After the harsh words at the beginning of chapter 2, these are tender words.
They reminded me of a song I used to sing in concerts, written by singer/songwriter Julie Miller
“You knew the way to my heart,
I had a good defence but you tore it all apart.
You knew, you knew the way to my heart.
There were other lovers, knocking at my door,
You were like no other I had known before.
When nobody else could touch me, nobody else could see
Your compassion reached the deepest part of me.”
I have experienced the compassion of God for the rebel and the runaway.
I first became a follower of Jesus when I was about 10 years old. I didn’t come from a church-going family. How, even at such a young age, I was attracted to Jesus and saw my need for a relationship with him, is another story.
In my early twenties I quite deliberately chose to stop living as a follower of Jesus, and to take back control of my life and do my own thing. The causes of this reversal were several and complicated…over a period of time relationships, unanswered prayer and a sense that God really had no interest in me, all added up until the burden of trying to live something I no longer really believed and serving a God I no longer trusted became to much, and I just walked away.
However, God, who it turns out is very reluctant to lose anyone and who, it seems, often lets us live through things for our good refused to walk away from me.
Chance encounters with old friends who also followed Jesus, friends who refused to judge me and continued to show God’s love to me. Talking with a friend at college who was searching for God and who, despite my best efforts to make them cautious, still went ahead and gave their life to Jesus. Eventually, one day I walked back into the church where I first started to grow as a follower of Jesus, was welcomed back with tears and much joy and, later, made my peace with God.
At the end of my time away from God, I had discovered that doubt is OK, and my trust in God was stronger than ever before, even when I failed to understand the way God works and why he does the things he does in the way he does.
In the end, God knew the way to my heart, and I knew that nothing else in life could replace the relationship I had with him.
In Hosea, God reminds Israel of his love for them. He talks of leading them into the desert (which happened later when they went into a time of Exile)…and of course, many years before, it was in the desert, after God freed Israel from slavery in Egypt, that their relationship with him was forged. He reminds them that they have exchanged his love for slavery to other gods, who are like slave masters to them (the name of the god who they have been worshipping, Baal, means “master”). He woos them and invites them to fall in love with him all over again.
Because of my own experience of God’s unrelenting compassion, that prophecy really resonates with me.
Has your relationship with God cooled off, or got off track? It’s often not something that happens suddenly, but rather it happens because of creeping neglect on our part to grow the relationship. Maybe we stop spending time with God every day in prayer and the scriptures. Maybe something happens that causes us to doubt God or to lose our trust in him, and instead of taking it to God we allow it to fester and make us bitter.
Take a long, honest look at yourself. If you truly value your relationship with God, do all you can to put things right. God hasn’t stopped loving you!
Pilgrim Traveller 