The Taunt of the Ransomed King Text: Hosea 13:14
Introduction: A Promise Buried in Judgment
The book of Hosea is a book of severe judgment. God is bringing His covenant lawsuit against His unfaithful bride, Israel. The charges are idolatry, spiritual adultery, and a complete abandonment of the covenant. The sentence is death and exile. The language is stark, full of lions, leopards, and bears tearing the people apart. God is not playing games. And right in the middle of this litany of coming destruction, embedded like a diamond in a lump of coal, we find this verse. It is a staggering, explosive promise of resurrection.
Modern Christians, particularly those of a certain sentimental stripe, often have trouble with the God of Hosea. They want the New Testament God of love, as they imagine Him, and are embarrassed by the Old Testament God of wrath. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand everything. You cannot have the second without the first. The good news of the gospel is only good news when you understand the bad news of the judgment you deserve. The promise of resurrection only shines with its brilliant, world-altering glory when you see it set against the black velvet of the grave.
This verse in Hosea is a divine taunt, a challenge thrown down to the great enemies of God and man: Death and Sheol. It appears to be a question, but it is a rhetorical question dripping with sovereign irony. God is not wondering if He will ransom His people. He is declaring that He will. And this declaration is not some new idea, some plan B that God cooked up when the New Testament rolled around. The Apostle Paul picks up this very trumpet and blows it at the climax of his great resurrection chapter in 1 Corinthians 15. This hope of resurrection is an ancient hope, sown deep in the soil of the Old Testament. It is the hope that sustained the patriarchs, the hope that Job confessed, and the hope that Hosea proclaims in the midst of national death.
The context is the impending dissolution of Israel. They had sinned with Baal, they had forgotten their God, and so God was going to deliver them over to death. As a nation, they were going to die. But God's ultimate purpose is not death, but life. His judgments are always restorative. He tears down in order to build up. He kills in order to make alive. And so, in this verse, God looks past the grave of Israel's exile and proclaims a victory so complete that it will swallow up death itself.
The Text
Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol?
Shall I redeem them from death?
O Death, where are your thorns?
O Sheol, where is your sting?
Compassion will be hidden from My sight.
(Hosea 13:14 LSB)
The Sovereign Questions (v. 14a)
The verse opens with two questions that are, in fact, thunderous declarations.
"Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol? Shall I redeem them from death?" (Hosea 13:14a)
The answer implied is a resounding "Yes!" This is not God deliberating. This is God declaring His fixed and settled purpose. He is looking at His apostate people, who have sold themselves into the slavery of sin and are about to be handed over to the power of the grave, both nationally and individually, and He declares His intention to buy them back. The words are precise. "Ransom" and "redeem" are marketplace terms. They speak of paying a price to liberate a slave or a captive.
Sheol, in the Old Testament, is the realm of the dead. It is the grave, the pit, the place of silence and shadow. It is not necessarily a place of torment for the righteous, but it is a place of weakness, a place where the dead are cut off from the land of the living. And Death is its great king. Together, they represent the final enemy, the ultimate consequence of sin. Adam sinned, and so death entered the world. Israel sinned, and so they were being handed over to death.
But God says He will invade that kingdom. He will march into the stronghold of the enemy and bring His people out. How? By paying the price. The price for sin is death. To redeem His people from death, a death must occur. A substitute must be provided. The entire sacrificial system pointed to this reality. And here, in Hosea, God promises to do it. This is a promise of the atonement. This is a promise of a Redeemer who will conquer the grave by entering it and paying the price Himself. The power of Sheol will be broken by a greater power.
The Divine Taunt (v. 14b)
Having declared His purpose, God turns to address the enemies directly. He mocks them.
"O Death, where are your thorns? O Sheol, where is your sting?" (Hosea 13:14b)
This is the language of a victor, spoken before the final battle is even fought in human history, because in the eternal counsel of God, the outcome has never been in doubt. The New King James translates it as "O Death, I will be your plagues! O Grave, I will be your destruction!" Both translations get at the same glorious truth: God is declaring war on Death and the Grave, and He is going to win decisively.
The Apostle Paul quotes this very passage in 1 Corinthians 15, applying it directly to the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the future resurrection of all believers. "When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: 'Death is swallowed up in victory.' 'O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?'" (1 Cor. 15:54-55). Paul tells us exactly what Hosea was talking about. He was talking about the gospel. He was talking about Easter.
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law (1 Cor. 15:56). Jesus Christ satisfied the demands of the law perfectly and paid the penalty for sin completely on the cross. Therefore, when He rose from the grave, He defanged death. He pulled its sting out. For the believer, death is no longer a penal execution. It is a doorway. The thorns and plagues that God promised to be to Death were unleashed at the cross and the empty tomb. Christ entered the domain of Death, not as a victim, but as a king, as a plague, as its utter destruction.
The Unswerving Resolve (v. 14c)
The verse concludes with a statement that sounds harsh to our modern ears, but it is the very engine of our salvation.
"Compassion will be hidden from My sight." (Hosea 13:14c)
What does this mean? In the immediate context of judgment upon Ephraim, it means that God's sentence is fixed. He will not relent from the judgment of exile. The nation must die. But in the broader context of the promise of redemption, it means something even more profound. It means that God's resolve to defeat death will be absolute and unswerving. When the time comes for the Redeemer to pay the ransom, God will not show compassion on Him. He will not pull back. "He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?" (Romans 8:32).
The cross was the place where God's compassion for us meant hiding compassion from His Son. For Jesus to be our ransom, the Father had to pour out the full measure of wrath upon Him. There could be no flinching, no turning back. The thorns of Death had to be driven into the brow of the Son of God. The sting of Sheol had to be plunged into His heart. And because God's resolve did not waver, because compassion was hidden from His eyes in that crucial moment at Calvary, our redemption is secure. His face was set like flint to save His people, and nothing, not even the claims of Death itself, would stand in His way.
The Resurrection Applied
This ancient promise from Hosea is not just a theological curiosity. It is the foundation of our entire Christian life. Paul says that if Christ is not raised, our faith is futile and we are still in our sins (1 Cor. 15:17). But because Christ is raised, everything has changed.
First, it means our sins are actually forgiven. The resurrection is God the Father's public declaration that the ransom has been paid in full and accepted. The debt is canceled. The receipt is the empty tomb.
Second, it means that we who are in Christ have been raised to new life with Him. The same power that brought Jesus out of the grave is at work in us right now, liberating us from the power of sin (Romans 6:4). Regeneration is our personal Easter. God has ransomed us from the power of our own spiritual death.
Third, it guarantees our future bodily resurrection. This world is not all there is. The grave does not get the last word. Because our King has conquered Death, we who belong to Him will also conquer it through Him. Our bodies will be raised, glorious and imperishable, conformed to His own glorious body. This is not wishful thinking; it is a blood-bought promise, declared thousands of years ago through the prophet Hosea.
Therefore, we can look at our own sin, our own struggles, and even our own mortality, and we can join with God in His ancient taunt. We can look the last enemy in the eye and say, "O Death, where is your sting?" Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. He is the plague of Death and the destruction of the Grave. He is the ransom for many. And because He lives, we shall live also.