Lyrics
Always Take Me Back by John Van Deusen
I’ve been running for so long.
I’ve been foolish, I’ve been wrong.
I’ve forgotten all you’ve done for me.
Yet somehow,
You always take me back,
take me back with open arms.
I’ve been disloyal with my love.
Thought I found someone to fill me up.
A revolving doorway, stuck in the mud again…
Yet somehow,
You always take me back,
take me back with open arms.
The artist: John Van Duesen
Hosea is a prophet of heartbreak. He carried his message of spurned love not only with a cracking voice or tear-stained parchment but in his own flesh and blood. For Hosea, God’s cry to Israel to return to his love was autobiographical.
Hosea is a prophet of heartbreak. He carried his message of spurned love not only with a cracking voice or tear-stained parchment but in his own flesh and blood. For Hosea, God’s cry to Israel to return to his love was autobiographical.
God told Hosea to marry an unfaithful woman. Whether she was a prostitute when Hosea proposed, or the label of whore applied to merely an inward bent, it wasn’t too long until she was unfaithful. After bearing Hosea a son, she bore a daughter and another son that most likely didn’t belong to him (1). Eventually her serial- adultery got so serious that she found herself sold into slavery, treated like sexual property.
If it wasn’t shocking enough for God to tell his prophet to marry a woman like that, he now commands Hosea to go and buy her back. Not just to release her from
her slavery, but to bring her back to himself, united as husband and wife. The offered love, the unfaithfulness, the desire to free and restore was the history of God and Israel writ small, and Hosea’s following sermon indicts them for their spiritual adultery and predicts not only judgment, but calls them back to the God whose love goes deeper than their infidelity.
No Old Testament book explains God’s relationship with his people in more intimate terms. The covenant name of God, Jehovah, which reminded Israel of the unique promises God had given them with every use, occurs 46 times. Even the less-relational Elohim occurs 18 of 22 times with personal possessive pronouns (my God, our God, your God, etc.). Hosea and Gomer press the intimacy imagery to the limits.
That husband-like love only makes Israel’s unfaithfulness more striking. Although the Hebrew root word for love occurs almost 20 times (more than any other Old Testament prophet) the majority of times it is used to describe Israel’s illicit relationship with her spiritual lovers. God accuses Israel of three great crimes: they have no integrity, no loyalty and no knowledge of God (2). As Hosea unpacks these ideas the accusations pile up. They have scattered their pagan altars across the kingdom (3), and found new gods to
thank for all the blessings Jehovah had bestowed (4). Despite God giving them his law (5), and the constant testimony of his prophets (6), they had forgotten all that God had done and forsaken his goodness and love.
As is always the case, sin has consequences. Just as conception leads to children, sin leads to death. The coming consequences are graphically portrayed in the names of Hosea’s children (7). Israel will be scattered, no longer protected by God’s mercy, no longer God’s people. Their turning to foreign God’s and foreign nations for love will not end in deliverance, but in slavery (8). Assyria is coming, and Israel will be destroyed.
However God, like Hosea, will not abandon his people. He has a plan to call them back and contrary to what they deserve, God will bring them back and restore them as his beloved. Scattered throughout predictions of God’s just and imminent judgment, are futures of hope and reminders of God’s love (9).
They culminate in words that reflect God’s unrelenting love in heart- wrenching clarity:
How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart recoils within me;
my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my burning anger;
I will not again destroy Ephraim;
for I am God and not a man,
the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.
Who can resist such undeserved love?
