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In their anxious search for kings and allies who would save them from the dangers threatening their national existence, Israel’s leaders were driven into a habit of revolutions, assignations, and foreign alliances, all of which showed that they were no longer trusting God to take care of them. For both of these failures, Hosea used metaphors of whoredom and adultery and portrayed the Lord as the aggrieved husband of a faithless wife. He proclaimed a total punishment that would end the nation’s career of promiscuity. But, amazingly, Hosea saw that behind God’s wrath there was a love that would not let the people be wiped out, and that the judgment itself would bring about a new beginning, a new covenant, and a new gift of land in a second history of reconciliation and regeneration.
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