Feeling God's Pain

During this season of Lent, I am focusing my devotional reading of Scripture on the minor prophets. It's a section of Scripture I haven't read in a while, and so I decided to delve into the words of individuals who may not have written as much as guys like Isaiah and Jeremiah, but whose message to us is just as important.

So I started reading through the first chapter of Hosea. Right at the beginning, God does the unthinkable: He orders His prophet Hosea to marry an adulterous wife and to conceive unfaithful children. The reason? "Because the land is guilty of the vilest adultery in departing from the Lord." Apparently God wanted Hosea to feel the kind of gut-wrenching emotions that God Himself must feel when His people abandon Him, prostitute themselves before the lifeless pagan gods around them, and ultimately beget children who are faithless.

If I were Hosea, I don't know what my resonse would have been.

You see, I have a couple close friends of mine who experienced this firsthand. They married women, they loved them, but over the course of the marriage, the women's hearts changed and they engaged in adulterous relationships.

In both cases, my friends expressed a willingness to reconcile, to go to counseling, to try and rebuild the trust and intimacy and start fresh. But their wives would have none of it. They had made up their minds ahead of time and chose to sever the relationship rather than work things out. In one case, my friend's wife walked away with half of the financial assets in the marriage, even though she contributed very little financially.

I saw what that situation did to my friends. I saw grown men crying like babies, heart-broken, shocked, angry, filled with both love and hatred. My one friend has three boys, and despite the counseling they have received, I'm sure the scars of that experience will always be with them.

All because one party in the marriage chose narcissism, self-gratification, deceptiveness and unfaithfulness over commitment, truthfulness, communication, and reconciliation.

I reflect on this, and then I think... Is this what I do to God every time I sin? Does God's heart ache like my friends' did when I make my self-interest, rather than God's glory and righteousness, the motivating factor in my decisions? And on a more corporate level: how does God truly feel about the church's relationship with the pagan gods of our culture today, or the church's sometimes selfish agenda? Does He view us as adulterous?

Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann argues that pathos is absolutely crucial to prophetic ministry: the ability to feel, and to energize others to feel, the heart of God that cries out against apathy, numbness, and unfaithfulness. The people of God must be exposed to a candid expression of the way in which their individual and corporate sin has betrayed God on the very deepest levels. This requires more than theological savvy or administrative gifts: it requires a discerning heart driven by a life of rich prayer and disciplined spirituality, as well as a courage to speak deeply and truthfully about unpleasant things. (See Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination)

If the experiences of my friends (and of Hosea) are any indication of God's reaction to His people today, I believe that this season of Lent offers us a unique opportunity. I pray that through my reading of the minor prophets and through my prayer life, God may invite me into a deeper understanding of His heart, and also a courage to know how most effectively to use that understanding in a way that is productive and energizing.

May our Lenten journey give us a fresh understanding of the lengths to which God will go, and has gone, to restore us adulterous people to our rightful place as His Bride, the Church.