Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: March 8th

THE DEW OF GOD’S GRACE

I will be as the dew unto Israel. - Hosea 14:5

Scholars tell us that the kind of moisture that is meant in these words about the dew is not what we call dew, of which, as a matter of fact, there falls little or none at the season of the year referred to in this text, in Palestine, but that the word really means the heavy night-clouds that come upon the wings of the south-west wind, to diffuse moisture and freshness over the parched plains in the very height and fierceness of summer. The metaphor of "the dew" becomes more beautiful and striking if we note that, in the previous chapter, where the prophet was in his threatening mood, he predicts that "an east wind shall come, the wind of the Lord shall come up from the wilderness" - the burning sirocco, with death upon its wings - " and his spring shall become dry, and his fountain shall be dried up." We have, then, to imagine the land gasping and parched, the hot air having, as with an invisible tongue of flame, licked streams and pools dry, and having shrunken fountains and springs. Then, all at once, there comes down upon the baking ground, and the faded, drooping flowers that lie languid and prostrate on the ground in the darkness, borne on the wings of the wind, from the depths of the great unfathomed sea, an unseen moisture. You cannot call it rain, so gently does it diffuse itself; it is but like a mist, but it brings life and freshness; and everything is changed. The dew, or the night mist, as it might more properly be rendered, was evidently a good deal in Hosea’s mind; you may remember that he uses the image again in a remarkably different aspect, where he speaks of men’s goodness as being like a morning cloud and the early dew that passes away. The natural object which yields the emblem was all inadequate to set forth the Divine gift which is compared to it, because as soon as the sun has risen, with burning heat, it scatters the beneficent clouds, and the "sunbeams like swords" threaten to slay the tender green shoots. But this mist from God, that comes down to water the earth, is never dried up. It is not transient. It may be ours, and live in our hearts.