• God did not stop loving Jonah, even though he refused to take God’s saving message to Nineveh. After his experience in the belly of the great fish, we read that the “word of the LORD came to Jonah the second time” (Jonah 3:1). God gave Jonah another chance to obey, and Jonah went on to preside over one of the greatest revivals in history.

• God did not stop loving Peter, even though he denied Jesus three times. The Lord restored Peter to fellowship by matching his threefold denial with a threefold recommissioning (John 21:15–17).

Hosea: The Story of God’s Unrelenting Love

Now we come to one of the most vivid and direct examples of God’s unrelenting love—and one of the most beautiful stories in the Bible. It involves an eighth-century Jewish prophet named Hosea and his wife, Gomer. Hosea was called to prophesy to the ten northern tribes of Israel just before the Assyrians took them into captivity in 722 BC.

As a background to Hosea’s prophecy, we need to remember that God formed a covenant with Israel that took the form of a marriage. The vows were exchanged at Mount Sinai in Exodus 24, then renewed when Israel entered the Promised Land (Joshua 8:30–35), and again after Israel had settled into the land (Joshua 24:1–28). God’s love was like that of a cherishing husband—deep, intimate, tender, provident, and protective.

When a man and a woman first fall in love, the feeling is intense and ecstatic. When that love leads to marriage, the couple experiences the closest, most intimate and devoted of all human relationships. That is how God felt about Israel.

God, the heavenly Groom, and Israel, His earthly bride, had pledged their fidelity three times, but the bride did not remain faithful. Even though the time in which Hosea prophesied was one of great prosperity, it was also a time of great wickedness.

The nation of Israel blatantly broke every commandment. Lying, thievery, bloodshed, oppression, perverted justice, and prostitution were rampant and openly practiced. Excessive luxury existed side by side with abject poverty. Adultery was even incorporated into their religion. In Jerusalem, male cultic prostitutes were actually being housed in the Jewish temple along with women who wove fabrics for the idols. As one writer summarized the conditions, “Those who were first in rank were first in excess… The idolatrous priest loved and shared in the sins of the people… Corruption had spread throughout the whole land… the knowledge of God was willfully rejected; the people hated rebuke.”3