Christ in Hosea

Hosea 1 takes the worst words a covenant people could hear and turns them, before the chapter ends, into the first clear sketch of the gospel. The prophet’s three children are named as verdicts on a nation that has broken faith with the LORD: Jezreel, for the blood God is about to avenge; Loruhamah , “not pitied,” for I will no more have mercy upon the house of Israel (v. 6); and Loammi , the name of estrangement, for ye are not my people, and I will not be your God (v. 9)…

Hosea 2 is the gospel told as a marriage that should have ended in divorce and ends instead in a wedding. The LORD names His wife’s unfaithfulness plainly - she is not my wife, neither am I her husband (v. 2) - and traces the heart of it: she chased lovers for her bread and her wool and her oil (v. 5), and she did not know that I gave her corn, and wine, and oil, and multiplied her silver and gold, which they prepared for Baal (v. 8). Yet His discipline is aimed at homecom…

Hosea 3 is one of the clearest pictures of redeeming love in the Old Testament. The LORD does not tell Hosea to write the unfaithful wife off; He says, Go yet, love a woman beloved of her friend, yet an adulteress - and gives the reason in the same breath: according to the love of the LORD toward the children of Israel, who look to other gods (v. 1). Love is commanded toward the one who has betrayed it, and the ground of that love is not her worth but His own heart. Then t…

Hosea 4 names the disease beneath every sin in the land: there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land (v. 1), and at its heart stands one of the most quoted lines in the prophets - My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge (v. 6). The famine here is not of bread but of the knowing of God, the very thing Amos warned would come: not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD (Amos 8:11). The New Testament answers tha…

Hosea 5 sets the seriousness of unrepented sin beside the mercy that waits to be sought. The charge falls on the very ones meant to lead - Hear ye this, O priests; and hearken, ye house of Israel; and give ye ear, O house of the king (v. 1) - and the deepest indictment is not a single sin but a settled refusal: They will not frame their doings to turn unto their God… and they have not known the LORD (v. 4). Their religion runs on while their hearts do not, and when…

Hosea 6 turns on two lines the Gospel takes up and never lets go. The people, calling one another back to God, say of Him: he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up. After two days will he revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight (vv. 1-2). The God who wounds and then heals is the God Israel had long confessed - I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal (Deut. 32:39); he maketh sore, and bindeth up…

Hosea 7 opens with a word of startling tenderness turned grief: When I would have healed Israel, then the iniquity of Ephraim was discovered (v. 1). God draws near as a physician, and the drawing near is what exposes how deep the sickness goes - falsehood, theft, and a court inflamed like a baker’s oven, where all their kings are fallen: there is none among them that calleth unto me (v. 7). Then the chapter names the disease with an image no one forgets: Ephraim is a cake…

Hosea 8 sounds an alarm over a people who keep the language of faith while emptying it of obedience - Israel shall cry unto me, My God, we know thee (v. 2), even as they have cast off the thing that is good (v. 3). Its most enduring line is a law as fixed as gravity: For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind (v. 7) - and the New Testament states that same law without softening it: Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that sh…

Hosea 9 opens by forbidding the very thing the nation most wanted - festal joy: Rejoice not, O Israel, for joy, as other people: for thou hast gone a whoring from thy God (v. 1). The harvest that fed the feasts will fail (v. 2), and in exile there can be no feast at all - What will ye do in the solemn day, and in the day of the feast of the LORD? (v. 5). Unfaithfulness severs a people from the joy of God’s presence; the same ache sounds in the far country of the prodigal,…

Hosea 10 holds judgment and grace together in the same breath, and at its center stands one of the great evangelical invitations of the Old Testament: Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy; break up your fallow ground: for it is time to seek the LORD, till he come and rain righteousness upon you (v. 12). The chapter opens on Israel as an empty vine that bringeth forth fruit unto himself (v. 1) - fruit that fed altars and images rather than the LORD - a vine to…

Hosea 11 opens in the place a parent keeps a child - When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt (v. 1) - and the New Testament reaches straight for that line. When God brought the child Jesus up out of Egypt, Matthew writes that it happened that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son (Matt. 2:15). What Hosea said of the nation God called His son, Matthew sees answered in th…

Hosea 12 sets a chasing, deceitful Ephraim - one who feedeth on wind (v. 1), trusts the balances of deceit (v. 7), and boasts I am become rich (v. 8) - against the memory of their father Jacob, who had power with God… he wept, and made supplication unto him (vv. 3-4). Out of that contrast comes the chapter’s summons: turn thou to thy God: keep mercy and judgment, and wait on thy God continually (v. 6) - the same threefold shape of a life turned home that Micah names…

Hosea 13 burns with judgment and then breaks open onto the brightest promise in the book. Ephraim, once exalted, offended in Baal and now sins more and more , kissing idols of his own silver (vv. 1-3); against the gods men make, the LORD sets His own name and His sole claim to save: Yet I am the LORD thy God from the land of Egypt, and thou shalt know no god but me: for there is no saviour beside me (v. 4). That last line stands behind the New Testament’s most precious con…

Hosea closes where every honest reading of God’s mercy must close - in pure, unearned grace. The book that opened with a prophet sent to love an unfaithful wife ends with the LORD throwing the door wide: O Israel, return unto the LORD thy God… Take with you words, and turn to the LORD (vv. 1-2). He even supplies the prayer the penitent cannot find on his own - Take away all iniquity, and receive us graciously (v. 2) - a prayer answered in full in the One who said, h…