Hosea 2:1 - Frederick Brotherton Meyer's Commentary

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the Bitter Sin of Wandering from God

Hosea 2:1-13

Hosea is represented as having exhausted his expostulations upon his faithless wife. He has tried every arrow in love's quiver, but in vain; so now he sends his children, worse than motherless, to plead with their mother, before she brings upon them all irretrievable retribution.

Almost insensibly our mind passes from the pleadings of the human love to the divine Bridegroom. Often He has to erect thorn hedges about us -not that He takes pleasure in thwarting us, but that we may be diverted from ruin. There was no better method of turning Israel from her idols than by withholding that material prosperity which she thought they gave. Has not this been our experience also? Our mirth has ceased and our prosperity has vanished. We have sat amid the wrecks of a happy past. It is not that God has ceased to care for us, but that He longs to wean us back to Himself. Have we reached the point of saying, “It was better with me then than now?” Then let us be of good cheer! The dawn is already on the hills, and God's coming to us, in restoring grace, is like the breaking glory of the morning!

Related Commentaries of Hosea 2:1

Hosea 2:1-13

1 Say ye unto your brethren, Ammi;a and to your sisters, Ruhamah.

2 Plead with your mother, plead: for she is not my wife, neither am I her husband: let her therefore put away her whoredoms out of her sight, and her adulteries from between her breasts;

3 Lest I strip her naked, and set her as in the day that she was born, and make her as a wilderness, and set her like a dry land, and slay her with thirst.

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

5 For their mother hath played the harlot: she that conceived them hath done shamefully: for she said, I will go after my lovers, that give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, mine oil and my drink.b

6 Therefore, behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and makec a wall, that she shall not find her paths.

7 And she shall follow after her lovers, but she shall not overtake them; and she shall seek them, but shall not find them: then shall she say, I will go and return to my first husband; for then was it better with me than now.

8 For she did not know that I gave her corn, and wine,d and oil, and multiplied her silver and gold, which they prepared for Baal.

9 Therefore will I return, and take away my corn in the time thereof, and my wine in the season thereof, and will recovere my wool and my flax given to cover her nakedness.

10 And now will I discover her lewdnessf in the sight of her lovers, and none shall deliver her out of mine hand.

11 I will also cause all her mirth to cease, her feast days, her new moons, and her sabbaths, and all her solemn feasts.

12 And I will destroyg her vines and her fig trees, whereof she hath said, These are my rewards that my lovers have given me: and I will make them a forest, and the beasts of the field shall eat them.

13 And I will visit upon her the days of Baalim, wherein she burned incense to them, and she decked herself with her earrings and her jewels, and she went after her lovers, and forgat me, saith the LORD.