe moral compromise or bitterness, disappointment with God, and they leave behind their promise.

They leave behind community and their commitments.

Companies make all sorts of promises, don't they, these days, about sustainability or community development, and then are found secretly polluting and doing awful exploitation of workers, manipulation of data.

We're familiar with this stuff, aren't we?

Promises made and promises broken.

So what's happening in verses 1 to 3?

What does it have to do with broken promises?

Well, Israel, as many of us know, are God's covenant people.

They are living in an agreement with the living God, which is legal, relational, and certainly spiritual.

They're in covenant agreement, in a covenant promise, and they have been breaking their promise, just year after year, century after century.

So God, in verses 1 to 3, calls a man named Hosea, and we know almost nothing about this man.

But we know that God wants to cause this man to live out, as it were, the message he wants to send to his people.

Something that's done quite frequently through the prophets.

He has to marry a promiscuous, unfaithful woman and watch what happens.

What we do know about Hosea is that he was a prophet in the 8th century BC.

So, he was working on God's behalf, speaking to the 10 tribes in the north called Israel, and there were 10 in the south that were known as Judah.

And Judah had Jerusalem, and Israel were typically more unfaithful than Judah to this covenant promise.

So, 755, 8th century, 755 BC to around the fall of Samaria, when the Assyrians came and routed the north, about 722 BC, Hosea was a prophet, speaking on behalf of God.

And so, it was a chaotic time.

Politically, there was nothing that was in order amongst the people.

King Jeroboam had just died.

In his leadership, there was enormous economic prosperity, but the rich got richer and the poor got poorer, as is so often the case.

Corruption was everywhere, bribery in the courts, dishonest scales, land grabbing.

Spiritually, there was idol worship rampant everywhere, golden carves set up at the places that were meant to be worshipping Yahweh, at Dan and Bethel.

The priesthood was corrupt.

It was an awful situation.

When we say covenant, you might remember, but just let me check for out of interest.

Does anyone remember Ben's fantastic sermon on covenants at the Hebrews?

Jin, I'll tell him that Jin at the back of the room remembered that he preached on a covenant.

He just did a fantastic job leading through the covenants of the Old Testament, all the way up to the Hebrews' explanation of the new covenant.

Let me give you a definition if you've forgotten because I've now realized most have.

A Biblical covenant is a sacred binding agreement between two parties initiated by God that establishes a relationship based on promises, obligations and trust.

It's not breakable.

A Biblical covenant is relational and enduring, rooted in the faithfulness and love of God.

Covenants are how humans relate to the one living God from Genesis to Revelation.

I will very quickly remind you of some of the covenants.

There's the Adamic covenant where God said, I will give you the seed of the woman.

I will provide a redeemer who will crush the serpent's head.

And then you have the Noahic covenant.

The judgment of the flood came on all the world.

And God said, I'll make a covenant promise with you, the sign being the rainbow.

I'll never do this again using floodwater.

And then we have the Abrahamic covenant, Genesis 12, where God says, I will give you an enormous group of descendants, a people who will need a land and I'll give you a land, and I'm going to bless you so that you can be a blessing to all nations.

And then the Mosaic covenant we read about in Exodus and Deuteronomy, where God says, if you will be my people, my chosen possession, though all the earth is mine, I've chosen you and carried you on eagle's wings, just obey me, and I will bless your socks off.

I've added that, but I will bless you abundantly, but if you disobey, I'm telling you there are consequences.

This is my covenant promise to you.

If you disobey, if you chase after other gods and give yourselves kings that come from humanity and not the one king, you will be cursed to the third and fourth generation.

And then we have the Davidic Covenant in 2 Samuel 7, where God says, from the descendants of David, I will raise up one who will have an everlasting dynasty.

So, Israel are locked in to this covenant agreement with God, and yet they're breaking it, just constantly.

And so it's time for God to communicate this with them clearly.

Have you ever been betrayed?

If you have been betrayed in a deep, profoundly painful way, in a traumatic way, you're probably now wondering, why did you have to hijack my day by even raising it?

And so I want to apologize up front that if you have been betrayed deeply, that so affects us.

