Are You Faithful?
Notes
Transcript
Introduction
Introduction
Background: There are some truths I wanted to leave with you at the end of the Book of Daniel, then we will move into this opening of the mInor Prophets
Here are some things that will take place during the millennial reign:
Now it shall come to pass in the latter days That the mountain of the Lord’s house Shall be established on the top of the mountains, And shall be exalted above the hills; And all nations shall flow to it.
Many people shall come and say, “Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, To the house of the God of Jacob; He will teach us His ways, And we shall walk in His paths.” For out of Zion shall go forth the law, And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations, And rebuke many people; They shall beat their swords into plowshares, And their spears into pruning hooks; Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, Neither shall they learn war anymore.
This means that human kingdoms will be changed. Sin will still be on the earth, but Jesus Christ will deal with it immediately. Every nation left on earth will begin to seek the truth that comes from Jesus Christ.
“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, The leopard shall lie down with the young goat, The calf and the young lion and the fatling together; And a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze; Their young ones shall lie down together; And the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play by the cobra’s hole, And the weaned child shall put his hand in the viper’s den.
They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain, For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord As the waters cover the sea.
This is when the lions and the lambs will lie down in harmony. This means that all the chaos of the earth will stop, all of creation will have had their fill, and they will be totally content with God’s provision. So content that the lions will begin to eat straw and the nursing child will play by the cobra’s hole.
The wilderness and the wasteland shall be glad for them, And the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose;
This means that the barren wasteland that we know as the desert will begin to produce life in abundance…and we will be there to rule and to reign with Jesus Christ. We will take part in His kingdom forever, we will have our rest, and then we will rise to get our inheritance.
The Final Rebellion
The great tragedy about all this is that people will still reject Christ even during his 1,000 year reign. Sometimes people say, “If God would just give me a sign, then I’d believe.” No they wouldn’t…because it doesn’t matter if the lions eat straw and the King of Glory rules the earth, there will still be people who will not believe in Him.
At the end of the 1,000 years, Satan will be released and he will deceive the nations again, and they will come to make war against us, but they will not last long.
Now when the thousand years have expired, Satan will be released from his prison
and will go out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle, whose number is as the sand of the sea.
They went up on the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city. And fire came down from God out of heaven and devoured them.
The devil, who deceived them, was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone where the beast and the false prophet are. And they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.
This will be what is called the Great White Throne Judgement. This is the point when all unbelievers who have died will be resurrected, and judged, and when Satan will be judged and cast into the Lake of Fire.
A New Heaven and New Earth
Following this, God will create a new heaven and a new earth (Revelation 21-22).
Adrian Rogers says that even the old heaven has been stained with sin because of Satan’s rebellion.
Everything that we know that is perverse, and wrong, and filled with heartache, is because of sin. We don’t get too much detail on this New Heaven and Earth, but we know that we will live in perfection, free from sin, sorrow, and death.
As far as the background of Hosea, there really isn’t much information on this prophet.
What we Know
His name means “salvation”.
Hosea was commissioned by God to marry a prostitute.
God uses Hosea’s marriage to this harlot and his children to send a message to Israel.
Hosea’s life in this book is a picture and a reality of how Israel is treating their relationship with God.
Hosea pictures Jesus Christ because you will see in this book that he goes and he buys back his wife from adulterous livng. He restores his wife just like God will restore His people.
Context: As far as the Context of Hosea, there really isn’t much information on this prophet.
What we Know
His name means “salvation”.
Hosea was commissioned by God to marry a prostitute.
This book represents God’s faithfulness to an unfaithful people.
That’s why tonights title is “Are you faithful?”, because God wants you to be faithful to Him.
He wants you to more than just faithful in your church attendance, he wants you to be faithful to love Him.
Think about the imagery here….a marriage doesn’t automatically mean love. Living in the house doesn’t automatically mean love.
