Hosea 14
God reveals himself to us
as the Healer of his sin-sick church.
Hosea’s vision of God as our Healer sets before us an invitation with an
offer. In chapter 14 verses 1 to 3 the prophet
invites us to return to the Lord, even explaining to us how. In verses 4 – 8 God himself speaks, offering
to heal us of the malignancy of our sins and give us fresh spiritual
health. Hosea helps us see that sin is
more than bad. Sin, because it draws us
away from the living God, is also enfeebling.
A worldly church is a decrepit church, hobbling its way into the
geriatric ward, even though it may perceive itself as vibrantly youthful. Such a church is like a cancer victim
energetically pumping iron in a gym, admiring himself in the mirror, unaware
that he is in fact dying from deep within.
Hosea helps us get in touch with reality by the sharply defined clarity
of his categories. Sin is our disease,
God is our doctor and his treatment alone restores the church to health. Hosea begins with the doctor’s prescription:
an undiluted, full-strength dose of repentance.
Verse 1
If we want healing from
God, thorough repentance is the way to receive it. Hosea’s wording connotes a kind of repentance
that does more than just point a life in the Lord’s general direction. The repentance implied by his idiom brings
that life fully back to the Lord withholding nothing from him. It is not enough that we see our sins and
feel bad about them. It is not enough
even to stop sinning. True repentance
comes all the way back to God, back to our original relationship with him, back
to our first love, back to the basics of the gospel, back to the daily
disciplines of holiness. We leave the
world behind, including worldly Christianity and go hard after God until we
rediscover how to live in his nearness.
The very idea of “returning” tells us to go back the way we came. Retracing our wayward steps, we must undo
what we have done, dismantle our idolatries, own up to our foolish judgment
calls, recant our wrong ideas. Then we
reassemble the life, personally and institutionally, that is pleasing to God,
according to the Scriptures. We start to
think more carefully about how we live.
We get tough on ourselves and make some long-overdue, hard decisions. We prize God alone as our great delight and
reward. This is real repentance. It is
costly, inconvenient and embarrassing.
But it is the only way to healing.
“return unto the Lord thy God." We are his covenanted people, chosen in
Christ, redeemed at the cross, sealed with his Spirit. Despite what we deserve, his covenant with us
still holds. He still identifies with us
as our God. We have no true interest or
advantage anywhere else. So we are not
being required to grope after some strange, risky, unknown relationship. God is calling his own prodigals home. We are his people, set apart to him in the
first place.
Our problem is not that
God is inaccessible or unknowable. Our
problem is with us. We have stumbled
over our sins. “thou hast fallen by thine
iniquity.” Hosea has in mind here
Israel’s steep national decline during his lifetime. The country was on the skids. How could they put on the brakes? The people hoped that their weakening
position might be secured through political alliances: “When Ephraim saw his
sickness, and Judah saw his wound, then went Ephraim to the Assyrian and sent
to king Jareb: yet could he not heal you nor cure you of your wound.” (chapter
5 verse 13)
The people of God did not
understand that their nation was suffering social disintegration and
international diminution for a moral reason, not a political reason. We can see our symptoms easily enough but we
do not diagnose the disease wisely. And
so we apply irrelevant, ineffective remedies.
And we risk antagonizing God even further by treating him as if he were
irrelevant. How dimly we grasp the true
relevance of spiritual things for living real life in this tough world!
Moreover, Hosea’s
generation also felt that economic realities required them to mix in some
Canaanite Baalism with their biblical faith.
Portraying Israel as the Lord’s unfaithful wife, the prophet read the
nation’s mind. “For their mother hath played the harlot: she that conceived
them hath done shamefully: for she said, I will go after my lovers, that give
me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, mine oil and my drink.” (chapter
2 verse 5)
The Israelites saw the
good things in life as the pay-off for their dalliances with the rites of Baal
worship. To this the Lord responded “For
she did not know that I gave her corn and wine, and oil and multiplied her
silver and gold, which they prepared for Baal.” (chapter 2 verse 8)
But however the Israelites
were rationalizing their compromises, they were not really being driven by
material or economic necessity. The
truth was far worse. Israel was madly in
love, flirting with the Baals. Deep
within the national mood there stirred an emotional craving for the exotic,
sexy world of Baalism. And the familiar
world of classical biblical faith seemed old and boring by comparison. This is worldliness. And the Lord tells us in Hosea 2 verse 13 how
he dealt with Hosea’s generation of worldly semi-believers: “And I will visit
upon her the days of Baalim, wherein she burned incense to them and she decked
herself with her earrings and her jewels, and she went after her lovers, and
forgat me, saith the Lord.”
