________________________________________________________________________

In our first message from the book of Hosea, we discussed how that God chose a man whose personal life perfectly mirrored the relationship of God and His people at this time. Hosea married Gomer and had three children during a time when most of Israel was worshipping idols and being "unfaithful" to God, their spiritual "husband." Then Gomer was unfaithful to Hosea and after her adultery, she slipped into prostitution, and eventually sold herself into slavery. And this great hurt of losing the wife that he loved and seeing her sell herself on the street and then as a common slave so impacted Hosea that he began to be in the "fellowship of God's suffering" and thus got a tremendous revelation of how much God was hurt by the children of Israel's unfaithfulness. It is one thing to preach about how God feels, it is quite another to preach having experienced what God feels, and so Hosea's message were not tinged with judgment and harshness but despite being blunt and straightforward about the coming wrath of God were tinged instead with a broken heart and a sorrow of the man who delivered them!

There is a two-fold message in the words of chapter 2 of Hosea. They first of all are the words of God toward Israel, His unfaithful people, but they also are the story of Hosea's hurt and shame and experiences to Gomer, his unfaithful wife. Never forget that the reality was the relationship between God and His people and that the life of Hosea was but a model and illustration in front of the crowds of what was happening in the Spirit. Therefore we will consider the words first as from God to His unfaithful people, and use the story of Hosea only to help us somewhat understand God's point of view.

These are first and foremost the words of judgment spoken by God to His unfaithful people. No doubt Hosea felt the same way toward his unfaithful wife, but I want you to realize what hard words these are from God. "She is no longer my wife." If she doesn't repent of her sins, then God will cause her to suffer horribly. He will "not have mercy." He goes on to say that He will "remember her past" and bring it against her. Because Israel had turned to idols, God would not spare any judgment against her unless they repented! That's a hard pill to swallow from such a loving and compassionate God and yet the first 13 verse of this chapter spell out in great detail the horrible things that await the unfaithful people of God!

When we read our text, we began reading at verse 14 because it is there that suddenly -- "in midstream" -- God changes His tone and His mercy slips in.

Suddenly we have a change! Those are not the words of judgment but of reconciliation!

From judgment to hope! God is talking about reconciliation with His people now. His anger and wrath has been spent and you can almost feel a change of feeling toward Israel. In verse 16, God says "thou shalt call me 'Ishi' or 'husband' and shalt call me no more 'Baali' or 'master'." It is here that we see the reasons for Gomer leaving Hosea and why Israel was unfaithful to God. It was not the faults of Hosea or God, but rather how the wife viewed the husband. She viewed him as "master" or "dictator" or "demander and enforcer or rules" rather than "husband" or "lover" or "best friend."

It is true even today that when people leave God's grace and mercy and are unfaithful to Him by returning to a life of sin it is because they view Him as "master" only and never come to know Him as "friend" and "companion." If you are going to be faithful to God, then you must change your viewpoint of Him, His messenger, and His Word. Those who view God as "the one who makes rules against all fun" and who view the Lord's messenger and pastor as "hard and hammering" are missing the entire point of God's Word and correction! Hebrews says:

I heard a man say one time that "the test of sonship is obedience to correction." It's true. You can produce a child and raise them up, but if they refuse to listen and obey your correction and your rules, they cease to be your son. The term "son" means more than just "something that was sired" but implies obedience to correction and respect for the position of "father." It is true in the Spirit. The flesh of Jesus Christ was called the "Son of God" because it was born of Mary. But it is also called "the Son" because it was completely faithful and obedient to the Spirit of God, "the Father," even to the point of dying at Calvary. We understand that the "Son" was God manifest in flesh, but understand that God didn't choose those titles and references lightly. They were carefully chosen to teach us a principle. We are to be the "body of Christ" and "sons of God" in this world, but if we ever cease to be obedient to the commands of "the Father" and His mouthpieces, then we cease being "sons of God."

