We delight in thinking about the love of Christ for his Bride. We think of those glorious passages in Ephesians 5 and Revelation 22, and can’t help but feel our hearts wooed towards our beloved Husband. It is a wonderful reality that we can gaze into a marriage and understand Christ and His Church. When we consider this relationship, we often think of healthy marriages and reflect on how this mirrors Christ and the Church. This is a good and useful exercise. However, when we want to contemplate the love of Christ for His Church, the image of a loving, healthy marriage doesn’t truly help us appreciate the depth of what Christ has done. To rightly understand the magnitude of Christ’s love for His Church, we must look to a much uglier reality.

Step forward Hosea! The book of Hosea is a painfully delightful read. If you don’t know the story, Hosea the prophet is commanded by God to go and take a wife of whoedom and have children of whoredom.¹ Hosea marries Gomer and has children by her. At some point she leaves and returns to her whoredom again. Then the Lord commands Hosea to go again and love the adulteress woman who is loved by another.² So Hosea went and spoke sweet words to her and brought he home to be his wife. Now, the point of this living parable was to highlight how Israel had treated God and yet how willing he was to welcome them home again.

When you see this picture of a broken marriage, it is easy to read and be amazed by Hosea’s commitment to this woman. How many of us husbands would welcome back a wife that whored herself out to any and all and hadn’t shown any desire to return? Yet this picture of brokenness serves a greater purpose: to highlight to us the love of Christ for his Church. While we rejected our Maker and whored after the lusts of our flesh and other gods, the second person of the Trinity took on human flesh and laid down his life for the Church. He wooed us, not with wonderful poetry, but with the song of his suffering and misery. Christ, in his love for his bride, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but instead took the form of a servant and laid down his life. He preferred to die rather than to live without his bride.

How many husbands can say they have loved their brides like this? We talk about dying to ourselves for our wives when we wash the dishes or protect them from an invader. Yet, how many of us would lay down our lives for the sake of a wife committed to whoredom who did not want to return? Such is the love of Christ, that he would suffer and die to redeem a church for himself. Such indeed is his love. As you approach Easter this weekend, as you look to Golgotha and the darkest day, consider the husband who loves his bride, even though she hated him.

1. Hosea 1:2 ↩︎
2. Hosea 3:1 ↩︎