Feeding on Ashes

“He feeds on ashes; a deluded heart has led him astray.” Isaiah 44:20

Isaiah watches a man walk out to the woods and cut down a tree. He carries it home. Half of it he burns. He warms himself at the fire and says, ah, I am warm. He bakes his bread over it, roasts his meat, and eats until he is full. Then he takes what is left of the same tree, the other half, and he shapes it, and he bows down to it, and he says, deliver me, for you are my god.

The strange part is not that he worships. The strange part is that he watched himself make it.

You will not be tempted by a wooden idol. But you will be tempted by something you built with your own hands and then knelt to. A reputation you assembled. A political certainty you carved. A family you love so much that you have quietly begun asking it to save you. A retirement account. A rightness. A routine. You watched yourself make it. You remember the labor. And still you find yourself asking it for deliverance.

Isaiah says the man feeds on ashes, and that is the exact accounting. An idol does not starve you all at once. It feeds you. It gives you something real. Ash has substance, it fills the mouth, and you can go a long way on it before you notice that nothing in it is keeping you alive.

But here is the line that should stop you where you stand. No one stops to think. No one has the knowledge or the discernment to say, half of it I burned in the fire. He does not ask the question. Not because he could not answer it. Because he never asks it.

So ask it.

What is the thing you are asking to deliver you? And do you remember making it?

I Will Freely Love Them

"I will heal their apostasy; I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them." Hosea 14:4

I will love them freely.

Freely means without cost or payment. It means given as a gift. When Jesus sends the disciples out and tells them to heal the sick and cleanse the lepers, he tells them they received freely, so give freely, and he means do not put a price on it. When Paul says we are justified freely by his grace, he means there is no invoice.

And it also means willingly. Spontaneously. Without being compelled. David says he will freely sacrifice, and what he means is that nobody made him do it. There is no obligation in the room.

To love freely, there has to be freedom.

Which brings me to the phrase I wish we would bury, and I mean bury it in the church first. You scratch my back and I will scratch yours.

It sounds like brotherly love. It sounds like unity. It is faithlessness with good manners. Because the moment that motto gets into the heart of a church, it requires obedience without love, and it turns a relationship into a transaction, and a transaction always has terms. Which means it can always be breached. And when it is breached, either side now has the right to leave, or to withhold, or to be cruel.

That is not love. That is bondage with a friendly face.

And most of us are running this arrangement with God and do not know it. Jesus, I come to church, I give, I serve, I have done my part. And I am not being blessed right now. So you are not doing yours.

Listen to me. The transaction already happened. It happened between Christ and the Father, and the debt was paid, and you were not a party to it.

There is nothing left to negotiate.

He is not going to love you more if you produce, and he is not going to love you less if you fail.

He said he would love you freely.

Let him.

I Will Allure Her

"Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her." Hosea 2:14

Allure is not a word we use much, and when we do we usually mean something a little dishonest. A lure is what you put on a hook.

That is not this.

The allurement here is not to trick. It is a persuasion that radically suggests a different option than the one we are living. It says, would you be willing to consider something else. Would you be willing to see my goodness as greater than whatever it is you love more than me.

And notice the mechanism, because it is the strangest part of the verse. He does not corner her. He does not expose her. He brings her into the wilderness and speaks tenderly.

Faithful love never forces itself on anybody.

Think of the two on the Emmaus road. They are walking away from Jerusalem, away from their group, away from everything, and they are doing it after two separate testimonies came back and told them the tomb was empty. They heard the women. They sent the men. And they walked away anyway.

And Jesus comes alongside them and hides their eyes and just walks.

He had every reason to boast. He had just defeated death. He could have said, what is wrong with you, you had two witnesses. Instead he listens. He asks questions. He opens the Scriptures and shows them how the whole thing has been pointing at him the entire time, and he lets them not know it is him.

He never once pushes them to see him.

He walks in the direction they are already going.

I have wondered whether he does that all the way. Whether he walks the ones who are turning away as far as they will go, still speaking tenderly, still offering the other option, right up to the gate.

Their hearts burned first. The recognition came second.

He is not going to force you.

He is going to walk with you until something burns.

Go, Again

"Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress." Hosea 3:1

It is one thing to love someone who comes crawling back and asks for forgiveness.

It is another thing entirely to go and find them.

To make the first move when they are the one who hurt you. To settle a debt you did not create. To walk out the door and go looking for a person who left you, and who is not sorry, and who is currently in another man's house.

That is hard. Everything in me wants to say, it is not my fault. I did not leave. I stayed with the kids.

And God says, go again.

I learned something early in ministry that has cost me more than almost anything else I know, and it is this. You can tell who is more spiritual in an argument. Not by who is right. By who, in humility, makes the first move toward reconciliation. It is the person who sees more value in the relationship than in the verdict.

That is Jesus. He was never wrong in a single argument in his life, and he was always the first one seeking reconciliation. Always. He does not wait at the far end of repentance with his arms crossed. He comes down the road.

And this is where the story turns from being about our unfaithfulness to being about his character, because at this point in the book Gomer has done nothing to earn a second look. There is no scene where she comes to her senses. God says go, and he says love her, and he says love her the way I love Israel, though they turn to other gods.

Though. Not after. Though.

I call it radical love. God pursues us to redeem the relationship even when we are the ones who walked away, chasing loves that never loved us back.

You do not have to fix it first.

He is already coming.

Go, Marry Her

"When the LORD first spoke through Hosea, the LORD said to Hosea, 'Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom.'" Hosea 1:2

God tells Moses to go free the captives. God tells Abraham to leave and go to a land I will show you.

And then God comes to Hosea.

I want you to marry a prostitute.

I think I would have asked for more time to pray that one through. I think I would have gone back and said, Lord, I want to make sure I heard you, because there is nothing holy about what I think you just said. And he says, yes, Hosea. She is a prostitute. Her name is Gomer.

Not Mary. Not Sarah. Gomer.

Imagine the whispers at the market. Did you hear about Hosea, the prophet, the man of God? He is getting married. And you will never believe who.

But here is what is incredible about it. God is not asking Hosea to make a strange life decision. God is asking Hosea to live out a prophecy. Every painful moment, every whisper behind his back, every betrayal that is coming, all of it is going to paint a picture. A living picture of how God feels about his people. Of how much he loves them, even when they run.

So they marry. They have three children. Life is happening.

And then one morning Hosea wakes up and she is gone. He searches the house. He checks the yard. He walks up and down the street. Nothing.

And now the prophet is a single father with three children, and if you have ever been a single parent you know the days are hard and the nights are worse. And the whispers around town are not helping. I knew it would not work. What was he thinking.

We read Hosea as a book about Israel, and it is. But God did not send Israel a memo. He sent them a man, with a wrecked house and a broken heart, and he said, look at him. That is me.

Before you ever read a word about your idols, read that.

The God you left is not indifferent about it.