Hosea: Humanity’s hurt and God’s heart

Have you ever been rejected, or felt the pain of loving someone who didn't love you back? In this episode, Zanita Fletcher, assistant editor of Signs of the Times, opens up about a painful breakup that led her to the story of Hosea. In conversation with Jarrod Stackelroth, she unpacks what the universal experience of heartbreak tells us about God—and why He might be far less stoic and emotionless than we imagine.

Buy the book here 
Get 10% off with the code 'Record' 

What is Living Covenant?

The characters and stories of the Old Testament form a rich tapestry, revealing both the best and worst of the human condition—and, most importantly, how God relates to us.

Based on the Living Covenant book series, this podcast explores the sometimes messy lives of those who lived under God’s first covenant, asking what these blessedly unsanitised saints can teach us about living out our faith in relationship with a God who promises never to leave us or forsake us.

=Welcome to the Living Covenant Podcast, where we journey through the messy human stories of the Old Testament explore what it means to live in covenant with a promise keeping God. I'm your host, Zanita. Let's dive in.   And welcome back to the Living Covenant Podcast, where we are joined by your regular host Zanita. Hi Zanita.

Hey, Jarrod. Thank you for swapping seats with me today.

You are welcome now, you are doing a great job in hosting this podcast, getting all our interviews, but today we're privileged because you actually contributed to the Living Covenant series and you wrote the chapter on Hosea.

We're gonna dig into that a little bit today and we thought it'd be hard for you to interview yourself, so thankfully.  I'm able to ask you some questions about this because this was, I would have to say one of the favorites of mine. I really saw you stretch yourself in terms of writing from a very personal place, really engaging with this story, your life story and Hosea's story, and bringing some very valuable insights out of it.

So I'm excited for this conversation today.

Oh, Thank you. That's really kind. I don't often get letters to the editor kind of thing, but this article is probably one that I've received the most feedback on, and it's been good, praise God. Um, but yeah, I was definitely inspired by the master storyteller and Sharry yourself. So thank you for your encouragement in getting me through and helping me, pull down some of those walls.

Yes. I was pushing people to do that because part of this series is to really engage with these characters. What was it about Hosea that made you want to engage with this story? Why did you pick it?

Ooh, I wouldn't say I wanted to engage with it. There was definitely a bit of reluctance. Maybe a year or a year and a half before you had even mentioned this series, Jarrod, I heard a pastor share a sermon on the story of Hosea, and he said something in his sermon that I alluded to in my article, which is this idea that when you feel what it's like to love someone who doesn't love you back, that's a glimpse of what it's like to be God. 📍

And that really struck me at the time, because I was going through a really hard breakup, and I felt like my healing journey was just taking so long. Um, I was really struggling, was going to God and asking for healing, doing all the right things, I felt, but just didn't really feel like I was getting anywhere.

And honestly, I was really angry at God at the time, because I was like, "Why are you not helping me with this?" This was also a relationship that I had gone to him before the relationship started, and I felt like he'd given me the green light, and I'd gone to mentors and asked for advice, I'd thought about it a lot, and I felt really good going into it. I felt like he had led. So when it ended, of course, I was confused, and I was really angry at God. I felt like he was being cruel in making me suffer for so long. And, you know, you often hear people say that Jesus experienced every emotion on Earth that we experience.

But in my mind at the time, I was like, " You haven't experienced 📍 this. You left this place at 30. You didn't have to think about finding a life partner and getting through this world. Sure, maybe you've experienced rejection in other ways, but you weren't ever in a relationship."

So when I heard the story of Hosea being preached, it was like the penny finally dropped, And I realized for the first time, man, does he know what rejection feels like, and on such a larger scale than what myself or anyone else has ever 📍 experienced.

So after I heard that pastor preach, this is a long answer, sorry. After I heard that pastor preach on Hosea, I went away and I read it for myself, and it was honestly a really powerful experience for me in coming to understand God's love for us.

Definitely did not think about writing my experience at the time. In fact, when you said, "Hey, we're doing this series,"  I looked at the list, saw Hosea there, kind of just scanned on, 📍 um, thought, "Nope, not gonna happen," because it just felt very 📍 vulnerable, and I, I guess I wanted to be sensitive to other people. So I kept trying to find other interesting things about other characters on the list, but I couldn't resonate with any of them.

Um, so in the end, I prayed about it for a while, decided to actually write some thoughts out, but not tell you that I'd decided on Hosea. But in that process, I actually just felt a lot of peace about it. I think maybe because I just came to realize that heartbreak is such a universal experience and I felt like I could write it in a way that was still being sensitive.

