Failure and Faith: Hosea 11:1-9 - 24th Sunday after Pentecost

Can God make mistakes? Can God fail?

Four thousand years ago, God promised to make a great nation of Abraham and Sarah, whose descendants would be more numerous than the stars in the sky. This nation was to be a light to all the nations of the world. God’s plan was to reconcile all the world through Israel, his chosen people. 

When they were enslaved in Egypt, God acted with a mighty hand to free them. For forty years, God sustained them in the wilderness. God gave them land he had promised them, and under King David, they were the most powerful nation on earth. But it was not to last. 

David’s grandson was so corrupt that the nation split apart. Under the leadership of corrupt and incompetent kings, God’s people turned to other gods. They discarded God’s Law and became corrupt and violent. Injustice so poisoned their society that neither kingdom could hold itself together against the evil empires pressing in on their borders. 

Click here to read the Scripture text.

Three hundred years after the triumphs of King David, the Northern Kingdom fell. The Southern Kingdom would fall one hundred thirty years later. 

What else is there to say, then, but that God’s grand plan ended in failure?

Photo by David Brooke Martin on Unsplash

The words of the Northern Kingdom prophet Hosea capture God’s absolute agony, that the child God had loved and raised up had turned from him. “The more I called them, the more they went from me,” God cries. Even when they were in distress, they still refused to return to their God. So, there was nothing more God could do for them. God gave them over to the Assyrians, who destroyed their towns and cities, confiscated their land, and took them into exile.

What else is there to conclude, then, except that God had failed?

But how do you define failure?

I don’t know about you, but I instantly think of all the tests I’ve taken in school, and elsewhere, that I’ve failed, either because I was unprepared, I made mistakes, or I did not understand what I needed to learn. Regardless, the responsibility for that failure fell on my shoulders, and not the teachers. (Those were the days).

Sometimes, failure happens for reasons totally beyond your control. Can you imagine having tried to open a restaurant at the start of the pandemic? How many times have we worked hard to plan a worship service or a ministry or an event, only for very few people to show up? And we are so quick to blame ourselves for that failure, especially when we see other people doing the very same things and being quite successful!

But if there’s one thing you can say about God, it is this: God is not a quitter. Yes, God is anguished that his chosen people have turned away and are now suffering the inevitable consequences of their sins. Yet God’s compassion stretches beyond what any human parent would have for their own children. 

As far as God is concerned, failure is not an option. God never stopped loving, teaching, defending, and rescuing his chosen people, even when they failed to do what was right. Even when God put on human flesh in Jesus Christ and we rejected and murdered him, God did not quit. The only way for God to fail is for God to stop existing. That’s not going to happen. 

Furthermore, our failures do not get in God’s way. If anything, God uses our failures to act in our lives. Failure gets us out of God’s way so that we can learn to follow God’s way. 

Failure is that teacher you had in school who was mercilessly challenging, and yet, you learned more from them than you ever could have had they been easy. Struggle and failure are a necessary part of the journey towards learning and growth.

When you fail, God is speaking. God may be telling you that the way you’ve been doing things isn’t working, and you need to try something else. You need to change. 

Failure is what tests your convictions, because if you believe in something or desire something enough, failure will make you work harder. That’s how you get stronger. 

Failure is what keeps you humble. It reminds you that God is God, and you are not. It not only keeps you dependent on God, it keeps you dependent on others. Nobody has ever changed the world all by themselves.

Make no mistake: sin is failure of the worst kind. Where there is sin, there are consequences. When you sin, other people suffer. When you trample on other people to get what you want, you diminish yourself in the process. God punishes your sin so that you do not persist in it. God’s punishment serves to teach you that righteousness is the better way.

But there is another kind of failure that’s also sin: doing nothing. It’s being so afraid of failure that you don’t even try. Let’s be honest: if you’re not going out of your comfort zone, taking risks, making mistakes, being rejected by others, challenging the status quo, and sometimes seeing your best efforts fail, you must ask: are you really following Jesus?

Too many Christians and too many congregations are living as though God has failed. But God never gives up. Even when we nailed God to the cross, God didn’t give up. And God certainly didn’t fail. God’s will shall be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

In Christ, we are forgiven of our sins and given grace to walk in newness of life. Failure is never forever. When ministry of Jesus’s love in word and deed fails to deliver what we had hoped, we don’t give up. We turn back to Jesus to make that failure a blessing. For nothing that we say or do in Christ’s name will ever be in vain. It is God, not us, who wins the victory. God does not quit. God never fails.