And I will sow her unto Me in the earth.
God’s sowing
I. These words refute pantheism. God is not nature, nor is nature God. Pantheism teaches that there is no real and practical distinction between God and the universe. This form of infidelity ignores evil as evil, and all moral responsibility, for it declares that the soul is only a mode of the thought of God.
II. These words declare the Divine personality. Only on belief in a personal God can any sound superstructure of religion be raised.
III. These words show the abiding connection between God and His works. The Bible invariably attributes the operations of nature to the energy of God.
IV. These words show that the universe is the friend of the praying soul, One part of the universe is here represented as related to and acting upon another on behalf of Jezreel. All the forces of nature are arrayed against the disturber of the harmony of God’s kingdom.
V. These words teach that God will really answer prayer. The answers are, “I will sow her unto Me.” “I will have mercy upon her.” “Thou art My people.” The infinite God gives Himself to the soul, and becomes its present and eternal portion. (Christian Age.)
God’s people as seeds
1. God’s people are the seed of the earth.
2. Every godly man should so live as, either in life or in death, to be as a seed from whence many should spring.
3. The saints are sown unto Christ, they are seed for Christ, therefore all their fruit must be consecrated to Christ. (Jeremiah Burroughs.)
Hope for the forsaken
All the brighter side of the prophetic message is summed up in the most wonderful way in this verse, and there are few verses even in the Bible itself, so crowded with significance. Hosea sums up all that he himself had said, all that he had been teaching for some seven years. It is God whom he represents as speaking “these weighty” and matterful words:--And I will sow (an allusion, of course, to the meaning of Jezreel--‘God’s sowing’) her (the impersonated people of Israel) unto Me” (sow, and no longer scatter); and “I will have pity” upon, “not pitied”; and I will say unto “Not My people,” “Thou art My people”; and she shall say to Me, “My God.” Obviously, as soon as we can read the verse aright, we find in it the names of all Hosea’s children, and the whole significance of this prophetic message. On the one hand, we are reminded of the time in which Israel was scattered for their guilt among the heathen, the time in which God refused to pity them, or to acknowledge them as His own; and on the other hand, we are reminded of the better time in which, instead of being God-scattered, unpitied, and not My people, they were called God-sown, pitied, and sons of the living God; when the heavens smiled upon them, and the earth gave them her increase, and all the forces of nature, once so hostile, were at peace with them. (S. Cox, D. D.)
I will say to them who were not My people, Thou art My people; and they shall say, Thou art my God.
Sinners owning a covenant God
Read in the light of the context, these words seem to refer to the nation of Israel only. But in the ninth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, Paul quotes them as having a more comprehensive reference. He there applies them to the “vessels of mercy,” who are “called” in the Gospel day, “not of the Jews only, but also of the Gentiles.” These words foretell the formation of a gracious relation between God and sinners, and the mutual acknowledgment of that relation. On His side He shall own the outcasts as His people. On their side they shall own Him as their God. What is implied in sinners saying to Jehovah, “Thou art my God”?
I. The gracious relation thus acknowledged.
1. And first of all, it is a new covenant relation. Naturally, as is here intimated, we are “not” the people of God. When the covenant which He made with us in Adam, our representative, was broken, we ceased to be His people and He ceased to be our God. We, by wilful apostasy, have cast Him off; and He, in holy and righteous displeasure, has cast us off. Our carnal minds are enmity against Him, and His law has only condemnation and death for us. We are miserable outcasts from our Maker. We are “without God in the world.” But He has made a covenant with His Chosen: and in that new and better covenant He has made provision that the gracious relation so fearfully ruptured shall be more than restored. He has covenanted with His only begotten Son, as the Head of an innumerable multitude of our outcast race, that on condition of His assuming their nature and doing all His will in their redemption He will, in a very special and gracious sense, be a God to Him, and in the same special and gracious sense be a God to them.
2. In this new covenant relation, as willing to be our God in Christ, God offers Himself to us unconditionally and individually in the Gospel. It was such an offer of Himself He made to the Israelites when, from the summit of the flaming mount, He proclaimed--“I am the Lord thy God, who have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” It was God in the person of Christ, as we learn from Stephen (Acts 7:38), who there announced His willingness to be the God of Abraham’s seed. And to these sinners, deeply infected as they were soon to show, with the idolatry and moral corruption or Egypt, that was a most free offer; and it is expressed in absolute and unconditional terms, clogged with no condition of any sort whatever. It was also an individual offer, made to every Israelite in the camp without exception, so that, every soul in all that host, the vilest and most abject was warranted as much as Moses and Aaron, to close with it, and on the ground of it to take Jehovah as his own personal God. Now we are most earnest you should realise this day that God is making to each one of you, through Christ, the same absolutely free and gracious offer to be your God. Only with this great difference, “that He is making it not from the mount that might be touched and that burned with fire, and from blackness and darkness and tempest”--not from among that dark obscurity of type, and rigor of ordinance and law tending to bondage and fear, which beset the revelation of covenant mercy and love under the old economy, but in the clear sweet light of the risen Sun of Righteousness, and through the lips of ambassadors whom He has sent to beseech you in Christ’s stead to be reconciled to Him. “Incline your ear, and come unto Me: hear, and your soul shall live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David” (Isaiah 4:3).
