The answer is found in the middle of verse 9: He is God and not man! He does not have to lower His high standard of perfection in order to show compassionate love toward us. As the next line says, He is “the Holy One in [our] midst.” God’s holiness is not diminished when His love is increased. God is God and God is holy, and He can do as He will and love whom He will.

But there’s still a difficulty to be addressed before we can understand how a holy God can forgive unholy sinners. Perfect holiness cannot rightly tolerate the contamination of sin. One cannot allow rats, roaches, and termites to infest his house and yet be a good homeowner. His house will become contaminated and it will fall. God cannot allow the contamination that sinners would bring into heaven and at the same time be a holy God. Heaven would no longer be a paradise. So how can God allow Himself to love us, infested as we are with sin?

We find the answer in the very name the prophet’s parents chose for him—Hosea. This name is given to two others in the Bible—one before the prophet and one after. The first was Joshua. “These are the names of the men whom Moses sent to spy out the land. And Moses called Hoshea the son of Nun, Joshua” (Numbers 13:16).

The second: “And she shall bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name JESUS, for He will save His people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). Interestingly, Hoshea, Hosea, Joshua, and Jesus are all renderings of the same name, meaning “salvation.” As G. Campbell Morgan says, “There came One in the fullness of time whose name was Jehovah and Hosea: His name was Jesus… and at last we find out how God can be just and the Justifier of the sinning soul.”14

Having no sins of His own, Jesus volunteered to take our sins as if they were His. He died on the cross so He could remove those sins from us and take them into death. That left us legally free of sin and washed us pure with the blood of Jesus so that we could enter the presence of God’s perfect holiness. Dr. Morgan continues, “Through Jesus, the claims of justice which are against my soul are all met. Through Him the glory of holiness is maintained. The redemption of the human soul is not a pity that agrees to ignore sin; but a power that cancels it and sets us free from its dominion.”15

Psalm 85:10–11 prophetically explains the result of Jesus’ sacrifice when it says, “Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and peace have kissed. Truth shall spring out of the earth, and righteousness shall look down from heaven.” In the first two lines, mercy and truth are reconciled. In the last two lines, heaven and earth are reconciled. Biblical expositor John Phillips explains: