Seasoned with Salt
Day 243 – 31 August
Take With You Words
“Take with you words and return to the LORD; say to him, ‘Take away all iniquity; accept what is good, and we will pay with bulls the vows of our lips.'” (Hosea 14:2, ESV)
My Word Is My Bond
For most of its history the London Stock Exchange ran on a Latin motto and a remarkable act of trust: Dictum Meum Pactum, my word is my bond. On the old trading floor, fortunes changed hands by voice alone, a jobber’s spoken price and a broker’s spoken acceptance sealing a bargain that no contract had yet recorded, the paper following days behind the promise. In that room a word was legal tender; to speak was to pay, and a man whose word failed was finished in the City more surely than one whose funds ran short. Modern markets have long since moved to screens, but the motto still names something the ancient prophets understood far more deeply, for on the last day of a month spent seasoning our speech, Hosea leads a bankrupt nation to an altar where the only currency accepted is words.
Bring Words
The instruction opens with a verb of fetching: קְחוּ עִמָּכֶם דְּבָרִים (qechu immakhem devarim, take with you words), from לָקַח (laqach, to take). Consider who is being told to bring them. Hosea’s Israel had reached the end of everything; the prophet’s own opening line states the cause in the people’s hand, for you have stumbled because of your iniquity, and the nation that once drove herds to the altar now had, in effect, nothing left to load onto a cart. So God prescribed the offering the ruined can still afford, וְשׁוּבוּ אֶל־יְהוָה (veshuvu el-YHWH, and return to the LORD), the great turning verb שׁוּב (shuv) with which the whole book bends towards home, and then, astonishingly, He wrote the prayer out for them: אִמְרוּ אֵלָיו (imru elav, say to Him). The commentators call it a liturgy placed in the people’s mouths, and Matthew Henry saw why, for the words were given to move the people rather than to move God. The script itself is brief and immense: כָּל־תִּשָּׂא עָוֹן (kol-tissa avon, lift away all iniquity), the verb נָשָׂא (nasa, to lift, to carry) being the scapegoat’s verb and the Servant’s, and, best of all, the very phrase from God’s own proclamation of His name on the mountain, נֹשֵׂא עָוֹן (nose avon, forgiving, carrying away iniquity); the penitent is taught to quote the Name back to its Owner. Then וְקַח־טוֹב (veqach-tov, and accept what is good), and the promise that closes the prayer: וּנְשַׁלְּמָה (uneshallemah, and we will pay), from שָׁלַם (shalam, to make whole, to pay, to complete), the language of a bill settled, פָרִים שְׂפָתֵינוּ (farim sefateinu, the bulls of our lips). Words are to be the payment, and words are to be the sacrifice: lips standing in for livestock.
The Fork Hebrews Took
That last phrase stands at a fork in the manuscripts, and the fork preaches. The Hebrew text reads פָּרִים (parim, bulls), the bulls of our lips, speech offered where cattle once burned; the Greek translators, dropping a single letter, read פְּרִי (peri, fruit) and wrote καρπὸν χειλέων (karpon cheileōn, fruit of lips). When the writer to the Hebrews came to describe Christian worship, he took the Greek road: through Him let us offer up a sacrifice of praise to God continually, that is, the fruit of lips confessing His name. Scholars rightly note that an apostle’s use of the Greek settles no question about the Hebrew original, and honesty keeps both readings on the table; but notice that the two roads arrive at the same altar. Whether bulls or fruit, the offering is speech. And that discovery closes a month with a click, for August opened its first Sunday at the altar of Psalm 19, asking that the words of our mouths be acceptable in His sight, and it closes on the last day of the month with words as the sacrifice itself. Every seasoned sentence of these thirty-one days, the salt, the bridle, the honey, the guarded gate, the cold water for the weary, was being prepared for this: to be carried Godward and laid down. David had said as much, that God takes no delight in bulls, that a broken spirit is the sacrifice He wants, and Hosea had said it earlier still, mercy over sacrifice, knowledge of God over burnt offerings. The lips, it turns out, were always the altar’s true stock.
He Answers Words with Dew
Now hear what happens at the counter when a bankrupt people pays in words, because the LORD’s reply follows at once and it is the gospel in three clauses. I will heal their מְשׁוּבָה (meshuvah, turning away, apostasy), He says, naming the wound with the people’s own noun and promising its cure; I will love them נְדָבָה (nedavah, freely), and that noun is the Hebrew word for the freewill offering, the gift brought under no compulsion and beyond any requirement, so that when the penitent bring their word-offerings, the LORD answers with a freewill offering of His own, love volunteered, unpurchased, poured out at His pleasure; and I will be like the dew to Israel, dew that falls silently in the night, asked by no one, earned by no field, arriving from above while the land simply lies still and receives. Here is the facet of God the month’s last day holds up: He accepts words as payment and pays back in dew, taking the poorest offering a soul can bring and answering it with the richest thing in heaven, love that is free by definition. Mark the grammar that guards the picture: the stumbling was by their own iniquity, the text’s own standing accounting, while the healing, the loving, and the dew are His initiatives entirely, so that judgment sits in the people’s ledger and mercy in His; and the counter stands open to whoever will take words and return, for the liturgy was written for a whole nation and addresses every lip in it. A God who behaves like this can be approached by anyone with a mouth.
The Month’s Last Delivery
So make this bank-holiday Monday, the still day at the end of a salted month, the day of the last delivery. Take with you words, three kinds. Take confession, naming without flinching the sentences of August you wish you could recall, and speaking over them the prayer God wrote: lift away all iniquity. Take thanksgiving, the fruit of lips, and let the day’s gratitude be spoken aloud rather than merely felt, since the fruit of lips is fruit only once it leaves them. And take the vows of verse three, the words you will never again say, the Asshurs and the horses of your own speech, the reputations you will no longer carve, the retorts you will no longer stock. Bring them to the counter where a word is legal tender and the bond is honoured on the spot, and then walk into September, whose theme awaits, with a mouth that has learned in one summer month how to be salt to the earth and sacrifice to heaven.
Declaration
I arrive today with nothing in my hands but words, and I have His own word that words will do. So I bring them: the confession named without flinching, the thanks spoken without hurry, the vows about what my mouth will never say again. A month of salted speech goes onto the altar this morning as the fruit of my lips, and I offer it with the prayer He wrote for me, to lift away all my iniquity and receive me graciously. He answers such words with dew, silent and unearned, and I walk into September with my lips still paying what only love could ever afford.
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