Hosea 2:23

And I will sow her unto me in the earth; and I will have mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy; and I will say to them which were not my people, Thou art my people; and they shall say, Thou art my God.

And I will sow her unto me in the earth - referring to the meaning of Jezreel (). Israel restored shall be the source of spiritual, and therefore also of temporal blessings to the millennial of earth. Not merely Judea, but the whole earth shall be the seed-plot wherein Gentile nations shall be the spiritual growth of the Jewish seed sown everywhere (see ; ; ).

And they shall say, Thou art my God - rather, as Hebrew, "my God" simply: my all in all, whose I am, and whom I wish to serve; my portion forever, my salvation, the one thing I long for as my chief good.

Remarks:

(1) When Israel and Judah shall be united to God (Hosea 1:10), they shall also become, united to one another as "brethren" and "sisters" in the one blessed family of God (). So in the case of the spiritual Israel, all alike being Ammi and rubecula, the people of God and objects of God's gratuitous mercy, cannot but have mutual love one toward the other. Let us test our sonship by this divinely-constituted mark, and seek more and more, as we experience the love of God in Christ, to love one another as brethren in the Lord!

(2) The faithful few in faithless Israel are told, Plead with your mother, plead (). So the duty of those who have been brought to know the grace of God is to expostulate with all around them on the awful consequences of unbelief, in order that the whole Church and nation may be brought to put away all unfaithfulness, and so may not be put away by the holy God. The Bride must put away all spiritual adulteries from between her breasts (); that is, all attachments to worldly things which alienate the heart from God and Christ, in order that the believing soul's "well-beloved may lie all night between her breasts" ().

(3) If the visible Church put off the inward adornments of grace, God will at last strip her naked of the outward privileges which were her boast, but which she failed to use to His glory. The world-powers with whom she committed her spiritual adulteries shall be made, in righteous retribution, the very instruments of her punishment. "These shall make her desolate and naked," and shall strip her of her carnal possessions (). Then shall she who was once the garden of the Lord become "as the wilderness," "dry" and barren: she who drank not of the waters of life while they were within her reach, shall have them removed from beyond her reach when "the Lord God will send a thirst not for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord" (). Let us then be diligent in our several spheres to improve present opportunities of grace, because the whole Church is made up of individual members. Though the past generation have bequeathed to us, the children, a legacy of guilt before the God who visits the sins of the fathers upon the children, let us cut off the entail of wrath by repentance and faith; so shall we and the Church escape the sentence, "I will not have mercy upon her children; for they be the children of whoredoms" (). (4) The shameless and perverse alienation of Israel from God appears in this, that, notwithstanding God's warnings by His prophets, instead of turning penitently to Him, she encouraged and emboldened herself in idol-worship, saying, "Come, let me go after my lovers, that give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, mine oil and my drink" (). Turning her back on Him who would so lovingly have drawn her, she passionately pursues those who draw her not, and attributes to these dead idols the gifts which she owed to God alone, the giver of every good gift. We, too, have our idols, which our natural hearts madly run after, turning away from God. Whatever we make our chief good, outside of God, is an idol. How apt, moreover, we are to take God's gifts, our food, clothing, comforts, and luxuries, as if they were our own by some special right, calling them "my bread, my water, my wool, my flax," and to attribute our possession of them to our gold, our industry, and our talents, making these our gods. Or else, as Israel by the unconscious instinct of human weakness, though she rejected God, was constrained to acknowledge some power above her; so many still, having wandered from the God of revelation, either turn to degrading superstition, or else, professing themselves wise, become fools by virtually deifying the so-called powers and laws of nature, which are nothing but the expression of the will of the omnipresent and omnipotent God.

(5) Though Israel thus dishonoured God, God's mercy still yearns over her. If the sinner were left to himself, and suffered to take his own way without hinderance of cross, he would go on to certain ruin. But God, in order to save, His people, "hedges up their way with thorns" (). The pains which by, God's gracious ordinance, often attend sinful pleasure, are the thorny hedge which tear the transgressor in attempting to find his way to his guilty desires. If even this is insufficient to deter him, God makes also a "wall" to cut off His people from the paths to hell. Lot had such a wall interposed between him and destruction in the overthrow of Sodom, the place which in his worldliness he had chosen for a residence; just as previously the vexation to his righteous soul caused by the filthy conversation and unlawful deeds of the people there, was the thorn-hedge keeping him on the narrow way, from which otherwise he had well-nigh strayed.

