When Israel [was] a child, then I loved him
Or, "for Israel [was] a child" F21; a rebellious and
disobedient one, therefore his king was cut off in a morning, and
he has been, and will be, without a king many days; yet still "I
loved him": or, "though Israel [was] a child" F23; a
weak, helpless, foolish, and imprudent one, "yet I loved him":
or, "when a child"; in the infancy of his civil and church state,
when in Egypt, and in the wilderness; the Lord loved him, not
only as his creature, as he does all the works of his hands, but
with a more special love than he loved others; choosing them to
be a special people above all others; giving them his law, his
statutes, and his judgments, his word and his worship, which he
did not give to other nations. So he loves spiritual and mystical
Israel, all the elect of God, whether Jews or Gentiles, when
children, as soon as born, and though born in sin, carnal and
corrupt; yea, before they are born, and when having done neither
good nor evil; and so may be expressive both of the earliness and
antiquity of his love to them, and of the freeness of it, without
any merits or motives of theirs; and called my son out of
Egypt,
not literal Israel, as before, whom God called his son, and his
firstborn, and demanded his dismission from Pharaoh, and called
him, and brought him out of Egypt with a mighty hand and
outstretched arm; and which was a type of his calling spiritual
Israel, his adopted sons, out of worse than Egyptian bondage and
darkness: but his own natural and only begotten Son, our Lord
Jesus Christ; for these words are expressly said to be fulfilled
in him, ( Matthew 2:15
) ; not by way of allusion; or by accommodation of phrases; or as
the type is fulfilled in the antitype; or as a proverbial
expression, adapted to any deliverance; but literally: the first
and only sense of the words respects Christ, who in his infancy
was had to Egypt for shelter from Herod's rage and fury, and,
when he was dead, and those that sought the life of Jesus, he was
by an angel of the Lord, warning Joseph of it, called out of
Egypt, and brought into Judea, ( Matthew
2:19-23 ) ; and this as a proof of the love of God to Israel;
which as it was expressed to him in his infancy, it continued and
appeared in various instances, more or less unto the coming of
Christ; who, though obliged for a while to go into Egypt, must
not continue there, but must be called from thence, to be brought
up in the land of Judea; to do his miracles, preach his
doctrines, and do good to the bodies and souls of men there,
being sent particularly to the lost sheep of the house of Israel;
and, above all, in order to work out the salvation and redemption
of his special people among them, and of the whole Israel of God
everywhere else; which is the greatest instance of love to them,
and to the world of the Gentiles, that ever was known, ( John 3:16 ) ( 1 John 2:2 ) ( 1 John 4:9 1 John 4:10 ) .