He Takes Her Out There to Speak Kindly

The verse begins with the wrong word.

That is the first thing to notice about Hosea 2:14, and it is the thing that makes the rest of it land.

Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her.Hosea 2:14, King James Version

Therefore.

A therefore always points back at something. And what it points back at, in Hosea 2:1-13, is thirteen verses of the hardest language in the book: a list of what has gone wrong, what has been taken, what has been forgotten, what was given credit to somebody else. It is a chapter of consequence, and it is not gentle.

So when you reach verse fourteen and the word therefore arrives, every instinct a person has says: here it comes. Here is the sentence.

And the sentence is: I will allure her.

Not I will punish her. Not I will let her sit with it. Allure. Woo. Court. The word is the language of a man persuading a woman who has every reason not to listen to him, which is exactly the picture the whole book of Hosea is built on, because Hosea was told to marry Gomer and the marriage is the sermon.

Hosea is prophesying in the northern kingdom in the eighth century before Christ, in the last generation of its life, under Jeroboam the second and the kings who came after him in quick and violent succession. Everything he says is said to a country about forty years from being carried off by Assyria. This is not a chapter written from a comfortable decade.

And then look at where He takes her.

The wilderness is not the sentence, it is the room

Bring her into the wilderness.

I have heard that read as the punishment part, as though the alluring were the kind bit and the wilderness were the discipline attached to it. Read the sentence again. There is no seam in it. I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her. One movement, three verbs, and the middle one is not a change of tone.

The wilderness in this verse is where the speaking happens.

And the last of the three verbs is the one that undoes people. Speak comfortably unto her. In the older wording that is a phrase about the heart: to speak to her heart, the way you speak to somebody who is upset and standing right in front of you, close enough that volume is not required.

You are not in a punishment, you are in a place He chose. Hosea 2:14 puts the wilderness in the same sentence as the alluring and the comforting, with no punctuation dividing them, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that sentence from being rearranged by a tired reader at eleven at night.

I want to name what the quiet has felt like, because I think you have been reading it as a verdict.

The invitations stopped. The role ended, or the job did, or the season of being needed did. The prayers that used to have a shape to them turned into sitting there. And somewhere in the middle of that you concluded, without ever saying it to anybody, that the silence was the response. That God had gone quiet because of something. That the emptiness was a comment.

You have been reading a room as a ruling, and Hosea 2 will not let that reading stand. The written word says bring her into the wilderness as the second clause of an alluring, and the same Spirit who carried that verse out of a collapsing kingdom is the one carrying it into a quiet house.

Now the next verse, and it is one of the boldest things in the Prophets.

And I will give her her vineyards from thence, and the valley of Achor for a door of hope: and she shall sing there, as in the days of her youth, and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt.Hosea 2:15, King James Version

The valley of Achor for a door of hope.

You have to know what Achor was to feel that. It is in Joshua 7. It is the valley where Achan was taken after Jericho, when the nation's first defeat in the land was traced back to what he had hidden under his tent. It is the place of the worst day in the early conquest, and the name itself means trouble. When an Israelite heard Achor they heard the word for disaster.

And God says: I will make that a door.

Not I will help her forget it. Not I will take her a different way round. The valley named after the worst thing becomes the entrance.

You have a door where you have only ever had a memory, and it is being cut in the wall of the specific valley you avoid. Hosea 2:15 names Achor by name and calls it a door of hope, and it is His Spirit who makes that a personal address rather than a lovely piece of poetry about somebody else's history.

And then the last clause: she shall sing there. Not afterward, when she is out. There.

You have singing available in the location itself, and Hosea 2:15 puts that one small word at the end of the sentence deliberately. The written account never moves the singing to a later address, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that one small word exactly where it was set down.