The Cost of Suffering Love
It is not clear whether Hosea married a whore to demonstrate his love for her and Yahweh’s unfailing love for Israel or whether he married a respectable woman who became a whore and to whom Hosea remained faithful to demonstrate Yahweh’s faithfulness to israel. Nor is it clear whether it was his experience with Gomer that led him to insights about Yahweh or vice versa. But does it matter? The two incidents were contemporaneous. Perhaps not even Hosea could have answered the question. Perhaps he never even asked it. What is clear is that both were out of character for the people of his day. So how did it come about?
Possibly, as with Job, as a result of personal experience. It may well be the result of Hosea realising he could no longer square his own feelings of love for Gomer with what he knew everyone expected of him. Was that what led him to understand why Yahweh could never give up Israel? Was that relationship also a deeply loving one like that of father and child or husband and wife? If that were the case then his relationship with Gomer taught him something about God. Here we have theology built on personal experience challenging established practice, and there is a price to be paid — unpopularity, uncertainty, scorn, plus the fact that in the end it may all collapse like a pack of cards and the perpetrator finish up eating humble pie.
Once he has made that discovery, and by the time he has come to terms with his theology (chapter 12) he not only has a new conviction about how he is to treat Gomer but also a new spiritual strength to handle it. Superficially it may not make life any easier, may do little if anything to alleviate the scorn; the unpopularity may never go away and he still lives life on the edge for fear of everything coming unstuck and people shouting, ‘we did warn you’, but at least now he knows why he is behaving as he does and in whose footsteps he is treading.