Hosea 2:15

THE VALLEY OF ACHOR

‘I will give her … the valley of Achor for a door of hope.’

Hosea 2:15

The prophet Hosea is remarkable for the frequent use which he makes of events in the former history of his people. So he foretells that the old story of the wilderness will be repeated once more. In that wilderness God will speak to the heart of Israel. Its barrenness shall be changed into the fruitfulness of vineyards, where the purpling clusters hang ripe for the thirsty travellers. And not only will the sorrows that He sends thus become sources of refreshment, but the gloomy gorge through which they journey—the valley of Achor—will be a door of hope. In all our difficulties and sorrows and perplexities; in the losses that rob our homes of their light; in the petty annoyances that diffuse their irritation through so much of our days; it is within our power to turn them all into occasions for a firmer grasp of God, and so to make them openings by which a happier hope may flow into our souls.

I. But the promise, like all God’s promises, has its well-defined conditions.—Achan has to be killed and put safe out of the way first, or no shining hope will stand out against the black walls of the defile. The tastes which knit us to the perishable world, the yearnings for Babylonish garments and wedges of gold, must be coerced and subdued. Swift, sharp, unrelenting justice must be done on ‘the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eye, and the pride of life’ if our trials are ever to become doors of hope. There is no natural tendency in the mere fact of sorrow and pain to make God’s love more discernible, or to make our hope any firmer. All depends on how we use the trial, or, as I say, first stone Achan, and then hope!

II. So, the trouble which detaches us from earth gives us new hope.—Sometimes the effect of our sorrows and annoyances and difficulties is to rivet us more firmly to earth. The eye has a curious power, which they call persistence of vision, of retaining the impression made upon it, and therefore of seeming to see the object for a definite time after it has really been withdrawn. If you whirl a bit of blazing stick round, you will see a circle of fire, though there is only a point moving rapidly in the circle. The eye has its memory like the soul. And the soul has its power of persistence like the eye, and that power is sometimes kindled into activity by the fact of loss.

III. The trouble which we bear rightly with God’s help gives new hope.—If we have made our sorrow an occasion for learning, by living experience, somewhat more of His exquisitely varied and ever ready power to aid and bless, then it will teach us firmer confidence in these inexhaustible resources which we have thus once more proved. ‘Tribulation worketh patience, and patience experience, and experience hope.’ That is the order. You cannot put patience and experience into a parenthesis, and, omitting them, bring hope out of tribulation. But if, in my sorrow, I have been able to keep quiet because I have had hold of God’s hand, and if in that unstruggling submission I have found that from His hand I have been upheld, and had strength above mine own infused into me, then my memory will give the threads with which hope weaves her bright web. I build upon two things—God’s unchangeableness, and His help already received,—and upon these strong foundations I may wisely and safely rear a palace of hope, which shall never prove a castle in the air. The past, when it is God’s past, is the surest pledge for the future. Because He has been with us in six troubles, therefore we may be sure that in seven He will not forsake us.

Illustration

‘Immortality!—that word suggests the highest application of this text. People call the world a “vale of tears.” I do not say whether that is a good name for it or not, but if earth is the valley of trouble, then the supreme instance of the way in which it becomes a “door of hope” is that, when we get up to the very head of it, and the black cliffs seem to stand there and block all further advance, a door will open, and we shall pass into a short tunnel and come out into light on the other side the hill, where we shall find broad plains, a bluer sky, a brighter sun, and the trouble will all have died down into perfect peace.’

(SECOND OUTLINE)

HOPE IN TROUBLE

We have before us in this chapter the history of a soul. What was here written of a nation was written of souls. It was true of the nation, just because the nation was a nation of souls. In all dealings with God, the individual is the reality of the nation.

I. The soul was at first the betrothed and the espoused of God.—Each several soul ought to be so.

It is only in God that any soul can find rest. Why? Because the soul was made for God, for One perfectly good, perfectly lovely, perfectly loving, unchangeable, ever new yet ever constant, the same yesterday and to-day and for ever, and yet Whose mercies fail not but are new every morning. No wonder if the soul that will not have Him has nothing, or if the soul that strays from Him strays from its rest.

II. Now that is the case with the soul here described.—The faithless, truant soul has become tired of God. It was perhaps never His really. So then to all alike, though not quite in equal degree, the saying is applicable; the soul that will not have God has said to itself, as it is here written, ‘I will go after my lovers, that give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, mine oil and my drink.’ That is the idea of the lovers: they are all those things from which the soul hopes for advantage.

It may be pleasure. Or, perhaps the fancied ‘lover’ is not pleasure, but something else. There are sordid souls as well as sensual. And there are thousands everywhere who have no such definite aims as these: not worshippers of pleasure or money: men who have little energy and no plan of life; but who yet, from day to day, are equally truants from God, and equally seeking their happiness—such happiness as they know of—in the things of this world. To all alike the words are appropriate: would to God that they might be convincing and converting too!

III. The soul has deserted God and gone after its lovers.—Does He let the matter alone? The chapter before us discloses a far different scene. It details to us God’s dealings with the soul which has refused Him. Take a few particulars.

(1) There is, first, a discipline of disappointment.

(2) There is, next, a discipline of deprivation.

(3) There is a discipline of desolation. A discipline, observe: there is love in it still.

(4) The issue and end of all these dealings. The soul, disappointed, deprived, desolated for her sin, says at last, ‘I will go and return to my first husband, for then was it better with me than now.’ The words are almost those of the Prodigal Son, ‘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.’ Yes, the thought does come at last, It was better for me when I was with God. Such is the one hope of sinners. Such is the end which God himself proposes in His ministry of patient discipline towards those erring and faithless souls which He first created for Himself, and then bought back for Himself by the blood of Jesus Christ.

The subject has great sweetness in it. This, then, is what God is.

This God Whom I have been escaping from, has that in Him which would be my soul’s rest. Nay, has that in Him without which my soul never can know rest. And this God, from Whom I have been escaping, not only has in Him that which would make me happy, but also—marvellous thought—is anxious that I should reach it. What does this chapter say? That God is engaged in the pursuit of truant souls, not for punishment, but for love. There is a whole course and chain of means and efforts for bringing them back to Himself for happiness. Everything that befalls me has this end.

—Dean Vaughan.

Illustration

‘The valley of Achor was a long wild pass up through the hills. The prophet says that a door of hope would open there, like the Mont Cenis tunnel, which conducts from the precipices and torrents of the northern side of the Alps to the sunny plains of Italy. That door opens hard by to the heap of stones, beneath which Achan lay, who had troubled Israel. You must put away your Achans, if you would see doors of hope swing open before you.’