The Predicable Path to Ruin

Intro

Surely it must just be the result of the fall, but it is much easier to destroy something than it is to build or preserve something, isn’t it? If you’ve ever watched one of those home remodeling shows, you know that “demo day” is rather short compared to the long, arduous hours of rebuilding what was just torn down. One bad car accident can wreck a car beyond repair in a matter of seconds, whereas I’m sure it takes weeks, if not months, to assemble a car.

Lives are just as easily brought to ruin by breaking covenant with God, whereas it takes the help of the Spirit for us to stay off the predictable path of ruin. Scripture gives us many examples of people and nations who failed to keep covenant with the Lord, to their ruin. These examples are meant to warn us, like flashing signs that say End of the Road, so that we too don’t end in ruin. The situation might be different, and the results may vary somewhat, but be sure ruin follows a predictable path, one that we can chart together in our text this morning. As we do, we will learn what not to do by learning to attend to God and His word for direction in faith and life.

Hosea 8:1-14

It Starts with Presumption

Again the prophet is called to give voice to his message of woe because Israel has transgressed their covenant with the Lord by rebelling against His law (word). But whether from ignorance or brazen apostasy, Israel is not aware that she has spurned the good. Their great sin causes them to be bold to confess, saying, “My God, we—Israel—know you.”

When we considered Hosea 5, we took note that knowing God was not about knowing certain facts about him. Rather it is one of the statements in scripture that summarizes an intimate relationship with the Lord and implies keeping covenant with him. That knowledge is experiential and results in love and obedience.

Israel claims that they know God in this way, yet the results of their actions have not caused them to draw near to him in holiness, but to transgress his covenant. To transgress is to go beyond. As if the law was a line on the ground that said do not pass. The transgressor is someone who crosses that line. Israel has become a transgressor, yet they claim to know God. This is the sin of presumption.

The puritan Thomas Manton preached seven sermons on David’s plea in Psalm 19:13 to “keep back your servant also from presumptuous sins.” He did so because this class of sins (if we can call them that), is a real killer, both individually and corporately. To understand what presumptuous sins are, we need to distinguish them from another class of sin, the puritans called sins of infirmity.

Sins of Infirmity

These are sins that come from ignorance of God and of his word. Thankfully when the Lord calls a man he doesn’t reveal all of his sins to him in that moment. That would crush him under a weight too heavy for him to bear. Rather, in the course of the Christian life the Lord discovers unto us those sins which we had until then carried on in without any concern at all. Along with ignorance we add sins of weakness. We are finite and limited creatures, and we have the added difficulty of carrying about a sinful flesh. An example would be, knowing that you need to continue always in prayer, and yet finding it difficult to persevere in that discipline. All sins of infirmity may become sins of presumption, by carelessness and neglect.

Sins of Presumption

In the Law, the Lord distinguishes between sins, with the most egregious being “high-handed sins.” These are what I am calling (after the Puritans) sins of presumption. Manton defines them this way:

Sins of presumption are sins against light and knowledge, wittingly and willingly committed, with a full consent of the will, carried on obstinately and proudly against God. They are usually such open and gross sins as are manifest; as whoring, gluttony, drunkenness, which are manifest even to natural conscience; or else are manifest by the common light of Christianity, as denying the faith; so that there is no doubt of the unlawfulness of the act done…There is a constancy or resolved purpose in these sins, without the fear of God or men. (Manton, Works, Vol 21, 341-342)

Called presumption, because it brazenly tramples upon the nature of God, trying his patience and mercy. Almost as if the sinner dares God to take action and do His worst. And the more these sins are engaged in the harder the sinner becomes causing them to be even bolder in their rebellion against God.

Zechariah 7:11–12 (ESV): 11 But they refused to pay attention and turned a stubborn shoulder and stopped their ears that they might not hear. 12 They made their hearts diamond-hard lest they should hear the law and the words that the Lord of hosts had sent by his Spirit through the former prophets. Therefore great anger came from the Lord of hosts.

If you want to avoid the path of ruin then you must guard your heart from presumptuous sins.

Galatians 5:19–21 ESV

Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Believers find themselves on the path of presumptuous sin through a careless neglect of searching your heart. Small sins, become large when they are habitually carried out with no attempt to mortify them. As another Puritan John Owen said in his most famous treaty On the Mortification of Sin, “be killing sin, or it will kill you.” Israel didn’t just happen on to the path of ruin, she deliberately found it, and made a studied determination to stay the course. All the while saying to the Lord, “My God, we—Israel—know you.”

