The figure sets the Prophet’s imagination going, and he turns it another way, comparing Israel to a heifer, broken in, and liking the easy work of threshing, in which the unmuzzled ox could eat its fill, but now set to harder tasks in the fields.  Judah, too, is to share in the punishment.  If men will not serve God in and because of prosperous ease, He will try what toil and privation will do.  Abused blessings are withdrawn, and the abundance of the threshing-floor is changed for dragging a heavy plough or harrow.

Verse 12 still deals with the figure suggested in the close of the previous verse.  It is the only break in the clouds in this chapter.  It is a call to amendment, accompanied by a promise of acceptance.  If we ’sow for righteousness’—­that is, if our efforts are directed to embodying it in our lives—­we ‘shall reap according to mercy.’  That is true universally, whether it is taken to mean God’s mercy to us, or ours to others.  The aim after righteousness ever secures the divine favour, and usually ensures the measure which we mete being measured to us again.

But sowing is not all; thorns must be grubbed up.  We must not only turn over a new leaf, but tear out the old one.  The old man must be slain if the new man is to live.  The call to amend finds its warrant in the assurance that there is still time to seek the Lord, and that, for all His threatenings, He is ready to rain blessings upon the seekers.  The unwearying patience of God, the possibility of the worst sinner’s repentance, the conditional nature of the threatenings, the possibility of breaking the bond between sin and sorrow, the yet deeper thought that righteousness must come from above, are all condensed in this brief gospel before the Gospel.

But that bright gleam passes, and the old theme recurs.  Once more we have sin and punishment exhibited in their organic connection in verses 13 and 14.  Israel’s past had been just the opposite of sowing righteousness and reaping mercy.  Wickedness ploughed in, iniquity will surely be its fruit.  Sin begets sin, and is its own punishment.  What fruit have we of doing wrong?  ‘Lies’; that is, unfulfilled expectations of unrealised satisfaction.  No man gets the good that he aimed at in sinning, or he gets something more that spoils it.  At last the deceitfulness of sin will be found out, but we may be sure of it now.  The root of all Israel’s sin was the root of ours; namely, trust in self, and consequent neglect of God.  The first half of verse 13 is an exhaustive analysis of the experience of every sinful life; the second, a penetrating disclosure of the foundation of it.

Then the whole closes with the repeated threatening, dual as before, and illustrated by the forgotten horrors of some dreadful siege, one of the ‘unhappy, far-off things,’ fallen silent now.  A significant variation occurs in the final threatening, in which Beth-el is set forth as the cause, rather than as the object, of the destruction.  ’They were the ruin of him and of all Israel.’  Our vices are made the whips to scourge us.  Our idols bring us no help, but are the causes of our misery.