Hosea 2:1-13 (Chapel)

Introduction

In our last time together we were introduced to Hosea and his commands from God to go and marry a wife of whoredom and then to subsequently name his three children, Jezreel, No Mercy, and Not My People. We saw Hosea’s immediate obedience to God in these things and we noted how important it is that we feel the oomph of these things! Even in part of our application we saw how this connection with the deep pain and brokenness of this book ought to drive us farther from our own sin. We realize that sin in all of its forms is an affront against our holy God who loves us with the love of a perfectly true and faithful husband. When we choose to reject His perfect love for us to pursue other lovers, and all sin is that, a pursuit of that which we desire but know is not permitted by our faithful God, when we choose in sin to pursue these other lovers there is no more fitting of a picture than that of a wanton woman turning from a perfect husband to other lovers. I once read a book that I believe was called “the Smell of Sin” In it the author made all sorts of allegorical analogies for sin and in all of their grotesqueness I don’t think they quite came to the level of this simple and yet utterly painful picture that is painted for us through the life of this prophet. This wonderfully faithful man of God chose to submit to his Lord in these things, chose to live a life that I can’t even imagine being asked to live all so that he could faithfully live and preach before these people this message that God was giving him! That alone ought to give us ample reason to linger long over these things and seek to let them have their intended effect on our lives. That though only forms at best the second reason why we ought to linger long here. The primary reason is because of the amazingly glorious picture we get here of God. This book like so many other things in God’s word is not primarily about us, just like the commands to Hosea weren’t primarily about Him, Gomer, or their children but rather about their lives revealing before the people who God is, so even as we read these things we, yes, ought to seek to apply them to our lives but even before that we ought t to seek to see here the God who is Himself the blazing center of this story! It is my hope and prayer that we will be able to do just that today! READ & PRAY

Historical Context

As we jump into this chapter there are a few historical context points that we need to explore just a bit farther. It is really not possible for us to relate rightly to this book and even just this chapter within the book without having a grasp of two particular historical realities that form the backdrop for all of this. These two pieces of history are the worship of Baal and the beliefs and practices surrounding adultery in the ancient near east. We will touch a bit on adultery and then the worship of Baal before jumping into chapter 2.

Adultery

We know a lot about the legal concerns surrounding adultery in this time. Now it is important to note that we are talking about adultery not just prostitution. While prostitution was often a widely accepted practice in these days adultery was not. The other thing that will give us pause as we consider these things is that many of the laws about adultery and the consequences of it seem so totally out of step with our modern culture and particularly as it regards the treatment of women in these matters. The driving force behind much of the law codes in the ancient near east when it comes to adultery is the honor of the husband. In this culture women’s rights were not a thing, women were often treated as little better than property and adultery was nearly always if not always treated as a great offense against the honor of the woman’s husband and an offense for which the woman was almost always put to death. The law codes of Ur said this: If the wife of a man, by employing her charms, followed after another man and he slept with her, they (i.e., the authorities) shall slay that woman, but that male shall be set free.Hammurabi which many will be familiar with from middle school social studies class says this: When a man’s wife has left her own house and has visited another man where he is living, if he has lain with her, knowing that she was a man’s wife, they shall put the man to death and the woman as well.And in the Bible as the law for the Israelites as delivered to them from Saini we read: If a man is found lying with a married woman, then both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman, and the woman; thus you shall purge the evil from Israel.Again it is important, especially from the Biblical passages to remember that we are talking adultery here. This is a man and a woman both consenting to this thing and both bringing shame and dishonor on the husband who is at home. There were also laws for rape and other forms of sexual abuse and when the one violated was not a willing party there is not a sentence of death but when there is a willing defilement of the marriage such as adultery then in that case it is almost a universal sentence of death and this death is to uphold the honor of the husband. It is vital that we see this connection because we tend to think little of honor and dishonor in our modern day cases of adultery. There is still a taboo nature to adultery for sure but even in that so often it is quick to be excused because our society seems to be totally unwilling to condemn someone for seeking to fulfill any of their desires much less their sexual desires. However, central to the book of Hosea is the dishonored husband who has every right to put the wanton spouse to death for her violation of his honor. No less than the honor of the most excellent being in the entire universe, the creator and sustainer of all things is at stake here, we must keep this in mind as we read the indictments and punishments listed by this God against these people, His beloved.

Baal Worship

The next piece of history is the worship of Baal. Baal is one of the primary false gods to the Canaanite peoples and beyond that of many of the peoples of the ancient near east. Baal was said to be the god of storms and the one who brought rain and was said to be responsible for the fertility of crops and livestock. The interesting thing about Baal is that the word itself is really a generic word for lord or master. In this sense we even find God, the true God referred to in this way. This is likely one of the means that false prophets and wicked kings sough to sneak the worship of Baal into Israel and Judah. The people of Israel swung heavily into Ball worship in the days of Ahab, until that point the people had tended to worship Baal alongside of Yahweh but Ahab and his wife Jezebel made the worship of Baal official and even persecuted those who would still seek to worship Yahweh. Some of these things provide really helpful context to other stories. For instance, we all likely know the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal along with the drought and then the story of Elijah’s servant seeing the fist sized cloud. The background there though is that Baal would have specifically been responsible to bring rain and that God in closing the heavens was directly challenging this false god. In fact, during times of severe drought there were often stories that sprung up about Baal having been killed by other gods. Baal worship by the time of Hosea though was pervasive. These people worship Baal, sought to receive from Baal all that they needed and when they got those things the directly ascribed those provisions to Baal. We will see today just how central that is to the indictments that God will bring.