It Proceeds to Innovation

Presumption often leads to innovation. Brazen, high-handed sins cause people to forget God. Then every man becomes the standard of his own righteousness, as in Judges, when they did what was right in their own eyes.

Proverbs 14:12 (ESV): 12 There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.

The path to ruin begins with presumption and leads to innovation. Having already thrown off God’s law as a rule of life, the next step is to find leaders that won’t rock the boat.

2 Timothy 4:3–4 (ESV): 3 For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, 4 and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.

So Israel, without consulting the Lord and His blessing, set up kings and princes for themselves. It was these who introduced innovative worship practices, mixing and blending the worship of the Lord with Baal and other foreign gods. First under the auspices of worshiping the Lord. But as with all innovations in worship, that is soon left behind, so that all that is left to worship is idols. But in the heat of sin, you never realize the stupidity of bowing down (worshipping) things that you have made.

God often gives us the leaders we deserve; take for evidence our current political moment. If you want a good indicator of where a society is going, and I mean any society, the family, the church, the state, even institutions. You need not look further than who they call to lead them, or who their leaders are. Have we sought the Lord to put in place leaders He has called to those positions? Or, out of a desire to have sanctioned idolatry, have we gathered leaders who will tell us what we want to hear.

Notice that false leaders and false worship often go hand in hand. You need not look further than the mainline church for examples of this. After ordaining women elders, it's no surprise they produce the 'sparkle creed' and other such idolatrous worship practices. The biblical model for leadership is rooted in the created order, with God calling men to lead in family, church, and state. When men abdicate their responsibility to lead, or women usurp that authority, you can be sure that idolatry is at the root of it.

In our culture, the desire to innovate is seen as a virtue. Wasn't it Peter Drucker, the management guru, who said, "Innovate or die"? Or the techno-utopians whose motto is "move fast and break things." But where has innovation gotten us? Has it produced healthier families, stable nations, and God-honoring churches? No, no, and no. The family is in tatters. Since feminism has rendered men supposedly redundant, by claiming that women can do anything men can do, men often can't be bothered to show up, or stick around, and have become little more than sperm donors. Suffrage brought women the vote, but it also opened the door for them to become politicians, and now we have cat-fights in the Senate as we become a nation ruled by 'Karens.' What an embarrassment our nation has become.

The path to ruin is predictable. It starts with the sin of presumption and leads to innovations that reject God and His creational norms. The results are just as predictable - ruin!

The Result is Ruin

Notice that the imagery the prophet uses to describe Israel's ruin is barrenness. "Sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind" has become well-known enough that its force is sometimes lost on us. It's not merely that Israel has sown nothing, and so she has reaped nothing. Rather, she has sown nothing and reaped destruction. The prophet is alluding to her foreign policy, but the background is faithfulness. Israel is like that person who is so desperate to be friends with everyone that they cross boundaries, gossip, and look for favors, but everyone sees it, and they recognize this is not a friend, but a politician, and not to be trusted, and all that effort produces no lasting friendships. Israel is a 'useless vessel' to the nations.

It turns out that unfaithfulness in one area makes it that much easier to be unfaithful in other areas. Having been duplicitous in her worship of the Lord, it's no wonder this has led her to be duplicitous in the political realm as well. Only there she did not meet an enemy that had pledged himself to be faithful to her as her Lord, one whose character was to be slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. Rather, these political intrigues she had engaged in would come back to devour her, swallowing her up.

As much as we try to keep our life compartmentalized into its various silos, God has a way of making what happens in one spill over into others. If you can cheat on your taxes, then chances are you won't have a problem cheating your company by cutting corners, or by being lazy on the job. It turns out unfaithfulness when carried out in one area of life makes you susceptible to unfaithfulness in other areas as well. As much as we would like our sins to stay in their places, they don't; they have a tendency to spread out and infect everything. You don't sow to the flesh and reap more flesh. You sow to the flesh and then you reap corruption—you reap death.

The most startling thing about Israel's ruin is that it is cloaked in the garb of religiosity. There are more and more places of worship in Israel than ever before, but these the Lord says are just more and more sites for sin. They are so foreign to the Lord that when they hear his law they 'regard it as a strange thing.' Even though they go through the motions, they offer sacrifice and eat it, their heart is so far from God that he will not accept it.

