32. Return to Your First Husband
32
Return to Your First Husband1
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.
—Hosea 2:6–7
Whatever you love besides Jesus, your husband, is an adulterous lover. Now it is God’s special blessing to Judah that He will not let her find her paths in following her strange lovers. “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” (Hos. 2:6–7). O thrice happy Judah, when God builds a double stone wall betwixt her and the fire of hell! The world and the things of the world, Madam, is the lover you naturally affect2 beside your own husband, Christ. The hedge of thorns and the wall that God builds in your way, to hinder you from this lover, is the thorny hedge of daily grief, loss of children, weakness of body, iniquity of the time, uncertainty of estate, lack of worldly comfort, fear of God’s anger for old unrepented-of sins. What do you lose if God twists and plaits the hedge thicker daily? God be blessed, the Lord will not let you find your paths. Return to your first husband.
Do not weary, neither think that death walks towards you with a slow pace. You must be riper before you are shaken. Your days are no longer than Job’s, that were “swifter than a post…[and] passed away as the swift ships: as the eagle that hasteth to the prey” (Job 9:25–26). There is less sand in your glass now than there was yesternight. This span of ever-fleeting time will soon be ended. But the greater is the mercy of God, the more years you get to consider upon what terms and upon what conditions you cast your soul in the huge gulf of never-ending eternity. The Lord has told you what you should be doing till He comes. “Wait and hasten,” says Peter, “for the coming of our Lord.”
All that is here is night, in respect to ignorance and daily ensuing troubles, one always making way for another, as the ninth wave of the sea to the tenth; therefore sigh and long for the dawning of that morning and the breaking of that day of the coming of the Son of Man, when the shadows shall flee away. Persuade yourself the King is coming; read His letter sent before Him: “Behold, I come quickly” (Rev. 3:11). Wait with the wearied night-watch for the breaking of the eastern sky, and think that ye have not a morrow. As the wise father said, who, being invited against to-morrow to dine with his friend, answered, “Those many days I have had no morrow at all.” I am loath to weary you. Show yourself a Christian by suffering without murmuring, for which sin 14,700 were slain (Num. 16:49). In patience possess your soul. They lose nothing who gain Christ.
1. Letters, no. 4, 40–41.
2. affect: have affection for