When Christians pray, their prayers often start “Dear God,” or “Dear Father,” or “Dear Lord,” and some of them continually repeat the same title throughout the prayer, much to the mistimed amusement of those listening. However, nobody starts a prayer “Dear Lover.”
That is, with the exception the minor prophet Hosea.
In the book of Hosea, God is a passionate lover of the nation of Israel, who doesn’t quite return the same level of steadfast love. In fact, Israel is compared to a whore and a prostitute, abandoning their divine Lover for idols. God’s love is expressed towards them as both the caring father figure who taught them to walk and brought them up, and as a romantic lover pained at his wife’s unfaithfulness.
In Hosea, Israel’s rejection breaks his heart, and he allows her to be punished and mocked, sent into the wasteland. However, that does not stay the case forever. The Lord says this in Hosea 2:14-15:
“Therefore, behold, I will allure her,
and bring her into the wilderness,
and speak tenderly to her.
And there I will give her her vineyards
And make the Valley of Achor a door of hope
And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth
As at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.”
Thinking about God as our lover is a relatively foreign concept today, though all the remnants of it haven’t yet passed out of our Christian lingo. For example, in the New Testament we have the beautiful idea of a Wedding Feast, which is the way in which Christ will welcome his bride, the Church, into the Kingdom of God. God as the Lover of Israel has grown to the Lover of the Church- however, we still see that his love is consistently directed towards his chosen people.
In the song “Jesus, Lover of my Soul,” Charles Wesley writes this: “Jesus, lover of my soul, / let me to thy bosom fly.” Today, as Christians, we can still partake in the intimacy expressed in the idea of our Lord as lover. While this doesn’t mean “Jesus is my boyfriend,” it does mean that we should pursue Christ relentlessly, being in love with him. Let us be like Mary, the sister of Martha, who sat at the feet of Jesus, putting aside everything else to simply listen to him.
