His roots as Lebanon. 6.  His branches shall spread, and His beauty shall be as the olive-tree, and His smell as Lebanon. 7.  They that dwell under His shadow shall return; they shall revive as the corn, and grow as the vine:  the scent thereof shall be as the wine of Lebanon. 8.  Ephraim shall say, What have I to do any more with idols?  I have heard Him, and observed Him:  I am like a green fir-tree.  From me is thy fruit found. 9.  Who is wise, and He shall understand these things? prudent, and He shall know them? for the ways of the Lord are right, and the just shall walk in them:  but the transgressors shall fall therein.’—­HOSEA xiv. 1-9.

Hosea is eminently the prophet of divine love and of human repentance.  Both streams of thought are at their fullest in this great chapter.  In verses 1 to 3 the very essence of true return to God is set forth in the prayer which Israel is exhorted to offer, while in verses 4 to 8 the forgiving love of God and its blessed results are portrayed with equal poetical beauty and spiritual force.  Verse 9 closes the chapter and the book with a kind of epilogue.

I. The summons to repentance.

‘Israel,’ of course, here means the Northern Kingdom, with which Hosea’s prophecies are chiefly occupied.  ’Thou hast fallen by thine iniquity’—­that is the lesson taught by all its history, and in a deeper sense it is the lesson of all experience.  Sin brings ruin for nations and individuals, and the plain teachings of each man’s own life exhort each to ‘return unto the Lord.’  We have all proved the vanity and misery of departing from Him; surely, if we are not drawn by His love, we might be driven by our own unrest, to go back to God.

The Prophet anticipates the clear accents of the New Testament call to repentance in his expansion of what he meant by returning.  He has nothing to say about sacrifices, nor about self-reliant efforts at moral improvement.  ‘Take with you words,’ not ’the blood of bulls and goats.’  Confession is better than sacrifice.  What words are they which will avail?  Hosea teaches the penitent’s prayer.  It must begin with the petition for forgiveness, which implies recognition of the petitioner’s sin.  The cry, ‘Take away all iniquity,’ does not specify sins, but masses the whole black catalogue into one word.  However varied the forms of our transgressions, they are in principle one, and it is best to bind them all into one ugly heap, and lay it at God’s feet.  We have to confess not only sins, but sin, and the taking away of it includes divine cleansing from its power, as well as divine forgiveness of its guilt.  Hosea bids Israel ask that God would take away all iniquity; John pointed to ‘the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.’  But beyond forgiveness and cleansing, the penitent heart will seek that God would ‘accept the good’ in it, which springs up by His grace, when the evil has been washed from it, like flowers that burst from soil off which the matted under-growth of poisonous jungle has been cleared.  Mere negative absence of ‘evil’ is not all that we should desire or exhibit; there must be positive good; and however sinful may have been the past, we are not too bold when we ask and expect that we may be made able to produce ‘good,’ which shall be fragrant as sweet incense to God.