Commentaires bibliques

When I would have healed Israel - God begins anew by appealing to Israel, that all which He had done to heal them, had but served to make their sin more evident, and "that," from highest to lowest, as to all manners and ways of sin. When the flash of God's light on the sinner's conscience enlightens it not, it only discloses its darkness. The name "Israel" includes the whole people; the names, Ephraim and Samaria, probably are meant to designate the chief among them, Ephraim having been their royal tribe, and being the chief tribe among them; Samaria being their royal city. The sins, which Hoses denounces in this chapter, are chiefly the sins of the great, which, from them, had spread among the people. Whatever healing methods God had used, whether through the teaching of the prophets or through His own fatherly chastisements, they "would not hearken nor be amended, but ran on still more obstinately in their evil courses. The disease prevailed against the remedy, and was irritated by it, so that the remedy served only to "lay open" the extent of its malignity, and to shew that there was worse in it, than did at first appear" . Paul says of all human nature. "When the commandment came, sin revived" Romans 7:9.

Apart from grace, the knowledge of good only enhances evil. : "So, when God, made Man, present and visible, willed to "heal Israel," then that iniquity of the Jews and wickedness of the Scribes and Pharisees was discovered, whereof this iniquity of Ephraim and wickedness of Samaria was a type. For an evil spirit goaded them to mock, persecute, blaspheme the Teacher of repentance who, together with the word of preaching, did works, such as none other man did. For Christ pleased them not, a Teacher of repentance, persuading to poverty, a Pattern of humility, a Guide to meekness, a Monitor to mourn for sins, a Proclaimer of righteousness, a Requirer of mercy, a Praiser of purity of heart, a Rewarder of peace, a Consoler of those who suffered persecution for righteousness' sake. Why did they reject, hate, persecute, Him who taught thus? Because they loved all contrary thereto, and wished for a Messiah, who should exalt them in this world, and disturb the peace of nations, until he should by war subdue to their empire all the rest of the world, build for them on earth a Jerusalem of gold and gems, and fulfill their covetousness in all things of this sort.

This their mind He once briefly expressed; "How can ye believe which receive honor one of another, and seek not the honor which cometh from God only?" John 5:24. They persecuted Him then who willed to heal them, as madmen strike the physician offering them medicine, nor did they cease, until they required Him their King to be crucified. Thus was the "iniquity of Ephraim and wickedness of Samaria discovered," yet filled up by them; and so they filled up the measure of their fathers, and discovered and testified, that they were of the same mind with their fathers. In all these things they "committed falsehood," lying against, their King whom they denied, and accused as seditious."

For they - (i. e. all of them) commit falsehood Falsehood was the whole habit and tissue of their lives. : "They dealt falsely in all their doings both with God and man, being hypocritical and false in all their words and doings, given to fraud and deceit, from the highest to the lowest." Night and day; in silence and in open violence; "within," where all seemed guarded and secure, and "without," in open defiance of law and public justice; these deeds of wrong went on in an unceasing round. In the night, "the thief cometh in," breaking into people's houses and pillaging secretly; "a troop of robbers spoileth without," spreading their ravages far and wide, and desolating without resistance. It was all one state of anarchy, violence, and disorganization.

And they consider not in their hearts - Literally, (as in the E. M) "they say not to their hearts." The conscience is God's voice to the heart from within; man's knowledge of the law of God, and his memory of it, is man's voice, reminding his heart and rebellious affections to abide in their obedience to God. God speaks through the heart, when by His secret inspirations he recalls it to its duty. Man speaks to his own heart, when he checks its sinful or passionate impulses by the rule of God's law, "Thou shalt not." "At first, people feel the deformity of certain sorts of wickedness. When accustomed to them, people think that God is indifferent to what no longer shocks themselves." "They say not to their heart" anymore, that "God remembers them."

