I Will Hedge Up Her Way With Thorns – Hosea 2:1-13

When God disciplines His people He often creates “hedges of thorns” that will prevent us from getting what it is we think we need.  But we need discipline more than anything else.  It is pain brought into our lives to direct our hearts and attention back to Yahweh.

Say to your brothers, “You are my people,” and to your sisters, “You have received mercy.”

“Plead with your mother, plead—for she is not my wife, and I am not her husband—that she put away her whoring from her face, and her adultery from between her breasts; lest I strip her naked and make her as in the day she was born, and make her like a wilderness, and make her like a parched land, and kill her with thirst.  Upon her children also I will have no mercy, because they are children of whoredom.  For their mother has played the whore; she who conceived them has acted shamefully.  For she said, ‘I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.’

Therefore I will hedge up her way with thorns, and I will build a wall against her, so that she cannot find her paths.  She shall pursue her lovers but not overtake them, and she shall seek them but shall not find them.  Then she shall say, ‘I will go and return to my first husband, for it was better for me then than now.’  And she did not know that it was I who gave her the grain, the wine, and the oil, and who lavished on her silver and gold, which they used for Baal.

Therefore I will take back my grain in its time, and my wine in its season, and I will take away my wool and my flax, which were to cover her nakedness.  Now I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, and no one shall rescue her out of my hand.  And I will put an end to all her mirth, her feasts, her new moons, her Sabbaths, and all her appointed feasts.  And I will lay waste her vines and her fig trees, of which she said, ‘These are my wages, which my lovers have given me.’

I will make them a forest, and the beasts of the field shall devour them.  And I will punish her for the feast days of the Baals when she burned offerings to them and adorned herself with her ring and jewelry, and went after her lovers and forgot me, declares the LORD.  (Hosea 2:1-13 ESV)

Yahweh now speaks a word of judgment on Israel for her unfaithfulness to Him in their worship of Baal.  But He begins with a plea to Israel’s children to receive His mercy, to be His people, to hold to covenant relationship with Him.  He is appealing to the remnant of those who truly believe and explaining that their “mother” is no longer His wife.  She sought another lover, Baal, thinking he would provide her with grain, oil, wine, wool, etc., giving her love to him to get these things, but it was really Yahweh who provides and provided all this.  Baal is no god at all.

But now Yahweh is going to shut Israel off from worship of Baal by sending an invading army to take away all that sustains the nation.  Then she will return to her first husband, Yahweh, and reject Baal.  In the law of Moses, Deuteronomy 24:1,2, Yahweh forbids a woman who is divorced from her husband and then marries another to return to her first husband.  But here He in essence has divorced Israel but will restore her to Himself as his wife once again after this fierce judgment.