Then said [God], Call his name Loammi: for ye [are] not my people, and I will not be your [God].
Ver. 9. Call his name Loammi] Nomen extremum et deploratum, saith Pareus, the last and most lamentable name of all, containing a most heavy, but spiritual, and therefore less sensible, punishment, viz. an utter abjection and abdication from the covenant, from grace, from God, from life eternal.
For ye are not my people] But, being totally cashiered, and discovenanted; "Are ye not as the children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel, saith the Lord? Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir?" Amos 9:7 : q.d. True it is, I have brought you up out of Egypt (and therein you greatly glory), but have I not done as much as all this for those profane nations here mentioned? with and among whom, hence forward I shall reckon you, for you are no people of mine, but discarded, and dispeopled. Till the covenant made with Abraham, all nations were suffered to walk in their own ways, Acts 14:16, as fishes pass at liberty through the paths of the seas, Psalms 8:8. One person was no more respected than another. But as soon as it was said, I will be thy God, and the God of thy seed after thee, the Church became as fish cast into a pond for peculiar use, and was divided from other nations no otherwise than light was from darkness in the first creation, or than Goshen was from Egypt in that wonderful separation. But here God seems to rescind his own act, to cast off the people of his purchase, and utterly to disown them; as once before he also did, when he fathered them upon Moses, saying, "Thy people, which thou hast brought out of Egypt," &c., Exodus 32:7. But this (we must know) is no other than mutatio rei non Dei, effectus non affectus, facti non consilii, not a change of God's will, but only of his works. "For hath God indeed cast away his people? God forbid. God hath not cast away his people, whom he foreknew," Romans 11:1,2. "Thus saith the Lord God, If heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel, for all that they have done, saith the Lord," Jeremiah 31:37. And albeit (by an angry aposiopesis) he says here, "I will not be your God" (the word "God" is not in the original, ab irate omittitur, it is omited from anger, saith Mercer), yet to show that he is Baal Chemah, One that can rule his wrath, as Nahum 1:2, he subjoineth here, Hosea 1:10 ,