Hosea 13:16

"It is your destruction, O Israel, that you are against Me, against your help." What they had done in lifting themselves up, in forsaking Jehovah, was spiritual and national suicide. They were alone responsible for their destruction. Where was their king to save them out of such ruin and destruction? They had forsaken the house of David, the family with which God had made His covenant.

God blesses man, does not destroy him. Man destroys himself by his sin. We read, "O Israel, you have destroyed yourself; but in Me is your help" (Hos. 13:9). Men and nations destroy themselves, and then God comes in to destroy, that is, to carry out righteous government in relation to man's sin. The law puts a murderer to death, but only because he has committed a crime punishable by death. In truth the murderer destroys himself, though the law passes a verdict of guilty and carries out the sentence.

The historian Josephus tells us that Menahem was the military leader of Zachariah, the murdered king. When the town of Tiphsah refused his authority, he carried out a terrible, barbaric punishment: "He ripped open all the pregnant women there." And God in His eternal justice permitted the same punishment to fall upon Samaria (Hosea 13:16; Amos 1:13).

God marks the whole behaviour of Israel, keeps it in mind, and brings it forward to instruct the people, so that, if it were at all possible, they might be spared. This whole picture, drawn by God Himself, gives us deep instruction. It teaches us to keep close to Him. However great His patience may be, He takes note of all our ways, and He has ordained that we should reap what we have sown.

The king of Assyria besieged Samaria for three years. He finally took the city and all Israel, and moved captives to areas in Assyria, to Halah and the cities of the Medes. This was a sweeping judgment of God against His people Israel, and the ten tribes have never been restored to their land since that time… God has now allowed this great scattering of the ten tribes. Only a miraculous act of God at the end of the Tribulation will bring His people Israel back to their land.

Hosea 13 is a constant conflict between the affections of God and His judgment. The thought of their sin calls out the announcement of the judgment that must come. As soon as He pronounces that judgment, the heart of God returns to His own thoughts of grace… Nothing could be finer than this mixture: the moral necessity for judgment, God's just anger at such sin, and His pleading to persuade Israel to leave their evil ways and seek Jehovah, who would certainly have compassion. Then God returns to the eternal counsels of His own grace, to secure for the people He loved what their sin had taken from them.

Deliverance will come when the last Assyrian strikes his last blow. He is the king of the north in the book of Daniel. This time he will not carry the people away, as he did long ago. He himself will fall, and his fall will be far worse than the punishment Samaria once suffered at his hands.