Love Hurts

"Come, let us return to the LORD. For He has torn us, but He will heal us; He has wounded us, but He will bandage us. He will revive us after two days; He will raise us up on the third day, that we may live before Him." (Hosea 6:1,2)

The book of Hosea is both a very depressing and an immensely uplifting book. It shows God's boundless love towards His people like that of a husband who keeps taking his unfaithful wife back again and again. But His love is only as deep as our rejection of it is remiss. We flippantly ignore His loving words and sacrifices He has made for us. We leave at night only to return in the morning sick and exhausted. We take it for granted that He will be there waiting for us and will drop everything to clean us up, undress us and put us to bed. And so His love deepens with every such return. However, God's love has another mind-boggling expression, one that we often do not want to associate with love. It is precisely because He loves us that He is willing to hurt us. He will inflict pain on us (and on Himself in the process) to heal us, to make us whole, so that we may stay in His presence and not just occasionally return to Him. It is as much if not more of an expression of God's love as His continuous forgiveness and patience. He loves us enough that He is willing to hurt us. A.W. Tozer made a profound, albeit a very disturbing, statement: "It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply”. It is paradoxical but so is God and most of our faith.