Hosea 2

Chap. 2. In this chapter the Lord exposes and rebukes the sins of His people, and threatens retribution (verses 2-13); then turns to promises of effective discipline and of restoring mercy (verses 14-23). Throughout this chapter the adulterous mother, Israel, is spoken of in the third person, and the Lord declares what He will do to her in judgment and for her in mercy. Remarkably, and as if to give a more impressive sense of her horrible guilt, her children are introduced—are apprised of the unnatural crime of their mother, and are exhorted to plead with her to put away her sins. It is manifestly the purpose of God, in this message by Hosea, to paint a life scene of the crimes of His covenant people in their relations to Himself.

1. Say to your brethren, Ammi; to your sisters, Ruhamah. Drop the negative particle from the names, Lo-Ammi, Lo-Ruhamah; sound the sweet words, “My people;” “the pitied and beloved”—as if to suggest that the heart of the Lord still yearns to make them again His own, and to give the freest flow to His great and deep compassion. H. C.

8. It was a grievous charge which God here preferred against the Israelites, that His corn and wine and oil, and silver and gold, which He had given them, they employed in the service of Baal, an abominable idol. If, when God giveth us wit, wealth, power, authority, health, strength, liberty, or any other good things, instead of using these things to His glory and the relief of His servants, we abuse them to the service of those idols which we have set up in our hearts, to our pride, our covetousness, or our sensuality, we are as liable to the charge as the Israelites were; as unjust, as profane, as unthankful in every respect as they. Bp. Sanderson.

8,9. God cannot allow Himself to be put out of His own world. If men will take His gifts and not thank Him for them; if they will forget His hand, and seize as their own the things which He daily “gives them richly to enjoy,” He must remind them of Himself—must, for their sake—by taking away; by “recovering” (as He here calls it)—that is, taking back from the thankless that which the thankful will value. C. J. Vaughan.

14. This verse is, for the chapter, the transition point between rebuke and threatened retribution for the sins of idol worship on the one hand, and promises of effective discipline and of restoring mercy on the other. “Behold,” calls special attention to the great things God now proposes to do. “Therefore” reminds us to ask why? The reasons, viewed fundamentally, lie deeper than the sins of Israel, even in God’s covenant love and faithfulness. He cannot bear that His own Israel should sink hopelessly under her sins into ruin. Therefore His pity moves Him to discipline and to mercy. “Will allure her”—in a good sense; persuade her, draw her by the sweet attractions of love. H. C.

God’s thoughts and ways of mercy are infinitely above ours; His reasons are all fetched from within Himself, and not from anything in us; nay, His goodness takes occasion from man’s badness to appear so much the more illustrious. Therefore, because she will not be restrained by the denunciations of wrath, God will try whether she will be wrought upon by the offers of mercy. Those whom God has mercy in store for He first brings into a wilderness, into solitude and retirement, that they may the more freely converse with Him out of the noise of this world; into distress of mind, through sense of guilt and dread of wrath, which brings a soul to be quite at a loss in itself and bewildered, and by those convictions He prepares for consolations; and sometimes into outward distress and trouble, by that to open the ear to discipline. He will then allure them, and speak comfortably to them; will persuade them, and speak to their hearts; He will by His word and spirit incline their hearts to return to Him, and encourage them to do so. He will allure them with the promises of His favor, as before He had terrified them with the threatenings of His wrath; will speak friendly to them both by His prophets and by His providences. H.

That they might be cast on Him alone, and not become immediately re-entangled in the world’s affairs, Israel is not led directly from Egypt to Canaan, but by long journeys through the wilderness, where the life of nature and history stands still, and the people are alone with their God. Since the wilderness is without nourishment, and without so much as a path, the simplest sign of human culture, He undertakes to feed them with manna; He undertakes their guidance in the pillar of cloud and fire, that herein too the people may be directly pointed to Him, and accustomed to the thought of Him. Auberlen.—It is this meaning of the wilderness-wandering of Israel as a process of education which makes it so important, not simply historically, but also religiously; and this is the point of view under which the Old Testament itself—the Pentateuch, and especially Deuteronomy, from which a few chief passages have been brought forward in the text, as well as prophecy—presents the history of the Israelites. In verse 16 the future restoration of Israel is represented as a new guidance through the wilderness. In the preceding passage it is foretold that God will remove Israel into a position of separation, where it can no more have intercourse with the idols to which it has given itself. This is the first stage. And now, verse 14, “Behold, I will entice her, and lead her into the wilderness, and will speak to her heart;” the people shall be placed in a position where they are thrown entirely on God, as Israel was once in the Arabian wilderness, to learn by experience what it has in its God. O.