I'm trusting that today, raising it for you will be a blessing, will be encouraging as you hear the grace of God shown in this story.

But to be genuinely betrayed by someone we love and trust, I think is one of the harder things that we experience as human beings.

Would you agree?

Isn't it interesting and encouraging in a way about the pain that you and I have experienced possibly?

That at the core of the gospel, the gospel story is playing out.

Where is betrayal in the gospel story?

As Jesus carries the sin of the world, it just happens that the sin of the world, a world filled with broken promises, manifests itself that just before he goes to the cross, he's betrayed.

Betrayal is right there, isn't it?

Not just from Judas, but from Peter and really the rest of the disciples.

I feel that that's a powerful truth to remember.

Jesus knows what it is to experience what really the human condition tends to offer.

The experience of betrayal of promises is through broken promises.

We live in a world of broken promises and a world of painful consequence, and some of us know exactly what that is all about.

Broken promises, certainly marital ones, can cause consequences, and I would even say catastrophic consequences on our well-being.

Hosea's call was to live out in real time.

This is where it gets weird and interesting.

He's living out in real time what God wants to communicate to his people.

The consequence of broken covenants in the prophet's own life and in his children.

Think about this.

I heard like a groan behind me when they were reading out the names, because it feels unjust, and I'll get to that in a sec.

Verse 4, then the Lord said to Hosea, call him Jezreel, this son that you have been given, because I will soon punish the house of Jehu for the massacre at Jezreel, and I will put an end to the kingdom of Israel.

In that day, I will break Israel's bow in the valley of Jezreel.

Goma conceived again and gave birth to a daughter.

Then the Lord said to Hosea, call her Lo-Ru-Ha-Ma, which means not loved, for I will no longer show love to Israel, that I should at all forgive them.

Yet I will show love to Judah, and I will save them, not by bow, sword or battle, or by horses and horsemen, but either Lord their God will save them.

After she had weaned Lo-Ru-Ha-Ma, Goma had another son.

Then the Lord said, call him Lo-Ami, which means, not my people, for you are not my people, and I am not your God.

God's message to Israel is conveyed strangely through Hosea and Goma's children, who are children of consequence, right?

They are children of consequence, the consequence of the unfaithfulness of Israel.

So, Jezreel, verse four, call him Jezreel, because I will soon punish the house of Jehu for the massacre at Jezreel.

Jehu was raised up by God to bring judgment on the wicked king Ahab.

But when he brought the judgment, he brought no mercy at all.

It was a bloodbath, and he went way beyond what he was called to do.

Jezreel means God sows or God scatters.

So, the violence that is in the land, the blood of those killed, is calling out, and the violence has not been forgotten.

It will bear fruit, God says.

The next child is a daughter, Lohru Hamar, not loved, not loved.

It means also no mercy, no compassion.

God is withdrawing His protective mercy from Israel, and in just a few years, they will experience what that's like when Assyria come and kill most of them or drag them off into exile, and they are never to be heard of again.

We don't know where the North went.

Isn't that amazing?

The 10 tribes in the North disappeared.

Incredible level of judgment that was brought on them.

The third child will be another boy, Lo-Ami.

Not My People is what his name is.

The reversal is chilling of the formula, I will be your God and you will be my people, Exodus 6.

He's changing that around.

Temporarily, this is undone.

Consequences, how do you feel about this text?

Yeah, it is sad, pardon?

Feel a bit sorry for the kids.

Really sorry, like it feels unjust.

It's deeply sad.

What did the kids do to earn the right of being called these cursed names?

But think about it, isn't that what God told us?

He says in Deuteronomy, at least in many places, but Deuteronomy and Exodus, as I said before, when you disobey me, there are consequences.

Your kids will bear the consequence in their DNA to the third and fourth generation.

What we're reading about here is the truth that the stakes are high in life, amen?

How you live has consequence not just for your own life, for my life, but for my kids, if I have kids, for those who follow me and you, who we have influence over, this is about God speaking.

If you see this text up here, the picture of all the passage, is it there?

Yeah.

So you see this pattern in the 11 verses.

Verse 1, the word of the Lord comes.

Verse 2, the Lord begins to speak.

Verse 4, the Lord says to Hosea.