The point is that the chastisement and correction comes because the Father wants the best for us! When God identifies something as sin, it is because it is something, even if you don't recognize it right now, will destroy you and hurt you. God corrects us through His Word and even sends a preacher to correct us not because He relishes being "master" or "ruler" but because as our "husband" and "friend," He truly loves us and does not want to see us hurt! Somebody needs to get the revelation today that God hates sin so much, not because He is a hard God to please, but out of His great love for us! He hates sin because it hurts us, whom He loves more than anything else!

Some people don't have a real understanding of how great God's love really is. They are like a parent who will not discipline their child. It's the worst thing that you can do to a child is not to discipline them. And not disciplining your child is proof that you really don't love them like you should, because if you truly loved them, you would care more about their behavior that is detrimental to their well being than you would of whether they "like" you at the moment!

Some parents will not make their child mind, and they would never think of punishing them or giving them a disciplinary "spanking." If you are that way, then you don't love your child. At least that's what the scripture says. The BIBLE -- which cannot lie and is always true -- says:

Children must be "trained." You must "train them up in the way that they should go." If you do not correct your child, then you do not care enough about how they are going to turn out to help them get out of destructive behavior. I'm not talking about child abuse. I'm not talking about something done in anger. I'm talking about loving correction applied to destructive behavior because you care for their soul. They will only obey God as much as you teach them to obey you. If you do not correct them, then they will never respond to God or the man of God correcting them. If you don't correct your children when they are young, then the man of God and youth pastor will not be able to help them when they are teenagers. They probably will not respond to the Word of God as adults. You'd better correct your children because their salvation is greatly affected by it! If you don't correct them, you are saying that you don't care about their salvation!

And God is not that kind of God. He cares about your salvation and your well-being, and so the scriptures say that "God chasteneth whom He loveth." I'm teaching you a principle that applies to relationships in the Spiritual realm as well. I've looked some of you in the eye and said as your pastor: "I don't agree, and here's why." If you are making a detrimental decision or choosing to live against God's Word, I will continue to tell you the truth. Do you know why? Because I care about you. I love you. A pastor that doesn't care enough about his saints to warn them of the danger of what they are about to do, shouldn't be in the ministry, because he does not love like God loves!

And God loves with a higher love that only time will reveal how deep it is! He is coming down hard on Israel in this chapter and then shows that the judgment is so that they will see how much He loves them. Look back at verse 14. God says "I will bring her into the wilderness" and then He speaks softly to her. In other words, God will let Israel's willful sin drag her to the dry and the barren places and when she is thirsty and has found out that sin cannot satisfy, then He will speak to them knowing that they will listen. I have seen billboards for churches in San Antonio that says "hell and judgment not included." If that is true, then that church has no right to preach about God's love and mercy because they obviously don't understand true, Godly love. Jesus didn't preach about hell so often because He hated people, but because He loved them. Jesus is the only preacher that has actually seen hell and so didn't avoid the subject because His great love knows how horrible a place it is and He doesn't want anyone to go. True love warns and tries to prevent the tragedy. It isn't true love that just sits and watches someone leap off a cliff without trying to prevent it!

________________________________________________________________________

Look at verse 15, and you will see the point of our message found in a phrase. God says "I will give Israel 'the valley of Achor for a door of hope:'!" I want to spend the remainder of this sermon showing you what a powerful lesson is contained within this phrase.

"Achor" means "troubling." It is named after the man, "Achan" whose name means "troubled." You may remember the story of Achan in Joshua chapter 7. It was Achan who went against the plan of God when Jericho's walls fell. God told the children of Israel that all of the gold and silver and fine clothing of Jericho -- it's treasure -- was to be given to the Lord since it was the firstfruit, the first city, of the Promised Land. Achan took some silver and gold and some clothing and hid them in the floor of his tent and thus disobeyed God. Because of Achan's disobedience, God allowed the little army of Ai to slaughter Israel in the next battle and God told Joshua:

"Neither will I be with you anymore, unless you destroy the accursed from among you." Wow! Those are pretty tough words from God. If they did not get the hidden sin from out of one man's tent and destroy him, the God who had delivered them from Egypt and invested much time and effort in this people, would not be with them anymore!