These then were the 2
primary sins that proved to be the downfall of God’s people in Hosea’s time:
futile hopes and vulgar desires. They
hankered after the security of worldly alliances and the thrill of worldly pleasures. They did not really feel that their heavenly
husband would either protect them or satisfy them. And so they were sniffing around where they
had no business, caressing their darling sins, trying to get their needs met by
others. The church in every generation
is in danger of stumbling over the very same sins.
What is it that brings the
people of God low? What is it that
obstructs our progress and frustrates our good intentions? What is it that sets us up to be caught out
by unintended consequences? The answer is embarrassingly simple. We sin: “Your sins have been your
downfall!” And we sin today in
essentially the same ways they did then.
But Hosea is showing us the way out: “Bend your will around and go back
to the Lord. Go so far back that you
begin to do something very radical, you begin actually, literally, to obey
him. You begin to allow, by faith, that
he might just be your all-sufficiency.
It’s your refusal to trust him enough to obey him; it’s not your
political weakness, not your finances, not anything else; it’s your sins that
have been your downfall. So go back to
God. Relearn his ways. There is no healing for you any other way.”
How then do we return so
fully, so thoroughly to God? What does
he want from us when we approach him.
Verse 2
God wants to hear from
us. He wants us to approach him with
plain-speaking honesty; no evasion, no equivocation, no excuses. And he wants to hear from each one of us. In verse 1 “return” was a singular imperative
and his pronouns (thou hast fallen … thine iniquity) were also singular. He was addressing the people of God all
together as one corporate whole. But
here in verse 2 Hosea changes to plural verbs when he says, “Take … turn …
say”. He breaks the corporate whole down
into its constituent members and speaks to us now as individuals. Could there be any other way? Repentance cannot remain a corporate act only
and still be real. You and I must make
it our own.
Is it not interesting that
God wants us to bring to him, of all things, words? What else might we bring? We know that we cannot bring him our own
merit, as if we deserved healing from God.
Only Christ crucified can bring us back into God’s good graces. But we might deceive ourselves into thinking
that we can present him with religious acts and offerings, with pageantry and
spectacle, with programmes and organisations and events, as the church’s
trumpets blare and drums beat in triumphalistic enthusiasm. We might think that is what God wants from
us. It will not work: “They shall go
with their flocks and with their herds to seek the Lord; but they shall not
find him; he hath withdrawn himself from them.” (chapter 5 verse 6) We mean well.
But sometimes we do not think, we do not see it through God’s eyes.
So what does God want from
us? He wants not display but words:
words of brokenness, words of renunciation, words of fresh resolve, words of
praise. He wants a thoughtful, meaningful
encounter with each one of us. We have
unfinished business with God and it has to be prayed through. If we cannot think of anything to say to God,
then we may not yet feel with sufficient intensity our need for him. Maybe we need to suffer some more. But if we do sense our need and are uncertain
that our effort will do any good, Hosea is coaching us in what to say and
encouraging us that God really will listen.
As we approach God in
individual repentance, what are we going to say to him?
First we confess our sins,
holding nothing back, “Forgive all our sins” – or to paraphrase the force of
these words, “Carry off all our sins, every single one of them. We don’t want them around any more. We are sorry we ever flirted with them. They have done us nothing but harm. Remove all our sins far from us.”
God is more willing to
forgive us than we are willing to seek his forgiveness. And God is better able to release us from our
sins than we are to get free of them.
Is it not significant
that, in returning to God for healing, we must first face into our sins? We must place ourselves under the judgment of
the Word of God. Outward success can
seduce us into a spirit of self-admiration: “And Ephraim said, Yet I am become
rich, I have found me out substance: in all my labours they shall find none
iniquity in me that were sin.” (chapter 12 verse 8) In other words: “I’m so successful, no one
will notice or care about my hidden failings.”
Such boastfulness drives God’s healing presence away. So it makes no sense to ask the Lord for
greater blessing on our unexamined status quo.
We need to be released from what we now are. That is where we begin.
Secondly, we ask God to
show us new favour: “Receive us graciously.”
Severe honesty in confessing our sins is not a waste of time. It opens the way to renewed communion with
God. We are graciously reinstated to the
enjoyment of his goodness.
