Less Than Perfect—Broken Men & Women Of The BibleSample

Gomer

She stands outside in the cool, refreshing rain, allowing it to run in rivulets across her cheeks and down her lips. She is like the lily of the valley that spreads its fragrance across the fields or like the lush, abundant grapes that make men glad. Fertility and fruitfulness, celebration and wild abandon—these are the forces that rise and surge within her.

Young, beautiful, and bold, she is always smiling, flashing her big, dark eyes, attracting inevitable attention. God knows how easy it would be to entice her admirers into showering her with gifts of silver and gold. She is determined to squeeze every ounce of sweetness from life. 

Suddenly she notices a man hurrying toward her. It is not desire that propels him but pain. 

“Gomer,” he says, “come home!”

And so she does, but reluctantly. Her husband Hosea is a good man, but goodness can be tiresome. He talks only of God and of faithfulness to the covenant, dampening her high spirits and making her feel ashamed of her sins. But how can it be wrong to dream of having just a little pleasure in this life?

But Hosea insists on pointing out the twistedness in everything—the gap between rich and poor, all the deception and lies, the sleeping around, the killings, and the worship of countless idols. She finds it infuriating and embarrassing to be known as the wife of the prophet Hosea, and her eyes begin to cast about for someone she can truly love.

If Gomer would stop for just one moment and try to read her husband’s heart, she would discover that she has broken it more than once. Perhaps she already knows this. But she doesn’t know—not yet—how hard it was for Hosea to marry her when he did. She has no inkling that Yahweh, the God of his ancestors and hers, had instructed him, saying, “Go, marry a promiscuous wife and have children with her, like an adulterous wife this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the Lord.” Nor does she realize that her marriage has become a public parable—a story God is telling to his people.

This amazing story of a prophet who married a prostitute displays the deep, self-sacrificing love of a God who calls us back from all the places we have wandered so that we can finally come home to him.