Death Before Resurrection

This is a prophetic passage which I believe is coming into fulfillment in our day. It’s the promise of God to His people Israel to restore them, to restore them to Himself, to restore them to the blessings that He has for them, to restore them to their land.

And here in Hosea, he describes the way that He’s going to work out their restoration. I want you to listen carefully because, as so often, the way God does things is not the way you and I would expect Him to do things. And therefore, we have to be, as it were, watchful, or we’ll miss what God is doing.

This is what the Lord says concerning the restoration of Israel in

“Hosea 2:14-16”:

“Therefore I am now going to allure her. I will lead her into the desert and speak tenderly to her.”

See, sometimes God begins to allure us. That word is a rather mystical word. It contains the thought of somehow dealing with us in a way that we don’t fully understand, and yet we feel drawn. He says, “I will lead her into the desert.” The desert is not normally the place of blessing. “And speak tenderly to her.”

Literally, in Hebrew, the Lord says, “I will speak to her heart.” That’s a very beautiful expression in Hebrew. You see, it’s not always possible for God to speak to our heart. Sometimes our heart is closed. Sometimes we’re not responsive. So God has to work in our lives and bring about situations, like bringing Israel into the desert, where He can speak to our heart.

Then this is what He says, once He’s gained her attention:

“There I will give her back her vineyards, and will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.”

You need to know that in Hebrew, the word Achor means trouble. “I will make the Valley of Trouble a door of hope.”

That phrase ‘door of hope’ in Hebrew is Petach Tikva, and it’s the name of one of the major suburbs of Tel Aviv today. But it’s taken there from that passage in Hosea. “I will make the Valley of Achor a door of hope.”

“There she will sing as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt.”

And you notice, we saw earlier in the story of the bitter pool how Miriam and all the women of Israel sang there on the shores of the Red Sea. God says, “I’m going to give her back her song.”

Maybe I’m talking to some right now who’ve lost the song. I think it’s tragic when a Christian loses that song. You used to have a song in your heart. You used to praise the Lord so freely and spontaneously. And now, there’s a heaviness. There’s a doubt. There’s a kind of sense of being left out. God wants to give you back your song. “There she will sing as in the days of her youth, as in the day she came up out of Egypt.”

And now we come to the purpose of God, the revelation. Just as at the bitter pool, there’s a revelation of Himself that God wants to give.

“In that day,” declares the Lord, “you will call me ‘my husband’; you will no longer call me ‘my master.’”

See, under the Old Covenant, Israel’s relationship to the Lord was a marriage relationship, but they knew Him as Baal, as master. It was a relationship not really based on heart commitment, on deep personal love. But God says, “When I restore you, you’ll not come back on the same level of revelation. You’ll come back on a higher revelation. You won’t just call me ‘my master’; you’ll call me ‘my husband.’” That’s a very intimate word in Hebrew. “I’ll show you Myself in a new light. I’ll show you Myself as the One who loves you, as a husband loves his wife.” It’s a revelation of love, of deep tenderness.

So you see, God’s purpose in dealing with Israel was to bring them to a new revelation of Himself. When I see in history all the infinite wisdom and patience of God He has expended in dealing with Israel, and is still expending, I take tremendous courage in my own life. I think if God is so patient with a nation, then He can be that patient with me. And even if I do have to go through the Valley of Trouble, if I will continue, if I will persevere, not give up, not turn back, not grumble, not start to complain, then that Valley of Trouble will become for me, as for Israel, a door of hope. A door that leads me to a new and deeper and fuller revelation of the Lord, a revelation of His love and His compassion and His tenderness.

You know, sometimes it’s only in seasons of grief that we can really appreciate compassion and tenderness. So, if it’s the bitter pool, bear in mind that out of the bitter pool, God is going to reveal Himself to you if you will let Him speak to your heart.

Now, I want to illustrate this same principle of God’s dealings from a passage in the New Testament, in the writings of Paul, where Paul is writing in a very personal vein about experiences that he himself had gone through—very hard, difficult experiences. The passage is found in

“2 Corinthians 1:8-10”:

“We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia. We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. He has delivered us from such a deadly peril”—literally, it’s ‘from such a death’—“and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will continue to deliver us.”

There’s a man speaking out of personal experience. He said, “We were under such pressure, we despaired of life. It was far beyond our ability to endure.” Do you suppose that Paul was out of the will of God in that situation? There’s no indication whatever. He was in the full will of God. He was doing the purpose of God. He was being used of God. And yet, God permitted him to come into that situation of pressure where it seemed the very life was being pressed out of him. Have you ever felt like that? Have you ever felt, “I can’t take another step. There’s not one more ounce of pressure that I can endure. God, why are you permitting this?”

Well, Paul and many other servants of the Lord have been through that before you. And there is a reason. God’s reason is stated by Paul:

“But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead.”

See, God wants to bring us to a place where we’re at the end of all confidence in ourselves. We’ve reached the absolute limit of our own knowledge, our experience, our strength, our ability. We’ve entered into an experience of death. And then out of that death, God supernaturally moves to bring us into a resurrection, which is on a far higher level than we were living on before we experienced that death. You see, God always is leading us upwards. He’s leading us onwards. But if He’s going to bring us into a resurrection, He has to bring us through a death.

I’ve experienced that in my own life. And I remember I cried out to God once, and I said, “God, why do You only bless the things that first die and then are resurrected?” And I felt God gave me this simple answer. He said, “Because when I’m allowed to resurrect something, I resurrect it in the form that I want it to be in.”

And so if you’re going to go through an experience of death, remember there’s a resurrection. Remember there’s a new revelation of God, a deeper, fuller knowledge of God, if you’ll just hang on and trust Him and believe Him.