Hosea acts out a visual aid of God’s unfailing love for His people. We wander, we rebel, we run away, we pursue idols in our hearts — and God continues to pursue us, even to the point of buying us back from our adultery at the ultimate expense of His own life.

That is the book. Everything else in it serves that one picture. God does not send Hosea with a sermon about faithlessness; He sends him to live inside it, so that when the prophet finally speaks, the nation is not hearing an argument. They are watching a man they know, with a wife they know about, and they can see for themselves what it costs him.

The command, and what it cost him

When the LORD first spoke to Hosea, the LORD told him, “Marry a prostitute and have children with that prostitute. The people in this land have acted like prostitutes and abandoned the LORD.”

Hosea 1:2  ·  God’s Word

Notice that the reason is given in the same breath as the command. The marriage is not a private tragedy God happens to use; it is the message, assigned before it happens. The children are given names that carry the message further — 1:2 – 2:1.

Then she leaves. And the word of the LORD comes to him a second time, and it is not a release.

Then Yahweh said to me, “Go again, love a woman who is loved by her companion and is an adulteress, even as Yahweh loves the sons of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love raisin cakes.” So I bargained for her for myself for fifteen shekels of silver and a homer and a half of barley.

Hosea 3:1–2  ·  Legacy Standard Bible

He does not take her back. He buys her back. She has become someone else’s property, and the price is paid out of his own house — roughly the price of a slave (Exodus 21:32). And God says plainly what the transaction is for: love her as I love the Israelites.

Follow that line forward and it does not stop at Hosea’s doorstep. The people God is speaking about here are the people He will one day buy back Himself, and the price is not silver. You were bought for a price (I Corinthians 6:20) — not with anything that can be counted out on a table, but with the blood of Christ (I Peter 1:18–19), the church bought with His own blood (Acts 20:28). Hosea paid what he had. God paid Himself.

The country he was speaking to

It will help you to feel what Hosea is saying if you know the condition of the nation while he said it. In the south, Isaiah, Amos and Micah were his contemporaries, and we can glean a good deal about Israel from what they say.

When Hosea began, Jeroboam II was the strong ruler — you can read of his reign in II Kings 14:23–29. Uzziah was king in Judah, and between them they had recovered almost the same territory that had belonged to David and Solomon. Hosea’s generation, living at the end of that reign, knew nothing of defeat by a foreign power. They had known peace for many years, and prosperity along with it (II Chronicles 26:10; Hosea 8:14; Amos 3:15, 5:11; Isaiah 9:10).

Wealthy and prosperous, and sliding further from God every year. Extreme poverty existed alongside great wealth. Greed, dishonesty and cheating describe this land where the weak were victimised by the strong (Hosea 12:7; Isaiah 5:8; Amos 8:5–6). Widows and orphans, God’s special concern, were oppressed, and the destitute were bought and sold at public auction (Amos 8:4, 8).

Baal worship, brought into Israel and popularised under Jezebel, went on luring the people away from God (Hosea 2:8; 11:2; 13:1). Prostitutes under the guise of priestesses to Baal filled the land with lust (4:10–18). The people still built high places, and set up images of Baal and Asherah poles on them (II Kings 17:7–12).

Hold those two facts together and you have the reason the marriage was necessary. A nation committing adultery in its worship was being asked to watch adultery in a marriage. There is no way to hear it as somebody else’s problem.

What happened when the strong king died

After Jeroboam’s death the nation moved rapidly to disaster.

• His son Zechariah succeeded him and was killed by Shallum after six months  II Kings 15:8–12
• Shallum ruled one month and was killed by Menahem  15:13–15
• Menahem reigned ten years  15:17–22
• His son Pekahiah was killed by Pekah  15:23–26
• Pekah reigned twenty years  15:27

Then Assyria marched on Samaria, held it under siege for two years, and took it in 722 BC. It was during these turbulent days that Hosea pleaded with Israel to turn to God.

The covenant is the argument

The central idea of the book is the covenant God made with Israel at Sinai — the binding promise that made them His people. They had broken it, and Hosea is sent to plead with them about it. References to those early years are scattered right through the book (9:10; 11:1; Exodus 4:22), and he sets the size of their sin against the size of that promise (4:1–19; 6:4–11).

Adultery, in the marriage and in the nation, is not first of all a broken rule. It is a broken relationship — which is why the book’s most quoted line is not about sacrifice at all.

I want your loyalty, not your sacrifices. I want you to know me, not to give me burnt offerings.

Hosea 6:6  ·  God’s Word

He warns them that if they do not return, judgment will certainly fall (4:3; 5:1–15; 9:3; 10:6). In 9:3–6 the land of exile is called “Egypt” — not geography but memory, reminding them of the bondage they were in before the covenant of Sinai. Go back on the covenant and you go back to Egypt.

The love that will not let go

And yet. Although they have broken the covenant, God loves them and is patient with them (11:2–4; 14:1–9). He wants Israel to come back. Chapter 11 drops the marriage picture for a moment and speaks as a father teaching a child to walk:

I was the one who taught the people of Ephraim to walk. I took them by the hand. But they didn’t realize that I had healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness, with ropes of love. I removed the yokes from their necks. I bent down and fed them.

Hosea 11:3–4  ·  God’s Word

And then the verse where the whole book comes to a stop:

How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? … I have changed my mind. I am deeply moved.

Hosea 11:8  ·  God’s Word

That is the sound of the pursuit. Not indulgence — the judgment does come, and Samaria does fall — but a God whose love is not exhausted by the failure of the people He loves. Throughout the book Hosea sees a time of restoration on the far side of it (1:10; 2:14–15), and the promise is put in the language of a wedding, not a treaty:

Israel, I will make you my wife forever. I will be honest and faithful to you. I will show you my love and compassion. I will be true to you, my wife. Then you will know the LORD.

Hosea 2:19–20  ·  God’s Word

Where it lands

A careful reading of I Peter 2:10 shows the apostle quoting these very passages — once you were not God’s people, but now you are; once you were not shown mercy, but now you have been shown mercy — and seeing that promised restoration to covenant taking place in the Church, where through the blood of Jesus we enter the new covenant. Peter takes the names of Hosea’s children and reverses them.

So the buying back is not a figure of speech that stayed in the eighth century. Hosea went out with silver and barley and brought his wife home. God went further.

The outline

I. The adulterous wife  1:2 – 3:5

• The children as signs  1:2 – 2:1
• The adulterous wife  2:2–23 — the Lord’s judgment on Israel (2:2–13), the Lord’s restoration of Israel (2:14–23)
• The faithful husband  3:1–5

II. Adulterous Israel and the covenant of God  4:1 – 14:9

• Israel’s adultery  4:1 – 6:3 — the cause and the results (4:4–19), the people and leaders addressed (5:1–15), the plea (6:1–3)
• Israel’s punishment  6:4 – 10:15 — the case presented (6:4 – 7:16), judgment pronounced (8:1 – 9:17), the appeal (10:1–15)
• The Lord’s covenant love  11:1 – 14:9 — fatherly love and grief (11:1–11), punishment for unfaithfulness (11:12 – 13:16), restoration after repentance (14:1–9)

Before you move on

This is a short book. Read it in several translations, and let its message of love burn itself on your heart.