I remember all their wickedness - This was the root of "all their wickedness," want of thought. They would not stop to say to themselves, that God not only saw, but "remembered their wickedness," and not only this, but that He remembered it all. Many will acknowledge that God sees them. He sees all things, and so them also. This is a part of His natural attribute of omniscience. It costs them nothing to own it. But what God "remembers, that" He will repay. This belongs to God's attributes, as the moral Governor of the world; and this, man would gladly forget. But in vain. God does "remember," and remembers in order to punish. "Now," at the very moment when man would not recall this to his own heart, "their own doings have beset them about; they are before my face." Unless or until man repent, God sees man continually, encompassed by all his past evil deeds; they surround him, accompany him, whithersoever he goeth; they attend him, like a band of followers; they lie down with him, they await him at his awakening; they live with him, but they do not die with him; they encircle him, that he should in no wise escape them, until he come attended by them, as witnesses against him, at the judgmentseat of God. "His own iniquities shall take the wicked himself, and he shall be holden with the cords of his sins. God remembers all their wickedness" Proverbs 5:22.

Then He will requite "all;" not the last sins only, but all. So when Moses interceded for his people after the sin of the calf, God says to him, "go lead the people unto the place, of which I have spoken unto thee; behold My Angel shall go before thee; nevertheless, in the day when I visit, I will visit their sin upon them" Exodus 32:34; and of the sins of Israel and their enemies; "Is not this laid up in store with Me, and sealed up among My treasures? to Me belongeth "vengeance and recompense; their foot shall slide in due time" Deuteronomy 32:34-35. The sins, forgotten by man, are remembered by God, and are requited all together in the end. A slight image of the Day of Judgment, "the Day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God, against" which the hard and impenitent heart "treasures up unto itself wrath!"

They are before My face - All things, past, present, and to come, are present before God. He sees all things which have been, or which are, or which shall be, or which could be, although He shall never will that they should be, in one eternal, unvarying, present. To what end then for man to cherish an idle hope, that God will not remember, what He is ever seeing? In vain wouldest thou think, that the manifold ways of man are too small, too intricate, too countless, to be remembered by God. God says, "They are before My Face."

They make the king glad with their wickedness - Wicked sovereigns and a wicked people are a curse to each other, each encouraging the other in sin. Their king, being wicked, had pleasure in their wickedness; and they, seeing him to be pleased by it, set themselves the more, to do what was evil, and to amuse him with accounts of their sins. Sin is in itself so shameful, that even the great cannot, by themselves, sustain themselves in it, without others to flatter them. A good and serious man is a reproach to them. And so, the sinful great corrupt others, both as aiding them in their debaucheries, and in order not to be reproached by their virtues, and because the sinner has a corrupt pleasure and excitement in hearing of tales of sin, as the good joy to hear of good. Whence Paul says, "who, knowing the judgment of God that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them" Romans 1:32.

But whereas, they all, kings, princes, and people, thus agreed and conspired in sin, and the sin of the great is the rarest destructive, the prophet here upbraids the people most for this common sin, apparently because they were free from the greater temptations of the great, and so their sin was the more willful. "An unhappy complaisance was the ruling character of Israel. It preferred its kings to God. Conscience was versatile, accommodating. Whatever was authorized by those in power, was approved." Ahab added the worship of Baal to that of the calves; Jehu confined himself to the sin of Jeroboam. The people acquiesced in the legalized sin. Much as if now, marriages, which by God's law are incest, or remarriages of the divorced, which our Lord pronounces adultery, were to be held allowable, because man's law ceases to annex any penalty to them.

