《The Sermon Bible Commentary – Hosea》(William R. Nicoll)
Editor
Sir William Robertson Nicoll CH (October 10, 1851 - May 4, 1923) was a Scottish Free Church minister, journalist, editor, and man of letters.
Nicoll was born in Lumsden, Aberdeenshire, the son of a Free Church minister. He was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School and graduated MA at the University of Aberdeen in 1870, and studied for the ministry at the Free Church Divinity Hall there until 1874, when he was ordained minister of the Free Church at Dufftown, Banffshire. Three years later he moved to Kelso, and in 1884 became editor of The Expositor for Hodder & Stoughton, a position he held until his death.
In 1885 Nicoll was forced to retire from pastoral ministry after an attack of typhoid had badly damaged his lung. In 1886 he moved south to London, which became the base for the rest of his life. With the support of Hodder and Stoughton he founded the British Weekly, a Nonconformist newspaper, which also gained great influence over opinion in the churches in Scotland.
Nicoll secured many writers of exceptional talent for his paper (including Marcus Dods, J. M. Barrie, Ian Maclaren, Alexander Whyte, Alexander Maclaren, and James Denney), to which he added his own considerable talents as a contributor. He began a highly popular feature, "Correspondence of Claudius Clear", which enabled him to share his interests and his reading with his readers. He was also the founding editor of The Bookman from 1891, and acted as chief literary adviser to the publishing firm of Hodder & Stoughton.
Among his other enterprises were The Expositor's Bible and The Theological Educator. He edited The Expositor's Greek Testament (from 1897), and a series of Contemporary Writers (from 1894), and of Literary Lives (from 1904).
He projected but never wrote a history of The Victorian Era in English Literature, and edited, with T. J. Wise, two volumes of Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century. He was knighted in 1909, ostensibly for his literrary work, but in reality probably more for his long-term support for the Liberal Party. He was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in the 1921 Birthday Honours.
01 Chapter 1
02 Chapter 2
Verse 14
Hosea 2:14
God's presence in loneliness—a sermon for Lent.
I. From the first dawning of conversion to the hour of death, it is in solitude mostly that God speaks to the soul. God's will, as Himself, is everywhere; within and without He speaks to our souls, if we would hear. Only the din of the world, or the tumult of our own hearts, deafens our inward ear to it. Stillness is as His very presence, for like the prayer for the prophet's servant, it opens our senses to perceive what was there to behold, only our eyes were holden. All God's works, because He made them, bear traces of His hand, and speak of Him to the soul which is alone with Him. All works of man directed or. overruled by His providence—everything, good or bad, speaks of His presence or His absence. But chiefly, in the inmost soul He speaks, because there He dwells.
II. Once, we must be alone; and lonely, indeed, is that journey if He be not by us who first trod it for us, that in it we might fear no evil. Learn to be alone with God now. There shall He renew thy soul, hear thy prayer and answer it, shed hope around thee, kindle thy half-choked love, give thee some taste of His own boundless love; give thee the longing to pass out of all besides, out of thy decayed self; gathered upward unto Him, who came down hither to our misery to bear us up unto Himself, and make us one spirit with Him.
III. One thing only deafens us to the voice of God, untunes all, sets us out of harmony with all, that we should not, in all things, feel the thrill of His love, and behold there the earnest of heaven,—sin. Labour, by His grace, to cleanse away this; pray Him to cleanse it with His precious blood; commend thyself morning by morning to Him, do thy daily work unto Him, and He will be with thee, as with Adam in the garden; and thy daily labour shall again be a dressing and keeping of the Paradise of God, where He shall walk with thee.
E. B. Pusey, Sermons for the Church's Seasons, p. 196.
References: Hosea 2:14—Spurgeon, My Sermon Notes: Ecclesiastes to Malachi, p. 306; W. Robertson, Sunday Magazine, 1881, p. 47; J. N. Norton, Golden Truths, p. 134.
Verse 14-15
Hosea 2:14-15
Our text belongs, we may suppose in a special sense to the Jew. It may in part have been accomplished in his past history, but its thorough fulfilment is to be looked for in the future. But there is every reason why the passage should admit of a secondary application—an application to ourselves as the subjects of the chastisements which God appoints or permits.
I. Notice, first, the expression "allure." There is no apparent keeping between the process and the result; the process—that of allurement; the result—that of a wilderness. Yet if we think for a moment we shall see, that we are often actually allured into the wilderness. For what are all those brilliant and fascinating hopes, which God suffers for a time to float before our vision, but so many allurements? And when these hopes vanish, as they frequently do, where are we left but in a wilderness—a wilderness into which the hopes had led us?