Jesus had the sternest warnings, not for the prostitutes and tax collectors, but for the Pharisees, because they had a form of religion that not only tolerated but privileged hypocrisy. They loved the power, prestige, and honor that came along with their position in society because they were of the Pharisees. But they cared little for making their hearts conform to their outward behavior. They preached righteousness and lived as if they were, but their hearts were desperately wicked. They were clean cups, filled with sewage; white-washed tombs, that hid dead men.

The saddest part of religious hypocrisy is that it renders that person unable to respond to the overtures of the Lord. He gave them the law, he sent his law-men (prophets) to warn, but they didn’t listen and they couldn’t hear, because they had convinced themselves they were good with God since they “sacrificed meat and ate it.” Derek Kidner puts it like this:

It seems to be an occupational disease of worshippers to think more of the mechanics than the meaning of what we do; more of getting it right than of getting ourselves right; and this can degenerate from thoughtlessness into something worse, ranging from cynical detachment, if we are sophisticated, to religious superstition if we are not.[^1]

We have already encountered this on multiple occasions in Hosea, and we shall again. Nothing could be more important a warning for the people of God than to be on guard against hypocrisy. Now a certain level of hypocrisy is going to be present in each of us. For we are not yet what we should be. The Holy Spirit is in the process of making what is true of us by virtue of our union with Christ an objective reality. That process we call sanctification. However, until it is completed, not in this life, but in the one that is to come, there will always be inconsistencies. We will say one thing and do another, we will know the right thing to do and not be able to do it, or at least not consistently. In other words, a certain level of incongruity will exist between what Christ has made us, and our lived reality. Which is why Romans 6, 7, & 8 must all be read in conjunction with each other. You are to consider yourself dead to sin because you have died with Christ (union) chapter six, but that doesn’t mean there is not an ongoing war of flesh (old man) against spirit (new man in Christ), therefore you must remember that there is no condemnation for those in Him. Contrary to that is hypocrisy that denies Romans 7, going from Consider yourself dead, to there is now no condemnation, without coming to terms with the ongoing battle every believer must have against indwelling sin.

Israel's hypocrisy consisted of syncretism, melding together of Canaanite religions with the worship of Yahweh. As if Yahweh was just one God among many, and none should be left out. Especially when false worship had such engaging and stimulating worship practices that were so innovative. The Pharisees' religious hypocrisy was a leaning into their identity as the Lord’s chosen people, those who had circumcision and the law, priding themselves on keeping it exactly to the letter. But they failed to keep the spirit of the law, betraying that in reality they were no different than Israel before the exile, by failing to keep covenant from the heart.

Good things like worship, and theology, can be used wrongly and divorced from practice which will result in hypocrisy. Take the “gospel-centered” movement which has gone to seed and the fruit it has borne is just repackaged hypocrisy in the form of antinomianism. Grace upon grace, but no obedience to Christ and his word. Yes “sanctification is by faith” alone, but saving faith is never alone, but is always accompanied by its fruits, which are the good works of obedience wrought by His spirit. Over-psychologizing grace, in the hyper-grace movement, turns grace into a magic talisman that you trot out wherever there is sin. But grace is not a substance, it's a person. The person of the Holy Spirit, who indwells the believer, and enables the mortification of sin, as well as the vivification of righteousness. Practice must match profession, Orthodoxy must be accompanied by orthopraxy. Else it's a dead religion, and nothing compared to the transforming power of the Gospel.

When the presence of religious hypocrisy crops up in a community, you can be sure ruin is right around the corner. For once a community reaches that point, there is no turning their ear to hear the Word of the Lord; there is no turning them to see their sin for what it is. Instead, a hardening takes place, and the only thing that will break hardness is the crushing hammer of the Lord’s judgment.

So what?

It’s easy to diagnose the problem in Israel because the prophet provides the GPS coordinates which show the path Israel took to ruin. But it's not so easy when your boots are on the ground, and all you have is a compass and a direction. The tendency will always be to look for the fastest way that seems to go in the right direction. It so happens that there is that wide path, that is easy to find, easy to traverse, and leads straight to hell. It’s not only one we gravitate towards naturally, but it's one we begin life on.

Where are you going? Which path are you on? If we all begin on the wide path that leads to ruin, how do you get off it and on to the right path? “Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” (Jn. 14:6). The natural highway all men are born on is the path of ruin in hell. To get off that path, you need a pathfinder, someone who can blaze another trail for you to follow Him on. Which is what the Lord Jesus has done. You see He took that wide path all the way down to ruin, but it turned out his life was unruinable, so that he was able to create a path out of ruin to the promised blessing of eternal life. “For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the pathfinder of their salvation perfect through suffering.” (My translation, Heb. 2:10). It’s a path that is narrow and hard, and the evil one is always offering shortcuts that promise a pain-free path to glory. But that’s not the path Jesus made to resurrection. It’s a path of self-denial, of taking up your cross every day and dying. Dying to sin, so that you can live to Christ.

