The book of Hosea is my favorite book of the Bible. Apart from Christ and the Church, the story of Hosea and Gomer is truly the greatest love story ever told. I was thinking about the story during lunch today and I couldn’t help but cry. I am so glad that God knew we wouldn’t be able to comprehend how amazing His love is for us and put this beautiful story in the Bible to show us a glimpse of what He has done for us.
Hopefully one day I will write a blog post on just how much the story means to me and how it brought life to me in dark days, but for today I wanted to share something someone else wrote.
Francine Rivers wrote a book entitled Redeeming Love that is her depiction of the story of Hosea and is really a phenomenal read. Recently a friend shared with me a book review that an acquaintance had written about Redeeming Love. I’d like to share this review because it not only is so well written, I also could not agree more with every point made! I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did. J
The Most Important Book You’ll Ever Read (outside of the Bible).
Redeeming Love, by Francine Rivers
Before I write my review for this book, I need to establish something first. I have, truth be told, never been particularly enamored with Contemporary Christian literature. I find the majority of it to be trite, emotionally manipulative, boring, and poorly written. I don’t say this in an “I’m too cool to like what everyone else likes” sort of way; after all, I’ve confessed to enjoying the Twilight series, The Hunger Games trilogy, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, all of which are extremely mainstream and kind of silly. However, these books were written for the express purpose of entertaining the audience, and in that regard, they were all extremely successful.
Deep calls to deep, however, and when writing stories based on the greatest subject matter -namely God and how His creation fits into His redemptive history- I believe we have an obligation to respond to the task at hand with all the creativity our Creator has endowed us. Sadly, we have traded inspiration for banality, imagination for the mundane, and worst of all, unpleasantness for safety.
One of the reasons I love the Bible, secondary to the fact that it reveals the nature and the character of God, is how unflinching it is in its storytelling. Since the bible is anything but safe, why should today’s Christian writing shy away from the brutality of the human condition?
Thankfully, this story does not have these problems.
Let me say then, before I explain why I think this book is so important, two problems I did have with it. First, the cover is horrendous. It looks like a Christian romance novel set in the old days, and as such, no man will ever go near it. This is extremely unfortunate, as this is just as important a read for men as it is for women, perhaps more, because it does such a tremendous job of giving insight into a woman’s heart, particularly one who has been through abuse.
Second, and this is minor, the title is somewhat misleading. Redeeming Love sounds very much like love is the object being redeemed (again, making it sound like a cheesy romance novel dressed up in Christian clothing), rather than the agent through which redemption is accomplished. I understand that Redemptive Love may have been a harder sell as a title, so I don’t particularly fault the author or the publisher for this, but it would have been a far more accurate one.
That said, let’s talk about the story itself.
Sarah is a child born out of wedlock, to a father who doesn’t want her and a mother who chooses sorrow over love for her daughter. Through a series of unfortunate events, Sarah is eventually sold into sexual slavery as a little girl, and grows up to become a prostitute.
As a beautiful but hardened young woman -now named Angel- she catches the eye of Michael Hosea (the name is not an accident), a Christian farmer who is told by God to marry her, though she doesn’t seem to be too interested in this prophetic word from a God in whom she doesn’t believe. Throughout the book, Michael endures as he tries to convince this broken, hopeless, jaded woman of his love for her.
Those who are familiar with the prophetic book of Hosea in the Old Testament will recognize some familiar plotlines and themes in the story, but bible knowledge is not at all imperative to understanding or enjoying this book.
First and foremost, this is a well-written, compelling story. It never slows down, the character development is, at least for the main characters, extensive and unflinching, and the writing is descriptive without ever being extraneous. Rivers is an author who understands the need to move a plot along, while at the same time creating characters that matter to us. I found myself many times throughout the story wanting to yell at a character, becoming physically uncomfortable during tense moments, and hating the bad guys while cheering for the good guys. When people suffered, I suffered. When they rejoiced, I rejoiced.
To her credit, Rivers was uncompromising in her description of the abuse Angel suffered, though never gratuitously graphic. Instead, we were witness to the devastation those actions had on the mind and the heart of this young woman, allowing the weight of what was perpetrated onto her to be far more heavy and impactful than any depiction of the actual act could have been.
Most of all, this book works because I cared about these people like they were actually in my life. I am rarely given to emotional manipulation, and yet I cried almost the entire way through the book (which, as you can imagine, was a rather interesting sight to those seated around me on the airplane, which is where I read most of it).
This is, in essence, a story on three levels. At the surface, this is about a character named Angel, and the man who comes into her life, Michael. At a deeper level, this is about every woman’s desire to be loved; to have a daddy who adores her and finds her pretty, to trust that there are those in her life who will guard and protect her heart, be seen as something more than simply an object of desire for men, to have a sense of hope and purpose for this life, and to be fully known. This is also about what happens to a woman when that desire becomes highjacked, when a daddy’s love is replaced by abandonment, when trust is betrayed, when hope becomes dangerous because the weight of it threatens to crush her heart, and when a girl’s identity gets so twisted that she believes she is nothing more than a plaything for men.
At the deepest level, this is our story. All of us. We are Angel, broken, full of despair, without hope in the world. We all need a Savior, someone who will deliver us from bondage to slavery, someone who will know us fully and completely, someone won’t reject us. We all need a love that redeems us.
This is a story that needs to be read by every man to remind us of the consequence that comes when we see women as objects rather than souls. Nothing I have ever read has given me such a deep, complex, and complete insight into the condition of a woman who has been abused sexually. This will, I hope and pray, give every man who has ever viewed pornography, ever visited a strip club, ever manipulated a girl into sexual compromise a sense of the weight of their actions.
This is a story that needs to be read by every woman who thinks that her worth is defined by how men respond to her, who believes that all she has to offer is her sexuality, who has placed her value on a scale weighed against society’s version of what she should be and found herself lacking.
Most of all, this is a story that needs to be read by all of us who believe that our inherent self-worth is based on the love shown to us by another person. That love will always fail us, because that love is imperfect and incomplete. What Angel is shown is that it is only the love of the Savior who redeemed her, Jesus Christ, that can fully give her freedom from her bondage to slavery.
May we all know this love.