3. For, be it remarked further, that while God offers Himself in this relation to all, He actually gives Himself in this relation to those who are made willing by His Spirit to close with the offer by faith. This highest and holiest of covenant unions, like every other covenant union, is formed by mutual consent. Thus the sons of the stranger are said to “join themselves to the Lord,” in the way of “taking hold of His covenant”: in doing which they first take hold of Christ the Surety of the Covenant with the grasp of a living and entire faith when brought near them in the Gospel; and then, in and through Christ, they take hold of the God of the covenant, and enter into all the fulness of His covenanted love and grace (Romans 3:29-30). And mark how faith avails to bring the guiltiest and vilest into all the good and blessedness of this endearing relation to Jehovah. Faith, laying hold of Christ, unites us to Him. It makes us so vitally one with Him that we participate in all the boundless merit of His righteousness. And, having Christ’s righteousness as our own, there is no more any legal obstacle to keep us outcasts from God.
4. For observe yet again, that in this relation God gives Himself to believing sinners in all He is and all He has. “He is not ashamed to be called their God” (Hebrews 11:16). And why not ashamed to be called their God? It is because He acts toward them with a Divine munificence worthy of Himself, glorifying the exceeding riches of His grace in giving them not this or that kind and measure of good, but in giving them Himself, the Fountain and Centre of all good. Think of the ineffable dignity and privilege of being able to say of Him whom angels count it their supreme happiness to adore, He is my God; mine in all His essential perfections: His wisdom mine, to enlighten and guide me; His power mine, to uphold and protect me; His holiness mine, to raise me to walk in the light as He is in the light; His justice mine, to guard me as one of Christ’s ransomed ones, and to guarantee to me all the inheritance He has purchased with His blood; His truth mine, to fulfil to me every word He has spoken and every expectation and longing His Spirit has wakened within me; His love mine, to delight in me and rejoice over me to do me good; His infinitude mine, to be the measure of the good and the blessedness which I have in Him; and His eternity mine, to be the duration through which it shall all be enjoyed. “All things are yours; whether Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come; all are yours, and ye are Christ’s and Christ is God’s” (1 Corinthians 3:22-23). Can you contemplate this, the inheritance of the saints in light, without exclaiming, “ Happy is the people whose God is the Lord”?
II. What is implied in the acknowledgment of this relation which our text foretells? It is, as we have hinted, a divinely wrought acknowledgment. Neither reason, nor conscience, nor moral suasion, though that were put forth with the tongue of an angel, will persuade the soul in its natural hatred and fear and distrust of God to make it. It is the response of the newborn nature to the call of the Spirit of God within.
I. It implies, first of all, the believing personal acceptance of the offer which God makes of Himself to sinners indefinitely and individually in the Gospel. Proud unbelief, putting on the deceitful guise of humility, may tell you that it is presumption for such as you to claim Jehovah as your God. You virtually say by that refusal that all His professed love and goodwill toward you is insincere, that His word is not faithful and worthy of all acceptation.
2. This acknowledgment implies, further, the taking of God as our only and all-sufficing portion. Naturally, our carnal hearts will not have God for their portion. They that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh. But these earthly things can no more satisfy the nature and cravings of the spiritual essence within us than the husks that the swine did eat could satisfy the prodigal. Deeply and unfeignedly that sinner grieves that, in following lying vanities, he should so long have forsaken his own mercies. But in proportion to the shame and sorrow of his penitence is his satisfaction that in Christ, and God in Him, he has found at last the good, the rest, the home of his heart.
3. Again, this acknowledgment implies the surrender of ourselves to God as our Lawgiver and King and the great End of our being. If we naturally dislike God as our portion, we still more dislike the thought of entire subjection to Him as our King. Many, indeed, would wish to enjoy His favour and His benefits, provided that, free from His holy authority and control, they could get following their carnal inclinations and living aa they list. But this will not do. It is an eternal moral impossibility. God must change His nature and reverse all the laws of His moral government ere He can make you happy while you are unwilling to be holy, and ere you can enjoy Him as your portion while you will not know, obey, and submit to His will, in all things, as your Lawgiver and King. And most certainly on these terms you can never enter the bond of His covenant (Hebrews 8:10). The true-hearted covenanter is well pleased with God’s covenant in all respects. He delights in the law of the Lord after the inward man (Psalms 119:140). He feels that God has infinite claims upon the love and loyalty of his heart and the perfect obedience of his life. As He who made him, and made him a rational and immortal being responsible to Himself; as He who has made goodness and mercy to follow him through all his sinful (lays when he would have been honoured in shutting him up in hell; as He who has redeemed his life from destruction with the blood of His Own Son, and hid his life with Christ in Himself forever--he feels that He has claims upon him which the love and never-ceasing service of eternity shall fail to discharge, but which shall rather ever grow in a still accumulating debt.
4. In a word, this acknowledgment implies the explicit and formal devotement of ourselves to God. They “shall say, Thou art my God.” Not merely think it or feel it, but say it. Say it explicitly, formally, solemnly. With the heart he believeth, unto righteousness, and with the mouth he makes confession unto salvation. Such an avowed devotement of ourselves to God is really made in all spiritual worship. In all true prayer there is an owning of God s sovereignty and of our dependence which says, “Thou art my God.” In all true praise there is an owning of God’s goodness and of our obligations which says, “Thou art my God.” But the honour of God, the promptings of the new nature, and the necessity of binding our wayward hearts by the firmest and closest of bonds, demand that this avouching of the Lord to be our God should be made in the most explicit and public manner possible to man (Isaiah 44:3-6). (Original Secession Magazine.).