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Hosea 1:11 And the children of Judah and the children of Israel shall be gathered together, and they shall appoint for themselves one head.  And they shall go up from the land, for great shall be the day of Jezreel.

What a wonderfully encouraging prophetic word we have here at the end of a chapter about God’s devastating Judgement on his Covenant People.  The Northern Kingdom of Israel has been particularly targetted.  The prophet himself is told to marry a prostitute, Gomer, as a depiction of Israel’s ‘prostitution’ with the gods of the nations around them.  Their first child was to be called ‘Jezreel’ (meaning ‘God sows’, but making particular reference to their punishment for the wicked blood that was shed by Jehu at the town of Jezreel – 2 Kings 10:11).  Their next two children were to be called ‘Lo-ruhama’ (‘Not Mercy’) and ‘Lo-ammi’ (‘Not My People’) which delivered a very powerful and disturbing message to a people who presumed they were secure in Yahweh (the LORD) regardless of how they lived!

Hosea’s reference to the fact of a coming time when the sharply divided nation will be gathered together, and “they shall appoint for themselves one head” can only be a reference to their Promised Messiah, the ‘son of David’, the Lord Jesus Christ.  Hosea’s  subsequent word in 2:23 – “I will sow her for myself in the land.  And I will have mercy on No Mercy, and I will say to Not My People, You are my people’” was to give them further encouragement to say “Come, let us return to the LORD; for he has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up” (Hosea 6:1 – which John Morison aptly rendered in his hymn: “Come, let us to the Lord our God with contrite hearts return, our God is gracious, nor will leave the desolate to mourn”).

Two and a half centuries later, Zechariah will prophesy: “… so that, when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn” (Zechariah 12:10b), looking forward to the day, as we wait for the return of Jesus as Saviour, Lord and King, when “in Christ Jesus you [Gentiles] who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ.  For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility” (Ephesians 2:13-16), and ‘all Israel’ (God’s elect from under the Old Covenant: Israel and Judah, and from under the New Covenant: the ‘New Israel’, the Church) will share together at the ‘Marriage Supper of the Lamb’ (evelation 19:6-7), and “all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:25-36)!  Soli Deo Gloria!

– Bruce Christian