HOSEA v. 15-vii. 2.
Seeing that their leaders are so helpless, and feeling their wounds, the people may themselves turn to God for healing, but that will be with a repentance so shallow as also to be futile. They have no conviction of sin, nor appreciation of how deeply their evils have eaten.
This too facile repentance is expressed in a prayer which the Christian Church has paraphrased into one of its most beautiful hymns of conversion. Yet the introduction to this prayer, and its own easy assurance of how soon God will heal the wounds He has made, as well as the impatience with which God receives it, oblige us to take the prayer in another sense than the hymn which has been derived from it.[517] It offers but one more symptom of the optimism of this light-hearted people, whom no discipline and no judgment can impress with the reality of their incurable decay. They said of themselves, _The bricks are fallen, let us build with stones_,[518] and now they say just as easily and airily of their God, _He hath torn_ only _that He may heal_: we are fallen, but _He will raise us up again in a day or two_. At first it is still God who speaks.
_I am going My way, I am returning to My own place,_[519] _until they feel their guilt and seek My face. When trouble comes upon them, they will soon enough seek Me, saying_:[520]--
"_Come and let us return to Jehovah:_ _For He hath rent, that He may heal us,_ _And hath wounded,_[521] _that He may bind us up._ _He will bring us to life in a couple of days;_ _On the third day He will raise us up_ again, _That we may live in His presence._ _Let us know, let us follow up_[522] _to know, Jehovah;_ _As soon as we seek Him, we shall find Him._[523] _And He shall come to us like the winter-rain,_ _Like the spring-rain, pouring on the land!_"
But how is this fair prayer received by God? With incredulity, with impatience. _What can I make of thee, Ephraim? what can I make of thee, Judah? since your love is like the morning cloud and like the dew so early gone._ Their shallow hearts need deepening. Have they not been deepened enough? _Wherefore I have hewn_ them _by the prophets, I have slain them by the words of My mouth, and My judgment goeth forth like the lightning._[524] _For leal love have I desired, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt-offerings._
That the discourse comes back to the ritual is very intelligible. For what could make repentance seem so easy as the belief that forgiveness can be won by simply offering sacrifices? Then the prophet leaps upon what each new year of that anarchy revealed afresh--the profound sinfulness of the people.
_But they in human fashion_[525] _have transgressed the covenant! There_--he will now point out the very spots--_have they betrayed_[526] _Me! Gilead is a city of evildoers: stamped with bloody footprints; assassins_[527] _in troops; a gang of priests murder on the way to Shechem. Yea, crime_[528] _have they done. In the house of Israel I have seen horrors: there Ephraim hath played the harlot: Israel is defiled--Judah as well._[529]
Truly the sinfulness of Israel is endless. Every effort to redeem them only discovers more of it. _When I would turn, when I would heal Israel, then the guilt of Ephraim displays itself and the evils of Samaria_, these namely: _that they work fraud, and the thief cometh in_--evidently a technical term for housebreaking[530]--while _abroad a crew_ of highwaymen _foray. And they never think in their hearts that all their evil is recorded by Me. Now have their deeds encompassed them: they are constantly before Me._