02/22/2025 – Day 237 – Hosea – Chapters 1 – 7 / Verses 6: 1, 2. Return to the Lord
First by way of summarizing the book, I turn to Halley’s Bible Handbook for a few excerpts:
“Hosea was a prophet of the Northern kingdom. He began his ministry when Israel, under Jeroboam II, was at the zenith off its power. He was a younger contemporary of Amos, an older contemporary of Isaiah and Micah. As a child he may possibly have known Jonah. The kings in whoever reigns he prophesied were Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and Jeroboam II king of Israel.”
The Situation
Some 200 years before Hosea’s time the Ten Tribes had seceded, and set up an independent kingdom, with the Golden Calf as its official national god. Meantime God had sent the prophets Elijah, Elisha, Jonah, Amos and now Hosea.
Chapter 6: A Call to Repentence
“Come and let us return to the Lord; For He has torn, but He will heal us; He has stricken, but He will bind us up. After two days he will revive us;
On the third day He will raise us up; That we may live in His sight. Let us know, Let us pursue the knowledge of the LORD. His going forth is established as the morning; He will come to us like the rain, Like the latter and former rain to the earth.” Hosea 6: 1-2
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Commentary from: “The Evidence Study Bible – NKJV””
“God has made all his waves and his billows go over you; the Law has sounded its trumpet in your ear and brought your sin to remembrance; conscience has started up in alar from its long sleep and cries like a mighty man that wakes up from his slumber and finds the camp besieged. You are troubled and sore broken; your heart is melted like wax in the midst of your bowels, so that while you are sitting in the house of God to-day you are complaining –‘I am the man that seen affliction,’ and perhaps worse than that you are groaning ‘His wrath lies hard on upon me, I cannot look up’…
“Oh! may you, nay hearer, you upon whom I fix my eye this morning, you whose case is the case of Israel in Hosea , may you say, ‘Come, and let us return unto the Lord, for he has torn, and he will heal us, he has smitten, and he will bind us up.’ I desire to come straight up to you who are in this condition and put my hand inside yours, holding you fast while I strive in God’s name to reason with you, beseeching God the Holy Spirit reason better than I can, sweetly moving your soul, til you say, ‘I will arise and go unto my Father.’ ” Charles Spurgeon
Soli Deo Gloria!