Verse 6, the Lord says to Hosea.

Verse 8, the Lord says to Hosea.

Clearly, this is about God speaking through a prophet.

He is speaking to his people, and he is speaking strangely, curiously, through the life of a family.

Have you discovered that God wants to speak through your life too?

Or that could be a question.

Does God speak through your life and mine?

I think he does.

I think we are called to be ambassadors of Christ, and we tell a message that's unchanging, that happened in history, that God became a human and died, lived perfect life, died on the cross and rose again, and ascended to heaven.

But with that message, we tell the gospel with our own lives, amen?

And yet that is not an easy life.

No one gets a free pass.

Our life, in the same way, different, but in the same way, I think, to Hosea, speaks on behalf of God to the world about what God is like.

Because life is going to always be filled with times and seasons that are challenging, that bring us pain.

And we have a choice.

Do we respond by trusting in the grace of God?

Do we respond by clinging to His mercy?

Or do we cling to the sin and the broken promises that God has sometimes into the mess we find ourselves in?

Exodus 20 verse 5 and 6, the Ten Commandments, You shall not bow down to these other gods or worship them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.

There is a reality in our lives that how we live produces consequences.

And Hosea is just yelling this at us in a way that is undoubtedly shocking, to name children in line with what the parents and the descendants before them have done.

That's shocking, but it tells us something incredibly profound about life and its consequences.

We're in a world of broken promises, a world of painful consequence.

Are you depressed yet?

This is the part that turns and there is encouragement because but we know a God of steadfast faithfulness.

Verse 10, Yet God says through the prophet, yet the Israelites will be like the sand on the seashore.

That's the promise that God gave to Abraham, the sky filled with stars and your descendants are going to be like that, like the sand on the seashore, which cannot be measured or counted.

In the place where it was said to them, you are not my people, yes, there are consequences.

They will be called children of the living God.

The people of Judah and the people of Israel will come together.

They will appoint one leader and will come up out of the land, for great will be the day of Jezreel.

The story of Hosea and Goma will take us down.

We'll hear more of the story, a path of marital unfaithfulness and painful consequence.

And their lives will represent how Israel have treated God.

Israel are like an unfaithful wife, we're told.

But here in verse 10, we have this gem of hope, this glimmer of hope.

God is steadfast in his faithfulness.

He is faithful to his side of the bargain.

And Israel will, if they'll only turn, experience the Abrahamic blessing.

Even though they feel like they are not God's people due to the judgment and the condemnation, a time will come when they will feel like they are.

And of course, as I read that this week, I thought, Romans 4.

Are you familiar with Romans 4?

He is our father, Abraham, in the side of God, in whom he believed.

So Paul is talking about Abraham.

He believed the God who gives.

This is such a wonderful line.

If you've never highlighted in your Bible, it's worth it.

The God who gives life to the dead and calls into being things that were not.

Anyone ever felt like you're not?

Anyone ever felt like you were part of the descendents of a line of pain, of consequence, of sin affecting your life generation after generation?

And you might say, I am not.

I'm not in that crowd that get the leg up.

I'm in that crowd that get the leg down, the step down.

I'm in that, no, the message of the gospel is, God takes people who go, I'm not loved.

I'm not accepted.

I'm not on the in crowd.

I'm not successful.

I'm not heading up towards where I want to go.

I'm not.

And he says, no, no, by faith in Christ, and through the love and grace and faithfulness of God, he calls people that are not as though they are, hallelujah.

If you're not, you can be as though you are in Christ.

It's the truth.

And it affects how we treat others and how we can treat others.

Some of us, many of us would know something about Corrie 10 Boom, the Dutch Christian who has, her story has been handed down from generation to generation.

It's a powerful story.

She helped the Jews escape the Nazis in World War II, and then she was captured and her and her family were taken to Ravensbruck Concentration Camp, where her sister, Betsy, died and they were treated terribly there, as you would expect.

Years later, she's at a church in Germany, and who turns up to the church other than the man who did a lot of the torturing.

And she's speaking about God's forgiveness and she can't get him out of her mind.

She knows exactly who he is.

He's one of the cruelest guards from Ravensbrück.

