Valley of Trouble to Door of Hope

“Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her. And there I will give her her vineyards and make the Valley of Achor a door of hope. And there she shall answer as in the days of her youth, as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt.” – Hosea 2:14-15

Hidden here in Hosea is an epilogue to the sad story told in Joshua chapter 7. Joshua leads the Israelites in the defeat of Jericho, but all does not end well. One of the Israelites steals from the spoils kept for the treasury of the Lord, and God’s resultant wrath causes them to lose their next battle against Ai. The culprit turns out to be Achan, who is stoned to death. Before his dies, he confesses: “when I saw among the spoil a beautiful cloak from Chinar, and 200 shekels of silver, and a bar of gold weighing 50 shekels, then I coveted them and took them.” 

The place of Achan’s death is called the Valley of Achor; “achor” means trouble. Trouble found Achan and the Israelites the same way it found Gomer, in the violating of a covenant relationship with God by turning to shinier things. Hosea makes it clear that this is no mere legal infraction; this is the breaking of a love relationship. 

And yet, here in Hosea, God retells the story. You will answer me as you did in the days of Egypt. I will allure you with tender words into the wilderness. You will be given vineyards, and I will make the Valley of Trouble into a Door of Hope. There it is, the whole story of God’s people, Egypt to wilderness to the promise of fertile land, redeemed. Darkness in the valley transformed into passageways of hope. Even later, God will send Jesus, who left Egypt, who spent forty days in the wilderness, who says we are like vines who bear much fruit as we abide in Him. Who walked through the valley of the shadow of death, who experienced the judgment all the Achan's of the world deserved, to open for us a door of eternal hope: forgiveness for our troubling faithlessness, and redemption of our broken narratives. Jesus, who is God’s tender Word to us, the epilogue for all the stories in the Old Testament that have ever gone wrong.

Mercy

“Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’” – Matthew 9:13

“What shall I do with you, O Judah? Your love is like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes early away… For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” – Hosea 6:4, 6

Jesus quotes Hosea 6:6 twice so far in our readings in Matthew (chapters 9, 12). The Hebrew word for “steadfast love” is checed, translated often “kindness, mercy,” but coming from a root word that literally means “desire, ardour.” Which makes a poignant kind of sense in a story like Hosea’s. I desire desire. But both times Jesus quotes this verse to the Pharisees, he chooses the word for mercy, Greek eleos.

What is mercy? It’s often compared to grace, in that grace is receiving what you don’t deserve, and mercy is not receiving what you do deserve. Lloyd-Jones contrasts the two this way: “Grace is especially associated with men in their sins; mercy is especially associated with men in their misery. In other words, while grace looks down upon sin as a whole, mercy looks especially upon the miserable consequences of sin. So that mercy really means a sense of pity plus a desire to relieve the suffering. That is the essential meaning of being merciful; it is pity plus the action… we can describe it as inward sympathy and outward acts in relation to the sorrows and sufferings of others.”

God is not just a God of grace; He is a God of mercy. Look at Ephesians 2:4: “But God, being rich in [not grace, but…] mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses…” This is the essential movement of God, the impulse of his heart, and it is so tied up with his great love for us that in Hebrew checed can be translated both ways. If you miss this, Jesus says to the Pharisees, you don’t know God at all, despite all your ceremonial laws.

How has God shown me mercy? In many small daily ways: green lights when I’m late, Dave leaving work early to help with kids’ pick-ups, the hands of a Sweet Tomatoes lettuce-chopper so I don’t have to cook. Am I too habitually entitled to see his mercies, big and small? 

How am I moved to mercy? Sometimes, when one of our kids is crying, instead of letting annoyance rise up at the interruption or irrationality of it, I try to imagine how I would feel if I was crying like that. It moves me to just hold them for a bit. I see patients in my county clinic who have little social support, who can’t speak English, who have waited so long their cataracts have become complicated cases no one wants to touch. I don’t really want to do their cases, but I do, I have to. What does it mean for you?