Understand that God had no intentions of leaving His people, but God wants the best for His people, and He knew that if Achan was allowed to get away with his disobedience and no price was paid, that soon everyone would disregard the commandments of the Lord. And so, in the days before Grace and Mercy, Achan was stoned along with his family and animals to teach us a lesson that sin hurts us! Even if we can't see it as vividly and as obvious as the story of Achan, sin hurts humanity! Achan's sin "troubled" Israel. It cost 36 families their husbands and fathers, it cost his family from seeing the Promised Land. It cost precious time that should have been focused on receiving the blessings of God. Therefore the valley was named "the valley of Achor." Literally, the "place of troubling." And God said through the words of Hosea, "I will give you the valley of Achor." God was saying that He would bring them to a "place of troubling."

The simple point is this: God allows us to reap the ramifications of sin. Some people have to learn the hard way. Others are smarter and can learn from a warning and from seeing other people's actions. Things that God has labeled sin are things that bring hurt to us personally because they go against the laws, physical or spiritual, that God has set up in this world. In case, you haven't noticed, I'm trying in this message to get you to change the way you view sin from "stuff that God won't let me do" to "stuff that will destroy me if I do them, therefore God loves me enough to warn me about."

An English preacher, Stanley Jones, said in his book entitled "The Christ of Every Road": "We do not break the laws of the universe, we break ourselves upon them." He's right. When we sin, we are not really "breaking God's commandments" but rather "breaking ourselves on God's commandments." Put your hand into the fire and you will experience hurt and pain. It's the laws of the universe that God has created. If someone warns you "you will burn yourself if you put your hand in the fire" and you do it, you have not broken the law because the fire will still burn the next time and the next, but you have broken your hand. The law will never change, but if you do not realize that going against it hurts yourself, in time, your hand will forever bear the scars!

Sin is the same way. Things labeled sin by scripture are things that break the laws that God has set up in this universe and therefore bring hurt and pain. It's not always physical pain. It might bring hurt relationships or unfaithfulness. It might bring a lack of fruitfulness or emotional stress. But if it is against scripture, then realize that it will bring pain whether you see the results immediately or not. You reap what you sow. That is a basic law of the universe and it will not change. Therefore if you choose to try out sin, God will let you reap the hurt of sin. He will give you the "valley of Achor." If you want to go against God's Word, then God will let you and He will bring you to a "place of troubling" to show you why He warned you about it in the first place. He will allow the trouble and pain to show you that He had the best intentions in the first place when you rejected His warning as "judgmental" or "harsh."

________________________________________________________________________

Remember: God chastises whom He loves. And so sometimes people who have a shallow view of true, Godly love run from the truth of their actions. By doing so, they then find that God allows them to go to the valley of Achor. He allows their world to fall apart. He allows physical and emotional stress as a result of their sin. God tempts no man to sin, but He does make sure that you will reap the wages of sin. Why is that? Why would God speak through Hosea to tell him that He will bring Israel into the wilderness and then speak comfortably to her? These are verses of hope and or reconciliation, why then does God speak and say that He will give them the "valley of Achor," a "place of trouble?" The answer lies in the rest of the phrase: God will give them the "valley of Achor for a door of hope!" God's not bringing the trouble to "hammer them" or see them "get their just desserts" but rather to save them. To bring them "hope" in their life.

To understand what God is saying, we must take chapter 2 of Hosea along with chapter 3. Chapter 3 is not very long. For a few moments, the prophet goes back to his personal story. We find that years have passed since Gomer was unfaithful. And her brief affair caused her to lose the blessings and privileges of her husband and be cast out. She then turned to prostitution and then the progression of sin -- as it always does -- took her down even further until she willfully gave up her rights as a human being and sold her body into slavery. And just as it would happen, the day that she is on the auction block of slavery, or in her "place of troubling" if you will, Hosea walks by and sees the shell of what was once his beloved standing there. Years have passed now since Gomer walked out. She is no longer the beautiful, young bride of a financially successful prophet. She is now the shell of a older woman. Her face bears the "hard" look of her previous lifestyle. Her hair is now unkempt and her body is dirty and marred by the sinfulness in which she has lived. She is a slave and is standing there with the dregs of society in chains and leg irons being sold as a piece of cattle might.

