The Orchard After the Drought

In 1988, a peach farmer named Harold Gentry in Chilton County, Alabama, watched his orchard wither through the worst drought in forty years. Every tree stood skeletal against the August sky. His neighbors told him to bulldoze the lot and sell the acreage. Harold refused. He spent that fall hand-watering root systems with buckets from his well, pouring out what little he had on trees that had produced nothing.

The following spring, those same dead-looking trees erupted with blossoms so thick the branches bent under the weight. Harold told a reporter from the Clanton Advertiser, "Those trees didn't earn a single drop of that water. I just couldn't stop loving them."

This is the scandalous heart of Hosea. For thirteen chapters, God catalogs Israel's betrayals — the idolatry, the spiritual adultery, the relentless wandering after foreign gods. Any reasonable landlord would have razed the orchard. But then comes chapter fourteen, and the voice of the Almighty breaks through with staggering tenderness: "I will heal their apostasy; I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them."

That word "freely" is the hinge of the whole book. Not reluctantly. Not conditionally. Not after Israel cleaned itself up. Freely — like a farmer hauling water to fruitless trees simply because they are his. God does not love us because we finally got it right. He loves us because He cannot stop being who He is.