John Calvin Commentary Hosea 8:2-3

"They shall cry unto me, My God, we Israel know thee. Israel hath cast off that which is good: the enemy shall pursue him." — Hosea 8:2-3 (ASV)

When the Prophet says, To me shall they cry, some understand that the Israelites are blamed for not fleeing to God, and they explain the Prophet’s words in this way: “They ought to have cried to me.” To others, it seems to be an exhortation: “Let the Israelites now cry to me.”

However, I take the words simply as they are: that God here again touches on the pretense of the Israelites, They will cry to me, We know thee; and to this the ready answer is: Israel has cast away good far from himself; the enemy shall pursue him. I connect the two verses in this way. In the former, the Lord relates what they would do and what the Israelites had already begun to do. In the latter verse, He shows that their labor would be in vain, because they always cherished wickedness in their hearts and falsely invoked the name of God, as has been previously noted, even in their prayers.

Israel, then, will cry to me, My God, we know thee. In this way, hypocrites confidently profess the name of God and with a lofty air affirm that they are God’s people; but God scoffs at all this boasting, as it is vain and worthy of derision.

They will then cry to me; and then He imitates their cries, My God, we know thee. When hypocrites, as if they were God’s friends, cover themselves with His shadow, profess to act under His guardianship, and also boast at the same time of their knowledge of true doctrine, and boast of faith and of the worship of God—even if, He says, these cries are uttered by their mouths, yet facts speak differently, and rebuke and expose their hypocrisy.

We now see, then, how these two verses are connected and what the Prophet’s object is.

The verb זנח, zanech, means “to remove far off” and “to throw to a distance”; and sometimes, as some think, “to detest.” There is here, I doubt not, an implied contrast between the rejection of good and the pursuing of which the Prophet speaks afterwards, Israel has driven good far from himself; some interpret טוב, thub, as God Himself, as if it were of the masculine gender. However, the Prophet, I have no doubt, simply accuses the Israelites of having retreated from all justice and uprightness, indeed, of having driven far off everything right and just.

Israel, then, has repelled good; the enemy, he says, will pursue him. There is a contrast between repelling and pursuing, as if the Prophet said that the Israelites had by their defection brought it about that the enemy would now seize them.

There is then no better defense for us against all harm than attention to piety and justice; but when integrity is banished from us, then we are exposed to all evils, for we are deprived of God’s aid.

We then see how beautifully the Prophet compares these two things: the rejection of good by Israel, and their pursuit by their enemies. He then adds—