IDENTITY: ADULTEROUS
I would like to take a moment to embrace and identify with the word “adulteress.” I want to absorb the feeling of a deep and very personal form of unfaithfulness. I want to get a sense of the pain and destruction that adultery has on a sacred covenant, as it destroys trust and taints intimacy. And oh, the heartbreak, shock, insult, and damage adultery wreaks on lives people as it leaves brokenness in its trail. Adultery has dissolved many a marriage covenant. It has forever changed the course the lives of many within each family it touches. Adultery causes immense pain on multiple fronts.
It is simple for a woman who is faithful in covenant keeping, to dissociate herself with her adulterous nature. She can pridefully think herself above such a description as adultery, as though she is not a covenant breaker. This is the place I was at as I began to read passage after passage in Hosea.
I felt for poor Hosea as his life was spent picking up pieces from his ongoing marriage to an unfaithful woman. And then one day, my perception of the characters turned.
It is God who is pictured as in the imagery of Hosea. And it is Gomer who is the analogy of God’s people, Israel. Identifying with Hosea was the course my pride had taken me, when it is most certainly Hosea’s wife, Gomer with whom I should see myself.