At last we get to the salvation message. The instruction is to "return to the Lord your God. Your sins have been your downfall". Sin is our biggest problem, not doing things God's way is the root cause of our problems. So the only answer is to return to the Lord.
They had to "take words" to the Lord. Animal sacrifices would not do the trick. They needed to admit their guilt and rely upon the Lord to be merciful to them. The same applies to us. Yet we find this so hard to do. We want to justify ourselves, we want to prove that we aren't so bad after all. None of this will work.
Similarly Israel had to admit that Assyria and the false idols she worshipped were useless and could not offer any salvation.
God's response to this would be first heal our waywardness. Through the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, God brings changes about in the very heart of our being. He loves us freely, and holds no anger against us.
Israel would become like a cedar of Lebanon, sending its roots deep into the ground to seek its sustenance from the Lord. The fruit of this would be that Israel would become something to be admired and respected. The Holy Spirit works in our lives to change us, to make us people worthy of honour.
We become a source of shade for others. So instead of Israel running off to other nations for "help", other nations would come to her for wisdom. This is the way it is meant to be with us. We are meant to be people who learn from the Lord, and so the world can then learn from us. And the world can only learn from us if we are learning from the Lord.
The truly wide person knows that wisdom resides only in the Lord.
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