What Will I Do with You?

(Chapter Two: What Will I Do with You? (Hosea 4–10))

intro;

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.” and as the Prophet Hosea surveyed the kingdom of Israel, he would have agreed.

From his bitter experience with his wife, Hosea knew that sin not only breaks the heart of God, but also offends the holiness of God, for “righteousness and justice are the foundation of [His] throne” (Ps. 89:14, NKJV)

God wanted to forgive the sins of His people and restore their fellowship with Him, but they weren’t ready.

They not only would not repent, they wouldn’t even admit that they had sinned! So God conducted a trial and brought them to the bar of justice. It’s a basic spiritual principle that until people experience the guilt of conviction, they can’t enjoy the glory of conversion.

1. God Convenes the Court (Hosea 4:1–5:15) 1 Hear the word of the LORD,You children of Israel, For the LORD brings a charge against the inhabitants of the land:“There is no truth or mercy Or knowledge of God in the land. 2 By swearing and lying, Killing and stealing and committing adultery, They break all restraint, With bloodshed upon bloodshed. 3 Therefore the land will mourn; And everyone who dwells there will waste away With the beasts of the field And the birds of the air; Even the fish of the sea will be taken away. 4 “Now let no man contend, or rebuke another; For your people are like those who contend with the priest. 5 Therefore you shall stumble in the day; The prophet also shall stumble with you in the night; And I will destroy your mother. 6 My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being priest for Me; Because you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children. 7 “The more they increased, The more they sinned against Me; I will change their glory into shame. 8 They eat up the sin of My people; They set their heart on their iniquity. 9 And it shall be: like people, like priest. So I will punish them for their ways, And reward them for their deeds. 10 For they shall eat, but not have enough; They shall commit harlotry, but not increase; Because they have ceased obeying the LORD. 11 “Harlotry, wine, and new wine enslave the heart.

a.Just as Hosea had experienced a quarrel with his wife, so God had a quarrel with His estranged wife, the people of Israel. But it wasn’t a personal quarrel; it was an official controversy: “The Lord has a charge to bring against you who live in the land” (4:1, NIV).

b.The picture of God bringing men and nations to trial in His courtroom is a familiar one in Scripture (see Isa. 1:13; Jer. 2:9, 29; 25:31; Micah 6:2; Rom. 3:19).

c.The Judge read the charges to the accused as they stood before him.The nation as a whole (Hosea 4:1b–3).

d. The basis for judgment was the holy law of God, the covenant God made with Israel at Mt. Sinai. “All that the Lord has spoken we will do,” was their promise (Ex. 19:8), but that promise was soon broken.

e Just as Gomer didn’t take her marriage vows seriously but went to live with another man, so Israel reneged on her promises to God and turned to pagan idols. There was no faithfulness (truth) in the land, no loyal love to the Lord.

f. When people reject God’s covenant, they begin to exploit each other, for the Ten Commandments deal with our relationship with our neighbor as well as with the Lord. If we love the Lord, we will also love our neighbor (Matt. 22:34–40; Rom. 13:8–10).

g.But there was no mercy in the land, no love for one’s neighbor, no compassion for the poor and needy. People were falsehearted toward God and hardhearted toward one another.

h.The basic sin was ignorance; there was “no knowledge of God in the land.” “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hosea 4:6). This means much more than knowledge about God; it refers to a personal knowledge of God. The Hebrew word describes a husband’s most intimate relationship with his wife (Gen. 4:1; 19:8). To know God is to have a personal relationship with Him through faith in Jesus Christ (John 17:3).The Judge pointed to the Ten Commandments (Ex. 20:1–17) and reminded the people of how they had violated His law by pronouncing curses, telling lies, murdering, stealing, and committing adultery.

i. The land belonged to God (Lev. 25:23) the sins of the people polluted the land (18:25–28; 26:32–33). Natural calamities like droughts, famines, and the devastations of war were sometimes sent by God to discipline His people. Whether to bless or to judge, God always keeps His covenant promises.

