To fully understand and appreciate Hosea you have to read very carefully. Tucked in between all the explicit consequences of sin and rebellion are tender and broken hearted expressions of love and devotion. God is tender-hearted toward Israel (and by implication, us) and broken hearted over our unfaithfulness and rejection of his love.
6:6 reveals what God desires and it comes from the heart. All the religious ritual (sacrifices and burnt offerings) in the world is not what pleases him. Mercy and acknowledgement of God is what he wants–a relationship with us.
6:11 and 7:1 again reveal God’s tender heart. The “prosituting” of his people–their running away after other gods/lovers–God responds to with judgment, yes. But he also reveals his desire is to “heal” the, and “restore their fortunes.” Like a devoted lover, God wants to give his people good gifts. But they reject his gestures of love.
7:13 God says he LONGS to redeem his people. 15 it is God who “trained and strengthened” them but they use it to plot against him!
Over and over again in this amazing prophetic story, God reveals himself as the spurned lover/husband. No matter how unfaithful the wife, God continues to pursue and woo his “bride.” Philip Yancey calls God the “jilted lover” of the story. However, God is relentless in his love and never gives up. He continues to “speak tenderly” to Israel and to us.
The life of Hosea, a husband spurned and humiliated by a unfaithful wife, who goes again to find her an bring her home is the story of God’s love for his people. Who would have ever thought that God would cast himself in such a “role” in the sacred writings? But that is exactly what he has done in the book of Hosea. We belong to God by creation. But we have turned away and rejected his love. In Christ he has demonstrated his love through pain and humiliation in order to “buy us back” as his own bride. Now THAT is love!