I Will Hedge Up Thy Way With Thorns Is Written Down as Mercy

It does not work anymore and that is the worst part.

He would not have predicted that. He had assumed, if he ever thought about it, that a thing like this either keeps working or gets taken away from you in some dramatic fashion involving other people finding out.

What actually happened is that it went flat. The same thing, done the same way, at the same hour, produces less every year, and he has compensated the way anybody would, and the compensating has stopped working too.

And he is in the strange position of still going to it out of habit while getting almost nothing back, which is more humiliating than the thing itself and which he has never heard anybody describe.

There is a passage in Hosea where God says He is going to put thorns across somebody's road, and He says what He means by it.

The hedge

Here it is, in the King James Version:

Therefore, behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and make a wall, that she shall not find her paths. And she shall follow after her lovers, but she shall not overtake them; and she shall seek them, but shall not find them. (Hosea 2:6-7)

I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and make a wall.

That is God saying He is going to make something hard to reach.

And look at the two verbs in the next verse. She shall follow after her lovers, but she shall not overtake them. She shall seek them, but shall not find them.

Not: she will be stopped from going. She goes. The going is not prevented. What is prevented is the arriving.

That is exactly the condition of a man still going to a thing that produces almost nothing. He has not been stopped. He has been made unable to get there, and he has been interpreting that as a personal failure or as the thing wearing out, and Hosea 2 puts a different author on it.

You are not failing at something that has quietly stopped working and you were never watching it wear out on its own. Hosea 2:6 has God name Himself as the one making the paths hard to find, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a change in the thing itself who is at work in a road that has gone flat.

Then, and what she says

And then comes the word the whole passage turns on.

Then shall she say, I will go and return to my first husband; for then was it better with me than now. (Hosea 2:7)

Then shall she say.

Then. After the thorns. The sentence comes on the far side of the hedge and not before it, which is why the hedge is there.

For then was it better with me than now.

That is not a noble sentence and it is not high-minded repentance. It is a woman doing arithmetic and finding that an earlier arrangement compared favorably. It is close to the far country, where a man comes to himself while looking at what the pigs are eating.

God includes that sentence, in that form, as the outcome He was working toward. He does not require it to be prettier than it is.

You have a comparison you are allowed to make and you were never required to return for noble reasons. Hosea 2:7 puts then was it better with me than now in the mouth of the one coming back, and it is His Spirit who makes an unromantic sentence the beginning of something rather than an embarrassment.

And if this has taken you somewhere heavier than flatness, if it has reached not wanting to be here at all, that is not a thing to hold alone. A doctor, a counselor, somebody you trust who will pick up the phone. In the United States the 988 crisis line answers day and night. Nobody is asked to carry that by himself.

Where He takes her

And here is the part that changes what the hedge was for, and it comes seven verses later.

Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her. (Hosea 2:14)

I will allure her. Allure is a courting word. It is the language of somebody trying to win somebody, used here about the same person He just put thorns in front of.

And speak comfortably unto her. The old phrase means to speak to the heart.

So the same chapter that has the wall has a wilderness and a courting and words spoken to the heart, and they are done by the same person to the same person in the same passage.

And then:

And I will give her her vineyards from thence, and the valley of Achor for a door of hope. (Hosea 2:15)

The valley of Achor for a door of hope.

Achor is the valley where the worst thing in the book of Joshua happened. It is a place name that meant trouble to anybody who heard it, and the promise is that it will be a door of hope, which means the location of the worst thing becomes the way through.

You have a door of hope in the valley the trouble is named after and you were never being fenced in for the sake of it. Hosea 2:15 turns the valley of Achor into a door of hope, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the place a man is most ashamed of the doorway rather than the wall.

Who does the wounding and who does the binding

And two sentences from elsewhere that hold the whole thing together.

For he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole. (Job 5:18)

Both halves belong to the same person in that verse. That is either intolerable or it is the most reassuring sentence in the book, depending on whether a man believes the second half.

And Lamentations, written from the worst of it:

For the Lord will not cast off for ever: But though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies. For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men. (Lamentations 3:31-33)

He doth not afflict willingly.

That is the sentence that keeps the thorn hedge from being cruelty. It is not something He enjoys, and Scripture says so plainly, in a book written by a man watching everything burn.

You have a God who does not afflict willingly and you were never dealing with somebody who enjoys this. Lamentations 3:33 says it in plain words and Job 5:18 puts the wounding and the binding in the same hands, and it is His Spirit who makes those two facts hold together in a man at once.