You can be saved, and you can be at church every time the doors are open, but that doesn’t mean you love God. It’s possible to be in a marriage with Him, it’s possible to be in His house, and still be unfaithful. It’s possible that you are an idolater even if you bear the name of a Christian.
Now, very plainly, this book was not written to the church, it was written to the nation Israel and to Judah, but what’s the rule church? When you read the Old Testament,
You learn about the nature of man
You learn about the nature of God.
So, it’s not that this book was in any way written to us, but the principle of Who God is and what He commands of us still remains…and what we see here in the book of Hosea is that God wants us to be faithful, and that He is faithful beyond all measure.
I. God’s Amazing Grace
I. God’s Amazing Grace
Where are we at in the Bible?
The word of the Lord that came to Hosea the son of Beeri, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam the son of Joash, king of Israel.
Hosea is the prophet to both Israel and Judah and his ministry is taking place between 2 Kings 14-20. You need to remember, to make sense of the Old Testament, that after Solomon was king, Israel and Judah split. The nation sinned, and God preserved Judah for the sake of King David and for the sake of Jesus coming through the lineage of David.
So, when we say Israel and Judah…Israel is in the North, Judah is in the South.
At this time in the history of Israel, they were economically strong, but because they turned away from God their prosperity was short lived. They began to thank Baal for their prosperity rather than God…and established Baal worship in their temples. Because they did this, God sends Hosea as their prophet, and God gives a vivid imagery of exactly what Israel was doing by worshipping Baal.
They have taken God in marriage when they agreed to the covenant in Exodus, and they have committed serious idolatry against Him.
Other Imagery
Another vivid piece of imagery we get here in this opening verse is concerning sin and it’s pleasures. The nation of Israel may have experience 20 years of prosperity, but just like the pleasure of sin, it is short lived, and judgement will come.
Christian or Otherwise
And it doesn’t matter if you are a Christian or not, this principle applies. The lost person thinks that they are going to keep living in peace on prosperity, but in the end they will be judged by God. The Christian will sacrifice his relationship with God for temporary sin, but when the conviction of the Holy Spirit comes, it is a judgement so fierce and unrelenting that you will live in misery until you get it right.
Sin is fun, but only for a little while.
What’s the Big Idea?
When the Lord began to speak by Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea: “Go, take yourself a wife of harlotry And children of harlotry, For the land has committed great harlotry By departing from the Lord.”
A Harlot from the Start
This woman that Hosea would marry, her name was Gomer, and she was a prostitute. She was selected because she is the representation of the nation Israel.
Now, of all the people God could use to describe you, it might be insulting for God to use the imagery of a prostitue.
Our world is getting so perverse that they are trying to normalize this kind of work, they are trying to say that women who sell their bodies are validated and successful. They are trying to normalize pornography, and Satan is establishing institutions that make sexual perversion seem glorious and fulfilling.
One of the great blights of the internet is the ability to make sin seem fulfilling. Now, I’ve already said that sin is fun, but it’s only fun for a little while. There is great damage and great shame in these forms of sexual perversion.
What we see here is no different. The reason that God selected a prostitute is because her behavior is shameful. Her behavior is something that would have gotten her stoned or condemned if the nation Israel were following the law of God. However, God is using her life to convict the nation of Israel, and God is declaring that they will be judged, because they deserve to be judged.
Israel the Harlot
The bigger imagery here is that Israel has always been a harlot. They have always been unfaithful. On their wedding day, Moses comes down from the mounting with the covenant that God wanted to give them, and he finds them worshipping Baal.
And what was Aaron’s response when he was caught in this idolatry? “I don’t know how it happened, it just did.”
“I don’t know Aaron, maybe it’s because you smelted all the gold and then carved a golden calf…maybe that’s how it happened?”
Not only did they commit harlotry that day, but time and time again they abandoned their marriage with God, they abandoned their covenant with God.
God the Redeemer
But God is a God of redemption. Even though His people have played the part of the harlot, you are going to see that God will take us back regardless of how far we stray, because He has made us a promise, and He always keeps His promises.
