“You ought to tell her how you feel,” or something to that effect, says Hathaway to Lewis as they sip their pints at a pub along the Thames in Oxford. This television series Beth and I enjoy created romantic tension by having Lewis lose his wife of many years and then eventually find himself attracted to the female pathologist he meets at so many murder scenes. But his memories of his wife and natural reticence make him unable to speak his feelings. So, in show after show, we see Lewis and the doctor drawn to each other but then held apart by Lewis’s inability to find the words to express his heart.
So it is perhaps appropriate that there is a need for words at the end of a prophetic book full of its own romantic tension. On the one hand there is, as one commentator put it, the “half-told” love story of Hosea and his unfaithful wife Gomer. On the other hand, there is God and His unfaithful people Israel. Like God tells Hosea to go and redeem his wife and bring her back to him, God is seeking to redeem Israel and bring them back to Himself. But a lack of words is standing in the way.
In our text for this Sunday, the closing chapter of Hosea, chapter 14, Hosea gives some words in verses 2-3 for Israel to say as they return to the Lord. Verse two begins in the NLT translation we are reading, “Bring your confessions, and return to the Lord.” But that is a bit of a paraphrase based on the content of what follows. Literally, the prophet told Israel to “Bring words, and return to the Lord.”
That “bring words” is a bit enigmatic. It could be based on one of the big themes of the prophets, the inadequacy of acts of worship and animal sacrifices when unaccompanied by genuine faith and commitment to God or by just/righteous living. Thus Psalm 51:16-17 says,
“For you have no delight in sacrifice,
if I were to give you a burnt offering, you would not be pleased.
The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit;
a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.”
Presumably, then, in Hosea the idea would be that the “words” of confession being brought were evidence of a broken spirit and contrite heart. But while Hosea chastises Israel for its sacrifices to false gods, unlike the psalmist or other prophets (e.g. Amos last week) he does not really condemn legitimate sacrifice to the true God. So it’s probably better to take this injunction to “bring words” as shorthand for “bring [these] words,” meaning what follows, the actual prayer of confession Hosea offers.
Of course, as Scripture teaches in other places, words alone are not enough. So the confession contains actual commitment to forswear trusting in other sources of security (military resources, whether allies or their own cavalry) and worshipping those other gods with whom they have been unfaithful. It’s much like a human-to-human confession of unfaithfulness that includes a sincere “never again.”
As often in the Bible, the metaphors are mixed in Hosea and alongside the marriage and faithfulness imagery, we find parent-child imagery to describe God’s relationship with His people, particularly in the use of the tribe name “Ephraim” for the whole nation and in the naming of Hosea’s children in chapter 1, Lo-ruhamah, “not loved,” and Lo-ammi “not my people.” In a sweet culmination to those images, as the prayer of confession rejects the other gods, it concludes, “No, in you alone do the orphans find mercy,” expressing the trust that this “orphan” people will mind mercy in God.
And God does respond in mercy in the following verses, promising love that knows no bounds and an anger “gone forever.” It’s interesting that God’s compassionate blessing is compared no less than three times to the natural beauty and provision of Lebanon. One suggestion is that the worship of Baal idols had its origin from the north, in Lebanon. Thus God is promising that He would give His people all that they had hoped to receive by worshipping a false god who came from that direction.
There are those Christians who have little use for rote prayers and perhaps even less for expressions of corporate confession. I would suggest that we might learn from Hosea (and perhaps from DI Lewis and our own human relationships) just how very much we sometimes need words, especially words of sorrow, confession, and repentance. If we cannot come up with our own, then may they be given to us, so that we may offer God true repentance and trust, and then receive His gracious forgiveness and blessing.