What Kind of Love Should You Have?

Part Three of Great Marriages of the Bible

File: Oseias, Gomer, rosto divino (Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal ALC.455, fl.291v).png - Wikimedia Commons

The real work of this wedding begins to pick up today. Last night, Aedan and Addy went to the Justice of the Peace for the state part of the festivities. It’s been a while since Good Shepherd has signed New York State marriage licenses, for reasons that should be fairly obvious, so we toddled over to the brutalist Binghamton City Hall building and the dystopian chamber where they make lots of decisions for the three-minute ceremony. Can’t quite remember what they had to promise each other—something, as my mother says, numb and vague.

Also, yesterday, my epic takedown of Peter Enns was published over at CRJ. Here’s a taste:

A few years ago, a hilarious video made the rounds on social media of a married couple sitting together on their living room sofa. The woman is overwrought and anxious. “There’s all this pressure, you know?” she says, “And sometimes it feels like it’s right up on me.” The camera shifts and the viewer discovers that she has a nail sticking out of her forehead. Her husband, exasperated, says, “Yeah, well, you do have a nail in your head.” “Stop trying to fix it!” she cries, “You always do this, you always try to fix things.” Her husband sighs heavily and tries to pay attention while she complains that all of her sweaters are snagged — “like, all of them” — and that she can’t get enough sleep. “That sounds really hard,” he finally says, but when he leans in to kiss her, he gets whacked with the nail. The scene ends with the funny, and obvious, conclusion, “It’s not about the nail.”¹

Over the many years as I’ve attempted to listen to the complaints of progressive and deconstructing Christians and Ex-vangelicals, I have gradually come to feel like the sane though exasperated husband in “It’s Not About the Nail” — the person standing by, helpless, replete with pertinent information about God and the Bible that won’t end up being of any use because the distressed person is not interested in solutions and answers, but only the bleak experience of living in a sin-sick world. And this sensation deepened as I tried to attend to Peter Enns, to read his books and listen to his videos, to comprehend his particular point of contention with historic Christianity.

Here’s the podcast I recorded with Melanie:

So, I have barely any time this morning, as you can imagine, but I did have another brief post in my series, Great Marriages of the Bible. Today, we have the glorious marriage of Hosea and Gomer. You remember them?

Hosea was one of those prophets who had to go through a sort of lifestyle performance art exercise of acting out what God wanted to show the people whom he had chosen to love. Hosea had to go out and find a woman to marry, and that woman had to be unfaithful to him. I like to think of Gomer a little bit like Maddi here:

@madihart_soccerwhen shes suddenly getting so defensive over them, you just KNOW 😭 #sketch #comedian #jokes #breakup #relatable #anxiousattachment #couple

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Here’s how God puts it:

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, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.” So he went and took Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son.

And the Lord said to him, “Call his name Jezreel, for in just a little while I will punish the house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel, and I will put an end to the kingdom of the house of Israel. And on that day I will break the bow of Israel in the Valley of Jezreel.”

She conceived again and bore a daughter. And the Lord said to him, “Call her name No Mercy, for I will no more have mercy on the house of Israel, to forgive them at all. But I will have mercy on the house of Judah, and I will save them by the Lord their God. I will not save them by bow or by sword or by war or by horses or by horsemen.”

When she had weaned No Mercy, she conceived and bore a son. And the Lord said, “Call his name Not My People, for you are not my people, and I am not your God.”

Most of the time, when people fall in love (as New York State requires) and get married, the reasons they do that are because they don’t want to be alone. The existential dread of being alone with yourself and with God, for human people, is intolerable. And why wouldn’t it be?