Now as a teacher in a secondary I school, I learned about teenagers.

Some things, I’m glad I know.

Somethings, I wish I could forget.
And one of those things, is about teenage relationships.
I learned that, really, there are only two kinds of teenage relationships.
There’s the kind of relationship where each person is so nervous or
awkward that they can’t actually talk to each other. Just sort of giggle
awkwardly.

And there’s the kind that will NOT GET OF EACHOTHER.

It’s like if they let go of each other’s hands their arms will drop off.
It’s like if they stop staring at each other their eye’s will stop working.
It’s like, if they stop making out in the playground their brains might
actually start working.

Now, I think it’s really easy to look at teenage love and role our eyes.
How many of us have read Romeo and Juliet and thought ‘oh my word
guys, just calm down. You’ve only known each other for three days’
But of course these early romances are all a bit star crossed,
Because young people are learning something which is vitally important
and incredibly difficult.
They are learning to set good boundaries.

All relationships are, really about boundaries.

They’re about what we can and should expect from someone,
And what we owe them in return.
In romantic relationships this can be about emotional support, physical
touch, and exclusivity.

But boundaries are important in all relationship.

As a teacher, my relationships with my students had very clear
boundaries.
I could listen to them while they spoke about their problems, but I
wouldn’t share my problems with them
I could give them feedback on their coursework, but I couldn’t do it for
them,
I could see them in class, but that one time I went to the pub with
colegues after work and found the pub full of our sixth form students, we
left.
We have similar boundaries in every relationship, don’t we.
They aren’t always spoken,
We don’t always set them in writing,
But they are there. And they define those relationships.
We set them with our partners, our families, our friends and our
colleagues.
Our families are allowed to call us at 1 in the morning if there’s an
emergency,
But our work colleagues aren’t
Our bosses can give us set instructions in ways we’d find inappropriate
coming from a friend.
If our colleagues don’t tell us they love us, it’s fine. But if our partner
never told us that, we’d feel hurt.
Dr Perpetua Neo, a clinical psychologist who specialises in toxic
relationships says ‘Boundaries are flexible, but they are not week. They
allow you to show up safely for yourself and others’
And this is a key point.
Boundaries are important because they allow us to show up safely for
ourselves and for others.

One of the scariest things about all relationships is our ability to get hurt
from them.
Relationships always require a certain level of vulnerability.
We’re not really in a relationship with someone unless we give them the
ability to hurt us in some way.
This could be a like a boss, who can hurt us financially,
But equally it can be like our parents, who can hurt us psychologically
Or our friends who can hurt us emotionally,
And so these boundaries are important for us for our safety.

Our God, longs to be in relationship with us.

If boundaries are crucial in our human relationships, how much more
important are they in our relationship with God?
But in his wisdom, he sets clear boundaries, not to limit us, but to protect
us, and allow our relationship with him to flourish.
He does this right from the beginning.
In the Garden of Eden, in Genesis, God and humans live together in
perfect harmony,
God is described as walking with humans in the evening breeze.
But there is still a clear boundary.
Genesis 2:16 says: And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free
to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will
certainly die.”
Martin Luther calls the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil ‘a boundary
marker’ in our relationship with God.
And, as we read later on in Genesis 3, humans transgress this boundary,
And it damages our relationship with God.
It damages our world
And it damages our very nature.
The boundary that God set was always meant for humans to flourish

In his wisdom, God has set clear boundaries.

These boundaries are not to limit us, but to protect us,
And to allow our relationship with him to flourish.
He sets out these boundaries and commitments in what we call a
covenant.

The 17th Century Theologian Herman Witsius defined covenants like this:
‘A covenant is a mutual agreement between God and man, whereby God
promises certain blessings and requires certain duties from man.”
A covenant then is a contract, between us and God that provides safe
boundaries for a relationship of mutual love between God and his people.

one of the best illustrations of this is the image of marriage presented in

Hosea.
God, talking of his people Israel says to Hosea:
I will lead her into the desert
and speak tenderly to her there.
15 I will return her vineyards to her
and transform the Valley of Trouble[a] into a gateway of hope.
She will give herself to me there,
as she did long ago when she was young,
when I freed her from her captivity in Egypt.

God is remind Hosea of the covenant he made with the people of Israel
many centuries earlier.
When, after rescuing them from slavery in Egypt, God gathered them at
the foot of Mount Siania
And gave them his law.
He set his clear boundaries,
And in effect, he was marrying them.
He Declared in Exodus 6:7: ‘I will take you as my own people, and I will be
your God.
God loved his people, and so, by giving them his laws, he was setting out
boundaries for a safe relationship with them.
These laws are not the arbitrary rulings of a crazed dictator, as so many
atheists want to make them out to be,
They form a covenant with God,
A contract, a set of boundaries that enable safe relationship between God
and humanity
They lay out the ways in people can show honour and worship to God in a
respectful way,
They lay out codes of ethics, rule for how people engage with other people
So that God’s people can be a living example of goodness to the world,
We spend so much time as a church worrying and debating about the
rules here that govern our sex lives, and I’m not saying that they aren’t an
important part of the law, all parts of the law are important, Jesus says
that not ‘one dot or squiggle’ of the law is unimportant
But at the heart of these laws,
At the heart of God’s divine boundaries is
A concern for the way we treat the poor, the oppressed and the lonely.