Hosea’s Children
So he went and took Gomer the daughter of Diblaim, and she conceived and bore him a son.
Then the Lord said to him: “Call his name Jezreel, For in a little while I will avenge the bloodshed of Jezreel on the house of Jehu, And bring an end to the kingdom of the house of Israel.
It shall come to pass in that day That I will break the bow of Israel in the Valley of Jezreel.”
And she conceived again and bore a daughter. Then God said to him: “Call her name Lo-Ruhamah, For I will no longer have mercy on the house of Israel, But I will utterly take them away.
Yet I will have mercy on the house of Judah, Will save them by the Lord their God, And will not save them by bow, Nor by sword or battle, By horses or horsemen.”
Now when she had weaned Lo-Ruhamah, she conceived and bore a son.
Then God said: “Call his name Lo-Ammi, For you are not My people, And I will not be your God.
We have these three children, three names, with three meanings.
Jezreel
The name Jezreel means “God Scatters”.
In 2 Kings 9-10 you can read that Jehu was commanded by God to destroy the evil that Ahab did by killing Ahab’s descendants. What Jehu did was far more than what God commanded. He did kill all the descendants of Ahab, but he killed far more than who God commanded, and now his lineage and his dynasty will be judged.
This judgement was carried out against Jehu’s great-great-grandson, King Zechariah in 752 B.C.
Lo-Ruhamah
This name means “not loved”. This was the symbolism that God removed His love from the nation Israel.
Two Principles
God’s love is unconditional in that He does love the whole world and is ready to redeem it.
For us to enjoy and take part in that love we must have faith and obedience.
“Therefore know that the Lord your God, He is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and mercy for a thousand generations with those who love Him and keep His commandments;
and He repays those who hate Him to their face, to destroy them. He will not be slack with him who hates Him; He will repay him to his face.
Therefore you shall keep the commandment, the statutes, and the judgments which I command you today, to observe them.
“Then it shall come to pass, because you listen to these judgments, and keep and do them, that the Lord your God will keep with you the covenant and the mercy which He swore to your fathers.
We’ll talk more about this truth when we get to Gomer.
Lo-Ammi
This name means “not my people.”
This represented that God was going to divorce the nation Israel and that He was rejecting His son Israel.
But do you want to know a wonderful truth about God?
God’s Redemption Foretold
Every time you stray, every time His people negelcted Him, every time the world rejected Him, God immediately installed a plan of redemption.
“Yet the number of the children of Israel Shall be as the sand of the sea, Which cannot be measured or numbered. And it shall come to pass In the place where it was said to them, ‘You are not My people,’ There it shall be said to them, ‘You are sons of the living God.’
Then the children of Judah and the children of Israel Shall be gathered together, And appoint for themselves one head; And they shall come up out of the land, For great will be the day of Jezreel!
Say to your brethren, ‘My people,’ And to your sisters, ‘Mercy is shown.’
What God is saying here is that one day He will make Israel unite, one day He will tell them “you are sons of the living God.” One day, God will restore them…because God never breaks His promises.
Eschatology and Principle
This is in part a foretelling of the end of time when the Jewish nation recognizes Jesus as the Messiah. Right now they are scattered all over the world, but they will be reunited under the banner of God’s grace, and God’s promise to Abraham will be fulfilled.
God’s grace is sufficient. We deserve judgement, we deserve Hell, we deserve condemnation, but the scripture tells us this…2 Cor 12:9
My grace is sufficient for you
These three children, “God scatters”, “unloved”, and “not my people”, are renamed “God unites”, “Loved”, and “My people.”
That’s exactly what God does for you, He has united you with Himself, He has made you loved and worthy, and He has made you His child.
II. God’s Fearsome Holiness
II. God’s Fearsome Holiness
Just because God has a grace that is sufficient for us, just because God loves us, does not mean that we are absolved of our responsibility to love Him.