II. God speaks comfortably in the wilderness. If we force Him to make a wilderness in order that He may be heard, He does not make it that He may speak terror and despair to our souls. The object is, with the wicked, to draw off their attention from earth and its vanities; with the righteous to discipline them for an "exceeding and eternal weight of glory; and what, in both cases, is this but comfortable speaking?
III. The text is more than an assertion as to God's comforting His people under affliction; it declares that their afflictions may be made an occasion of advantage, or be converted into instruments of spiritual good. "I will give her her vineyards from thence: "Christians gather their best grapes from the thorn. "And the valley of Achor for a door of hope:" Sorrows which are especially the chastisements of misdoing may issue in a firmer hope of everlasting salvation. God never breaks a man's heart except that He may be able to pour in, like the good Samaritan, the oil and the wine. He brings the sinner into the valley, the terrors of the law urge him forward and prevent all retreat. But just then it is—when the sinner feels himself utterly lost and at the same time confesses God's justice in destroying him—that the Almighty shows him, as it were, a cleft in the rock, into which he may run. The valley of Achor terminates in a door of hope; gladness comes back into the soul, the sense of pardon, the sense of reconciliation; he sings in the valley "as in the days of his youth, and as in the day when he came up out of the land of Egypt."
H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit, No. 1843.
I. The text expresses the constancy and tenderness of the Divine love. (1) The relation between Jehovah and His people is spoken of in terms of the relation between husband and wife: "I will betroth thee unto Me in faithfulness." Blended with the Divine wrath against idolatry—yea, lying at the very root of that wrath—is the eternal love. God does not spurn Israel away, and bid her begone again to the lot which she has chosen; but, in the exercise of that affection which has survived all her shame, He says, "Behold, I will allure her... and speak comfortably unto her." (2) These words not only reveal constancy, they also breathe tenderness. To speak comfortably is, literally, to speak to the heart. Such speaking is not addressed to the ear only; nor does it merely inform the understanding; it reaches the affections; it thrills the soul; it awakens responsive echoes there. God has His unobtrusive yet mighty forces. Goodness, as well as evil, woos the soul.
II. The text points to the beneficent purpose of the Divine discipline and chastisement. (1) The wilderness is typical of the discipline to which God subjects His people. Through all trial there runs the same beneficent purpose. God designs to bring us into a true and safe prosperity; and so He seeks, by strengthening our character, to prepare us for entering into the land of "vineyards." (2) "The valley of Achor" may be taken as typical, more especially, of the Divine chastisements. The afflictions with which we are visited often assume to our consciences the aspect of correction. This is because our calamities—bringing us more directly into the light of God—bring us also face to face with the sins which that light condemns. Only accept your trouble as the chastisement of One who loves you and there, in the valley of your humiliation, where the blackness of your sin is revealed to you, rise up against the traitor, lust, and stone it to death. Then "the valley of Achor" shall be made unto you also a "door of hope;" and with confident expectation, because with purified heart you will march on to fuller conquest and final victory.
T. Campbell Finlayson, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xi., p. 251.
Verse 15
Hosea 2:15
This promise, like all God's promises, has its well-defined conditions. Achan has to be killed and put safe out of the way first, or no shining hope will stand out against the black walls of the defile. The tastes which knit us to the perishable world, the yearnings for Babylonish garments and wedges of gold, must be coerced and subdued. There is no natural tendency in the mere fact of sorrow and pain to make God's love more discernible, or to make our hope any firmer. All depends on how we use the trial; or, as I say: First stone Achan and then hope!
I. So the trouble which detaches us from earth gives us new hope. Vain regret, absorbed brooding over what is gone, a sorrow kept gaping long after it should have been healed, like a grave-mound off which desperate love has pulled turf and flowers in the vain attempt to clasp the cold hand below—in a word, the trouble that does not withdraw us from the present will never be a door of hope, but rather a grim gate for despair to come in at.
II. The trouble which knits us to God gives us new hope. That bright form which comes down the narrow valley is His messenger and herald—sent before His face. All the light of hope is the reflection on our hearts of the light of God. If our hope is to grow out of our sorrow, it must be because our sorrow drives us to God.
III. The trouble which we bear rightly with God's help gives new hope. If we have made our sorrow an occasion for learning by living experience somewhat more of His exquisitely varied and ever-ready power to aid and bless, then it will teach us firmer confidence in these inexhaustible resources which we have thus once more proved. We build upon two things—God's unchangeableness, and His help already received; and upon these strong foundations we may wisely and safely rear a palace of hope, which shall never prove a castle in the air.
