I recently talked with a theologically-minded guy who visited our church and didn’t like the phrase we sing, “You didn’t want heaven without us,” in the song “What a Beautiful Name It Is.” He said it diminishes God’s glory by making him sound needy, as if he were somehow deficient without us.
His concern is understandable. But when I look at the story of Hosea and God’s response to the rebellious nation of Israel, I’m reminded how scandalous God’s love is.
Scandalous because God’s love is meant to mirror the love Hosea shows for Gomer, the adulterous prostitute God had told Hosea to marry. Anyone in Hosea’s situation would have felt perfectly justified in walking away. But even after Gomer spurned Hosea’s love over and over again, Hosea kept coming back to declare his love and attempt to restore his marriage.
What Hosea did for Gomer, by the way, was not required by Hebrew law. In Leviticus 20, God had said that a man whose wife cheated on him could divorce her—even have her stoned for her unfaithfulness!
But Hosea wasn’t looking for a loophole, and he remained obedient to God. His love drove him beyond the legal requirements of the law. He could very easily have walked away—and been in the right. His steadfast love was not merely faithful, but shocking, scandalous.
Hosea, you see, certainly didn’t need Gomer. He didn’t need the difficulties and pain that her adultery would cost him. And yet he kept going back for her. At God’s command, he didn’t want his life without her.
Then God says something remarkable: That’s the way I feel toward you.
I never want to depict God as needy, deficient, or lacking. But if the picture of his love in Hosea doesn’t stop us in our tracks, we aren’t reading it right. Look, for instance, at Hosea 11:8, which may be the most remarkable verse in the Old Testament: “Oh, how can I give you up, Israel? How can I let you go? My heart is torn within me!” (NLT)
The God for whom our planet is a speck of dust couldn’t let us go! Say what you will about God’s glory. But never detach that glory from the depth of emotion that God displays toward his people.
According to Hosea 11:8, God has bound up his happiness in ours. That’s how you feel when you love someone. Your happiness is bound up in his or her happiness.
I told my wife after we had our fourth child that I didn’t think I would ever be happy again. I had learned by that point that as a parent, I can only be as happy as my least happy child. And with four kids, for the rest of our lives, one of them is going to be unhappy about something. I am pretty much doomed to be unhappy until the day that I die. My heart is so bound up in theirs that I can’t be happy until they are happy.
That is how God feels about us. Theologian J.I. Packer said, “By his own free voluntary choice, God will not know perfect and unmixed happiness again till he has brought every one of his children to heaven.”
I’ve heard it compared to adoption: When a family adopts, it’s not that they were unhappy before they adopted the child (at least I hope not). But from the moment they make the choice to adopt, they bind their happiness to the happiness of their child.
So yes, God doesn’t need us. God was happy before he made us. And he would have been justified had he destroyed us after we sinned.
But God made a choice to wrap up his emotions in our pain so much that he could not be happy until we were happy.
That kind of love always comes at a great cost. For Hosea, that cost was financial and emotional. For Jesus, however, who took the consequences of our sin into himself, the cost was eternally greater. On the cross, he held the gates of heaven open for us for as long as it took for us to receive it. The cat of nine tails ripped the flesh from his body; the nine-inch nails went into his hands and his feet, the crown of thorns tore his face. This is what he went through—because he didn’t want heaven without us.