When a man and a woman get married, they recite to each other their reasonable expectations. They usually sound like this, “For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and health, until death do us part.”
There are also some implied expectations.
For the man, it’s implied that when you hear a sound at night, you’re not going to roll over and say, “Honey, I heard a noise, will you go check it out?”
For the woman, it’s implied that when…nevermind…
For the man, it’s implied that when something breaks, you need to get up there and fix it.
For the woman, it’s implied that….well, you get my point.
Above all, what is implied but not always stated in marriage vows is that the man and woman are going to stay faithful to each other, and that they won’t give themselves to another man or another woman.
When we got saved, we declared before God some reasonable expectations.
God, I am trusting you, and when I die expect to go to Heaven.
Just like we expect that God bring us to Heaven, God expects us to live in holiness here on Earth. To be a representative of Him and to legitimately love Him and serve Him.
What we see in the following verses are the three ways that Israel has abandoned the vows they made to God.
Idolatry
“Bring charges against your mother, bring charges; For she is not My wife, nor am I her Husband! Let her put away her harlotries from her sight, And her adulteries from between her breasts;
Lest I strip her naked And expose her, as in the day she was born, And make her like a wilderness, And set her like a dry land, And slay her with thirst.
“I will not have mercy on her children, For they are the children of harlotry.
For their mother has played the harlot; She who conceived them has behaved shamefully.
Now, Idolatry is this…it is spiritual adultery.
Baal the fertility god
Think of this, every time the people of Israel walked away from God, they worshipped Baal. Each time Baal was worshipped, Baal was worshipped by committing sexual immorality with prostitutes.
Idolatry means prostitution just as much as it symbolizes prostitution.
God’s Lawful Divorce
God says that Israel is not His wife…He is divorcing her. He is divorcing Israel because she has broken the covenant of God and has committed idolatry.
Our Responsibility
Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world.
And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever.
We can get so focused on this life that we forget our purpose. We can be so busy getting things done that we never take the time to worship God. I don’t mean just on Sundays, I mean living a life of worship towards God.
I mean living our life as Jesus intended for us to live it. That means worshipping Him day in and day out with psalms and spiritual songs, with praise and adoration, and with prayer.
If you want to know how you can be sure that you are truly living for Jesus, then begin to praise him with those psalms and spiritual songs, with praise and adoration, and with prayer…and everything else will fall into place. You’ll love His word, you’ll love to talk about Him, you’ll love His people…and you will minister to them.
Not only did they violate God’s holiness with idolatry, they did it with ingratitude
Ingratitude
For she said, ‘I will go after my lovers, Who give me my bread and my water, My wool and my linen, My oil and my drink.’
“Therefore, behold, I will hedge up your way with thorns, And wall her in, So that she cannot find her paths.
She will chase her lovers, But not overtake them; Yes, she will seek them, but not find them. Then she will say, ‘I will go and return to my first husband, For then it was better for me than now.’
For she did not know That I gave her grain, new wine, and oil, And multiplied her silver and gold— Which they prepared for Baal.
“Therefore I will return and take away My grain in its time And My new wine in its season, And will take back My wool and My linen, Given to cover her nakedness.
That is, that they gave credit to Baal for all the things God did for them.
Notice
God could have allowed Israel, He could have allowed His people, to go and be with these false gods, with these false lovers, but instead v. 7 you’ll see that God caused Israel to turn back to Him.
In the same way, every time we go astray, God is making plans for us to return to Him.
God’s Holiness Requires Thankfulness
Regarding gratefulness, Wiersby says it like this, “One of the first steps towards rebellion against God is a refusal to give God thanks for His mercies. God will not allow us to enjoy His gifts and at the same time ignore the Giver, for this is the essence of idolatry.”
Not only did they violate God’s holiness with idolatry and ingratitude, they violated it with hypocrisy
Hypocrisy
Now I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, And no one shall deliver her from My hand.
