Hosea 6

¹⁸For He wounds, but He also binds; He strikes, but His hands also heal.

³⁹See now that I am He; there is no God besides Me. I bring death and I give life; I wound and I heal, and there is no one who can deliver from My hand.

⁶The Lord brings death and gives life; He brings down to Sheol and raises up.

⁴⁰Let us examine and test our ways, and turn back to the Lord.

⁴¹Let us lift up our hearts and hands to God in heaven:

⁴I will heal their apostasy; I will freely love them, for My anger has turned away from them.

³And many peoples will come and say: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us His ways so that we may walk in His paths.” For the law will go forth from Zion, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

⁵“Go back and tell Hezekiah the leader of My people that this is what the Lord, the God of your father David, says: ‘I have heard your prayer; I have seen your tears. I will surely heal you. On the third day from now you will go up to the house of the Lord.

⁴that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,

¹⁹Your dead will live; their bodies will rise. Awake and sing, you who dwell in the dust! For your dew is like the dew of the morning, and the earth will bring forth her dead.

¹¹Then He said to me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. Look, they are saying, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope has perished; we are cut off.’

¹²Therefore prophesy and tell them that this is what the Lord God says: ‘O My people, I will open your graves and bring you up from them, and I will bring you back to the land of Israel.

¹⁴I will ransom them from the power of Sheol; I will redeem them from Death. Where, O Death, are your plagues? Where, O Sheol, is your sting? Compassion is hidden from My eyes.

⁴Sing to the Lord, O you His saints, and praise His holy name.

⁵For His anger is fleeting, but His favor lasts a lifetime. Weeping may stay the night, but joy comes in the morning.

⁷I will give them a heart to know Me, that I am the Lord. They will be My people, and I will be their God, for they will return to Me with all their heart.

⁵I will be like the dew to Israel; he will blossom like the lily and take root like the cedars of Lebanon.

¹My son, if you accept my words and hide my commandments within you,

²if you incline your ear to wisdom and direct your heart to understanding,

⁶May he be like rain that falls on freshly cut grass, like spring showers that water the earth.

¹³Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead,

¹⁴I press on toward the goal to win the prize of God’s heavenly calling in Christ Jesus.

¹¹He replied, “The knowledge of the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them.

⁸How could I give you up, O Ephraim? How could I surrender you, O Israel? How could I make you like Admah? How could I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart is turned within Me; My compassion is stirred!

³Therefore they will be like the morning mist, like the early dew that vanishes, like chaff blown from a threshing floor, like smoke through an open window.

³⁴When He slew them, they would seek Him; they repented and searched for God.

³⁵And they remembered that God was their Rock, that God Most High was their Redeemer.

¹²Then they believed His promises and sang His praise.

¹³Yet they soon forgot His works and failed to wait for His counsel.

⁷So he said to the keeper of the vineyard, ‘Look, for the past three years I have come to search for fruit on this fig tree and haven’t found any. Therefore cut it down! Why should it use up the soil?’

⁸‘Sir,’ the man replied, ‘leave it alone again this year, until I dig around it and fertilize it.

²⁰If indeed they have escaped the corruption of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, only to be entangled and overcome by it again, their final condition is worse than it was at first.

²¹It would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness than to have known it and then to turn away from the holy commandment passed on to them.

²⁹“Is not My word like fire,” declares the Lord, “and like a hammer that smashes a rock?”

¹⁰See, I have appointed you today over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and plant.”

¹²For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it pierces even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow. It judges the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

¹⁴Therefore this is what the Lord God of Hosts says: “Because you have spoken this word, I will make My words a fire in your mouth and this people the wood it consumes.

⁵But because of your hard and unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.

¹⁶Therefore repent! Otherwise I will come to you shortly and wage war against them with the sword of My mouth.

¹³But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

⁷If only you had known the meaning of ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent.

³To do righteousness and justice is more desirable to the Lord than sacrifice.

²²But Samuel declared: “Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obedience to His voice? Behold, obedience is better than sacrifice, and attentiveness is better than the fat of rams.

²¹“I hate, I despise your feasts! I cannot stand the stench of your solemn assemblies.

