Albert Barnes Commentary Hosea 13:9

"It is thy destruction, O Israel, that [thou art] against me, against thy help." — Hosea 13:9 (ASV)

O Israel, you have destroyed yourself, but in Me is your help - This is one of the concise sayings of Hosea, capable of many shades of meaning. The five words, one by one, are literally, “Israel, your destruction, for” or “that, in” or “against Me, in” or “against your help.” Something must be supplied in any case; the simplest interpretation seems to be: “O Israel, your destruction” is “that” you have been, have rebelled “against Me, against your help.”

Yet, in whatever way the words are filled up, the general sense is the same: God alone is our help, and we are the sources of our own destruction. This means that in separating ourselves from God, or rebelling against Him who is our help (until we depart from Him)—who alone could be, and who, if we return, will be our help.

The sum of the meaning is that all our destruction is from ourselves, and all our salvation is from God: “Perdition, reprobation, obduration, damnation, are not, properly and in themselves, from God—dooming to perdition, reprobating, obdurating, damning—but from man sinning, and hardening himself in sin to the end of life.

Conversely, predestination, calling, and grace are not from the foreseen merits of the predestined, but from God—predestinating, calling, and, by His grace, preceding the predestined. Therefore, although the cause or reason why they are predestined does not lie in the predestined, yet in those not predestined does lie the reason or cause why they are not predestined.”

“This saying then, ‘O Israel, you have destroyed yourself, but in Me is your help,’ may be unfolded thus:

• Your captivity, Israel, is from you; your redemption from Me.
• Your perishing is from you; your salvation from Me.
• Your death from you; your life from Me.
• Your evil from you; your good from Me.
• Your reprobation from you; your predestination from Me, who ever stand at the door of your heart and in mercy knock.
• Your dereliction from you; your calling from Me.
• Your misery from you; your bliss from Me.
• Your damnation from you; your salvation and making blessed from Me.”

For “many good things God does in man, which man does not do; but man does nothing good which God does not enable him to do.”: “The first cause of the lack of grace is from us; but the first cause of the gift of grace is from God.”: “Rightly is God called, not the Father of judgments or of vengeance, but the “Father of mercies,” because from Himself is the cause and origin of His mercy; from us is the cause of His judging or avenging.”

“Blessed is the soul that comprehends this, not with the understanding only, but with the heart. Nothing can destroy us before God but sin, the only real evil; and sin is wholly from us—God can have no part in it.

But every aid to withdraw us from sin, or to prevent us from falling into it, comes from God alone, the sole Source of our salvation.

The soul then must always bless God, in its sufferings and its good things; in its sufferings, by confessing that it itself is the only cause of its suffering; in its good things, by acknowledging that, when altogether unworthy of it, God preceded it with His grace, and preserves it every moment by His almighty goodness.”

It is also said: “No power, then, of the enemy could harm you, unless, by your sins, you called forth the anger of God against you to your destruction. Ascribe it to yourself, not to the enemy. So let each sinful city or sinful soul say, which by its guilt draws on itself the vengeance of God.”

This truth, that in Him alone is help, He confirms by what follows: