Book of Hosea Chapter 11 Vs. 1

 

The Lord's Love for Israel

When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt. Hos. 11:1

When Israel was... The 13th prophecy in Hosea (Hos. 11:1, fulfilled). Next, Hos. 11:5. The prediction concerned the Christchild and bringing Him up out of Egypt after Joseph had been warned to take Him there to save His life (Mat. 2:13-15).

called my son... Quoted of Christ in the N.T. in Mat. 2:15; cp. Exo. 4:23.

In tender words reminiscent of the Exodus from Egypt (compare Exodus 4:22-23), the Lord reassured Israel of His intense love for her. His compassion for her was aroused (compare Isa. 12:1; 40:1-2; 49:13; Jer. 31:10-14; Zech. 1:12-17; see Matthew 2:15 for Matthew’s analogical use of this verse in relationship to Jesus Christ).

Israel was known as the family of Jacob for their stay in Egypt. They became known as the nation of Israel on their journey to the Promised Land. God had seen them in their destitute condition, and He had mercy upon them. God took them for His family and brought them out of Egypt. God redeemed them from heavy bondage in Egypt and declared them to be His son. God loved them above all other nations.

THE FATHERHOOD AND HUMANITY OF GOD

FROM the thick jungle of Hosea’s travail, the eleventh chapter breaks like a high and open mound. The prophet enjoys the first of his two clear visions-that of the past. Judgment continues to descend. Israel’s sun is near his setting, but before he sinks-

A lingering light he fondly throws

On the dear hills, whence first he rose.

Across these confused and vicious years, through which he has painfully made his way, Hosea sees the tenderness and the romance of the early history of his people. And although he must strike the old despairing note-that, by the insincerity of the present generation, all the ancient guidance of their God must end in this!-yet for some moments the blessed memory shines by itself, and God’s mercy appears to triumph over Israel’s ingratitude. Surely their sun will not set; Love must prevail. To which assurance a later voice from the Exile has added, in Hos. 10:10-11, a confirmation suitable to its own circumstances.

The early history of Israel was a romance. Think of it historically. Before the Most High there spread an array of kingdoms and peoples. At their head were three strong princes-sons indeed of God, if all the heritage of the past, the power of the present, and the promise of the future be tokens. Egypt, wrapt in the rich and jeweled web of centuries, basked by Nile and Pyramid, all the wonder of the world’s art in his dreamy eyes. Opposite him Assyria, with barer but more massive limbs, stood erect upon his highlands, grasping in his sword the promise of the world’s power. Between the two, and rising both of them, yet with his eyes westward on an empire of which neither dreamed, the Phoenician on his sea-coast built his storehouses and sped his navies, the promise of the world’s wealth. It must ever remain the supreme romance of history, that the true son of God, bearer of His love and righteousness to all mankind, should be found, not only outside this powerful trinity, but in the puny and despised captive of one of them-in a people that was not a state, that had not a country, that was without a history, and, if appearances be true, was as yet devoid of even the rudiments of civilization-a child people and a slave.

That was the Romance, and Hosea gives us the Grace which made it. When Israel was a child then I loved him. The verb is a distinct impulse: I began, I learned, to love him. God’s eyes, that passed unheeding the adult princes of the world, fell upon this little slave boy, and He loved him and gave him a career: from Egypt I called him to be My son.

Now, historically, it was the persuasion of this which made Israel. All their distinctiveness and character, their progress from a level with other nomadic tribes to the rank of the greatest religious teachers of humanity, started from the memory of these two facts-that God loved them, and that God called them. This was an unfailing conscience-the obligation that they were not their own, the irresistible motive to repentance even in their utmost backsliding, the unquenchable hope of a destiny in their direst days of defeat and scattering.

Some, of course, may cavil at the narrow, national scale on which such a belief was held, but let them: remember that it was held in trust for all mankind. To snarl that Israel felt this son-ship to God only for themselves, is to forget that it is they who have persuaded humanity that this is the only kind of son-ship worth claiming. Almost every other nation of antiquity imagined a filial relation to the deity, but it was either through some fabulous physical descent, and then often confined only to kings and heroes, or by some mystical mingling of the Divine with the human, which was just as gross and sensuous. Israel alone defined the connection as a historical and a moral one. The sons of God are begotten not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. Son-ship to God is something not physical, but moral and historical, into which men are carried by a supreme awakening to the Divine love and authority. Israel, it is true, felt this only in a general way for the nation as a whole; but their conception of it embraced just those moral contents which form the glory of Christ’s doctrine of the Divine son-ship of the individual. The belief that God is our Father does not come to us with our carnal birth-except in possibility: the persuasion of it is not conferred by our baptism except in so far as that is Christ’s own seal to the fact that God Almighty loves us and has marked us for His own. To us son-ship is a becoming, not a being-the awakening of our adult minds into the surprise of a Father’s undeserved mercy, into the constraint of His authority and the assurance of the destiny He has laid up for us. It is conferred by love, and confirmed by duty. Neither has power brought it, nor wisdom, nor wealth, but it has come solely with the wonder of the knowledge that God loves us, and has always loved us, as well as in the sense, immediately following, of a true vocation to serve Him. Son-ship which is less than this is no son-ship at all. But so much as this is possible to every man through Jesus Christ. His constant message is that the Father loves every one of us, and that if we know that love, we are God’s sons indeed. To them who feel it, adoption into the number and privileges of the sons of God comes with the amazement and the romance which glorified God’s choice of the child-slave Israel. Behold, they cry, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God. (1Jhn. 3:1-24)

Israel’s ingratitude punished.

Once again, the Lord recalled Israel’s early history to contrast the past with the present (cf. Hos. 9:10; 10:1). At the beginning the Lord’s relationship with Israel had been like that of a father to a son (cf. Exo. 4:22-23). (On the quotation of this passage, see Mat. 2:15.) The Lord displayed His love toward the nation by summoning her from Egypt (cf. Deut. 7:8; also cf. Hos. 12:9, 12:13; 13:4).