So yeah that's kinda why I chose Hosea.

Mm, it's interesting. I think we've all been in that place of wrestling with God, doubting God, questioning God. And you are, sort of what you're describing is that that experience helped you to understand Hosea, I guess better. What do you think Hosea's? 'cause it doesn't really say, the Bible doesn't have a lot of details.

How do you think Hosea was as a person to go through some of this and to take the path that he went through? The Bible sort of skims over. It doesn't tell you Hosea felt. Bad about this. It just sort of says, Hosea went and his wife cheated, and then he went and bought her out of slavery.

He brought her back into the home. He did this, he did that. It just describes his actions rather than some of the emotional turmoil. Give us an insight now that you think, how was Hosea processing some of this?

Yeah, I don't know. It's a good question. I guess Hosea was well-known and well-respected by the people of Israel. They thought of him as, like, a holy man, a prophet, a beacon of light in their community. And so maybe God told him to do this because he knew Hosea was capable. He knew his character, he knew his strengths. But Hosea was still a human. Like, he was still just like you and I. And so I wonder if there was part of Hosea that thought in loving Gomer, he could have changed her, that in her experiencing this amazing, loyal love that she's probably never experienced in her life before, that maybe she might settle or change or grow to become this incredible, loyal wife and 📍 mother.

The Bible doesn't say or let on to how Hosea felt or how he processes these things, but we can only imagine that he would've been massively hurt and disappointed when she left him, especially after everything he did to protect and honor her. Like, I'm sure there would've been moments where he turned to God, just like I did, and said, "What are you doing? What is happening right now?"

Um, but I guess even aside from that,  Hosea really would have had to trust God, and he would have had to have a lot of grit, because in looking for Gomer, he would have no doubt had to go to places where men of God were not expected to go or be. 📍 And no doubt, there would have been a lot of suspicion, a lot of rumors, a lot of judgment and comments made about him at the time.

So I think for him to persevere, to keep putting himself in those positions was probably really painful and embarrassing and confusing. But I also think in his persistence in loving her and forgiving her time and time again, that that's where we see this really beautiful picture of a God that does exactly the same for us, um, even though we too don't deserve it.

 There's this saying that I don't think is always very helpful, that says that God only gives his, you know, greatest battles to his strongest soldiers or something. All through the Old Testament, but even in Hosea's story specifically, we can sort of sanitize Hosea and just think that he was just this, almost like a righteous robot.

Um, just goes through the motions, you know, his wife wanders away. And he just goes and gets her and brings her back. And why do you think that's unhelpful in terms of our perspective of God to sort of sand off the rough edges of some of these stories and just imagine that, oh yeah, this is what happened.

A, B, D, and this is what it means. And Hosea is just this perfect guy who was just able to do that. You managed to bring some of the humanity or the heartbreak and some of the feeling in, and maybe, you know, Hosea felt some of that. Why do you think it's important for us to see our Bible characters, our bible heroes as humans?

And how does that color our picture of God?

I know for me, when I was going through my healing journey, I genuinely would question like, is something wrong with me? Because I knew people who had also gone through breakups recently but who seemed to heal a lot quicker or who appeared to be doing okay. As far as I knew from my kind of surface level perspective, I felt like I was struggling much more than other people. But it wasn't until I started to open up about it, have conversations about it, ask people questions where I realized that, oh, well actually many of these people have really struggled or are really struggling just in different ways, or their struggle isn't out in the open for everyone to see. Just like mine isn't now 📍 in the open for everyone to see. Like someone might've seen me who was struggling with a heartbreak and thought, how is Zanita doing so fine? Not everyone wears their heart on their sleeve. Not everyone just cries in public. And I think sometimes it's the same with these characters in the Bible. Like we see their stories, we see their circumstances, but we don't necessarily get the sentence that says, Hosea's heart was so broken that he didn't eat for five days. Or Hosea was so overwhelmed that he cried himself to sleep every night. Like for many of the stories in the Bible and not just that for many individuals in our lives, you have to read between the lines. Like you have to ask them personal questions. Sometimes you have to experience something to then understand.

So. I think when we don't do that, when we don't step back and look at things or put ourselves in someone's shoes, whether it's in the Bible or in our own lives, I think we just assume that everyone is okay. I think we assume we are doing something wrong, or that we have little faith.

