the worshippers.  To be ‘ashamed of their own counsel’ is the certain fate of all who depart from God; for, sooner or later, experience will demonstrate to the blindest that their refuges of lies can neither save themselves nor those who trust in them.  But shame is one thing and repentance another; and many a man will say, ’I have been a great fool, and my clever policy has all crumbled to pieces,’ who will only therefore change his idols, and not return to God.

Verse 7 recurs to the political punishment of the civil rebellion.  The image for the disappearance of the king is striking, whether we render ‘foam’ or ‘chip,’ but the former has special beauty.  In the one case we see the unsubstantial bubble,

    ‘A moment white, then melts for ever’;

and in the other, the helpless twig swept down by the stream.  Either brings vividly before us the powerlessness of Israel against the roaring torrent of Assyrian power; and the figure may be widened out to teach what is sure to become of all man-made and self-chosen refuges when the floods of God’s judgments sweep over the world.  The captivity of the idol and the burst bubble of the monarchy bid us all make Jehovah our God and King.  The vacant shrine and empty throne are followed by utter and long-continued desolation.  Thorns and thistles have time to grow on the altars, and no hand cuts them down.  What of the men thus stripped of all in which they had trusted?  Desperate, they implore the mountains to fall on them, as preferring to die, and the hills to cover them, as willing to be crushed, if only they may be hidden.  That awful cry is heard again in our Lord’s predictions of judgment, and in the Apocalypse.  Therefore this prophecy foreshadows, in the destruction of Israel’s confidences and in their shame and despair, a more dreadful coming day, in which we shall be concerned.

Verses 9 to 11 again give the sin and its punishment.  ’The days of Gibeah’ recall the hideous story of lust and crime which was the low-water mark of the lawless days of old.  That crime had been avenged by merciless war.  But its taint had lived on, and the Israel of Hosea’s day ‘stood,’ obstinately persistent, just where the Benjamites had been then, and set themselves in dogged resistance, as these had done, ’that the battle against the children of unrighteousness might not touch them.’

Stiff-necked setting oneself against God’s merciful fighting with evil lasts for a little while, but verse 10 tells how soon and easily it is annihilated.  God’s ‘desire’ brushes away all defences, and the obstinate sinners are like children, who are whipped when their father wills, let them struggle as they may.  The instruments of chastisement are foreign armies, and the chastisement itself is described with a striking figure as ‘binding them to their two transgressions’; that is, the double sin which is the keynote of the chapter.  Punishment is yoking men to their sins, and making them drag the burden like bullocks in harness.  What sort of load are we getting together for ourselves?  When we have to drag the consequences of our doings behind us, how shall we feel?