The word of God is your GPS. It shows you where you are, and plots, of course to where you should be. Maybe the lights on the map on your dash keep flashing wrong way, wrong way, turn around, u-turn ahead, as it constantly tries to reroute you. If you make high-handed sins of presumption your waypoint, then I can predict the path, and it's not to glory. “No one born of God makes a practice of sinning, for God’s seed abides in him; and he cannot keep on sinning, because he has been born of God.” (1 Jn. 3:9) Sins of ignorance and weakness when engaged in often enough can harden into sins of presumption, and lead you down the path to ruin. The way to overcome sins of ignorance is to press on to know the Lord. If your GPS says off-line mode, no data, you have a problem. You need to download maps. You need to attend to the Lord and his word to know where you are and where you should be. By attending to the Lord and his word, we are confronted both positively with the holiness of his nature and his call for us to imitate him, and negatively in the threatenings of the law’s prohibitions. Putting yourself as much as you can under the reading and preaching of the Word is the best way to avoid the predictable path to ruin. Being under the Word, is the right posture, a posture of humility, and a recognition that apart from the grace and mercy of God we could just as easily find ourselves mimicking Israel in her hypocrisy saying, “My God, We—Israel—Know you,” yet in practice our actions say otherwise.

Ultimately it does not rest on human ingenuity or striving to find or stay on the right path, it rests on the sovereign Spirit of Christ. He makes the Father and the Son known to us through the Word of God. He convicts of sin, drives us to the cross in confession, and applies the merit and mercy of our faithful redeemer. He causes us to return to the narrow path in repentance when we take the enemy's shortcuts, and he causes us to persevere until at last that narrow path brings us to our desired destination in God. Only then will we find that the whole journey long the Spirit was fitting us for that place, so that we at last take possession of that promised rest.

So through the example of Israel, the Holy Spirit warns you in Hosea 8: because the path of ruin is predictable, you must attend to the Lord and His word to keep covenant with Him and avoid ruin.

Lord’s Supper Meditation

We come now to a fitting meal for pilgrims on the path of salvation. The world offers you food that will only sustain you for a few hours until your next meal. But the Lord gives you his body and blood that will satisfy your hunger and thirst for all eternity. We do not come to an altar, where Christ is sacrificed each Lord’s day. No, we come to a table, with a meal of bread and wine, emblems of his once-for-all sacrifice for sin. The bread and the wine are signs and seals that Christ, your pathfinder, has blazed the path of your salvation with his own body, and his own blood. He himself is the way, he is the path to salvation. When we eat and drink by faith we testify that it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And when we come to this table we come not as those who presume upon the grace and mercy of Christ; not as those who presume they have no sin. But we come with confidence that our sins have been forgiven. That Christ paid for each one, even those high-handed presumptuous sins we carried out in ignorance. For what we proclaim when we eat and drink by faith is the dying and rising of Christ for all our sins. The Supper is then your profession of faith, that you receive him who gave himself in death for your sins, to reconcile you to God, and open up for you the path to glory. If you have received Jesus by faith, then come and proclaim your participation in his death. Our tradition requires me to fence the table, by issuing warnings to those who would come and eat and drink but not in faith. For the danger is the judgment of ruin. For like Israel, if you come to this table and eat and drink the bread and wine in an unworthy manner, you would be guilty of the sin of presumption. For the act of taking the bread and wine is a profession of faith, and if it does not come from the heart then you are a hypocrite. All I can do is warn, for I cannot see your heart. It is easy enough to “sacrifice meat and eat it” and multiply sites of worship as Israel did, meaning you go through the motions of worship, and because of that receive the fierceness of His judgment since you do not keep His covenant from your heart. Whatever is not of faith is sin, and that would include your participation in this celebration of Christ’s death. So let us ask the Lord for the faith to come and receive Christ, let's pray and we will conclude with the Lord’s prayer.

Charge

Because the path of ruin is predictable, you must attend to the Lord and His word to keep Covenant with Him and avoid ruin.

Benediction

Jude 24–25 ESV

Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

[^1]: Kidner, Derek. The Message of Hosea: Love to the Loveless. Edited by J. Alec Motyer and Derek Tidball. The Bible Speaks Today. England: Inter-Varsity Press, 1976. Pg. 81.