God afflicts us for our profit, that we might be partakers of His holiness. The flowers smell sweetest after a shower; vines bear the better for bleeding; the walnut-tree is most fruitful when most beaten; saints spring and thrive most internally, when they are most externally afflicted. Afflictions are the mother of virtue. Manasseh’s chain was more profitable to him than his crown. Luther could not understand some Scriptures till he was in affliction. The Christ-cross is no letter, and yet that taught him more than all the letters in a row. God’s house of correction is His school of instruction. All the stones that came about Stephen’s ears did but knock him closer to Christ, the cornerstone. The waves did but lift Noah’s ark nearer to heaven; and the higher the waters grew, the more the ark was lifted up to heaven. Afflictions lift up the soul to more rich, clear, and full enjoyments of God. “Behold, I will lead her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her,” or rather, as the Hebrew has it, “I will earnestly or vehemently speak to her heart.” God makes afflictions to be but inlets to the soul’s more sweet and full enjoyment of His blessed self. When was it that Stephen saw the heavens open, and Christ standing at the right hand of God, but when the stones were about his ears, and there was but a short step betwixt him and eternity? And when did God appear in glory to Jacob, but in the day of his troubles, when the stones were his pillows, and the ground his bed, and the hedges his curtains, and the heavens his canopy? Then he saw the angels of God ascending and descending in their glittering robes. T. Brooks.

“I will speak to her heart.” How exquisitely natural as well as touching is this language! None but a man in affliction or a God who knows what is in man in affliction would have thought of it. Others speak comfortably to us in sorrow, but if that sorrow is deep, what power have their words? They may be kind words and right words, they may deserve our gratitude and have it, we may feel ashamed of ourselves that they have so little of it; but they can no more get to our hearts when God has really wounded them than they can restore our blessings or raise our dead. C. Bradley.

There is a wonderful word in one of the old books which is universally and blessedly true—“I will lead her into the wilderness, and there I will speak to her heart.” And they, I think, know comparatively little of the intimacy and the sweetness of Divine companionship who have not passed through the bitter experience of human loneliness. Christ had to take the blind man apart from the crowd before he could give him his sight. Moses had to be called into the dreary desert, with its gloomy peaks and splintered crags of granite, before he could see the great sight; and Elijah had to go to the same lonely district ere to him there came the still, small voice. Friend, if you are condemned to a lonely life, nestle close to God, and the solitude will be full of sweetness and blessedness. There is yet another kind of solitude. Besides the necessary one to catch the personality, and the providential one which God’s mercy sometimes flings upon us, there is the voluntary one, without which there is no depth of Christian life and no adequate possession of that Divine Spirit. I know that domestic arrangements and imperative duties make it all but impossible for many Christian people to secure more than a little solitude; but God can also come to a man in a crowd. But for all that, I venture to say that no Christian person can do without some quiet moments with himself and his God. May I still further venture to say that, however useful good conferences for deepening spiritual life may be, solitary communion with Jesus Christ is better, and that, perhaps, if we had fewer congresses and meetings and unions of different kinds, and Christian people accepted more that invitation to “Come, my people, and enter into thy chamber, and shut the door,” we should find a deeper possession of power than from the ordinary church meetings and such like. The voice of the Spirit of God is heard in our closets more than in crowds. A. M.