And for whatever reason, Jared, the Bible hasn't given us super detailed stories. 📍 Most of them are quite brief. Like you could literally have an entire novel on Hosea's story and in that you might learn more about his emotions, you might learn more about his heartbreak and the turmoil that he went through.

But I think the Bible leaves a lot of that to us. It kind of requires that we use our imagination, that we pause and think about how they might have felt or what they might have experienced.

And you mentioned what you'd experienced in the story. Can you tell us some of the symptoms of your heartbreak and what you think, coming out the other side or if you are out the other side, what that looks like for you now? Like, did you learn something? We don't want to characterize pain as helpful or teaching us lessons necessarily, but how has that process of going through that journeying through that changed you as a person. Where do you find yourself now? Paint the picture for us a little bit and then how you came out of that and what that looks like for you now.

Yeah, for me it was a lot of things, to be honest. Um, I didn't really have an appetite for months and months. The emotional way of things made me really tired a lot of the time I had really fragmented sleep. I just couldn't feel the joy or the love for things that I normally would . Um, I got really anxious and depressed, and they were two things that I had never really experienced before. And then I'd say as well, it affected my overall self-worth and my ability to trust people. I actually remember reading a book by a woman who studied heartbreak, and she mentions that rejection is one of the most profound wounds a person can experience. Like if you place someone who has recently suffered heartbreak through a scanner, you'll see parts of their brain light up that are similar to the parts that undergo like a physical injury, but heartbreak can have more side effects than a physical 📍 injury because of how long it can last for some people. And to be honest, Jared, I was really shocked by how much it impacted me. Like I've been pretty accident prone all my life. I've had a lot of injuries, but I've also known a fair amount of people to die from all sort of circumstances from old age, from giving up hope from really unexpected tragedies, but heartbreak unlike anything else I have experienced completely wallop me.

What did you ask? How did that change me? I think I just feel far more empathetic for people who are going through any kind of rejection or heartbreak because I had no idea, well, I did on a smaller scale, but now whenever I hear someone is going through rejection or heartbreak, I'm like, ah, are you okay? Do you need anything? Do you want someone to talk to? I just, I really feel for people who are going through any kind of rejection, to be honest, really.

Zanita, I know you have an interest in. All things sort of health related, physical and mental, especially health. You've been writing for signs of the Times in that space a lot. You've got your Health hacks, your happy hacks column. Is this something that you were interested in before or was that something that came out of wrestling through this yourself and that sort of developed an interest that made you want to understand more, some of these sort of phenomenon?

Yeah, it definitely came out of it. I think I had an interest in coaching before, but didn't really think about doing it professionally. It was more of just something I had received and found certain tools helpful. Then when I was actually in my healing journey, my psychologist was like, "I think you'd be really good at this coaching thing." So I kinda went down that journey a little bit.

Um, but I think  because I found it so difficult to heal, I tried so many things. Like, I actually saw multiple counselors, and I talked to so many people and asked them, like, "What did you do? How did you get out of this?" "What do I do when I'm feeling this? What do I do when I have a panic attack?" I was just asking people 'cause I was so, desperate, and I learnt a lot in that period.

And I think, you know, trusting God, persevering, praying, that's all great, but I think there's also a lot of practical things that you can do, especially in terms of checking your thoughts. Like, The Bible says to take your thoughts captive. That's not as easy as it sounds. That takes 📍 intentionality, and that takes awareness. So some of that cognitive stuff, like recognizing and changing the lies you're believing, that you're constantly ruminating over, that are causing you to have anxiety attacks, um, I think is really important.

But yeah, like I was saying, because it took me so long to heal, I tried all these different things and kind of formed this toolkit of things that worked and. things that didn't. Which has honestly been so helpful in my role as a coach now because one thing might work for someone, but it won't work for someone else.   But I think definitely the most helpful thing was just to correct the lies I was telling myself, and we all have those, but I think it takes practice to get good at identifying them and that's something that has been helpful in so many different situations.

It's always interesting when my mind wrestles with some of these ideas, whether, you know, to say that God brought on the heartbreak.

But in this story we see him telling Hosea, go marry Gomer. Like he seems to lead Hosea in that direction, and then all the fallout, therefore that happens after that could potentially be then laid at God's feet and say, well, this is God's responsibility. And you alluded to how you got angry with God and that sort of thing.

But it always strikes me, it often strikes me, that for example, like you've got more tools now to be more compassionate and to help other people through these things. Hosea had now a story that showed God's love that reflected God. It spoke into Hosea's ministry, and it's what he's remembered for this sort of life experience that mirrored the God experience and so yeah, while I wrestle with how much God is responsible and how much broken humanity is responsible for inflicting, you know, pain and difficulty on us as people. I do see that sometimes I guess light can come out of darkness or you know, like the, the verse that says the seed has to fall into the ground and die before it grows and becomes, new life.

