“How precious also are Thy thoughts unto me, O God!” (Psa. 139:17).
Unbounded Patience
“How shall I give you up, Ephraim? how shall I deliver you, Israel? how shall I make you as Admah? how shall I set you as Zeboim? My heart is turned within Me, My repentings are kindled together. I will not execute the fierceness of My anger, I will not return to destroy Ephraim: for I am God and not man, the Holy One in the midst of you, and I will not enter into the city” (Hos. 11:8,9).
What a tender unfolding of the heart of God is here! It is the yearning thought of the fondest of Fathers over a nation of wayward prodigals. How grievous had been their ingratitude. He speaks in the beginning of the chapter of His loving thoughts to Israel when “a child” (verse 1), His especially gentle upbringing of Ephraim, even “as a nurse cherishes her children” (1 Thess. 2:7). “I taught Ephraim also to go, taking them by their arms…. I drew them with cords of a man, with bands of love”(Hos. 11:3,4). Yet what is the return for all this lavish, endearing tenderness? “My people are bent to backsliding from Me” (verse 7).
Surely the next entry in the divine record must be the sentence of righteous retribution: “Ephraim is joined to his idols, let him alone.” No! it is rather a burst of fond parental love, such as, at times, is dimly pictured on earth when we see a mother with breaking heart and eyes dim with weeping, locking in her embrace the prodigal boy who has wounded her, embittered her existence, and scorned her tears.
Listen to the tender words, “How shall I give you up, Ephraim? how shall I deliver you [that is, give you over to the vengeance of the enemy], Israel?” He remembers “the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah” of a former age, and “their sin [which was] very grievous” (Gen. 18:20). The iniquity of Israel and Ephraim can be compared in turpitude only to that of these inhabitants of the plain, on whom “the LORD rained … brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven” (Gen. 19:24). Admah and Zeboim were two adjoining cities in the Valley of Sodom which were involved in this terrible overthrow (Deut. 29:23). “How,” says He, “shall I make you as Admah? how shall I set you as Zeboim?” Then, when He sums up with the declaration, “I will not return to destroy Ephraim,” He gives as the reason, “for I am God, and not man”!
Yes, truly, Thy thoughts, O God, are not as man’s thoughts, and Thy ways are not as man’s ways; had they been so, long before now how many of us would have been “given up” and have had judgment executed against us because of our obstinacy and rebellion against God. But in spite of all this, His anger is turned away from us; His hand of mercy is outstretched still! Well may we say, with the stricken monarch of Israel, “Let us fall now into the hand of the LORD, for His mercies are great, and let me not fall into the hand of man” (2 Sam. 24:14).
Backslider, return! Though you may have tried the patience of your God by years of provocation, yet He still “keeps silence” (Lam. 3:28); He waits to be gracious; He is “not willing that any should perish” (2 Pet. 3:9). Let His goodness and patience, His tenderness and longsuffering, lead you to repentance (Rom. 2:4).
Trembling penitent, bowed down under a sense of your base ingratitude, your prolonged alienation, fearful lest a guilty past may have cut you off from the hope of pardoning mercy—return! You are saying, perchance, in the bitter reproach of self-abandonment and despair, “I am given up”—delivered over to the tyranny of my spiritual enemies—and the Lord has cast me off forever and can be favorable no more (Psa. 77:7)!
No! hear His wondrous, precious thoughts—the musings of the infinite Heart that you have wounded, “How shall I give you up? Man would crush his enemy, but I am God, and not man. I will not destroy, I will save.” Elsewhere He says, “Behold, you have spoken and done evil things as you could [that is, they could not have been worse],” yet goes on to appeal, “Turn unto Me” (Jer. 3:5-7)! “Return, you backsliding children,” says the LORD, “and I will heal your backslidings” (Jer. 3:22).
A Gracious Alternative
“Or let him take hold of My strength, that he may make peace with Me; and he shall make peace with Me” (Isa. 27:5).
God had just spoken of the certain destruction that would overtake obstinate and incorrigible sinners. These He describes under the similitude of briars and thorns set against him in battle. “I would go through them,” says He, “I would burn them together” (verse 4). He guards us, by a preliminary statement, against entertaining the supposition that He has any delight in the exercise of such stern retribution: “Fury is not in me” (verse 4). There is with Him, whose nature and whose name is Love, no vindictive passion, no capricious wrath, no wayward impulses of anger analogous to those in man. His thoughts, in this respect too, are not our thoughts. His hatred of sin is a principle. It is the deliberate recoil of His own infinitely holy nature from iniquity—that iniquity which His justice and righteousness require Him to punish. Let us beware of a harsh and repulsive theology that would assimilate God to the avenging deities of the heathen. He is “slow to anger, and of great mercy” (Psa. 145:8). Judgment is “His strange work” (Isa. 28:21). While He visits iniquity “unto the third and fourth generation of those who hate [Him], He shows “mercy unto thousands [of generations] of those who love [Him]” (Exod. 20:5,6).
At the same time, neither must we forget that He is “glorious in holiness” (Exod. 15:11). To that very revelation which He made to Moses of His name and memorial as “The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin,” He appends the solemn statement, “and that will by no means clear the guilty” (Exod. 34:6,7).