In other words, God does
not merely remove our defect. He
restores us to something better. He not
only takes away our problem but he also does us good (“receive us graciously”). God’s moral calculus is factored very much to
our advantage. It is God who decides how
to answer that prayer. And he is wise
enough to know just what to do in each of our lives. Our part is to welcome his renewed favour,
however it comes to us, with a sense of undeserved privilege.
Thirdly, we pledge our
renewed devotion to our Lord: “so will we render the calves of our lips.” Thorough repentance is a new way of living, a
moment-by-moment responsiveness to God’s goodness. It’s a sensitive, personal engaging with God,
rendering back to him thanks for what we receive from him. This is so because true spirituality is
circular in design. God sends blessing
to us, and we offer the blessing back to him in praise. All good begins with God and returns to
God. Our lives are not to be graves,
where blessings go to die, but altars, where blessings are returned to God in
thanksgiving.
Verse 2 charts for us a
positive new course by showing us what to turn toward. But God does not intend that we merely add
pious ornamentation to the surface of otherwise unchanged lives. So verse 3 now adds depth and texture
to our rededication by showing us what to turn away from.
“Asshur shall not save us;
we will not ride upon horses: neither will we say any more to the work of our
hands, Ye are our gods: for in thee the fatherless findeth mercy.”
When we lay hold of the
“solid joys and lasting treasures” of our God, we also let go of the stylish
mythologies of the world that disappoint us.
Hosea articulates for us a twofold vow, followed by an affirmation of
confidence mingled with relief.
Our vow renounces all vain
hopes through self-help. We resolve to
live in complete dependence on our Lord alone.
How? First, we swear off all
alliances with the AssyriaNs and Egypts of our day (Asshur shall not save us:
we will not rise upon horses). Hosea’s
Israel had turned to these powers for national security: “Ephraim also is like
a silly dove without heart: they call to Egypt, they go to Assyria.” (chapter 7 verse 11) “Ephraim feedeth on wind, and followeth after
the east wind: he daily increaseth lies and desolation and they do make a
covenant with the Assyrians and oil is carried into Egypt.” (chapter 12 verse
1)
Now what is wrong with
this picture? Simply put, the people of
God feel nervous if all they have is God.
So they are fawning before the bullies of worldly power; that is what is
wrong. Today we profess that we have
taken refuge in the King of kings and Lord of lords. At the same time we sometimes stoop to curry
favour with politicians and earthly powers, as if the safety of the church
depended on human protection and political favour. Do we demonstrate confidence that the Lord
himself, and the Lord alone, is our power, our security, our boast? Human politics is an honourable calling, of
course, but we dishonour our Lord if we feel naked when surrounded with his
care only.
The people of God in
Hosea’s day gambled their future on placating worldly powers. They not only discredited their witness to
the world; they also antagonized God.
But the repentant people of God find their hearts saying, “What really
matters is not what they decided about us in the Assyrian throne room but what
God decides about us in the heavenly Throne room. That is where our future is really
determined. So we will put our hope in him,
come what may.”
The second way we reaffirm
our faith in God alone is to swear off the gods we have devised (“We will never
again say, “Our God” to what our own hands have made”). In Hosea’s day idolatry was laughably
obvious: “And now they sin more and more and have made them molten images of
their silver and idols according to their own understanding, all of it the work
of the craftsmen: they say of them, Let the men that sacrifice kiss the
calves.” (chapter 13 verse 2) The
idolatry of the modern world is more subtle than that, but it is still possible
to invest unrealistic power in the works of our own hands and expect very
little from God himself. The dreariness
of a prayer meeting, contrasted with our gushing enthusiasm over the latest
church technique, reveals where our confidence really lies. The church scene today is crowded with
temptations to venture little on God.
And because God has no intention of supporting human ideas, methods and
standard, his power withdraws. We are
then left with our own programmes still to fuel, but little of the divine
Presence. So we look even more desperately to the works of our own
hands, although we may continue to describe ministry outcomes in the pious
terms of “our God”, the old term of covenant endearment.
A repentant church has
abandoned itself to God alone. It risks
everything on the promises of God. It is
on its face before God. It understands
that our ancient confession of faith, that he is “our God”, makes a difference
in our practical execution of ministry and church development. A repentant church understands that methods
are never value-free but always reveal where our trust really lies. Therefore methods are placed under the
judgment of the Word of God. And
repentant people rediscover the experiential reality of “our God” so that they
never again want to go back to their own plastic substitutes.
