9 “You are destroyed, Israel, because you are against me, against your helper. 10 Where is your king, that he may save you? Where are your rulers in all your towns, of whom you said, ‘Give me a king and princes’? 11 So in my anger I gave you a king, and in my wrath I took him away.
This passage is the harshest portrayal of God’s anger in Hosea. Douglas Stuart points out that this is “the climax of the punishment message that began in chapter 1.” One of the most disturbing things about Hosea’s prophecies is how little hope they contain. Usually we think that the aim of the prophets was to get people to change, to become better. We hope they will repent. But as we go along in Hosea, things seem to get worse. Hosea seems to assume that Israel has sinned so much that there is no alternative but destruction. The only hope he holds out is that after their destruction, things will, long in the future, get better.
The covenant, in Deuteronomy 4:1, states that God is merciful and so will never destroy Israel completely. But there is a clear difference between the chosen people of God (the eternal Israel) and the nation of Israel that existed at the time of Hosea. As Paula Gooder points out, prophecy also has the function of helping people make sense of what has happened to them. The Israelites suffer the Assyrian invasion because they have so completely violated and even scorned the covenant. Does this have an application to the violence and suffering of today’s world? Certainly, what happened to Israel was particular to that time. Furthermore, since Hosea wrote, we have had a much greater revelation of God through Jesus. Any understanding we have must be colored by all that we learned from him. But Hosea always calls us to see the world as God does so we need to try to look at our world as he must see it.
In verse 10, God mocks the monarchy. In 1 Samuel 8 to 10 we can read the story of how Israel came to have a king. They wanted to be like the pagan nations around them and so they asked Samuel for one. As the chosen people, only God was supposed to rule them. By asking for a human dynasty, they, in effect, rejected him. After many warnings that bad things would happen, God gave them the king they wished for and, as predicted, bad things occurred. Now God mocks them for this wish and for the chaos in their government. They trusted a king and wanted him to lead them into battle rather than God, but now they must face the consequences of this decision. This suggests that this passage was written after King Hoshea had been taken captive by the Assyrians (2 Kings 17:4). They probably also imprisoned the royal family in the government so the nation was without any leaders.
Of course, God turns all things to good, and so the monarchy, symbol of Israel’s lack of confidence in its God, became the engine of its (and all the world’s) redemption. The line of David seemed to have failed, but God still made the Messiah from it. Jesus, of course, was not the kind of king that the people were expecting, but God always does the unexpected. By doing so, God united the line of the human king with himself. So the new Israel has as its ruler both God and a human monarch.
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