The Terrible East Wind of God Text: Hosea 13:15-16
Introduction: The Logic of the Covenant
We come now to the sharp end of God's covenant lawsuit against Israel. In our therapeutic and sentimental age, passages like this are often tiptoed around. They are an embarrassment to the modern evangelical mind, which wants a God who is endlessly affirming and never, ever severe. But the God of the Bible is not a celestial guidance counselor; He is the sovereign Lord of heaven and earth. And because He is a God of covenant, He is a God of blessings and curses. To be in covenant with God is the safest place in the universe, but only if you are faithful. To be in covenant with God and to be unfaithful is the most dangerous place imaginable. It is to be exposed, without shelter, to the full, righteous fury of His holiness.
Hosea has spent thirteen chapters detailing the spiritual adultery of the northern kingdom, Israel, whose capital was Samaria. They had abandoned Yahweh for the tawdry, orgiastic fertility cults of Baal. They had trusted in their own strength, their political alliances, and their fleeting prosperity. God had blessed them, and they had taken His gifts and offered them to idols. They had, in short, broken their wedding vows in the most flagrant way possible. And covenant breaking has consequences. What we are about to read is not random, chaotic violence. It is the methodical, judicial, and terrible application of the covenant curses that God had laid out centuries before in Deuteronomy 28. This is not God losing His temper. This is God keeping His word.
The imagery here is stark and brutal. It is meant to be. God is speaking in a way that will cut through the fog of their idolatrous stupor. He is showing them that the world is not a neutral playground. It is His world, governed by His laws, and rebellion against Him does not lead to liberation. It leads to desolation. The very things they trusted in for life, their fruitfulness and their children, will become the instruments of their destruction. This is the principle of reaping what you sow, applied with divine precision. Let us not flinch from what the text says. God is good, and God is just, and sometimes His justice looks like an east wind from the wilderness.
The Text
Though he is fruitful among the reeds,
An east wind will come,
The wind of Yahweh coming up from the wilderness;
And his fountain will become dry,
And his spring will be dried up;
It will plunder his treasury of every desirable article.
Samaria will be held guilty,
For she has rebelled against her God.
They will fall by the sword;
Their infants will be dashed in pieces,
And their pregnant women will be ripped open.
(Hosea 13:15-16 LSB)
The Fragility of False Fruitfulness (v. 15a)
We begin with the first clause of verse 15:
"Though he is fruitful among the reeds..." (Hosea 13:15a)
The "he" here is Ephraim, the dominant tribe of the northern kingdom, representing all of Israel. The name Ephraim itself means "fruitful." And for a time, they had been. They were prosperous. They had military strength. They looked, to the watching world, like a success story. They were fruitful "among the reeds," which is a picture of a lush, well-watered place. This is a picture of worldly success. They had the appearance of life and vitality.
But their fruitfulness was not rooted in God. It was a swampy, marshy fruitfulness, not the fruitfulness of a well-tended vineyard. It was the result of God's common grace, which they had taken for granted and attributed to their own cleverness and the patronage of their idols. They thought their prosperity was a sign of their own strength and Baal's favor. But God is about to show them that He is the one who gives the rain, and He is also the one who sends the drought. Any fruitfulness that is not grounded in covenant faithfulness to Him is temporary, fragile, and stands on the brink of judgment. It is a house built on the sand, and the storm is coming.
The Wind of Yahweh (v. 15b)
The agent of this judgment is described next.
"An east wind will come, The wind of Yahweh coming up from the wilderness; And his fountain will become dry, And his spring will be dried up; It will plunder his treasury of every desirable article." (Hosea 13:15b)
The east wind in Palestine was the sirocco. It was a hot, dry, scorching wind that blew in from the Arabian desert. It withered crops, dried up water sources, and made life miserable. It was a known and feared natural phenomenon. But Hosea is clear: this is no ordinary weather event. This is "the wind of Yahweh." God is sovereign over the winds, and He uses them as His instruments. This is the same kind of wind that brought the locusts on Egypt and that parted the Red Sea. It is an agent of divine, historical intervention.
This wind comes from the wilderness, a place of testing and judgment. And what does it do? It attacks the very source of their apparent fruitfulness. "His fountain will become dry, and his spring will be dried up." All their economic vitality, their sources of prosperity, will evaporate. The basis of their pride will be gone. God is turning off the spigot. The blessings they took for granted are being removed, because they refused to acknowledge the Giver.