And she's just talking about forgiveness.

And he comes up and says, Fraulein, how good it is to know that, as you say, all our sins are at the bottom of the sea.

Will you forgive me?

What do you do?

And her story is she stopped and she thought, I don't want to forgive you.

But she thought about what she had experienced from a God of steadfast faithfulness.

And somehow, by the grace of God, she put her hand out and said, I forgive you, brother, with all my heart.

And she says later, forgiveness is not an emotion, it's an act of the will.

We can only forgive at that level when we have experienced the forgiveness that comes through the grace of Jesus, amen.

But it's available because we know a God of steadfast faithfulness.

Sometimes, you know, depending on who you are, the personality you have, we can lean a bit towards judgmentalism, we can lean a bit towards that strong man, but it doesn't take long before you realize yet, but by the grace of God go I.

I would put it to you that we've all broken promises to God because the Bible says we're all sinners.

All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

But we have this example, and it's in the interaction of a holy and faithful God with Hosea, that God is faithful and has done what he promised.

Through Christ, he has made a way available for us to be forgiven and restored to relationship with him.

Let me just very quickly remind you of some of the promises that are yours if you know Christ as Lord.

He will never leave you nor forsake you, Hebrews 13.

Even when you feel distant to him or undeserving, and that will be regular if you're struggling with any level of sin, you will feel like you're distant to him, but his presence is not conditional, or his love is not conditional on whether you've done enough to earn your way.

It's conditional on us coming back and cling to his mercy, and saying, God forgive me.

I've messed up again, but I know you're faithful.

He has forgiven all your sins.

1 John 1,9, if we confess our sins, he's faithful and just, and will forgive us all our sins.

He's faithful to that promise, amen.

He doesn't come back and forth from that promise, go, oh, maybe today, maybe not.

No, no, he's steadfast in his faithfulness.

Colossians 2 says, he forgave us all our sins, nailing them to the cross.

There is no sin in this room that is too big for God.

That's his promise.

He has given us the Holy Spirit, Ephesians 1.

You were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, guaranteeing our inheritance.

You can trust his faithfulness.

He will finish what he started, Philippians 1.

He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion.

You may not be able to trust your promises, but you can trust his, amen?

You can trust him.

He will never let you be snatched from his hand, John 10.

No one will snatch them out of my hand.

He will work all things together for your good.

In all things, God works for the good of those who love him, Romans 8.28.

He will bring you home, John 14.

I go to prepare a place for you.

I will come back and take you to be with me.

And also 2 Corinthians 5.

We have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven.

The story of our lives, like Hosea's, will undoubtedly involve pain and levels of confusion and levels of shame and guilt as we are reminded that we are unfaithful.

Not all the time, but we are unfaithful.

His faithfulness will never fail us, never.

It's been demonstrated once and for all in Jesus, in his life, death and resurrection.

It is true that we live in a world of broken promises.

Some of us have experienced it more than others.

It's certainly a world of painful consequence, but we know a God of steadfast faithfulness.

Amen.

And it's so fitting and a blessing that we can come to the table now, this table of remembrance, that we were given as a gift by the Lord Jesus on the night that He was betrayed.

We have such clarity in understanding what these elements mean.

The bread represents His body, and as we eat it together, all consuming the bread, we are reminded that by faith in Christ, for those of us who belong to Christ through faith in Him, we are one body.

We're joined together.

We're one body spiritually, and the bread is the reminder of that.

And when he took the cup on that night that he was betrayed, he said, this is the cup of the new covenant, the blood about to be poured out for you.

Drink it in remembrance of me.

This is the new covenant, once and for all, no more blood of bulls and lambs, one Saviour, one Mediator, the Lord Jesus Christ, whose blood is enough to cleanse us of sin, to cleanse you and I of our unfaithfulness.

And can I encourage you to believe His blood is enough to cleanse the person that let you down?

The broken promises, bring them to the cross, the same way you're coming to the cross.

Let's take a moment and as we reflect on the bread and the cup, and that it points us to a saviour on a cross and then an empty cross.

Confess what you need to.

Own up to your broken promises.

And allow the Spirit of God to remind you of God's faithfulness.

‍