And importantly these boundaries are not simply about what we do as

individuals.
About 60-70% of the laws in the Torah are not about what the Israelites do
as individuals,
They are about what they do as a community collectively.
God’s covenant is communal
The very first of these laws is to love God above all.
But the law of the old testament, the old covenant, also teaches us to love
our neighbout

But we know, through the books of Kings and Chronicles how unfaithful
the people of Israel were.
23 times in the books of 1 and 2 Kings we read of Isreal ‘doing evil in the
sight of the lord’
Their kings worshiped other Gods
People murdered and killed innocent people
The poor were oppressed
And the worship of God in the temple was desecrated.

God sent prophet after prophet,

Not just to instruct Israel to obey the law, but to declare his love for her
To beg her to come back to him.

One such prophet, as Paul introduced us to last week, was the Prophet
Hoese.
This is a book of prophetic action – live a life that demonstrates God’s
covenant faithfulness.
God told Hosea to marry an ‘adulterous woman’
A euphemism that almost definitely means sex worker.
This was to illustrate the marriage of a faithful God to an unfaithful Isreal.
This image is beautiful and tragic.
Through it we see God’s deep love and desire for humanity,
But we also see how it broke God’s heart.
Speaking of Israel to the Prophet Jeremiah God says calls them ‘the child
in whom I delight? Though I often speak against him, I still remember him.
Therefore my heart yearns for him; I have great compassion for him,”
declares the Lord.
God is yearning for Isreal to be faithful,
Because he loves them, and has deep compassion for them.

Despite being totally loved by Hosea, and even having children with him,
Gomer betrayed him again and again.
Because of her adultery Hosea stopped showing love to Gomer.
This is a symbol of God sending Israel into exile. Perhaps, if it had been up
to Hosea, he would have stayed divorced.
But God told him that he must again take Gomer as his wife, paying a
dowry for her: “The LORD said to me, ‘Go, show your love to your wife
again, though she is loved by another and is an adulteress. Love her as
the LORD loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods …’” (Hos.
3:1).
So Hosea paid 15 pieces of silver for Gomer again.
This was to show that despite the betrayal of Israel and the depths of
God’s hurt he could not simply divorce her (send her into exile) and be
done with it.
He was too in love.
He said, “I will show my love to the one I called ‘Not my loved one.’ I will
say to those called ‘Not my people,’ ‘You are my people’; and they will
say, ‘You are my God’” (Hos. 2:23).
God declared through Hosea his determination to bring Israel back to the
heart of covenant, to the place where they recognized him alone as their
God and themselves as his people.

15 pieces of silver is an interesting price, isn’t it.

It’s very specific
I always love looking at Biblical numbers,
And I want to suggest a theory here.
15 pieces of silver is half of what a slave is said to have been worth in the
Book of Exodus.
This is half the price of redeeming someone from slavery.
Perhaps, in this living metaphor,
God is pointing out that Hosea’s act of redeeming Gomer is only half
complete,
And that the covenant still has further to go.

Much later in the history of Israel, a man called Jesus was sold out to the
romans,
And does anyone remember how much he was sold for?
And the night that he was betrayed Jesus had a mean with his disciples,
and after the supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new
covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.’”
Jesus was setting up a new covenant for us,
Israel continued to fail to uphold their side of the covenant
Just as you and I fail to live up to the demands of loving God and loving
our neighbour,
But through the cross,
By dying in our place,
Jesus has taken on all the consequences of breaking the covenant.
Just as God temporarily had to forsake Israel, and Hosea temporarily had
to forsake Gomer,
Jesus cried from the cross ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me’
The son of God,
The word who was with God and was God in the beginning,
Was forsaken by God on a Roman torture device.
This infinite exile, this infinite abandonment fell on Jesus,
So that it will not have to fall on us.
But as the author of Hebrews reminds us:
Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may
receive the promised eternal inheritance—now that he has died as a
ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first
covenant.’

But let’s be clear, this does not mean that we can just abandon all rules,
Jesus took the consequence for our sin on himself,
But he didn’t do this to do away with covenants
Covenants are not bad
They are wonderful,
They are good,
We said earlier that all relationships are defined by the boundaries we set.
And covenants are the boundaries God sets for our relationship with him.
Jesus is not expelling us from one covenant.
He’s inviting us into a new one .

we are to obey God, but our reason for obeying is not to earn anything
(it’s already all ours!
It’s as a response to his love and as an expression of our love for him.
Jesus said, “If you love me, you will obey what I command” (John 14:15).
If the foundations of a house are right, that house will stay up.
This amazing truth is the foundation for everything else.
The reason we can have such security is that God’s love does not depend
on us—it depends on him.