15. “From thence”—from such a scene of moral discipline, God will give her her vineyards—with historical reference to the grapes of Esheol, which ancient Israel found on entering Canaan. Blessings come after, and out of, efficient moral discipline. “The valley of Achor” is still another historical allusion. The word Achor means, by its etymology, trouble—in history it was the place of trouble to Achan. (See Josh. 7 : 24-26.) So the troubles of Israel shall be her “door of hope.” “And she shall sing there” with declared reference to the joy of the Hebrews when, led by Moses and Miriam, they sang songs of deliverance on the hither side of the Red Sea. So joy comes from sanctified sorrow. Moral discipline that really turns the heart from sin to God is evermore a well-spring of blessings. H. C.

The valley of Achor (that is, of trouble) was a dismal place, and yet it is called here a door of hope. “I will give her the valley of Achor for a door of hope.” So be it with our Achors—with those spots in our lives where sin has found us out, or where great grief and great calamity has come upon us! Pray God to make them, each and all, to us a door of hope. They will be so if we will only, thus late, see God in them. They will be so if they only make us more humble, more lowly in our own eyes, more deeply penitent, more earnest and single-minded, more simple and resolute in our return to Him who is alone the rest and haven and home of the soul, who has long borne our provocations, who has been long tracking us in our wanderings, and who now at length—may He grant it—has overtaken us in the far country, and shall take us home with Him into that house of many mansions where it shall be well with us forever. “The valley of Achor for a door of hope.” C. J. Vaughan.

Very beautiful is the lesson that Cecil records when he tells us of his walk in a garden, during a season of painful dejection and gloom on account of a severe trial he was enduring, and his meeting the gardener cutting a pomegranate tree so deeply and severely, that Cecil thought he must have killed the very life out of it; but the gardener told him that the tree had borne no fruit for a long time, and that this deep and as it might seem hazardous cutting was necessary not indeed for its life, but its fruit-bearing life. He was thus treating it, that its branches might be covered with pomegranates. The lesson went to Cecil’s heart, as well indeed it might. G. B. C.

The fight may be a long one and it may be a very hard one, but the fight with sin is not hopeless, and it need not be of uncertain issue. The trial may be very severe, and you may say, “Oh, this knife of God, how deep it cuts! It seemed to me, when it touched my heart, as if it would never stop until it went clear through.” But, friend, God’s pruning-knife never goes by so much as a hair’s-breadth further than the necessities of the case require, and the use of it is never for the maiming, but only for the healing of the soul. The discipline, both of temptation and of trial, is intended to leave us richer than we were before—richer than we could have been without its endurance. Temptation and trial, I may say, are God’s drill and dynamite to blow up the obstructions that choke the channels of our affections and of our energies until the whole broad stream of God’s life shall course through our own and have its own sweet will. Ah! those are strong words that Peter uses when he commands us to rejoice because of our fiery trial, inasmuch as in it we are made partakers of Christ’s suffering. Then he lifts the veil for just a moment and shows us that when the Master’s glory shall be revealed, when we shall understand the meaning of His discipline with us, as he understands it now, we shall be glad with exceeding joy. Behrends.

Trouble in some of its thousand forms, trouble alone, leads to thoughtfulness about the courses, the aims, the end of life; thoughtfulness about the insufficiency of this world’s best, most valued objects; thoughtfulness about God, about the relations sustained to Him, the duties demanded by Him; thoughtfulness about the truth conveyed in His own Word, about the knowledge of Christ as a Saviour and of the Holy Spirit as the Sanctifier; thoughtfulness about sin in its nature, its desert, its forgiveness; thoughtfulness about death, a judgment, an unchangeable state of bliss or woe. And it is trouble on account of sin, trouble awakened in the heart itself by such thoughtfulness directed and applied by the Spirit of God; it is trouble on account of sin which precedes and leads to the possession of a living hope in the mercy of God. It is a memorable remark of an early commentator that “trouble for sin, if it be sincere, opens a door of hope, for that sin which truly troubles our hearts shall not ruin us.” And as it is through trouble we are introduced by the grace of the Divine Spirit into the Christian life, so it is through the same blessed means of trial that we are borne on throughout that life. By trial, as the chief outward means of God’s ordaining, do we go from grace to grace, from strength to strength. The cross is the symbol of our faith, the sign-manual of our Christian profession—the cross of suffering and self-denial. B.

