Sabbath School Today
With the 1888 Message Dynamic
Family Seasons
Lesson 9: Times of Loss
There's a tragic story in the Bible, all too common. But the way it ends is much too uncommon. Can we take a moment to consider another's loss and not just our own?
A man falls in love with an attractive girl, and she returns his love. They live happily until a spiritual cancer begins to destroy her heart. She flirts with other men, even in the very presence of her husband. Before long, it becomes an affair, which turns into an obsession, and this light-hearted, frivolous woman actually becomes a Prostitute.
Then the plot deepens, and takes a turn almost as unknown in human experience. She is abandoned by her lovers (that however is normal) and ends up being sold into slavery. Her husband hears that she sits forlorn in the slave market, dressed in rags and re-claims her.
It's not because he has pity on her as a decent man would pity a wounded creature, but wonder of wonders, he still loves her. This disheveled wreck is only the empty shell of the beautiful girl he once fell in love with; there is now no beauty or charm to attract him. She is in fact repulsive; but his love has never died in spite of her infidelity and insults. He is a captive to a love that he cannot forget. He has remained single--for him, "Love is eternal."
When you truly love a woman who loves you and commits herself to you, and then she betrays you, your heart is broken. The sunshine goes out, and the darkness is a loss of bitterness almost like hell.
To lose a loved one in death is painful, but rejection in love is more cruel, like having a limb wrenched from your body. Friends can sympathize in physical or material pain, but rejection in love is intensely private. A thousand faces cannot replace the beloved's.
Can God feel such pain? And does He? Some answer God is impassible, impervious to the heart-pain we feel. If God cannot feel pain of loss, why should we be concerned with the suffering of others? Could the Seventh-day Adventist Church be dwelling in that twilight zone of the impassibility of Christ? We may rejoice that He "is touched with the feeling of our infirmities," but can webe touched with the feeling of His pain?
Like the Lover in our story, the heavenly Husband cannot forget the one He loves and replace her. He is held in a deathless thralldom of devotion.
God permitted the hapless Husband to suffer this crowning human pain because, He says, "this will illustrate the way My people have been untrue to Me." [1]
A church is a "woman," good or bad, a corporate body of believers. If the object of Christ's love plays false to Him, can He simply shrug His shoulders and replace her with another "object [of] ... His supreme regard"? [2] Hosea couldn't, and neither can Christ. Offshoots of the Seventh-day Adventist Church proliferate because of a failure to understand this divine mystery of love. They assume that Christ's outrage at her infidelity prompts Him to choose another to take her place. But this can never be!
It may be hard for us to picture a grieving husband who not only loves his faithless wife but, greater still, also has the wisdom to "save" her. Such was Hosea; and such is Christ. Not only a "husband" to her, He is also "the Saviour of the body." [3] The glad news is that Hosea actually redeemed Gomer to a new life of purity and fidelity, and we are entitled to see them walking off-stage hand in hand in a love that is fulfilled, secure at last in each other's fidelity. We can be sure that the Lord would not withhold from Hosea the vindication of his earthly love which was so prophetic of His at-last-vindicated divine love.
In her early days in the "wilderness," Israel was devoted to the Lord; and in the early days of the Seventh-day Adventist Church there was also a sweet devotion on "our" part to the Lord who had led "us" through the "wilderness" of the Great Disappointment of 1844 and in later years entrusted to "us" the proofs of His electing love. It was exciting. The healing of our Great Disappointment was delicious because fellowship with the Lord grew deeper in our understanding of the sanctuary message and "the blessed hope" it gave us. Then came His "Great Disappointment"--1888. We have yet to appreciate the pain He felt, and does feel. "The disappointment of Christ is beyond description." [4]
The prophecy implicit in Hosea has to be Good News for a remnant church that a century later is enmeshed in a vast worldwide lethargy, torn with dissension, suspicion, and offshoots. As surely as Gomer at last responded to Hosea's undying love, so surely will the corporate church respond at last to Christ's undying agape. Christ gave Himself in death for this church; His sacrifice cannot prove a failure; a repentant humanity cannot remain more faithless to Him than was the repentant heroine of the Book of Hosea to her earthly husband; God has faith in us that must not prove futile.
The reasons for hope are these: Seventh-day Adventist doctrine gives a new dimension to this crisis. We do not accept the pagan-papal doctrine of natural immortality. We believe the righteous do not go to heaven at death, but wait until the resurrection. But that cannot take place until Christ Himself returns in glory; and He cannot return until His people are ready, otherwise they would be "destroy[ed] with the brightness of His coming." [5] The anti-typical crisis foreshadowed in Hosea sets everything in suspense. The success of the entire plan of salvation must therefore depend upon its final hour--Laodicea's repentance. The alternative? Accept "Babylon's" false doctrine that sends all the "saved" to heaven at death.
Gomer's repentance foretells Laodicea's. Christ "shall see the travail of His soul and be satisfied." [6] "The church may appear as about to fall, but it does not fall. It remains, while the sinners in Zion will be sifted out--the chaff separated from the precious wheat. This is a terrible ordeal, but nevertheless it must take place." "They will look on Me whom they have pierced; they will mourn for Him." There will be a response from "the house of David, and ... the inhabitants of Jerusalem." [7] It's a sin for discouraged Adventists not to believe the Good News in Hosea!
Speaking through Hosea, the Lord assures faithless Israel of a happy reunion: "They will return to the Lord their God, and to the Messiah, their King, and they shall come trembling, submissive to the Lord and to his blessings, in the end times." [8] Since agape is a love that creates value in its object, not dependent on its good qualities, it will create repentance within the church where self-centered fear or hope of reward have failed. But a change of heart is possible, and in the light of Hosea, it is certain. A much more abounding grace must be seen in the light of the cleansing of the sanctuary. The good news is that the coming of Christ is contingent on that repentance. "Let us be glad and rejoice and give honor to Him; for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and His wife hath made herself ready." [9]
--Paul E. Penno
Endnotes:
[1] Hosea 1:2, The Living Bible.
[2] Cf. Ellen G. White, Testimonies to Ministers and Gospel Workers, p. 49.
[3] Ephesians 5:23.
[4] Ellen G. White, Review and Herald, Dec. 15, 1904.
[5] 2 Thessalonians 2:8; Hebrews 12:29.
[6] Isaiah 53:11.
[7] Ellen G. White, The Upward Look, p. 356; Zechariah 12:10-13:1.
[8] Hosea 3:5, The Living Bible.
[9] Revelation 19:7.
Notes:
Pastor Paul Penno's video of this lesson is on the Internet at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQqVwigcBeI
"Sabbath School Today" is on the Internet at: http://1888message.org/sst.htm
| RR |