They are all adulterers - The prophet continues to picture the corruption of all kinds and degrees of people. "All of them," king, princes, people; all were given to adultery, both spiritual, in departing from God, and actual, (for both sorts of sins went together,) in defiling themselves and others. "All of them" were, (so the word means,) habitual "adulterers." One only pause there was in their sin, the preparation to complete it. He likens their hearts, inflamed with lawless lusts, to the heat of "an oven" which "the baker" had already "heated." The unusual construction "burning from the baker" instead of "heated "by" the baker" may have been chosen, in order to express, how the fire continued to burn of itself, as it were, (although at first kindled by the baker,) and was ever-ready to burn whatever was brought to it, and even now was all red-hot, burning on continually; and Satan, who had stirred it, gave it just this respite, "from the time when he had kneaded the dough" , until the leaven, which he had put into it, had fully worked, and the whole was ready for the operation of the fire.

The world is full of such people now, ever on fire, and pausing only from sin, until the flatteries, whereby they seduce the unstable, have worked and penetrated the whole mind, and victim after victim is gradually leavened and prepared for sin.

In the day of our king, the princes have made him sick with bottles of wine - (Or, "with heat from wine.") Their holydays, like those of so many Englishmen now, were days of excess. "The day of their king" was probably some civil festival; his birthday, or his coronation-day. The prophet owns the king, in that he calls him "our king;" he does not blame them for keeping the day, but for the way in which they kept it. Their festival they turned into an irreligious and anti-religious carousal; making themselves like "the brutes which perish," and tempting their king first to forget his royal dignity, and then to blaspheme the majesty of God.

He stretched out his hand with scorners - as it is said, "Wine is a mocker" (or "scoffer"). Drunkenness, by taking off all power of self restraint, brings out the evil which is in the man. The "scorner" or "scoffer" is one who "neither fears God nor regards man" Luke 18:4, but makes a jest of all things, true and good, human or divine. Such were these corrupt princes of the king of Israel; with these "he stretched out the hand," in token of his good fellowship with them, and that he was one with them. He withdrew his hand or his society from good and sober people, and "stretched" it "out," not to punish these, but to join with them, as people in drink reach out their hands to any whom they meet, in token of their sottish would-be friendliness. With these the king drank, jested, played the buffoon, praised his idols, scoffed at God. The flattery of the bad is a man's worst foe.

For they have made ready their heart like an oven - He gives the reason old their bursting out into open mischief; it was ever stored up within. They "made ready," (literally, "brought near") "their heart." Their heart was ever brought near to sin, even while the occasion was removed at a distance from it. "The "oven" is their heart; the fuel, their corrupt affections, and inclinations, and evil concupiscence, with which it is filled; "their baker," their own evil will and imagination, which stirs up whatever is evil in them." The prophet then pictures how, while they seem for a while to rest from sin, it is but "while they lie in wait;" still, all the while, they made and kept their hearts ready, full of fire for sin and passion; any breathing-time from actual sin was no real rest; the heart was still all on fire; "in the morning," right early, as soon as the occasion came, it burst forth.

The same truth is seen where the tempter is without. Such, whether Satan or his agents, having lodged the evil thought or desire in the soul, often feign themselves asleep, as it were, "letting the fire and the fuel which they had inserted, work together," that so the fire pent-in might kindle more thoroughly and fatally, and, the heart being filled and penetrated with it, might burst out of itself, as soon as the occasion should come.

They are all hot as an oven, and have devoured their judges - Plans of sin, sooner or later, through God's overruling providence, bound back upon their authors. The wisdom of God's justice and of His government shows itself the more, in that, without any apparent agency of His own, the sin is guided by Him through all the intricate mazes of human passion, malice, and cunning, back to the sinner's bosom. Jeroboam, and the kings who followed him, had corrupted the people, in order to establish their own kingdom. They had heated and inflamed the people, and had done their work completely, for the prophet says, "They are all hot as an oven;" none had escaped the contagion; and they, thus heated, burst forth and, like the furnace of Nebchadnezzar, devoured not only what was cast into it, but those who kindled it. The pagan observed, that the "artificers of death perished by their own art."

