Cords of a Man

He expects to be handled, and the word he would use if he were honest is handled rather than met.

The picture is not brutal. That is worth saying, because when people describe fearing God they are usually assumed to be picturing thunder, and he is not. What he pictures is more like being processed. Efficient. Firm. A hand on the elbow, a route decided for him, a pace set by somebody else, and no particular unkindness in any of it, and no particular regard for him either.

He would tell you that this is what he deserves and he says it without drama. He has thought about the matter a great deal and he considers efficient firmness to be a fair outcome.

And so he has not come back, for about three years, not because he fears cruelty but because he has no appetite for being managed.

I want to name that precisely, because it is a real and underdescribed fear. There are people who could survive anger and cannot survive being handled. To be dealt with correctly by somebody who is not looking at you is its own kind of cold, and a person who has had it done to them once by an institution never forgets the temperature.

That is you, expecting to be processed.

You've been picturing a firm hand and a decided route and a pace you have no say in. And you have concluded that this is fair, which is why you have never once examined the picture, because examining it would feel like special pleading.

Hosea chooses the image on purpose, and the choice is the point

In the middle of a chapter about a people who had gone a long way off, God describes His own method. Read the image, because He could have used any and He picked this one.

I drew them with cords of a man, with bands of love: and I was to them as they that take off the yoke on their jaws, and I laid meat unto them.Hosea 11:4

Cords of a man. The whole verse turns on that phrase, and it turns on a contrast the original hearers would have caught immediately.

There is another way to draw an animal, and everybody in that world knew it. You put a rope through, and you pull, and the animal comes because it has to. That is not cruelty; it is husbandry. It is simply how a beast is moved.

Cords of a man means the opposite. It means being drawn the way a person is drawn: by the hand, at a pace both parties can keep, with the one being drawn able to see where they are going and why. And then Hosea says it a second way in case anybody misses it, and the second way is bands of love.

You are drawn in human terms rather than moved like livestock, and the image was chosen specifically to rule out the one you have been picturing, and I am not softening a prophet: Hosea 11:4 says cords of a man, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can get that to somebody braced to be processed.

Now the third clause, which is the tenderest thing in the chapter. As they that take off the yoke on their jaws. Anyone who has worked animals knows this gesture. At the end of the day you lift the yoke clear of the head, and there is a particular way of doing it that keeps it off the sore places, and it takes an extra moment and everybody who does it properly knows that it does.

God describes Himself as the one doing that. Not the one putting the yoke on. The one lifting it off, carefully, at the end of the working day.

You have a God who describes His own method as the lifting off rather than the loading on, which is written into the third clause rather than into my sympathy for a fear you have never examined, with the Spirit of God able to take down a picture three years of assuming has hardened.

And then the last four words, and they are almost domestic. And I laid meat unto them. Food put down in front of them. That is the end of the sentence: drawn humanly, unyoked carefully, fed.

This is the method, stated by God about Himself, and there is no handling anywhere in it, because Scripture says cords of a man and bands of love, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a courtyard at the end of a day.