But the wind is more than a metaphor for drought. It represents the invading army of Assyria. God is summoning a foreign power to be His rod of chastisement. The Assyrians were the east wind personified, sweeping in from the desert regions to the east, and they were known for their utter ruthlessness. The wind "will plunder his treasury of every desirable article." Everything they had hoarded, everything they treasured, all the wealth they had accumulated through their unholy alliances and idolatrous practices, will be stripped from them. The Assyrians will be the divine repo men, repossessing the goods that Israel had stolen from God's glory.
The Verdict and the Rebellion (v. 16a)
Verse 16 opens with the formal verdict in God's courtroom.
"Samaria will be held guilty, For she has rebelled against her God." (Hosea 13:16a)
The language is legal. Samaria, the capital city, stands for the whole nation. She "will be held guilty." This is not an accusation; it is a sentence. The time for warnings is past. The judgment is now inevitable. And the reason is stated with devastating simplicity: "For she has rebelled against her God."
Notice the possessive pronoun: "her God." Yahweh was not some foreign deity. He was their God. He had rescued them from Egypt, given them the land, established them as a people. Their relationship with Him was one of covenant, like a marriage. Their sin was not mere ignorance; it was rebellion. It was cosmic treason. It was adultery. They had spurned the husband of their youth. This is the heart of the matter. All the specific sins, the calf-worship at Dan and Bethel, the political machinations, the social injustice, all flowed from this one central act of rebellion against the God who owned them and loved them.
The Horrors of Covenant Cursing (v. 16b)
The verse concludes with a description of the judgment that is as graphic as it is terrible.
"They will fall by the sword; Their infants will be dashed in pieces, And their pregnant women will be ripped open." (Hosea 13:16b)
This is hard to read, and it is meant to be. This is the raw, unvarnished reality of ancient warfare. The Assyrians were infamous for exactly this kind of brutality. This was their standard operating procedure for terrorizing conquered peoples. But the ultimate responsibility lies not with the Assyrians, but with God, who is using them as His instrument, and with Israel, whose sin demanded this judgment.
This is the outworking of the covenant curses. In Deuteronomy 28, God warned that if Israel rebelled, their children would be given over to their enemies. They had sacrificed their children to the idol Molech, passing them through the fire. Now, in a horrifying display of retributive justice, God is giving their children over to the sword of a pagan nation. They thought Baal would give them fertility and bless their wombs. But in their rebellion against Yahweh, the very source of life, their wombs become a place of death. The judgment is tailored to the sin. They sought life apart from the Giver of life, and the result is the most horrific kind of death imaginable, visited upon the most vulnerable.
We must not try to soften this. This is a holy God judging profound evil. To rebel against the source of all life is to embrace death in its most ghastly forms. This is what sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth. This is the wage of sin. And we must understand that our sins deserve no less. The only reason this is not our fate is because another child, an infant in Bethlehem, was destined for another sword, another violent death on a Roman cross. The wrath of God that Samaria experienced in history is a shadow of the eternal wrath that Christ absorbed on behalf of His people.
Conclusion: The Only Refuge
This passage is a terrifying snapshot of what happens when a people favored by God persist in rebellion. Their prosperity is revealed to be a fragile illusion. The instruments of God's creation, the wind and the wilderness, are turned against them. And the covenant which was meant to be their protection becomes the basis of their condemnation. The blessings are reversed into curses.
The warning for us is plain. We who are in the new covenant have been given far more than Israel ever was. We have the fullness of revelation in Jesus Christ. We have the indwelling Holy Spirit. If we trifle with this grace, if we treat our covenant bond lightly, if we flirt with the idols of our age, whether they be materialism, sexual autonomy, or political power, we should not think that we will escape judgment. Judgment begins at the house of God.
But the story of Hosea does not end here. Just one verse prior, in the midst of this very oracle of judgment, God cries out, "I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction" (Hos. 13:14). The same God who sends the east wind of judgment is the God who raises the dead. The God who oversees the ripping open of wombs in judgment is the God who was ripped open on the cross for our salvation.
The horrors described here should drive us to the only place of refuge from the righteous wrath of God, which is the cross of Jesus Christ. He is the true and faithful Israel who never rebelled. He faced the full, scorching east wind of God's fury on our behalf. He was dried up, plundered, and dashed in pieces for us. In Him, the covenant curses are exhausted. And because He was ripped open, our wombs, our families, our lives, can be fruitful in a way that no east wind can ever wither. He is our only hope, our only fountain, our only treasure.