Redeeming Love in Today’s America
Francine River’s Redeeming Love, first a novel and recently adapted into a film, captivated its audience with a powerful portrayal of unconditional love and redemption. The story follows a young woman living in prostitution, Angel, and God’s love for her as He makes a way for her to leave that life behind and discover her true worth.
Though Redeeming Love is based on the biblical account of Hosea and Gomer and is set during the California Gold Rush of 1850, Angel’s situation is not unlike what is still happening to hundreds of thousands of sex trafficking victims in America today. Her story of healing and restoration is an excellent representation of God’s heart to redeem, no matter how horrific one’s past is.
Angel’s story begins with the devastating reality of child sex trafficking; having been sold into prostitution and trafficked since childhood, she suffered through unspeakable horrors as she grew up. Her story picks up years later in California gold country where she’s known as the town’s most sought-after prostitute. Staring lifelessly out of the brothel window, she waits for the next nameless man to come through her door for her services. As she is sold day after day to man after man, Angel believes that nothing will ever change. She believes her life will never get better and that all she is worth is the gold dust people purchase her for.
When the story’s other protagonist, Michael Hosea, sees Angel for the first time, he immediately knows the truth - that her worth far outweighs any price a man could ever set. Michael feels called by God to marry Angel, bringing her out of prostitution and giving her a new life.
Never having known what it means to be truly loved, Angel struggles to accept her new reality, believing all she is good for is the life she left behind. And so begins the journey of Angel’s healing as Michael speaks the Lord’s truth over her identity and loves her with the unshakeable love of Christ, no matter how many times she runs away and comes back. Little by little, the lies she believed from her past are torn down, and she realizes her old life is no longer the life she wants.
When Angel grows to love Michael in return, she leaves for a final time, this time because of the belief that he deserves more than what her previous wounds allow her to offer. Michael resists going after her, knowing that the choice to come back has to be her decision to make.
Angel is soon forced back into the life by the man who trafficked her from the beginning, but this time, she knows the truth. There is more out there for her, and she is worth more than she previously believed. Angel has learned to stand her ground and speak out against her abusers, illuminating the true darkness of trafficking and finally escaping it once and for all.
As she continues to heal, Angel begins to hear and recognize the Lord’s voice for herself, truly understanding how loved she is by Him and that her identity and worth come from Him alone. She realizes Michael had allowed Christ to use him to teach her that only Christ can fill the emptiness and heal the wounds that had existed within her for so long.
Empowered to show this same truth to others, Angel starts a ministry reaching girls coming out of the same horrific situations she was in. Through His redeeming love, the Lord used her pain to turn it into her purpose, and He gave her a new life with a sense of dignity she never knew she could have. When the time came, Angel was finally able to make the choice to return out of love to the man who first showed her what true Love and new Life could be.
Redeeming Love shows us that God’s heart for the prostitutes, the sexually exploited, and sex trafficked was the same then as it is now - to redeem. He longs to draw them back to Him, out of the lies and into the truth, to the one who says they are priceless.
While Angel’s story brought attention to the issue of sex trafficking in the eighteen hundreds, and though her story is one of fiction, what happened to her is happening in today’s America to thousands of women, men, and children every day. Although it looks different and prostitution is now illegal in our country, the demand for commercial sex has not disappeared, and traffickers are well aware of this. Victims across the nation continue to be abused day in and day out through various forms of sex trafficking such as escort services, pornography, illicit massage parlors, residential-based commercial sex, and more.
However, just as was portrayed in Redeeming Love, we believe the Lord has a redemptive solution for every victim of sexual exploitation who desires to exit the life.
Rescue America exists to rescue, revive and empower the sexually exploited, and we see our mission reflected in Angel’s healing journey. Angel was rescued out of the life of sexual exploitation, revived from feeling lifeless to full of new life, and empowered to make her own decisions and use what happened to her to help others in their own healing.
We have seen many aspects of Angel’s story in the testimonies of the survivors we’ve served at Rescue America - the belief that nothing will get better, leaving the life but returning because of the lie that they aren’t good for anything else, and then because of the seeds planted, leaving the life for good as they learn to hear the Lord’s voice for themselves and find new freedom in Him.
Just as Angel realized her past doesn’t define her, that is our desire for every survivor who calls our Rescue hotline. We are honored to take survivors’ hands as they take the first steps in their own healing journeys and walk out their redemptive solutions. As we speak hope into their situations and help them on their paths to new life, we pray that they will open their hearts to God’s truth of who they are and the good plans he has for their future.
We’ve found that when a survivor learns to hear the voice of God, nothing is ever the same for them because they know they are made for more. Our prayer is that the survivors we serve continue learning to hear His voice, experience His life-changing, empowering presence, and that they realize through Jesus’s death on the cross and faith in Him, we are all made new.
*Disclaimer - this article is not intended to be an endorsement of the movie Redeeming Love. Please be advised if you choose to view this film it is not suitable for children and contains partial nudity, mature thematic content, sexual content, and violent content. Viewer discretion advised.
