WORD STUDY – HEAR JEZREEL

Hosea 2:22: “And the earth shall hear the corn and the wine, and the oil and they shall hear Jezreel.”

If there is any chapter in the Bible which expresses the heart of God it is Hosea 2.  We have a picture of Hosea who was married to an unfaithful woman and yet he deeply loved her and longed for her to return, not just to fulfill her duties as a wife and mother, but to return to a love relationship.  God called Hosea to marry this unfaithful woman and he put a deep love in his heart for her so that he could prophesy of His love for us.

How often we give our heart to God and then chase after other gods, gods of money, employment or earthly pleasures.  We are much like Hosea’s wife in our relationship to God. Yet, in Hosea 2 we see the deep love of God, the longing and desire for His people to return to him and not just to call him “baali” (my master), but to call him “ishi” (my husband).

In the midst of this declaration of love where God speaks of betrothing us to him again as a young love, He starts to talk of the earth hearing the corn and the wine and oil and then hearing from Jezreel.  Talk about throwing  a bucket of water on a hot romance.  In the midst of declaring His love he starts to talk about agriculture.

First we must look at that word hear. The word used here in the Hebrew is tanah which has the idea of recounting, telling again.  This is a wonderful poetic expression. There is a double meaning in this.  The first is a reference to the corn which is symbolic of prosperity. He then speaks of the wine which is often represented as a symbol of joy. When He speaks of  the oil he uses a unique word for oil in the Hebrew, it is yashar which is a pure, shinning oil.  It is an anointing oil. It is not olive oil used in ceremonies but a pure oil used to anoint a wound.

Here God shows us that His heart has been deeply wounded by our unfaithfulness, yet he is not only saying that he will restore us to our former prosperous position with Him, and to restore our joy in Him, but he will heal us.  When we wander away from God we also suffer a wounded heart for our sinfulness.  Rather than thinking of his own hurt, He is thinking of the hurt we feel when we have been wounded.  We can see a picture of this by looking at  Hosea.  He has been deeply hurt by his wife’s unfaithfulness, he has a broken heart and yet as he says these words to express the heart of God he is also expressing his own heart for his wife.  To this woman who has brought him so much pain and heartbreak, he is thinking only of the hurt she must have experienced and is longing to heal that hurt.

Then God says that we will hear Jezreel.  Jezreel in the Hebrew means God sows.  That is fitting for this poetic expression where He is using an agricultural motif to express his desire to restore us, but by using the word Jezreel He is saying that He will be the one to give us our prosperity, joy and healing, no one else, especially not those phony gods we pursue.  It will not be our money market accounts, nor our jobs, or our material possessions.  We will find it all in Him for He will do the planting.

But there is a secondary meaning here in the use of Jezreel.  Jezreel is where Gideon defeated the Midianites, where Saul defeated the Philistines and  it was in the city of Jezreel that Jehu order Jezebel to be tossed out her window.  Jezreel is a picture of victory and deliverance from our enemies, from idolatry.  God will recount or restore our victory over all these phony gods that we pursue and we will find our complete and total joy in Him.

But soft, note that this passage is not saying this will happen, it is only expressing the heart of God.  When we find ourselves in a weak moment, we give in to sin, we blow it.  We come crawling back to God, thinking He must really be angry with us, expecting Him to take the whip to us. So we bravely face up to the  music and wait for him to punish us.  That is what we would think because that is what we would do in the flesh.  But if we can just catch a glimpse of the heart of God as shown in Hosea 2, we find that even in our worst backslidden condition, He is longing to restore us to His prosperity, His joy. He wishes only to heal our wounds and forever remove those false gods from us.