The Valley of Trouble

[LaTonya Gibson]

Hosea 2:14-15

14Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her.

 15And I will give her her vineyards from thence, and the valley of Achor for a door of hope: and she shall sing there, as in the days of her youth, and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt.

 

The Lord has a way that is sweet and delightful. It is a way that doesn’t always appeal to man’s desire for comfort and pleasure. It is in these places that we expect to experience the greatest of God’s benefits. This expectation is the source of our trouble and presents a challenge in that God doesn’t have the same perspective of benefits. This is exemplified in these two verses of Hosea. In Hosea God speaks to Isreal about their spiritual whoredom – their decision to choose other gods over the only true and living God. As a result God tells Israel that He will destroy her. He’ll cause her to lose everything, He'll wipe it all out.

 

Almost jarringly God changes His tone here in verse 14. In verse 14 God says after I bring about great destruction and loss in Israel, I will allure her and bring her into the wilderness. The loss was chastisement. Israel were recipients of God’s belt because they chose disobedience. After chatisement,  God chooses to entice them into the wilderness. The term allure suggests that God uses what we are drawn to for the purpose of drawing us into a wilderness - place of intense loneliness, where there is no one but God. There is nothing to depend on but God. There is no shelter, but what the Lord provides. There is nothing, but what God gives. The wilderness is a place where we are taught to live for God alone, we are reminded of His desires for our lives, and we are given explicit directions as to how to get to our God specified promise. Here, we learn to follow the cloud by day and fire by night. In the wilderness we are taught blind faith.

 

Here is the beautiful thing. The entire time we are in the wilderness, we want to go crazy. We keep asking ourselves why we haven’t lost it yet. We keep looking at our issue and wondering, “Why am I not at my wits end? Where is this stillness coming from?” The Lord is speaking comfortably to us. He is using His Word to remind us that greater is He that is in us than he that is in the World. He is speaking that no weapon formed against us shall prosper. He is assuring us that all things really do work together for our good. We don’t want to hear the rehearsed Word. We want to be angry. We want to quit. We want to give up and we want to walk away. But God’s Word holds the reins, comforts us, and gives us supernatural strength and so we remain.

 

And it is a good thing that we do remain because verse 15 tells us the result of God drawing us into the wilderness. God says He will give us vineyards from thence. The grape is a pleasant fruit, and though much of a vineyard’s grapes are used as fruit, many are turned into wine and jelly. In other words, they are used for pleasure and the creation of pleasurable things. These pleasures are beyond the necessity. From the wilderness we are supplied the exceeding, abundant blessing. From the valley of Achor (trouble) we get hope. From this place we get a blessing and a hope we could not have received otherwise. We receive a blessing and a hope so overwhelming that it prompts us to sing like the day we were first brought into the faith. We sing like the day we first received Christ.

 

In the valley of trouble I learned a song and I’m going to sing it until I reach the mountain of victory.