Yeah.

Is this something that you were reflecting on as you were wrestling with this piece?

I do remember when I had come out of this relationship, I was very aware of this idea that God can use certain things for lessons and through hardship he can refine us and all of that. Um, I suppose because of my situation, like I mentioned earlier, this is something that I had prayed about a lot beforehand it's something that I stepped into very confidently and very excitedly because of the whole process. So when it ended, I could kind of see that I was learning things,  coming to understand things, but I'm not gonna lie, it was still painful and confusing. And I was like, man, if this is all just for some stinking lesson

what a 📍 joke. Like if this is God's way of helping me learn and be refined, then what a cruel God. And you know, research says that approximately 85% of individuals will go through a heartbreak during their 📍 lifetime. It ranks among the most stressful and life altering experience a person can have just below a sudden death of a loved one. And I at the time just didn't know how 85% of humanity had endured that.

But I guess in Hosea's case, God clearly does ask him to do that, which seems a bit strange and I don't know how God works sometimes, I don't know if he brings about things for us to learn lessons. I guess I would prefer to think that sometimes things just happen and he uses them as lessons, like he doesn't waste our heartbreak or our disappointments. But what I can say is that in hindsight, those big emotions and those heavy feelings have faded, and I'm still not thankful for that whole scenario. But I am thankful for the things that I've learned in that process. I am thankful for how it's shaped me into a better person. I'm thankful that I'm someone who can now be there for other people who are experiencing similar heartache or pain because they've seen me walk through it and they've seen me come out the other side.

 You wrote in your piece that there's a poem in Hosea 11, that paints a picture of God as a loving father who raised his son Israel and shared everything with him. However, the son grew up rebelled and turned against his father. It strikes me sort of, there's, parallels there with the Prodigal's son story. Now, the sort of son grew up and wished his father was dead, you know, took his inheritance and squandered it, and yet the sons reaction to him coming back.

But you said that in the poem, God is an emotional wreck. One moment he's filled with anger. The next he's heartbroken. He's overwhelmed with compassion and then forgiving. He cries. How can I ever give you up Israel? What do you learn about God from that passage in Hosea 11? What sort of the big takeaway picture of God and God's character, God's love from that picture that's painted on top of, you know, as a mirror to Hosea's story, like Hosea obviously felt in some senses, like he understood what God was going through, and maybe this passage or this poem is a reflection of Hosea's pain and him humanly relating to God. What do we learn about God from this passage?

Well, yeah, I think we don't often see God like this. I think most of the time, from my experience, we think of God as a very stoic, emotionless kind of 📍 figure. And I think in this poem in Hosea, we get this really human glimpse of him, where honestly, he seems like a bit of a wreck. Like, he's fluctuating between all these emotions that we see people experience when they're going through a heartbreak. Like, one second they're angry, then they miss them, then they're compassionate, then they want them erased from their mind.

And so I think while we wanna be careful of projecting rejection wounds onto God, rejection is a massive part of his story. And we see that in Hosea with his experience with Israel and his love for Israel, his compassion towards Israel.

But I think it's the same for us.   We all have very divided hearts like Gomer did. We all have lesser loves that we give more attention to than God. Like, even the most committed, dedicated followers of God are confusing, and have wayward 📍 affections,  and say one thing but act another way. And so I think we really see God in this passage, because He is so faithful, He is so loyal, He is so consistent, and He continues to chase after us even though we just fail Him time and time again.

 Yeah. And it brings to mind the verse in Isaiah 53, verse three, he was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and as one from whom men hide their faces. He was despised and we esteemed him not, and we've. I always taken that as a messianic prophecy. You know, this is talking about Jesus despised and rejected a man of sorrows. And I think Hosea the story as you've unpacked it, gives us that window into Jesus as well and his experience. You mentioned earlier like, oh, Jesus never had to experience this kind of relationship. Jesus, you know, had it differently on earth, but he did suffer a lot of things for us. Hmm. And that, I don't know if that's comforting. It's um, yeah, it's challenging. Um, and comforting in a sense.