The result with Israel was to be, she would follow with desperate tenacity after her lovers, but should not find them; then, wearied out at last with her profitless though laborious search, she would finally say, no longer as before, Come, let me go after my lovers (), but, Come, let me go and return to the Lord, my first husband; for when I walked in communion with Him it was better with me than now (). How often thus those who have been originally joined in church-covenant with the Lord by baptism, afterward search far and wide in worldly pleasure, ambition, and gain, for that satisfying happiness which can never be found in them! Then at last, through the Spirit of God acting on the heart, in concert with his afflictive providences, the prodigal son is brought to feel the contrast between the blessedness of the people of God and the misery of himself in his vain search for good outside of God. How many hired servants of my father have bread enough, and to spare, and I perish with hunger! I will arise and go to my father (). Then is there joy in the presence of God over the returning backslider.

(6) When men will not know God as the Giver of all their temporal blessings, they shall be compelled to know Him as the Withholder of them. Yea more, in order to mark His hand the more palpably in the visitation of wrath, He will take away the grain and other fruits of the earth "in the time thereof" (), that is, in the harvest time, when they were all but ours, and nothing seemed to remain to be done except to gather them in. It is altogether just that when men claim the grain and wine as their own by right, God should vindicate His right to them, saying, I will take away my grain, my wine, and my wool. Then shall the worldling, stripped of all the temporal prosperity and the gaudy finery (; ) to which he owed his seeming greatness among men, appear in his true foulness and folly. The mask of formal and false religion (such as Jeroboam introduced to serve his ends), and of hypocritical worship, with which conscience was lulled, shall drop off (); and the unfaithful professor shall be made to feel that, in forgetting God, he forgot his chief good, and the source of all true blessedness.

(7) Yet such is the marvelous grace of God that the ve ry thing which would provoke all other masters to cut off the (7) Yet such is the marvelous grace of God that the ve ry thing which would provoke all other masters to cut off the transgressor from all hope, is the very reason with God for opening to Israel a "door of hope." Israel's misery, the just fruit of Israel's sin, is what draws forth the tender pity of Israel's God. God therefore has mercy, not because we deserve it, but because we need it. He therefore draws us because we are so deeply sunken (Pusey). (.) God speaks to the heart in solitude, by His sweet promises and comforts, alluring and attracting it away from Satan's and the world's enticements. The 'valley of trouble' becomes the door of 'patient longing' after Him (). So the cry of trouble is exchanged for the "song" of joy, such as the believer sings in the freshness of newborn spiritual life, or such as Israel, 'in the youth' of her national existence, sang at the Red Sea, after her final deliverance from her cruel oppressors. Then shall every name of idolatry cease from among His people (). Peace with God, as not merely our Lord, but also our Husband (), peace among men and peace with the very beasts of the field, shall supersede the present disordered state of things, wherein, through man's sin, alienation from God, war, and bloodshed and the raging of wild beasts prevail (). Then shall the eternal marriage of God and his people be realized (). His "righteousness" and "mercies" His "judgment" and His "loving-kindness," shall be manifested, as brought into lovely harmony in the holy union which shall subsist between Himself and both the literal and spiritual Israel (Hosea 2:19).

Above all, His unchanging "faithfulness" to His promises shall appear; and Israel in her own land shall cry to God for the fruits of the earth, and not in vain. All the intermediate links of causes and effects, up to the Great First Cause, shall work in subordination to Him, in order to produce the desired effect of His people's prayers. "I will hear, saith the Lord, I will hear the heavens and they shall hear the earth; and the earth shall hear the grain, and the wine, and the oil; and they shall hear Jezreel." Then shall Israel be sown, not scattered (Hosea 2:21). Planted in her own land, she shall send forth offshoots into all the lands of the earth; and so not only herself, but all the Gentiles also, who were once not God's people, and had not obtained mercy, shall become "God's people," and shall share His mercy, appropriating Israel's God as their own, and saying MY God! (.) May the blessed time, and Christ's world-wide kingdom, soon come in its power! Amen.