The sweet brokenness we
sense in this verse shines forth most clearly in the last line: “for in thee
the fatherless findeth mercy.” Is that
not what we are: needy, hungry, penniless orphans, stumbling around in life
desperate to find love? A repentant
church rests in the truth of this and delights in the living reality of
it. They feel that they have “come
home”: in from the cold, hostile, foreign atmosphere of worldly alliances and
self-worship, back to where they belong.
We are far better off with our heavenly Father than with the
illegitimate children of our own idols.
The very length of the vow
here in Hosea 14 verse 3 tells us something: true repentance aims at vital
dependence on the Lord in all areas of life.
God wants us to know that
if we will draw near to him with real repentance, he will draw near to us with
a generous outpouring of healing power.
Verse 4
If we sinners had to fear
that going back to God he would only slap us around and scream at us and
humiliate us, we would never approach him.
We would safely keep our distance.
But that is why verse 4 is here: it assures us that God’s kindness leads
us to repentance. God receives broken
sinners. He has a soft spot in his heart
for them. He pours out his favour on the
penitent. So we have nothing to lose and
everything to gain. Who would refuse his
offer of healing? What sin could be
worth the wounds it inflicts.
Verse 4 brings us to the
gravitational centre of this entire passage.
Now God speaks to us. We have
declared our intention to take the courageous steps of true repentance. Now God declares what he will do for us: “I
will heal their backsliding.”
The covenant people of
Hosea’s day were lying at death’s door.
With herdlike conformity, his generation had veered off into a
persistent pattern of unreasoning but fashionable alternatives to obedient
confidence in God. Their hearts were so
hard they viewed the ways of God with an “Anything but that!” mentality. Running every which way but toward God, “My
people are bent to backsliding from me.” (chapter 11 verse 7)
But here Hosea shows us
that God’s commitment to us is even more profound than our apostasy from
him. Our crises do not overthrow his
mercies. God can take us back at our
worst and heal us.
Sin is a soul-destroying
disease, draining us of spiritual vitality and appetite and joy. Original sin is like a congenital birth
defect, and acquired sins are like self-inflicted wounds. But God is able to perform radical surgery on
his deformed and injured patients, with miraculous cures. In ourselves we are beset with “the demented
proclivity for rebellion and against return to Yahweh.” But his healing touch is able to restore us
to the spiritual life that can only be described with the lavish poetic imagery
of verses 5 – 7. Under God’s care, but
nowhere else, our prognosis for a full recovery is encouraging.
Hosea 14 verse 4 should
give us pause before we completely write off our more wayward denominations
today. Hosea’s generation was just as
bad. So how do we know? Maybe some mainline denomination will lead
the parade into God’s glorious kingdom.
Maybe he will do something like that just to highlight his grace all the
more wonderfully. And if so, then there
might be room there for you and me as well.
God’s therapy for his sick
people is love, not condemnation. We
must come clean about our sins (verses 1 to 3).
We must move over and take God’s side against our own sins. But when we do, God’s answer is not more
reproach but help (“I will love them”) and that at no charge (“freely”). He has within himself all the motivation and
resources he needs to work with us, to transform us, to see us through. He does not wait until we are healthy. He only waits until we are repentant. His Son declared, “It is not the healthy who
need a doctor, but the sick. I have not
come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” (Luke 5 verses 31 and
32)
If we will only put away
false appearances and admit how weak and sick we really are, how pathetic
compared with verses 5 – 7 so that we check ourselves into God’s hospital and
place ourselves under his care, he promises to heal us by loving us
freely. The eternal Word of God is
calling to us today as much as he did to Israel so long ago. He wants to draw us to himself with an offer
of his free, spontaneous, abundant love, so that our generation of the church
comes alive with new life and real growth – despite the fact that we have so
often spurned his love. Why do we punish
ourselves one moment longer? Why do we
not run back to him?
Our sins do incite his
disciplining anger. That is a solemn
truth. But his anger is not his final
word to us (“mine anger is turned away from him”). God’s ultimate intentions for us are
merciful, because he is merciful. If we
were to dig through all the attributes of the person of God, if I may put it
that way, we would hit bedrock at his mercy.
We could dig no deeper. So, while
we are by nature inclined to turn away from him in apostasy, he is by nature
inclined to turn toward us in mercy. It
is simply his way. That is why he
himself is all our hope. So what can the
power of God’s love actually accomplish for his penitent people?