Hmm, for sure. I know this is always brought out, the scene where Jesus is in the Garden of Gethsemane  and he's sweating blood. There's a medical term for it, like hemor-something. And it's basically when someone is so extremely stressed or overwhelmed that their vessels, like, 📍 rupture. You might wanna fact-check that, but that's the main picture I've had of God feeling something towards us. Aside from that, I don't think I'd ever really grasped, and probably still am grasping, that's probably a lifelong journey, but I don't think I'd ever really grasped how deeply he feels for us , until I read Hosea.

 Hosea's hurt, humanity's hope and God's heart. It's a cool title. And how you've taken that hopeful tangent at the end. What is the hope in the story of Hosea for us? What is humanity's hope as you see it, and how does Hosea help you uh, clinging to that hope.

I'd say our hope lies in the fact that He never gives up on us. Like, no matter what we do, He is the most secure and steady pursuer of all time. I think we kinda always compare our human relationships with God. But He's not like us where we carry these revenges if someone wrongs us, or who give our partners the silent treatment when they don't give us enough attention.

Um, I think when we look at Gomer, she obviously has a lot of shame and a lot of self-worth stuff going on, which explains why she's constantly running away. But the hope for us, I think, is that we don't have to work our way back to God so that He will love us.

He just loves us. He's there with wide-open arms waiting for us and hoping that we will come to Him. Um, and so yeah, the hope is that He adores us. He loves us. He's constantly chasing after us, and nothing, nothing will change that, no matter what we do.

 Hmm. And I guess for Goma, she perhaps is the villain of the story somewhat. But she represents us as you've alluded to, so, maybe we need to have more compassion on ourselves as well. Not that being unfaithful to God or to our spouse is ever  Okay.

Um. How do we see Hosea and by extension, God treating us in this story that should give us pause for thinking about Gomer differently because I feel like she gets a pretty bad rap. But maybe we don't understand the trauma she had as a child or the things that led her to that lifestyle, that, that path.

Mm.  Yeah. I think you have to be patient and understanding of people, which is hard to do when you don't know their stories. And a lot of the time when people are going through things, you don't know what they're going through. Like chances are if they haven't overcome it, they're probably not speaking about it. Like they don't have the vocabulary for 📍 that. And yeah, we have no idea what she went through, but based off her situation, she probably wasn't in a good place. She probably didn't have close family or community, she probably would've been looked upon as someone who was sinning doing the wrong thing, and all of that.

And so I think, you know, you have to be really patient with people on their journey and instead of disciplining them, show them the love of God, reflect that kind of like Hosea did, to be honest. And that might be a really slow process. You might not even see any fruit from that. But I think that's the best thing that you can do for other people.

And then also on yourself. Coming to understanding of things takes a long time. Healing of things takes a long time and chances are if you're in a lot of pain, you're not gonna be acting in the best way. Mm-hmm. Um, and so yeah I think the best thing is to do is be compassionate on yourself and others  and to let people in on that so that they can help you. I think if they understand where you're at and what's going on, they will be able to give you that compassion and that forgiveness more easily.

Final questions, Zanita. How do we live now? How do we go into our lives having read and wrestled with the story of Hosea and God's love for him? I already asked you about the hope that it can give us, but how should that change us? How should we live given that God is our pursuer, our lover, our relentless chaser?

He doesn't wanna let us go. He doesn't want to, let us stay in our sin. He wants us to bring us back into right relationship with him and pull us back from the brink all the time. How should that impact our day-to-day lives?

Yeah, good question. Something that I said in my article is that if you've been blessed enough to be loved well by someone, you know the comfort and security that that brings to life. Like, there's plenty of research that says that people who are in good, loving, healthy, safe relationships, they flourish more, they're more successful, they're more confident, they live longer, they're happier.

And on the flip side, if you've ever lost someone that you've loved, you know how discombobulating that is, that it can  shake your world and inflict havoc on your mind and body and just, pull the rug from under your feet. And so I think reminding yourself of who God is, reminding yourself of his character will kind of act as the same thing.

Like, if you know that you're loved by God , you will be happier, you will flourish more, you will be more confident and all of that. You'll live from that security, essentially. You'll be able to love people better from that. And I, I don't know, is it simple as reminding yourself of that?

I don't know. I think, to be honest, we need human love as well as divine love. But I think that's a really good place to start, is to just keep coming back to him and to keep looking at his character and his goodness and his love for you.

 Awesome. Hosea's hurt, humanity's hope and God's heart. You can check that out in our Living Covenant book. And we thank you Zanita for sharing the story behind the story today for writing this. You've put a lot of yourself and your heart into this as well, and we appreciate the insights and the lessons that we've been able to talk about today. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Jarrod.