“As for Samaria, her king is cut off like a twig on the water.” Hosea 10:7

The Twig

When I was a child, my parents would take us on picnics in the mountains. I thought it was magical how they could find a picnic table in the middle of what seemed—to my directionally-challenged young self—like nowhere.

I loved to throw little twigs into the streams and watch them float away, tumbling over rocks, being turned by currents and bubbles, occasionally pulled under the cold water and resurfacing to bob along. Eventually, the twig would be carried out of my eyesight and into oblivion, probably washed ashore somewhere downstream, to be noticed no more. It would never again be the seaworthy vessel my fanciful imagination had made it. Sometimes I made popsicle rafts, and stuck a leaf straight up in the middle as a sail or perhaps some shade for the pretend tiny people that were aboard for a trip down a piranha-infested river that was en route to a thatched-hut village on the mission field.

These memories came back to me when I read today’s Scripture in Hosea. It gave me pause, as all poetic word-pictures do when I read them in Scripture. Holy Spirit, the author of the Bible, chose these words and this image for a reason. It made me want to dig in a little bit, examining the words to find out why He said it the way He said it.

This verse comes in the middle of a scathing indictment against Israel, and against all the hills and temples where Israel had set up and worshiped idols. God would eventually destroy them all—Israel for worshiping other gods and forgetting the one true God Who loved her, and the surrounding nations for leading Israel astray.

The kings in those days felt secure in their positions. They were served, protected, and provided for. They were respected, or perhaps commanded obedience with the threat of punishment. In any event, they got what they wanted. This leads to a feeling of invulnerability—“you can’t hurt me.”

God’s Word says this is an extremely insecure position. “Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall” (1 Corinthians 10:12). For all the king’s posturing and threatening, he was, as Jon Courson says, “no more secure than air bubbles.”*

Any ruler, any person, in any position, in any nation—is no more secure than air bubbles if he or she is not held in place by the Father. A king—like any common twig—can be plucked and dropped into the stream, never to be seen or heard from again—unless the Father protects them in that place.

“Father, guide us into the right place for us. We know that Your hand is the most safe, secure place for us. Help us to trust You more. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.” 

*Courson’s Application Commentary