A. Maclaren, Weekday Evening Addresses, p. 159.
References: Hosea 2:15.—Homiletic Magazine, vol. x., p. 199; Bishop Lightfoot, Old Testament Outlines, p. 266. Hosea 2:19-20.—B. Baker, Thursday Penny Pulpit, vol. iii., p. 139. Hosea 2:23.—Spurgeon, My Sermon Notes: Ecclesiastes to Malachi, p. 309. Hosea 3:1.—Ibid., Morning by Morning, p. 35. Hosea 3:4, Hosea 3:5.—S. Leathes, Good Words, 1874, p. 226. Hosea 3:5.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xv., No. 888. Hosea 4:6.—C. J. Vaughan, Memorials of Harrow Sundays, p. 56.
03 Chapter 3
04 Chapter 4
Verse 17
Hosea 4:17
Spiritual abandonment.
I. We are apt to be surprised at the proneness of the Israelites to the sin of idolatry. And yet it may be doubted whether we have not a great deal in common with idolaters. Let us see what the idolatry of the Israelites was. There was given unto them a religion; it came direct from God. Of their religious system it was the singular characteristic that the chief acts of devotion could only be performed at one place. To Mount Sion the tribes went up for all their solemn observances, three times a year. At other seasons they were scattered over the country, cut off from the possibility of united worship. This, doubtless, was the cause of their manifold idolatry. God had taught them a religious system—that system contained some practical difficulties; it seemed, indeed, to check devotion. The Jews sought to remedy this by self-invented plans; the issue was apostasy. In the history of the Church of Christ we find much that is analogous. It was a zeal for religion which prostrated Israel at the feet of idols; it is zeal without knowledge which makes men forsake the catholic faith for crude theories of their own.
II. And now as to the punishment. "Ephraim is joined to idols; let him alone." To forsake God is to forsake our own mercies. The judgment threatened in the text is one which would reduce us to the position of Satan himself. For what will follow from God letting a man alone? He will experience no further promptings and warnings, but be left unrestrained by any secret reluctance to work all manner of evil. Memory and conscience have each a home in that lost spirit; but the whispers of the Holy One are never heard therein; and conscience has no voice to move to good, but wields only the fiery scourge for evil done or doing.
Bishop Woodford, Occasional Sermons, vol. i., p. 32.
These are very solemn words, whichever way we take them; but the way in which they are generally understood is distinctly a misunderstanding. They are not intended as a threatening of the cessation of the Divine pleadings with an obstinate transgressor; there are no people about whom God says that they are so wedded to their sin that it is useless to try to do anything with them; and they are not a commandment to God's servants to fling up in despair, or in impatience, the effort to benefit obstinate and stiffnecked evildoers. The context distinctly shows us that this is not the meaning; and the Book in which they occur is one long pleading with this very Ephraim, just because he is "joined to idols."
I. Ephraim is another name for the northern kingdom of Israel; one of the two halves into which the nation was divided. Hosea was a prophet of the northern nation, and his whole activity was devoted precisely not to letting Ephraim (that is, his countrymen of Israel) alone. But it is the people of the other, the neighbouring, kingdom that are addressed; and what is meant by letting alone is plainly enough expressed for us in a previous verse: "Though thou, Israel, play the harlot, let not Judah offend." The sin of the northern kingdom in the calf-worship is held up as a warning to Judah, which is besought and commanded to keep clear of all complicity therewith, and to avoid entangling alliances with backsliding Israel. This, and this only, is the purpose of our text—a plea with Judah to stand apart from association with evildoers.
II. It is a very bad sign of a Christian man when his chosen companions are people that have no sympathy with him in his religion. Of course there are many things—such as differences of position, culture, and temperament—which cannot but modify the association of Christian people with one another; but still, if you are a Christian man, and the brother most unlike to you in all these particulars, there is a far deeper sympathy, or at least there ought to be, than there is between you and the irreligious man that is most like you in them all. In the measure in which we walk in this world, separate from it because we are joined to Christ, in that measure will our faith be strong, and shall we be doing our Master's will.
A. Maclaren, Christian Commonwealth, Sept. 16th, 1886.
References: Hosea 4:17.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xix., No. 1140; Homiletic Magazine, vol. vi., p. 201; Preacher's Monthly, vol. ii., p. 24. Hosea 5:7.—Spurgeon, Evening by Evening, p. 349. Hosea 5:13.—W. Aitken, The Love of the Father; p. 193.
05 Chapter 5
Verse 13
Hosea 5:13; Hosea 6:2
So Ephraim and Judah went to the wrong person, and did not gain much by their application. The same fatal error is being perpetrated by multitudes amongst us still. The error is as ancient as Cain, and as modern as today.
I. It is pretty plain that Israel could not choose to be independent. They had not the forces at their control to enable them to defy all comers. Either the nation must lean on its God, or else it must lean on some arm of flesh, and king Jareb seemed as eligible a helper as anyone else. And neither can we be independent. Our nature is so constituted, and our conditions of existence are so ordered, that we must needs look beyond ourselves for solace and support amidst the strange and trying vicissitudes of life.