Probably the prophet is describing a scene of revelry, debauchery, and scoffing, which preceded the murder of the unhappy Zechariah; and so fills up the brief history of the Book of Kings. He describes a profligate court and a debauched king; and him doubtless, Zechariah ; those around him, delighting him with their wickedness; all of them habitual adulterers; but one secret agent stirring them up, firing them with sin, and resting only, until the evil leaven had worked through and through. Then follows the revel, and the ground wily they intoxicated the king, namely, their lying-in-wait. "For," he adds, "they prepared their hearts like a furnace, "when they lie in wait."" The mention of dates, of facts, and of the connection of these together; "the day of our king;" his behavior: their lying in wait; the secret working of one individual; the bursting out of the fire in the morning; the falling of their kings; looks, as if he were relating an actual history. We know that Zechariah, of whom he is speaking, was slain through conspiracy publicly in the open face of day, "before all the people," no one heeding, no one resisting. Hosea seems to supply the moral aspect of the history, how Zechariah fell into this general contempt; how, in him, all which was good in the house of Jehu expired.

All their kings are fallen - The kingdom of Israel, having been set up in sin, was, throughout its whole course, unstable and unsettled. Jeroboam's house ended in his son; that of Baasha, who killed Jeroboam's son, Nadab, ended in his own son, Elah; Omri's ended in his son's son, God having delayed the punishment on Ahab's sins for one generation, on account of his partial repentance; then followed Jehu's, to whose house God, for his obedience in some things, continued the kingdom to "the fourth generation." With these two exceptions, in the houses of Omri and Jehu, the kings of Israel either left no sons, or left them to be slain. Nadab, Elah, Zimri, Tibni, Jehoram, Zechariah, Shallum, Pekahiah, Pekah, were put to death by those who succeeded them. Of all the kings of Israel, Jeroboam, Baasha, Omri, Menahem, alone, in addition to Jehu and the three next of his house, died natural deaths. So was it written by God's hand on the house of Israel, "all their kings have fallen." The captivity was the tenth change after they had deserted the house of David. Yet such was the stupidity and obstinacy both of kings and people, that, amid all these chastisements, none, either people or king, turned to God and prayed Him to deliver them. Not even distress, amid which almost all betake themselves to God, awakened any sense of religion in them. "There is none among them, that calleth unto Me."

Ephraim, he hath mixed himself among the people - i. e., with the pagan; he "mixed" or "mingled" himself among or with them, so as to corrupt himself, as it is said, "they were mingled among the pagan and learned their works" Psalm 106:35. God had forbidden all intermarriage with the pagan Exodus 34:12-16, lest His people should corrupt themselves: they thought themselves wiser than He, intermarried, and were corrupted. Such are the ways of those who put themselves amid occasions of sin.

Ephraim is - (literally, "is become") a cake (literally, "on the coals") not turned The prophet continues the image . "Ephraim" had been "mingled," steeped, kneaded up into one, as it were, "with the pagan," their ways, their idolatries, their vices. God would amend them, and they, withholding themselves from His discipline, and not yielding themselves wholly to it, were but spoiled. The sort of cake, to which Ephraim is here likened, "uggah" literally, "circular," was a thin pancake, to which a scorching heat was applied on one side; sometimes by means of hot charcoal heaped upon it; sometimes, (it is thought,) the fire was within the earthen jar, around which the thin dough was fitted. If it remained long "unturned," it was burned on the one side; while it continued unbaked, doughy, recking, on the other; the fire spoiling, not penetrating it through. Such were the people; such are too many so-called Christians; they united in themselves hypocrisy and ungodliness, outward performance and inward lukewarmness; the one overdone, but without any wholesome effect on the other. The one was scorched and black; the other, steamed, damp, and lukewarm; the whole worthless, spoiled irremediably, fit only to be cast away. The fire of God's judgment, with which the people should have been amended, made but an outward impression upon them, and reached not within, nor to any thorough change, so that they were the more hopelessly spoiled through the means which God used for their amendment.