I will also cause all her mirth to cease, Her feast days, Her New Moons, Her Sabbaths— All her appointed feasts.
“And I will destroy her vines and her fig trees, Of which she has said, ‘These are my wages that my lovers have given me.’ So I will make them a forest, And the beasts of the field shall eat them.
I will punish her For the days of the Baals to which she burned incense. She decked herself with her earrings and jewelry, And went after her lovers; But Me she forgot,” says the Lord.
This is that they were still enjoying the feasts that God ordained, that God blessed, and that God upheld, but they were giving all the credit to Baal.
God’s Call to Us
What do we do in the church? The church grows and we credit the music, the preaching, the production, the committees, the business meetings, the whatever…and we don’t recognize that it’s God.
The hypocrisy that is displayed today is an emphasis on our man made obligations right here in the church. We can be in church, and still play the hypocrite. God will judge those who are hypocritical, loving other things while observing His blessings and His establishments.
We have seen Hosea’s children represent God’s grace, we understand from Gomer that God’s requires holiness, and now, through Hosea, we are going to see God’s Steadfast Love
III. God’s Steadfast Love
III. God’s Steadfast Love
For both points here, I am going to begin it like this,
“Because of God’s Steadfast love we can”.
Because of God’s Steadfast love, we can trust His promises
“Therefore, behold, I will allure her, Will bring her into the wilderness, And speak comfort to her.
I will give her her vineyards from there, And the Valley of Achor as a door of hope; She shall sing there, As in the days of her youth, As in the day when she came up from the land of Egypt.
“And it shall be, in that day,” Says the Lord, “That you will call Me ‘My Husband,’ And no longer call Me ‘My Master,’
For I will take from her mouth the names of the Baals, And they shall be remembered by their name no more.
In that day I will make a covenant for them With the beasts of the field, With the birds of the air, And with the creeping things of the ground. Bow and sword of battle I will shatter from the earth, To make them lie down safely.
“I will betroth you to Me forever; Yes, I will betroth you to Me In righteousness and justice, In lovingkindness and mercy;
I will betroth you to Me in faithfulness, And you shall know the Lord.
“It shall come to pass in that day That I will answer,” says the Lord; “I will answer the heavens, And they shall answer the earth.
The earth shall answer With grain, With new wine, And with oil; They shall answer Jezreel.
Then I will sow her for Myself in the earth, And I will have mercy on her who had not obtained mercy; Then I will say to those who were not My people, ‘You are My people!’ And they shall say, ‘You are my God!’ ”
At times when we don’t deserve it, God will call us back to Him. He won’t force us, but He will “allure us” to Him. That is, He wants us back…and when He calls, we can safely trust His promise.
When we return to Him from a time when we have suffered loss because of our disobedience or because of our unfaithfulness, God will make it right.
And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.
God will give us peace and contentment even when we walk through the consequences of our sin.
God has rescued us from condemnation
God hears the prayers of the righteous and He is ready to respond.
For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, And His ears are open to their prayers; But the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.”
Because of God’s Steadfast love, we can have redemption
Then the Lord said to me, “Go again, love a woman who is loved by a lover and is committing adultery, just like the love of the Lord for the children of Israel, who look to other gods and love the raisin cakes of the pagans.”
So I bought her for myself for fifteen shekels of silver, and one and one-half homers of barley.
And I said to her, “You shall stay with me many days; you shall not play the harlot, nor shall you have a man—so, too, will I be toward you.”
For the children of Israel shall abide many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or sacred pillar, without ephod or teraphim.
Afterward the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God and David their king. They shall fear the Lord and His goodness in the latter days.
Above all, our God is a God Who wants to redeem.
He is holy and He will punish sin…
He is just and He will destroy evil…
but He is a God that would rather redeem than destroy, He is a God that would rather forgive than condemn…He is a God that we can safely trust because of His steadfast love.
Are you faithful? Do you trust Him?
