Hosea 2:1-16: a reflection

1“Say to your brothers, ‘My people!’ and to your sisters, ‘My loved one!’ 2Contend with your mother! Contend, for she is not my wife, neither am I her husband; and let her put away her prostitution from her face, and her adulteries from between her breasts; 3lest I strip her naked, and make her bare as in the day that she was born, and make her like a wilderness, and set her like a dry land, and kill her with thirst. 4Indeed, on her children I will have no mercy, for they are children of unfaithfulness. 5For their mother has played the prostitute. She who conceived them has done shamefully; for she said, ‘I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.’ 6Therefore behold, I will hedge up your way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, that she can’t find her way. 7She will follow after her lovers, but she won’t overtake them; and she will seek them, but won’t find them. Then she will say, ‘I will go and return to my first husband, for then it was better with me than now.’ 8For she didn’t know that I gave her the grain, the new wine, and the oil, and multiplied to her silver and gold, which they used for Baal. 9Therefore I will take back my grain in its time, and my new wine in its season, and will pluck away my wool and my flax which should have covered her nakedness. 10Now I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, and no one will deliver her out of my hand. 11I will also cause all her celebrations to cease: her feasts, her new moons, her Sabbaths, and all her solemn assemblies. 12I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees, about which she has said, ‘These are my wages that my lovers have given me,’ and I will make them a forest, and the animals of the field shall eat them. 13I will visit on her the days of the Baals, to which she burned incense when she decked herself with her earrings and her jewels, and went after her lovers and forgot me,” says the LORD. 14“Therefore behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. 15I will give her vineyards from there, and the valley of Achor for a door of hope; and she will respond there as in the days of her youth, and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt. 16It will be in that day,” says the LORD, “that you will call me ‘my husband,’ and no longer call me ‘my master.’

The first part of this chapter is a hard picture of judgment on unfaithful Israel, portrayed as an adulterous wife. But then, astonishingly, the tone turns from judgment to wooing. Therefore, God says, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. The God who had every right to be done instead sets out to win her back, like a spurned lover courting again the one who wandered.

Notice several tender surprises. God allures rather than only punishes; he woos his wayward people back. He brings her into the wilderness, a place of stripping and hardship, and there, of all places, he speaks tenderly to her, so that even the hard, bare place becomes where love is renewed. He turns the Valley of Achor, whose name means trouble, into a door of hope. And he envisions the relationship changing: you will call me my husband, and no longer my master, moving from cold ownership to intimate love.

This is the heart of God toward those who have wandered from him. Not merely to punish, but to woo back; not to leave them in the wilderness, but to speak tenderly there and make the place of trouble a door of hope. If you have wandered and now find yourself in a wilderness, hear what God intends there: to allure you, to speak tenderly, to turn your valley of trouble into a doorway of hope, and to draw you into a love that calls him not master but husband. He is not done wooing you home.

Lord, though I have wandered, you do not only punish; you allure, you woo, you bring me into the wilderness to speak tenderly to me and turn my valley of trouble into a door of hope. Draw me home into that intimate love that calls you not master but husband. Speak tenderly to me in the bare place, and win my heart back to you.