As a result of all this (whether the words be by Hosea or another),[486]
_It shall be in that day--'tis Jehovah's oracle--that thou shalt call Me, My husband,_ _And thou shalt not again call Me, My Ba'al:_ _For I will take away the names of the Ba'alim from her mouth,_ _And they shall no more be remembered by their names._
There follows a picture of the ideal future, in which--how unlike the vision that now closes the Book of Amos!--moral and spiritual beauty, the peace of the land and the redemption of the people, are wonderfully mingled together, in a style so characteristic of Hosea's heart. It is hard to tell where the rhythmical prose passes into actual metre.
_And I will make for them a covenant in that day with the wild beasts, and with the birds of the heavens, and with the creeping things of the ground; and the bow and the sword and battle will I break from the land, and I will make you to dwell in safety. And I will betroth thee to Me for ever, and I will betroth thee to Me in righteousness and in justice, in leal love and in tender mercies; and I will betroth thee to Me in faithfulness, and thou shalt know Jehovah._
_And it shall be on that day I will speak--'tis the oracle of Jehovah--I will speak to the heavens, and they shall speak to the earth; and the earth shall speak to the corn and the wine and the oil, and they shall speak to Jezreel, the scattered like seed_ across many lands; _but I will sow him_[487] _for Myself in the land: and I will have a father's pity upon Un-Pitied; and to Not-My-People_ I will say. _My people thou art! and he shall say, My God!_[488]
The circle is thus completed on the terms from which we started. The three names which Hosea gave to the children, evil omens of Israel's fate, are reversed, and the people restored to the favour and love of their God.
We might expect this glory to form the culmination of the prophecy. What fuller prospect could be imagined than that we see in the close of the second chapter? With a wonderful grace, however, the prophecy turns back from this sure vision of the restoration of the people as a whole, to pick up again the individual from whom it had started, and whose unclean rag of a life had fluttered out of sight before the national fortunes sweeping in upon the scene. This was needed to crown the story--this return to the individual.
_And Jehovah said unto me, Once more go, love a wife that is loved of a paramour and is an adulteress,_[489] _as Jehovah loveth the children of Israel, the while they are turning to other gods, and love raisin-cakes_--probably some element in the feasts of the gods of the land, the givers of the grape. _Then I bought her to me for fifteen pieces of silver and a homer of barley and a lethech of wine._[490] _And I said to her, For many days shall thou abide for me alone; thou shall not play the harlot, thou shall not be for any husband; and I for my part also shall be so towards thee. For the days are many that the children of Israel shall abide without a king and without a prince, without sacrifice and without maççebah, and without ephod and teraphim._[491] _Afterwards the children of Israel shall turn and seek Jehovah their God and David their king, and shall be in awe of Jehovah and towards His goodness in the end of the days._[492]
Do not let us miss the fact that the story of the wife's restoration follows that of Israel's, although the story of the wife's unfaithfulness had come before that of Israel's apostasy. For this order means that, while the prophet's private pain preceded his sympathy with God's pain, it was not he who set God, but God who set him, the example of forgiveness. The man learned the God's sorrow out of his own sorrow; but conversely he was taught to forgive and redeem his wife only by seeing God forgive and redeem the people. In other words, the Divine was suggested by the human pain; yet the Divine Grace was not started by any previous human grace, but, on the contrary, was itself the precedent and origin of the latter. This is in harmony with all Hosea's teaching. God forgives because _He is God and not man_.[493] Our pain with those we love helps us to understand God's pain; but it is not our love that leads us to believe in His love. On the contrary, all human grace is but the reflex of the Divine. So St. Paul: _Even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye_. So St. John: _We love Him_, and one another, _because He first loved us_.