j. The priests (Hosea 4:4–14). When Jeroboam set up his own religious system in Israel, many of the true priests fled to Judah; so the king ordained priests of his own choosing (2 Chron. 11:13–15).

k. Of course, these counterfeit priests knew neither the Lord nor His law. They were primarily interested in having an easy job that would provide them with food, clothing, and pleasure, especially opportunities to be with the shrine prostitutes. “Don’t blame the people for what’s happening,” Hosea said to the corrupt priests, “because they’re only following your bad example!”When you obey God’s word, you walk in the light and don’t stumble (Prov. 3:21–26; 4:14–19),

l. Israel was like a stubborn heifer, not a submissive lamb; and God’s whirlwind of judgment would sweep the kingdom away.Priests, rulers, and people (Hosea 5:1–7). This is a summation of the evidence that the Judge applied to all the accused. He condemned the leaders for trapping innocent people and exploiting them. There was no justice in the land. They were sinking deep in sin and lacked the power to repent and turn back to God, for their sins had paralyzed them.What was the cause? They did not know the Lord (5:4; 6:3) and their arrogance only led them to stumble and fall (5:5; Prov. 16:18).

2. God Rejects the Appeal (Hosea 6:1–7:16)

a. it isn’t unusual for the accused in a trial to express regret and remorse for what they’ve done and to ask for another chance.

b.That’s just what Israel did, but God anticipated their hypocricy and exposed the sinful way they had treated their Lord.The nation’s false repentance (Hosea 6:1–3).

1.Come, and let us return to the LORD; For He has torn, but He will heal us;He has stricken, but He will bind us up. 2 After two days He will revive us; On the third day He will raise us up, That we may live in His sight. 3 Let us know,Let us pursue the knowledge of the LORD.His going forth is established as the morning; He will come to us like the rain, Like the latter and former rain to the earth.

c When you read these words, you get the impression that the nation is sincerely repenting and seeking the Lord,

d. when you read what God says, you see how shallow their “confession” really was.

Hosea 7;10“ And the pride of Israel testifies to his face, But they do not return to the LORD their God, Nor seek Him for all this.

(Chapter 7) 13 “Woe to them, for they have fled from Me!Destruction to them,Because they have transgressed against Me!Though I redeemed them,Yet they have spoken lies against Me.

e. What went wrong with this “confession”?To begin with, their concern was for healing and not for cleansing. They saw their nation in difficulty and wanted God to “make things right,” but they did not come with broken hearts and surrendered wills. They wanted happiness, not holiness, a change of circumstances, but not a change in character.

Hosea 6:3, “If we seek Him, His blessing is sure to come just as the dawn comes each morning and the rains come each spring and winter.”

f. The Christian life is a relationship with God, and the relationships aren’t based on cut-and-dried formulas.

g. One more evidence of their shallowness is the fact that they depended on religious words rather than righteous deeds.

3. God Pronounces the Sentence (Hosea 8:1–10:15))

a Hosea calls for the trumpet to be blown (8:1; 5:8). According to Numbers 10, the Jews used trumpets to announce special occasions, to sound alarms, to gather the people for assemblies, and to proclaim war.

b. This call was a trumpet of alarm because the enemy was coming and God was giving His people opportunity to repent.

c. Hosea again used a number of familiar images to show the people what God would do to them because of their sin.

d. The eagle (Hosea 8:1–6). “The house of the Lord” refers to the nation of Israel, for the people were God’s dwelling-place (9:15; Ex. 15:17; Num. 12:7). The Assyrian eagle was about to swoop down and destroy God’s house because the nation was given over to idolatry, and the leaders were not seeking God’s will in their decisions. They made kings and removed kings to satisfy their own desires, and they manufactured gods (especially the golden calves at Bethel and Dan) that could not help them.

