HOSEA 9
5 What will you do on the day of the appointed festival,
and on the day of the feast of the Lord?
6 For behold, they are going away from destruction;
but Egypt shall gather them; Memphis shall bury them.
Nettles shall possess their precious things of silver;
thorns shall be in their tents. 7 The days of punishment have come;
the days of recompense have come; Israel shall know it.
The prophet is a fool; the man of the spirit is mad,
because of your great iniquity and great hatred.
8 The prophet is the watchman of Ephraim with my God;
yet a fowler’s snare is on all his ways, and hatred in the house of his God.
9 They have deeply corrupted themselves as in the days of Gibeah:
he will remember their iniquity; he will punish their sins. – Hosea 9:5-9
HOSEA 9 THE DAYS OF PUNISHMENT HAVE COME
A poem by ILMA inspired by these verses
In this account, Hosea declares to the Israelites that the days of punishment have come. They will surely not miss it for they miscalculated God’s response to their terrible adultery. Hosea points out that when he warned them to not rejoice in their harvest in the previous verses, he was giving them time to repent so they can avoid the punishment of their sin.
They laughed at the prophet and called him a fool when in reality, they are the fools for thinking that they can get away with their sins and not bear the consequences of it. When they flee to Egypt after the Assyrians have destroyed their land hoping they could find comfort in them and later on come back to rebuild what they lost, they will soon find out that they have fled to their own graves. Memphis is a city of Egypt that will eventually devour them too. According to Matthew Henry’s commentary, “They shall be demolished and laid in ruins to such a degree that they shall be overgrown with nettles; so that if they survive the trouble and return to Israel, they would find it neither fruitful or habitable.”
This is what Hosea has warned them, the day of their punishment has arrived. If only they had heeded his warning, they could have been spared of it.
REFLECTION
· Why do you think the Israelites ignored Hosea’s warnings?
