“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.”

1 Peter 2:24

As the skin flakes off around the incision point where the look of my stitches linger, I am reminded of watching and attempting to help my hubby when his ankle was healing. Thankfully my mending is milder, simpler. A precise incision in a thin, straight line was neatly laced back up. The side of his ankle split wide under the force of external pressure instead of a surgeon’s scalpel. The resulting wound gaped like none I have ever seen. Apparently it was none like the ER nurse had ever seen as his eyes boggled while he whispered across the bed to ask us if he could take a picture.

After two surgeries, infection spread and negated any progress in his once gaping injury. A wound care specialist dug out the offending flesh and we learned about using cow intestine to bridge the gap so that skin could grow again to close the aching opening. 

There had to be some other flesh inserted to allow for the healing process. The split was too wide to heal on its own. 

Now when my own hurt cries out for attention, I thank God that it is not requiring that kind of backtracking and re-working. I keep bending and stretching and finding ways to bear up while the healing progresses.

Some days there is just deep ache and others shooting sharp pain, but there is comfort knowing this is just part of this process. The flesh that was cut is being knitted back together. Nerves are once again transmitting the agitation to my brain. Swelling is slowly subsiding as (hopefully) improved function begins to return.

After the pastor talked this weekend about God’s call to Hosea, I began to wonder about the deep ache he must have felt to live up to it. Married to a prostitute, his heartache must have been more of the split wide variety—burst open under the external pressure. 

God told Hosea to marry a woman who would give herself to other men. She had gone away from the home they made and now God was asking him to go and buy her back again—reclaim what the world saw as damaged goods.

The humiliation must have been tremendous, his heart exposed in every way. It was the kind of hurt that had to have throbbed and pulsated as the wound had not even fully closed from the first bursting open. He was trying to let it knit and she had severed the one flesh, leaving the opening in need of divine healing. 

God wanted Hosea to graft her back in.

In chapter 3, God tells Hosea to go again and love Gomer, his adulterous wife. Hosea has to do his own kind of wound reopening. In so doing, he learns for himself what sacrificial love is. He demonstrates for those around him what love is—an action, a choice, not dependent on the feelings and the hurt. An undeserving, adulterous wife who in no way is searching for redemption and restoration was offered it nonetheless. He sacrificed his own heartache for her.

God’s redemptive message was directed at the nation of Israel who had more than blatantly turned away. While they were actively lusting after other gods, abandoning their faith, He continued to pursue and woo the undeserving, unfaithful people. In chapter 11, the cry of a loving Father beckoned to his children. It sounds like the same throbbing ache for healing:

“When Israel was a child, I loved him,
    and out of Egypt I called my son.

The more they were called,
    the more they went away;
they kept sacrificing to the Baals
    and burning offerings to idols.

Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk;
    I took them up by their arms,
    but they did not know that I healed them.

I led them with cords of kindness,
    with the bands of love,
and I became to them as one who eases the yoke on their jaws,
    and I bent down to them and fed them.”

Like the children of Israel then, like Gomer in her marriage, we are the walking wounded, even now. We are choosing our own way, thinking the choices we make can heal the ache and numb the pain. 

The wounds that arise from following our idols are much too significant to heal on their own. This isn’t a precise line with neat stitches—this is a wide chasm that requires other flesh in its place to graft us in. He bore our sins in his body and we can only hold fast. His wounds became our healing salve and this was the only way to alleviate the pain of separation.

God has sacrificed his own heart to win ours back, to track us down, to buy us back and make us whole again.