Hosea 11:8-9 How shall I give you up, Ephraim? how shall I deliver you, Israel? how shall I make you as Admah? how shall I set you as Zeboim?… Hosea appears again and again to contradict himself. In one line he is denouncing a ruinous and final doom; in the next, with a voice that breaks with tenderness, he is promising a day of golden restoration. Does it not sound like a feeble absurdity to say that both sets of declarations can be fulfilled? Yet fulfilled in some ideal way I believe they are. Surely the prophet recognised that there were positive contradictions in life, — life and death, light and darkness, blessing and' cursing, the flame of wrath and the dew of blessing; and leaving these contradictions as he found them, he yet believed that God is a God of love, that mercy shall somehow or somewhere triumph over justice, that God will smite sin, and yet will spare. Hosea's was a real and not a sham message, and it was a message full of comfort; and still more full of comfort was the reason, "for I am God, and not man." The deepest consolation of life lies in this, God and not man is the judge. God is the Father of the prodigal. Christ was the friend of publicans and sinners; and in the revelation of God throughout all the Scripture, as in the words of Christ, we find always side by side with the awful certainty of retribution, the unquenchable beams of love and hope. But Hosea had learned his lesson, as so many are forced to learn it, in sorrow and anguish. He tells us his secret in the first three chapters. These explain the varying of emotions in almost every verse of the prophecy; and they also explaln why this prophet seems to see more deeply than all others into the heart of the love of God. The sorrows of life come to us all though they seem to come in different measure; but the point for us to observe is how differently they affect the wise and the foolish The holy submissiveness of Hosea's life taught him the one great lesson without which he would never have become a prophet at all. This lesson, — If the love of man, the love of a husband for a wife, of a father for his child can be so deep, how unfathomable, how eternal must be the love of God! To what sunless depths, to what unfathomed caverns can the ray of that light penetrate I In this is a message of hope for individual souls. (Dean Farrar.) Parallel Verses KJV: How shall I give thee up, Ephraim? how shall I deliver thee, Israel? how shall I make thee as Admah? how shall I set thee as Zeboim? mine heart is turned within me, my repentings are kindled together. |
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