Hosea 3:1 Then said the LORD to me, Go yet, love a woman beloved of her friend, yet an adulteress… The dark sad story which Hosea pathetically shadows forth in his first three chapters taught him the chief lesson of his life. For he accepted God's dealings with him, and found that though the chastening was grievous, it brought forth the peaceable fruit of righteousness in his soul. By virtue of his holy sub missiveness he became one of the greatest of the prophets, and in the fall, the punishment, and the amendment of an adulterous wife, he saw a symbol of God's ways with sinful men. For the lesson which he learnt was this. If the love of man can be so deep, how unfathomable, how eternal must be the love of God! First of all the prophets he rises to the sublime height of calling the affection with which Jehovah regards His people "love." In Amos God is beneficent, and knows Israel; in Joel God is glorious and merciful; but Hosea introduces a new theological idea into Hebrew prophecy when he ventures to name the love of God. Hence, Prof. Davidson, referring to Duhm, says: "Amos is the prophet of morality, of human right, of the ethical order in human life; but Hosea is a prophet of religion." And to what unknown depths cannot God's love pierce! Agonising experience had taught him that human love, so poor, so frail, so mixed with selfishness — human love, whose wings are torn and soiled so easily, and which droops before wrong like a flower at the breath of a sirocco, — even human love, though disgraced by faithlessness, though dragged through the mire of shame, can still survive. Must not this then be so with the unchangeable love of God? If Hosea could still love the guilty and thankless woman, would not God still love the guilty and thankless nation, and by analogy the guilty and thankless soul? That is why, again and again, the voice of menace breaks into sobs, and the funeral anthem is drowned, as it were, in angel melodies. He saw the decadence and doom of Ephraim; he saw king after king perish by war and murder; he heard the thundering march of the Assyrian shake the ground from far; he knew that the fate of Samaria should be the fate of Beth-arbel; and yet, in spite of all, in his last chapter his style ceases to be obscure, rugged, enigmatical, oppressed with heavy thoughts; and to this doomed people he still can say, as the message of Jehovah, "I will love them freely, for Mine anger is turned away." It is so intolerable to the prophet to regard God's alienation from His people as final, that from the first he intimates the belief that they would repent and be forgiven, and become numberless as the sands of the sea, and that Judah — of whom at first he thought more favourably than at a later time — shall be joined with them under a single king. (Dean Farrar, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: Then said the LORD unto me, Go yet, love a woman beloved of her friend, yet an adulteress, according to the love of the LORD toward the children of Israel, who look to other gods, and love flagons of wine. |
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