Albert Barnes Commentary Hosea 14:1

"O Israel, return unto Jehovah thy God; for thou hast fallen by thine iniquity." — Hosea 14:1 (ASV)

O Israel, return—now, completely—to the Lord your God. The heavy and scarcely interrupted tide of denunciation is now past. Billow upon billow have rolled over Ephraim, and the last wave discharged itself in the overwhelming, indiscriminating destruction of the seat of its strength. As a nation, it was to cease to be. Its separate existence was a curse, not a blessing; the offspring of rivalry, matured by apostasy; the parent, in its turn, of jealousy, hatred, and mutual vexation.

But while the kingdom was past and gone, the children still remained heirs of the promises made to their fathers. As Hosea declared before, Israel, after having long remained solitary, would in the end seek the Lord and David their king (Hosea 3:5). So now, after these manifold denunciations of their temporal destruction, God not only invites them to repentance but also foretells that they will be wholly converted.

Every word is full of mercy. God calls them by the name of acceptance, which He had given to their forefather, Jacob: “O Israel.” He deigns to implore them to return—“return now!”—and that not merely “toward” but “completely to” Himself, the unchangeable God, whose mercies and promises were as immutable as His Being. God invites them to return to Himself, the Unchangeable, and He does so as the One who is still their God. They had cast off their God; God had not cast off His people whom He foreknew (Romans 11:2).

As one commentator explains: “He entreats them not only to turn back and look toward the Lord with a partial and imperfect repentance, but not to stop until they had come completely home to Him by a total and sincere repentance and amendment.” He bids them “return completely to” Himself, the Unchangeable God, and their God. “Great is repentance,” is a Jewish saying, “which makes people reach all the way to the Throne of glory.”

For you have fallen by your iniquity—“This is the first ray of divine light on the sinner. God begins by revealing to him the abyss into which he has fallen and the way by which he fell. It was their own iniquity on which they had stumbled and so had fallen, powerless to rise, except through His call, whose voice is with power (Psalms 29:4), and Who gives what He commands.”

He would say: “Do not ascribe your calamity to your own weakness, to civil dissension, to the disuse of military discipline, to a lack of wisdom in your rulers, to the ambition and cruelty of the enemy, or to a reverse of fortune. These things would not have gone against you if you had not gone to war with the law of your God. You inflict the deadly wound on yourself; you destroyed yourself. Not as fools boast, by fate, or the fortune of war, but ‘by your iniquity you have fallen.’ Your remedy then is in your own hand. ‘Return to your God.’ ”

Another commentator observes: “In these words, ‘by your iniquity,’ he briefly conveys that each is to ascribe to himself the iniquity of all sin, of whatever he has been guilty, not defending himself, as Adam did, in whom we all, Jews and Gentiles, have sinned and fallen, as the Apostle says, For we were by nature the children of wrath, even as others (Ephesians 2:3). By adding actual sin to that original sin, Israel and every other nation falls. He would say then, ‘O Israel, you must first be converted, for you need conversion; ‘for you have fallen’; and confess this very thing, that ‘you have fallen by your iniquity’; for such confession is the beginning of conversion.’”

But with what should they return?