¹Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. Draw near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools, who do not know that they do wrong.

¹¹“Who told you that you were naked?” asked the Lord God. “Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”

⁶You dwell in the midst of deception; in their deceit they refuse to know Me,” declares the Lord.

¹Put the ram’s horn to your lips! An eagle looms over the house of the Lord, because the people have transgressed My covenant and rebelled against My law.

⁷They have been unfaithful to the Lord; for they have borne illegitimate children. Now the New Moon will devour them along with their land.

³³if I have covered my transgressions like Adam by hiding my guilt in my heart,

⁵⁹For this is what the Lord God says: I will deal with you according to your deeds, since you have despised the oath by breaking the covenant.

⁶⁰But I will remember the covenant I made with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish an everlasting covenant with you.

¹¹Is there iniquity in Gilead? They will surely come to nothing. Do they sacrifice bulls in Gilgal? Indeed, their altars will be heaps of stones in the furrows of the field.

²The godly man has perished from the earth; there is no one upright among men. They all lie in wait for blood; they hunt one another with a net.

²Cursing and lying, murder and stealing, and adultery are rampant; one act of bloodshed follows another.

²Deliver me from workers of iniquity, and save me from men of bloodshed.

¹⁹For I was like a gentle lamb led to slaughter; I did not know that they had plotted against me: “Let us destroy the tree with its fruit; let us cut him off from the land of the living, that his name may be remembered no more.”

⁸And while they were at the great stone in Gibeon, Amasa joined them. Now Joab was dressed in military attire, with a dagger strapped to his belt. And as he stepped forward, he slipped the dagger from its sheath.

¹¹If they say, “Come along, let us lie in wait for blood, let us ambush the innocent without cause,

¹²let us swallow them alive like Sheol, and whole like those descending into the Pit.

³Her princes are roaring lions; her judges are evening wolves, leaving nothing for the morning.

¹When I heal Israel, the iniquity of Ephraim will be exposed, as well as the crimes of Samaria. For they practice deceit and thieves break in; bandits raid in the streets.

¹“Hear this, O priests! Take heed, O house of Israel! Give ear, O royal house! For this judgment is against you because you have been a snare at Mizpah, a net spread out on Tabor.

⁹Among you are slanderous men bent on bloodshed; within you are those who eat on the mountain shrines and commit acts of indecency.

²⁷Her officials within her are like wolves tearing their prey, shedding blood, and destroying lives for dishonest gain.

³I know all about Ephraim, and Israel is not hidden from Me. For now, O Ephraim, you have turned to prostitution; Israel is defiled.

¹⁴And among the prophets of Jerusalem I have seen a horrible thing: They commit adultery and walk in lies. They strengthen the hands of evildoers, so that no one turns his back on wickedness. They are all like Sodom to Me; the people of Jerusalem are like Gomorrah.”

⁵Oholah prostituted herself while she was still Mine. She lusted after her lovers, the Assyrians—warriors

⁶Now in the days of King Josiah, the Lord said to me, “Have you seen what faithless Israel has done? She has gone up on every high hill and under every green tree to prostitute herself there.

³⁰A horrible and shocking thing has happened in the land.

³¹The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests rule by their own authority. My people love it so, but what will you do in the end?

⁷All this happened because the people of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. They had worshiped other gods

¹³Swing the sickle, for the harvest is ripe. Come, trample the grapes, for the winepress is full; the wine vats overflow because their wickedness is great.

¹⁰After Job had prayed for his friends, the Lord restored his prosperity and doubled his former possessions.

¹²But they do not know the thoughts of the Lord or understand His plan, for He has gathered them like sheaves to the threshing floor.

³³For this is what the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel, says: “The Daughter of Babylon is like a threshing floor at the time it is trampled. In just a little while her harvest time will come.”

¹⁵Then another angel came out of the temple, crying out in a loud voice to the One seated on the cloud, “Swing Your sickle and reap, because the time has come to harvest, for the crop of the earth is ripe.”

⁷The coast will belong to the remnant of the house of Judah; there they will find pasture. They will lie down in the evening among the houses of Ashkelon, for the Lord their God will attend to them and restore their captives.