Oh, most solemn, most terrible thought to those who are still as “briars and thorns against [Him] in battle,” who are still enemies by nature and wicked works. They cannot escape His wrath. They cannot elude His righteous retribution. If they continue in sin, they can know only in their bitter experience what “a fearful thing” it is “to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb. 10:31). He “would burn them together.” He is to all such “a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29).
But our motto-verse contains a wondrous alternative of mercy. At the very moment when sinners are rushing with blind madness against their sovereign God, He whom they have made their enemy has a thought in His heart of loving reconciliation. Listen to the gracious proposal: “Or let him take hold of My strength, that he may make peace with Me.”
Who is “the Strength of God”? Let Scripture answer: “Let Thy hand be upon the Man of Thy right hand, upon the Son of Man whom Thou made strong for Thyself” (Psa. 80:17). Christ is “the Power of God” (1 Cor. 1:24)—“the Daysman [or Mediator] between us, who might lay His hand upon us both” (Job 9:33). He, also, is “our peace” (Eph. 2:14). “Being justified by faith, we have peace with God” (Rom. 5:1). Peace, “not as the world gives” (John 14:27), was His parting, special legacy. It is a sure and well-grounded peace, purchased by His atoning blood, and secured and perpetuated by His continual intercession. Hence the gracious Proposer of reconciliation adds the assurance, “And he shall make peace with Me” (Isa. 27:5). It is a glorious certainty. Take hold of that arm, and salvation is sure. “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved” (Acts 16:31). It is a present peace, a sure peace, a permanent peace, peace now, and peace forever. The Lord Jesus says concerning His sheep, “They shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of My hand” (John 10:28).
“Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the LORD” (Isa. 51:9). “Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, Thou who leads Joseph like a flock …. stir up Thy strength, and come and save us!” “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end [or a future and a hope] (Jer. 29:11).
Tender Dealing
Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her. And I will give her [back] her vineyards” (Hos. 2:14,15).
“Therefore” has a strangely beautiful connection in this verse. God’s people had been grievously backsliding. He had been loading them with mercies and they had been guiltily disowning His hand. They had taken the gifts and spurned the Giver. “She did not know that I gave her corn, and wine, and oil, and multiplied her silver and gold” (Hos. 2:8). No, more, she had shamelessly gone after her lovers—she had deliberately preferred the ways of sin to the ways of God. What will His thoughts be towards this treacherous one? Can they be anything else but those of merited retribution—casting her out and casting her off forever?
We expect when we hear the concluding word, “therefore,” that it is the awful summing up of His controversy—the turning of the Judge to pronounce righteous sentence. We listen, but lo! utterances of love are heard instead. “I will allure her … and speak comfortably [or tenderly] to her.”
This is the way He deals with His people still. They often forget Him in the glare and glitter of prosperity. He hushes the din of the world—takes them out into the solitudes of trial—and there, while they are abased, humbled, and chastened, He unburdens in their ear His thoughts of love, forgiveness, and comfort. Oh, what infinite tenderness characterizes the dealings of this heavenly Chastener! How slow He is to abandon those who have abandoned Him! Every means and instrumentality is employed rather than leave them to the bitter fruits of their own guilty estrangement.
The kindest human thoughts toward an offender are harshness and severity compared with His. What were the thoughts and deeds of the watchmen in the Song of Solomon towards the bride as she wandered disconsolate in search of her heavenly Bridegroom, and that in consequence of her own unwatchfulness and sloth? They tore off her veil. They smote her, reviled her, loaded her with reproach. But when she finds her lost Lord, though she has kept Him standing amid the cold dews of night, He does not smite her, He does not upbraid her, no angry syllable escapes His lips. He brings her into the wilderness and speaks comfortably unto her, and the next picture in the inspired allegory is the restored one coming up from that wilderness leaning on her Beloved.
Reader! is God dealing with you by affliction? Has He blighted your earthly hopes, caused “all [your] “mirth to cease,” destroyed [your] vines and [your] fig trees” (Hos. 2:11,12), and made all around you a desert? Think what it would have been, had He allowed you to go on in your course of guilty estrangement—your truant heart plunging deeper and deeper in its career of sin! Is it not mercy in Him that He has dimmed that false and deceptive glitter of earth? You would not listen to His voice in prosperity. You took the ten thousand precious gifts of His bestowing, but there was no breathing of gratitude to the infinite Bestower. You sat, it may be, sullen, peevish, proud, ungrateful, at the very moment when His horn of plenty was being emptied in your lap.
He has brought you into “the wilderness.” As Jesus did with His disciples of old when He would nerve them for coming trial, He has taken you to “a high mountain apart” (Matt. 17:1), “a solitary place” (Mark 1:35), apart from the world. He has there humbled you and proved you. He may have touched you in your tenderest point, severed close friendships, leveled in the dust clay idols, but it was all His doing. He leads us into the wilderness, He leads us up, and He leads us through.
As He gives us our comforts—our oil, wine, wool, and fig trees—so when He sees fit He takes them away. Whatever be the voices He may be now addressing to me, may it be mine to recognize in them the thoughts and utterances of unalterable love, and to say, “I will hear what God the LORD will speak, for He will speak peace unto His people and to His saints” (Psa. 85:8).