Hosea 2:4

And I will not have mercy upon her children; for they [be] the children of whoredoms.

Ver. 4. And I will not have mercy upon her children] Lo, here another "and" to those four before; and more dreadful than the rest. Like as that in Jeremiah 16:13, where "I will not show you favour," was worse to them than their captivity in a strange country. Say that God do cast off his people, yet if he say, "they shall be as if I had not cast them off, and will hear them," Zechariah 10:6, the affliction is nothing so great as when he sends an evil, an only evll without mixture of mercy, as here, Ezekiel 7:5. Oh, this pure wrath, this judgment without mercy, must needs be very heavy: when it is once grown to hatred, there is little hope: Hosea 9:15, "All their wickedness is in Gilgal, for there I hated them." God is not of himself μισανθρωπος, a hater of mankind, but the contrary, φιλανθρωπος, Titus 3:4. But such is the venomous nature of sin, and so contrary is it to God's both holy nature and just law, that he cannot but hate it in whomsoever he finds it: yet with thin difference, that he pities it rather in his saints, and hates it in his enemies: as we hate poison in a toad, but we pity it in a man; because in the one it is their nature, in the other their disease. And as revenge is the next effect of hatred, wicked men may expect no better dealing from God than a man would afford to his stubborn enemy. Pharaoh had plague upon plague: neither did the Lord leave him till he had dashed the breath out of his body: so true is that of the Psalmist, "With the froward thou wilt wrestle," Psalms 18:26, and that of Solomon, "The backslider in heart shall be filled with his own ways," Proverbs 14:14. He hath made a match with mischief, he shall have his belly full of it. He would needs have his own way, and had it ("for I would have purged him, but he would not be purged"). Now I will have my way another while: "for thou shalt not be purged from thy filthiness any more, till I have caused my fury to rest upon thee," Ezekiel 24:13. So our Saviour to those refractory Jews in the Gospel, "I would have gathered thee as the hen gathereth her chickens," I would, but thou wouldst not: therefore they shall "lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee." And I will not have mercy upon her children Lo, God is so incensed by a general defection, that he will make havoc and destroy even the mother with the children (which was Jacob's great fear, Gen 32:11), yea, he will dash the mother in pieces upon the children, as Shalman did at Betharbel, Hosea 10:14, he will put young and old into the same bag together, as fowlers deal by birds, which yet was forbidden by a law, Deuteronomy 22:6; his eyes shall not spare children, as Isaiah 13:18. And why?

For they are the children of whoredoms They are mali ex malis, the bad of the bad, as Jerome interprets it: they love and live in the adulteries of their mother: they take after her, as the birth usually followeth the belly, and as in a syllogism, the conclusion follows the weaker proposition. a Those Jews in the Gospel boldly boasted to our Saviour that they were not the children of fornication, for they had Abraham to their father, John 8:33, nay, God to their Father, John 8:41. But he as boldly telleth them, that they are a bastardly brood, yea, a serpentine seed; and that they were of their father the devil, John 8:44. And in another place, as serpents, saith he, "ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?" If mercy interpose not, as the cold grave must one day hold your bodies, so hot hell your souls. But I will have no mercy upon her children: for they are the children of fornications, i.e. they are not only misbegotten and illegitimate (which though no fault of theirs, yet is their reproach, as hath been said in the notes on the former chapter), but they are children of fornications in an active sense too; they have learned of their mother to fornicate: they are as good at resisting the Holy Ghost as ever their fathers were, Acts 7:51; they fill up the measure of their fathers' sins, that wrath may come upon them to the utmost. Children, as they derive from their parents a cursed birth blot, which comes by propagation; so they are very apt to fall into their vices by imitation: and then they sue both their own and their parent's iniquities.

a Kακου κορακος κακον ωον. Qualis mater talis filia. Partus sequitur ventrem.