I will go and return to my place, till they acknowledge their offence, and seek my face: in their affliction they will seek me early.
I will go and return to my place - i:e., withdraw my favour. The image to which God compares himself (Hosea 5:14) is that of a lion going and returning to his covert, after having taken his prey.
Till they acknowledge their offence. The Hebrew includes the idea, also, 'until they suffer the penalty of their guilt.' Probably 'accepting the punishment of their guilt,' "whose possessors slay them, and hold themselves not guilty," is included in the idea (cf. Zechariah 11:5), as the English version translates. (Compare Leviticus 26:40-41; Jeremiah 29:12-13; Ezekiel 6:9; Ezekiel 20:43 "Ye shall loathe yourselves in your own sight for all your evils that ye have committed;" Ezekiel 36:31.)
And seek my face - i:e., seek my favour, (Proverbs 29:26, margin)
In their affliction they will seek me early - i:e., diligently; rising up before dawn to seek me (Psalms 119:147: cf. Psalms 78:34).
Remarks:
(1) They who set snares to entrap others to their destruction shall be caught themselves in the judgment of God. They who, as ministers of God and in high places, ought to have been watchers of the people, guarding them from evil, had become hunters of their souls to their ruin (Hosea 5:1). "Profound" and deeply laid as were their schemes of revolt from their allegiance to Yahweh (Hosea 5:1), they were "not hid from" God's all-seeing eye (Hosea 5:3). Man's master-strokes of state policy, as they think them, prove in the end to be but laborious and ingenious foolishness, fatal to the originators and to all connected with them. State expediency was Jeroboam's plea for the worship of the calves, as it has been the plea in all ages for compromises of the truth. But as the division of the nation was of God's appointment, had he with simple faith, done what God had ordained, and continued to worship in the temple of Jerusalem God would have assuredly blessed him and Israel in the end; whereas, by a tortuous and God-dishonouring policy of man's devising, he brought ultimately on his line and upon his kingdom destruction, from the Lord. Let the worldly wise remember God's words, "I know Ephraim" (Hosea 5:3); and so learn, as under God's all-seeing eye at all times, to follow the true wisdom, the beginning of which is the fear of the Lord.
(2) It is the ruin of transgressors that, like Israel, "they will not frame their doings to turn unto their God" (Hosea 5:4). The reason is, because there is in their inmost souls a spirit of apostasy, emanating from the father of evil, to whom they yield themselves up, and resist the Spirit of God who waits to be gracious if they would, but suffer Him. "They know not the Lord;" for if they knew what a loving God He is, they would not so perversely and suicidally turn from Him. But "pride" is their bane (Hosea 5:5). They are too proud to own themselves wrong, and to humble themselves before Him as sinners, and to become meek, gentle, and loving toward their fellow-men. Their pride is betrayed in their haughty bearing and self-satisfied expression of countenance; and as "pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall," their fall is nigh at hand; and with them shall fall all who take part with them, as Judah ultimately did with Israel.
(3) Sinners think to compound for past disobedience with sacrifice. But there is a time when it is too late to seek the Lord, even though one offer to Him costly gifts. That awful stage was already reached by Israel. The same stage shall be at last reached by all who long harden themselves against the grace of God. Slavish fear, when the judgment from God is in the act of descending, will constrain even the most reprobate to seek God: but then the Lord's words will be proved terribly true, "Ye shall seek me, and shall not find me; and where I am, there ye cannot come" (John 7:34). Even the godliness of a Josiah, though it saved his own soul, could not turn away "the fierceness of God's great wrath against Judah, because of all the provocations that Manasseh had provoked him withal" (2 Kings 23:25-27). Let us be wise in time and "seek the Lord while He is to be found."
(4) The respite afforded to transgressors is short (Hosea 5:7). The unfaithfulness and treachery toward God of the Israelite fathers was transmitted to the children. The case is peculiarly desperate when the children, who ought to be the hope of the next age, are reared in the apostasy of the parents, the men of the present generation. Nothing then remains but immediate judgments, cutting off the apostate race. "Their portions" (Hosea 5:7) shall perish with them; whereas the Lord is the everlasting portion of His people.
(5) The prophecies of Scripture are "that which shall surely be" (Hosea 5:9), because they are "grounded" on the truth, the justice, and the holiness of God. They who "remove the boundary" which the law of God hath set (Hosea 5:10), in order that they may, in self-willed presumption, "walk after the commandment" of men, shall, like Ephraim, who preferred Jeroboam's will to God's will, suffer God's just "wrath poured out" like an overwhelming flood. As Israel's sin was their following man's ungodly will, so should their punishment be their being led away against their will, at the will of the men who should be their conquerors.
(6) The judgments of God at first are, like the transgressor's own beginnings of apostasy, slow, silent, and imperceptible, as the "moth" that eateth a garment, or the "rottenness" that gradually and without observation sows the seeds of consumption in the body (Hosea 5:12). When the man is fancying himself safe and sound, a moral decay has set in at the heart safe and with it come the first small unobserved beginnings of God's judgments. If the sinner would take heed to these lesser judgments in time, he would escape those greater and final ones, which "tear" to destruction like a "lion" rushing upon his victim (Hosea 5:14). But the sinner, instead of searching into the deeply-seated spiritual cause of his malady, and of God's consequent judgments, and so finding the true remedy (Hosea 5:13), flees to human physicians of no value, who only aggravate the disease. So Ephraim, when he saw his sickness, went to the Assyrian; and Judah, when he saw his wound, sent to King Jareb. These human objects of trust proved to the impenitent unbelievers who had recourse to them, not "defenders," as they had hoped, but God's "avengers" on their impenitence and unbelief. So will it ever be with all who, instead of penitently bowing under God's judgments for sin, "make flesh their arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord" (Jeremiah 17:5).
(7) God withdraws His presence and His grace until men "acknowledge their offence, and seek His face." The first step in repentance is to acknowledge our offence, and to accept as justly due whatever punishment for iniquity God has seen fit to lay upon us. The next step is to "seek the face of God" (Hosea 5:15). Without the latter, despair, not repentance, would be the result, as in the case of Judah's remorse. Without the former step, to seek God's face would be presumption. Affliction, unless it be sanctified, only hardens; but when the grace of God teaches the lesson designed by it, the afflicted penitent seeks the Lord early, and with all diligence, as Daniel and the godly Jews did in Babylon, (Daniel 9:1-27.) Then there is a dawn of hope when the sinner complains more of his sins than of his sufferings. May God thus teach us all by His Spirit to seek Him early, that so we may find Him!