Verses 5 – 7
After the plainly stated
incentives offered in verse 4 – and “clarity is vital to the anxious and
conscience-stricken” – now the poetry takes wings and flies. Hosea’s imaginative language is describing
what a renewed, healthy church looks like in real life. The prophet heaps metaphor on metaphor to
enforce one overall point: how the church, restored to health, flourishes a
miraculous quality of life. God’s love inspires the wholesome growth of godliness,
not the rank growth of licence.
Freshness (dew), depth (cast forth his roots as Lebanon), beauty (beauty
… smell), influence (they that dwelt under his shadow shall return), abundant
life (they shall revive as the corn and grow as the vine) and prestige mark the
character and ministry of the healthy church.
The church explodes with life! No
longer is an insecure church nervously craving the approval of the world,
unwittingly stifling its own vitality.
Now the world comes to the church, seeking shelter under its ministries
and ordinances.
We bless the world when we
aim to please not the world but our Lord.
Why? Because it is his life in us
that makes us attractive. And he infuses
his life into us when we set our hearts on him alone. After all, isn’t the world looking for an
alternative? Why should they show any
interest, beyond passing amusement, in a church that is just a religious
version of the values and beliefs they already live by? The salt of the earth is effective because it
is different.
God puts into our hearts a
new desire that he would “take away all iniquity and receive us graciously”
(verse 2). We take these simple words to
God in prayer. And what does he grant in
response? He transforms the church into
a Garden of Eden (verses 5 to 7). How
largely, how imaginatively, God answers our prosaic little prayers, as the dew
of God falls on us so that we blossom like a lily!
Finally in verse 8 God
stretches out his hands to us in appeal, as it were. Having stated his case, he does not leave it
there. God appeals to us one more time
to see how sharply incompatible our idols are with his own glorious
reality. He offers himself to us and
confronts us with a decision.
The vision of divine
healing in verses 4 – 8 should have one powerful effect on us. By now we see God’s love and power as
unspeakably superior to the alternatives clamouring for our allegiance. “What have I to do any more with idols?” is a
way of saying “the issue has now become clear.
I am your God, your Father, your Healer.
I alone am your all-sufficiency.
Your idols bring nothing but corruption and death. How can any confusion now linger in your
minds? How can any hesitation linger in
your wills? The time to be decisive has
now come. So choose!”
Hosea’s image of God as a
luxuriant evergreen implies that the normal experience of the church is
a life of rich fruitfulness. The living
God does not produce a dead, dry church.
Abundance may be expected of a people in vital union with such a God. And when it comes, we must not fear it. We must not push it away in suspicion. We must not perceive it as aberrant. God’s grace is by its very nature
extravagant. How could it be otherwise,
given our deep sinfulness and desperate illness? A meagre supply of grace is not even
conceivable, if the all-holy God is to heal sinful people like us. Our part is to open our hearts in genuine
repentance, welcoming the flow of grace until it rises to fill us all. But this will not happen automatically. We must turn from our idols and cast
ourselves on the living God.
Baal can be manipulated
but not God. So God forces the issue of
our personal engagement with himself.
The words “I” or “me” appear conspicuously in each line of this verse. Why?
Because God is not a genie to be stroked; neither is he a mere doctrinal
abstraction to be recited. God is a
person. And here he is calling us to fix
ourselves on him, on him personally, him alone.
Where else can we go? There is a God in heaven, our prayer-hearing
God (“I will answer you”), our devotedly conscientious God (“I will care for
you”), who will be there for us when it counts, as no one else can ever
be. The only logical choice (if our minds
have been cleared of the idols’ hoopla), the only helpful course (if we consult
our own best and truest interests) is to go back to our God and never let go
again. Everything we most hope for in
life comes from him alone, our ever-luxuriant God.
To wait on the Lord, to
live the life of prayer, to abide in Christ, to walk in the Spirit, the modus
operandi of the open bible with the open heart, is a way of doing the business
of life that does not come naturally to us.
If in real life it is true that “your fruitfulness comes from me”, then
we must allow for mystery. Our methods
are not ultimate. God accomplishes his
work by his own means, at his own pace, for his own ends, and we cannot manage
him. God does not need you or me to be
his nanny. Our part is humbly to cling
to God as God and let God be God. We
must neither seek our fullness from other sources nor resist the real thing
when God grants if, for “your faithfulness comes from me.”
The venoms of our sins are
running in our veins. But God, who made
the soul with all its hidden capacities also knows the soul.
Will the weak and sick
church of today trust the Great Physician enough to submit to his healing care? Let it be our aim, our message, and our own
practice for his gospel to be our clinic every day, for life is in Christ
and nowhere else.
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