Hosea walks up and inquires as to her price, and finds out that she is on "sale" at 15 pieces of silver plus a homer and a half of barley. The price of a well-bodied slave was 30 pieces of silver and yet she is in such horrible condition physically that she is only worth half of that! The homer and a half of barley was equal to a slave's daily allotment of food and so we find that she is desperately in need of nutrition. Gomer standing there on that slave block being looked on by Hosea, who had loved her, wed her, and cared for her and yet had only been hurt by her is the perfect representation of how God feels when one of His own returns to willful sin after being "born again." Sin takes you further than you wanted to go, hurts you worse than you thought it could, and keeps you longer than you wanted to stay. There is no greater portrait of how God sees the sinner after Calvary than this chapter in Hosea. When Jesus endured the cross, He was paying the price for sin for us. He did that so that we would not have to pay it ourselves and could be set free without having to learn the "hard way." And so when we choose to willfully sin after Calvary, God sees us bound by our sins and our hurts and pains that we have received by choosing to be unfaithful and He feels like Hosea did that day looking at Gomer. He remembers the times of fellowship. He remembers the years of love and faithfulness. And He hurts to see you in your condition. He remembers when He paid the full price for sin at Calvary and yet you are still bound by those things.

If the story stopped there, then it would be the most depressing. If God had just said "I'll let you experience the troubling of sin, look at you, and then walk away shaking my head," then I would say to you and I who have failed God repeatedly: "there is no hope." But in the story of Hosea, a remarkable thing happens! God speaks to him as he is looking at the broken shell of what was once his beloved wife and God says "buy her back." And then God continues: "and not only buy her possession, but restore her as your wife." "Give her inheritance back." "Allow her to resume the normal mother/child relations with the children that she once abandoned." And then comes the kicker: because God says "love her." Choose to love the woman that was unfaithful. Because she is not going to be unfaithful any more, because her "valley of Achor," her "time of troubling" proved to her the importance of faithfulness and showed her what great love that she truly had at first!

When Hosea bought her off the slave block, restored her as his wife, and truly loved her as God commanded, he personified the greatest love that man can ever experience and the way that God loves us even when we have sinned! Does God allow us to experience the hurt and pain when we choose to go into willfull sin and to disobey? Yes, He does. He gives us the "valley of Achor." But does God allows us to stay there forever? No, He seeks us out. He is willing to pay whatever price, no matter how far broken down we are from our sins. And when He receives us back, He does not bring us back as a slave or as a second-class citizen of heaven. He restores us as His beloved bride. He gives us our full inheritance. He restores the relationships that we have lost with others. He is willingly to unconditionally love us even after we have been marred by sin.

If that is true, then why does God allow the "place of troubling" to come in the first place? Is God cruel? No, remember it's actually His great love that allows us to experience the correction and the hurt of sin. So why does God "give the valley of Achor?" Because after you have "learned the hard way" you will not turn back. When you experience His love, this time you will have realized how much He really loves you. Obviously before her unfaithfulness, Gomer didn't realize how much Hosea really loved her. But after she has been in her "place of trouble" where sin has destroyed her and broken her down, and yet Hosea not only bought her back and forgave her, but has restored her and loved her, now Gomer KNOWS how much that Hosea loves her!

And now you know why God has allowed sin to continue to ravage the human race. Now you know why He has delayed His coming despite the world "waxing worse and worse." Now you know why He will not come back until it is as sinful as "the days of Noah." Because within this troubling, this valley of Achor, there is a door of hope. God knows that there will be someone who despite the sinfulness of this world, will get a revelation of how much He loves them and cares for them. Therefore He has given them "a valley of Achor for a door of hope!"

But it's a door, and you must enter into it to experience it.

Isaiah scripture text.