e. Sowing and reaping (Hosea 8:7). The concept of sowing and reaping as it relates to conduct is often used in Scripture (Job 4:8; Prov. 22:8; Jer. 12:13; Gal. 6:7–8), and Hosea used it twice (Hosea 8:7; 10:12–13). In their idolatry and political alliances, the Israelites were trying to sow seeds that would produce a good harvest, but they were only sowing the wind—vanity, nothing—and would reap the whirlwind. Nothing could stop the force of the Assyrian army. The harvest would be more powerful than the seed!The sowing/reaping image continues with the picture of a blighted crop of grain. The rulers of Israel thought their worship of Baal and their foreign alliances would produce a good crop of peace and prosperity; but when the time came for the harvest, there was nothing to reap. And even where heads of grain did appear, the enemy reaped the harvest and Israel gained nothing. In the image of the wind, Hosea said, “You will reap far more than you sowed, and it will be destructive!” In the image of the grain, he said, “You will reap nothing at all, and your enemies will get the benefit of all the promises you made.”

f. Worthless pottery (Hosea 8:8). There was no grain for Israel to swallow, but she herself would be “swallowed up” by Assyria. She was a useless vessel “in which no one delights” (NASB). Their compromise had so cheapened them that Israel was of no value to the community of nations. Nobody feared them, nobody courted them, nobody wanted them.

g. A stupid donkey (Hosea 8:9a) Israel wanted to be a part of the alliances that were forming to fight Assyria, but she was actually very much alone. She was like a dumb animal that had lost its way in the wilderness. Israel had forsaken her God, and she had been forsaken by her allies, so she was abandoned to face a terrible future alone.

h. A prostitute (Hosea 8:9b–10). In negotiating with the Gentile nations for protection, Ephraim (Israel) acted like a common prostitute selling herself for money. Israel’s kings paid tribute to the king of Assyria and also sent gifts to Egypt (12:1). Instead of being faithful to her Husband, Jehovah God, Israel prostituted herself to the Gentile nations—and lost everything. God promised to gather them together for judgment and they would “waste away” (NIV) under the ruthless hand of the Assyrian king

i.Egyptian bondage (Hosea 8:11–9:9). Hosea mentions Egypt thirteen times in his book, and these references fall into three distinct categories: past—the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt (2:15; 11:1; 12:9, 13; 13:4); present—Israel’s unholy alliances with Egypt (7:11, 16; 12:1); future—Egypt as a symbol of their impending bondage to Assyria (8:13; 9:3, 6; 11:5, 11). Three times in this section, the prophet announces, “They shall go to Egypt” (8:13; 9:3, 6); but 11:5 makes it clear that “Egypt” is a symbol for Assyrian bondage: “He shall not return to the land of Egypt; but the Assyrian shall be his king” (NKJV).The prophet contrasts the past Exodus from the bondage of Egypt with the impending “exodus” into bondage of Assyria, the new “Egypt.” When the Jews left Egypt, they had not yet received the Law nor did they have the tabernacle and its system of sacrifices. But now the Jews had heard the Law for centuries, and the temple had been standing since Solomon’s time. Yet they ignored the Law, and the priesthood became corrupt. The NIV catches the irony in 8:11, “Though Ephraim built many altars for sin offerings, these have become altars for sinning.”Instead of trusting the Lord to protect her from Assyria, Israel fortified her towns and sought help from foreign nations, and from a spiritual point of view, this was like prostitution. (During the harvest season, prostitutes frequented the threshing floors where the men slept to guard the grain.) The harvest season was a time of great joy (Isa. 9:3), but there would be no joy in Israel. And when the people ended up in a foreign land, everything would be unclean to them, but they were an unclean people anyway, so what difference would it make?

j.Agriculture (Hosea 9:10–10:10). God reviews the history of His relationship with the Jews. You don’t find grapes in the desert, but if you did, it would thrill you. That’s how God felt when He called Israel. The early fruit of the fig tree is especially good, and Israel was special to the Lord. But this joyful experience didn’t last, for King Balak gave Israel her first taste of Baal worship, and the nation indulged in idolatry and immorality with its neighbors (Num. 25).God planted His people in a special land, but they polluted the land with their idols (Hosea 9:13). The more prosperous they became, the more they turned away from God. Now they must suffer a bitter harvest for their sins, they and their children. The nation is blighted, having no roots and bearing no fruits. She was a “spreading vine