19, 20. I will betroth thee unto Me. The threefold repetition of these words betokens the solemn joy with which the Divine Bridegroom rests upon the thought of that future marriage. As a betrothal or a marriage was, of course, “forever,” the emphatic declaration before us implies that the relation into which Jehovah would now enter with Israel should never again be broken up as it had been before—i.e., that her fidelity should be secured. This is explained by Jer. 31 : 31-34.

In righteousness, etc. All these characteristics, as well as that of “faithfulness” in the next verse, attach to Jehovah’s own part in this transaction, and not to Israel’s. The first pair, “righteousness and judgment,” conjoined also in Ps. 89 : 14, where likewise they are followed by “mercy and truth,” and in Ps. 97 : 2, point to the hatred of sin and the redeeming and purifying energy with which the Lord will effect the union (cf. Isa. 1 : 27) ; as on the other hand the next pair, “loving-kindness and mercies,” point to the tender and sympathizing love with which He will deal with a creature so greatly requiring forbearance. The New Testament revelation throws a clear and intense light upon the import of all this. B. C.

The fulness of the reconciliation between God and the people has never been more beautifully, more completely and more tenderly set forth than in the matchless words of the conclusion of the first parable of the unfaithful wife, “I will betroth thee unto Me forever.” The word betroth is used, the word suggestive of pure maidenhood, the word which indicates that no past sinful infidelity is to be remembered ; all that is forgiven, forgotten, never to be called to mind. “Yea, I will betroth thee unto Me in righteousness, and in judgment, and in loving-kindness and in mercies. I will even betroth thee unto Me in faithfulness ; and thou shalt know the Lord.” The parable of the prodigal son even does not equal this as a picture of Divine love, treating the adulterous wife, who wrongs her husband, far more than any prodigal does his father—treating her as though of virgin purity, one who had never sinned. O. T. Student.

20. “Thou shalt know the Lord” is one of the most expressive phrases possible to human language, implying to know God in all the great elements of His character and in all the experiences of His spiritual power ; to know with the heart brought fully under the power of Jehovah’s presence and love. H. C.

21,22. Setting forth the heavens and the earth as taking part in a grand responsive choral. It should be rendered, “I will respond to the heavens,” etc., as conveying the idea of a series of ascending petitions with the descending responses as the return vibration in the combined physical and spiritual movement that is represented in the figure. It is drawn from the responsive musical service of the temple. Nature, as thus responding to God, is a sublime anthem, a grand roll of harmony, with each chord so connected (both simultaneously and in melodious succession) with every other, that the result is a diapason movement, a modulation throughout the immense scale as it is touched from the supernal sphere. It is the same figure in the nineteenth Psalm as brought out by a more poetic, and, on that very account, more literal rendering. T. Lewis.

God will hear the prayer of His people for the earthly good they may need and shall ask of Him. The manner of saying this gives us what we may call a circle of prayer. “Jezreel” stands here for the people whom God plants in the land. Hence the form of the thought is : This people call for corn and wine and oil, and in a sense cry unto these things, and are heard and answered ; the corn and wine cry to the earth, the earth to the heavens, and the heavens to God. God hears the heavens ; the heavens hear the earth ; the earth hears the corn, and the corn hears the people whom God plants in the land. The agencies of Providence that lie between God and His praying people, which must be all put in operation in order to give them corn and wine, are beautifully put into the links of this chain of prayer. H. C.

23. The prophecy of this chapter (verses 2-23) closes in the same way as the prophecy chap. 1 : 2-2 : 1 does, with the reversal of the prophetic import of the names of the three typical children. First there is “Jezreel,” which, in the former prophecy (chap. 1 : 11), is dealt with only by implication. The name God-will-sow needs not to be changed, but only applied differently, and this here is explicitly done. “Israel is God-will-sow ; for I will sow her unto Me—i.e., to be My very own, in the land of Israel.” In Jer. 31, in which in verses 31-34 we have found the parallel to verses 19, 20 of this chapter, we have again in verses 27, 28 a prediction in which we seem compelled to recognize a distinct reference to and enlarge-

ment of this clause; for “unto Me” is explained by Jeremiah’s “I will watch over them, to build and to plant.” B. C.