and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. But the story of Hosea is second precisely because it is an anticipation in pageant form of Christ’s story. Hosea was a preacher during the reigns of four successive kings of Judah, the oldest and most southern of the two Jewish states, and during the reign of Jeroboam, one of the kings of the northern state of Israel—as the introductory caption to the prophecy tells us (v. 1). It must have been a long period of ministry, perhaps fifty or sixty years, but