Hos 2:6 | KingComments | STEP | This verse indicates how God acts with His people to bring them back from their own path. He uses imagery twice: “hedge up her way with thorns” and “build a wall”. A road barred with thorns is a road on which an impenetrable barrier has been placed. You can only go up that road if you are prepared to suffer painful injuries. The path of sin is made unattractive, its painful side is shown. Someone can be kept from a sinful road if it is painted in bright colors that will mean, for example, the ruin of his health. A military exercise ground or a minefield can be cordoned off by barbed wire because it is very dangerous to enter this terrain or field. Anyone who does not heed the warnings and still wants to risk it must bear the consequences. He can get a lot of clothes tears and also physical injuries, he even runs the risk of being killed. Only a fool does not care about thorns or barbed wire. But God still has a means. He will close off access to the path taken by sin with a wall. He does this to bring the illegal users – His unfaithful people – from the path of sin back on the right path. God erects a wall, a wall that provides seclusion, separating His people from their lovers (cf. ). This happens when He scatters Israel. Then they no longer exist as a nation and as a nation they no longer have contact with foreign peoples and their gods. In this way she can no longer commit adultery with the idols. In Hosea 3 this is further elaborated, but here this judgment is described as a disciplinary measure that must lead to conversion ( ).

‏ Hosea 2:6

Thorns and a Wall

This verse indicates how God acts with His people to bring them back from their own path. He uses imagery twice: “hedge up her way with thorns” and “build a wall”. A road barred with thorns is a road on which an impenetrable barrier has been placed. You can only go up that road if you are prepared to suffer painful injuries. The path of sin is made unattractive, its painful side is shown.

Someone can be kept from a sinful road if it is painted in bright colors that will mean, for example, the ruin of his health. A military exercise ground or a minefield can be cordoned off by barbed wire because it is very dangerous to enter this terrain or field. Anyone who does not heed the warnings and still wants to risk it must bear the consequences. He can get a lot of clothes tears and also physical injuries, he even runs the risk of being killed. Only a fool does not care about thorns or barbed wire.

But God still has a means. He will close off access to the path taken by sin with a wall. He does this to bring the illegal users – His unfaithful people – from the path of sin back on the right path. God erects a wall, a wall that provides seclusion, separating His people from their lovers (cf. Job 19:8).

This happens when He scatters Israel. Then they no longer exist as a nation and as a nation they no longer have contact with foreign peoples and their gods. In this way she can no longer commit adultery with the idols. In Hosea 3 this is further elaborated, but here this judgment is described as a disciplinary measure that must lead to conversion (Hos 2:7).