Afterward the children of Israel shall return, and seek Yahweh their God, and David their king, and shall come with trembling to Yahweh and to his blessings in the last days.
No other prophecy in the whole Bible so adequately foretells the future of God's relationship with Israel (both the old and the new) as does this one.  The call of Israel as the "chosen people," God's deliverance of them from slavery and his endowment of them with nationhood and a land of their own, their rejection of God as their ruler in the demand for a king, their progressively bold and arrogant apostasy, God's divorce of the sinful nation (the holy remnant excepted) from any further status as the "bride of Jehovah", the whole nation's sinking into the open debaucheries of paganism, such a state being one of spiritual slavery (to be equated in every way with the spiritual slavery of the whole Gentile world), God's redemption of the old Israel from the slavery of idolatry, his withholding from them his former favor through the long denial of any prophetic word (the time between the Old Testament and the New Testament), and his eventual new marriage to Israel (this time to the new Israel, made up of the faithful elements of the old, plus spiritual seekers of God's kingdom from among the Gentiles of all nations), and finally the great felicity and blessing pertaining to that new marriage as found in the church of Jesus Christ - all of these significant events pertaining to God and Israel are faithfully depicted in the first three chapters of the amazing prophecy of God through Hosea.