Verse 1

As we now move into chapter 2 we need to see that verse 1 is still part of the previous chapter. Verse 1 is the closing statement of the promised restoration and the reversal of names that we saw in the closing verses of chapter 1. Verse 1 takes place when the restoration of 1:10-11 takes place. However, including it here provides a great example of the stark transitions that we see throughout this book and that we will see today in chapter 2. This is just part of the structure of the book and likely stems from is being brought together from various prophecies that Hosea had spoken. It is thus not likely that Hosea ever said verse 1 and verse 2 together, they are pieces of separate oracles.

Verses 2-13: Relationship Broken

This then makes our true starting point for this oracle verse 2. In this verse we see a charge to the people to plead with their nation. It is interesting how God works here. God is clearly calling to individual people who are a part of this sinful nation to in a sense step back and look at the state of the nation as a whole, the mother, and realize what has become of her and then to cry out against her, to plead with her to repent. This distinction between the people/children and the nation/mother may well have been intended to help individuals mired in their own idolatry see the overall state of their nation and then be able to see the part that they played in it and repent of that. The thrust of this whole section then is going to be to show that Israel’s relationship with God has been broken. We will see this broken relationship painted for the people in terms of the adultery of Hosea’s wife. Another concern to note is that we, at least I had/have, a tendency to see this through the lenses of divorce. ​Plead with your mother, plead—for she is not my wife,and I am not her husband—That certainly sounds like what is happening here but there are problems with this. If divorce is what has taken place we know from the law that it was impossible for a divorced man to remarry the wife he had divorced! In fact, though there is much prophetic literature that speaks of Israel’s unfaithfulness to God, their adultery, their pursuit of other lovers, these prophets do not view God as divorcing His people. The relationship is broken, the people are not acting as a wife and God is not acting as a husband but the relationship has not been totally severed as in a divorce. So as we see God outlining the state of the broken relationship we see a mixture of God’s righteously indignant responses and His proclamations of Israel’s sins. We see in verse 2 that again it is the adultery, the pursuit of other lovers that is central to all of this. Israel has spurned God and as we read further down in verse 5 she has sought sustenance and provision from them. She believes that her bread, her water, her wool, her flax, her oil, and her drink all come from these other gods. Not content with what she has been provided with she has sought to fulfill her wanton desires through adulterous means, and even here we see that she attributes all she has to these false God’s, as Israel fell deeper and deeper into this idolatry they stopped worshiping the one true God altogether and ascribed everything to the false god Baal. The first result of this is that God in verses 6&7 says that He is going to stop her from receiving anything from these lovers. Remember His shutting off of rain in the days of Elijah! If these people were going to give Baal the credit for their rain he would cut it off entirely! This leads to a seeming repentance in verse 7, I will return she says but why is she returning? “Because it was better for me then than now.” This is followed up immediately in verse 8 with the first use of one of the key words in the book of Hosea. The Lord says that she, that is Israel, “did not know that it was I who gave her...” Know is an important word! Utterly important! One commentator says of this word: ​”...as much as any single term captures the essence of his understanding of what God wants and what Israel is lacking. Intimacy, loyalty and obedience—the three-fold cord of the covenant—are braided together in this word. To ‘know’ is to act as the covenant requires; not to ‘know’ is to fly in the teeth of covenantal allegiance, both in letter and spirit. Ignorance may more readily be excused; forgetfulness of the covenant and its Sovereign cannot.”When we take this know and tie it into the forgot me from the end of verse 13 we have a picture not of an innocent forgetfulness but if an intentional rebellious forgetting, a forcing out of the mind of who God is and what He requires. As an aside here I’ll note that this is exactly how sin works. Sin, especially sin that you get caught up in and have difficulty doing battle with so often moves us to seek to actively force out of our minds that which we know to be true of God so that we can make room for that sin in our lives at that moment. This is so terrifyingly dangerous! We can see here what God’s response is to this type of attitude! God strips her bare. He puts an end to her mirth, HE stops her feasts, He puts her to shame before those whose approval and provision she has sought, He lays waste to her crops and produce and send the wild beasts at her! Preach that to yourself the next time you feel like dancing around with with some sin that seeks to make you forget God! And in the end of this we see in verse 13 why all this is happening! She has worshiped the Baals, she has celebrated their feasts, she has gone after these other lovers and she has forcefully forgotten her one and only true lover, her utterly faithful husband, Yahweh her Lord.

Closing

Now at this point I had a decision to make, I had intended to cover all of chapter two in this message but we are at a break in the flow of things. IT is about to change drastically! We are going to swing to restoration again in verse 14. So I am guessing that this will be a bit short but if we carry on into verse 14 to close the chapter will likely make things a bit long and just as we have spent time today seeing God as a loving and faithful husband who has been greatly dishonored by an immoral wife who has wantonly sought out other lovers so also we need to take time in our next time together to seek to sound some of the depths of this great and awesome redeeming love of God. So as we close I just want to again point us to the fundamental reality held before us in Hosea! We have seen much of the wanton woman, we have seen her chasing her lovers, actively forgetting her husband forging ahead in her idolatry and only thinking of returning to him in times of distress because of what it would mean for her, she has as yet not a single thought to the dishonor that her behavior has brought to her husband! It would be easy to spend our time focused there, applying this wanton woman to us as I have tried to do. This is the story of each and every one of our lives. We, all of us, have rejected the God who loves us, sought to make our own rules, filled our lives with other loves, and actively forced from our minds the knowledge of the One who loves us, in the words of the book of Romans, we have suppressed the truth of God in unrighteousness. God says our lives are His, we say “no” my life belongs to me and I will do with it as I please! In order for that to land on us though we need to see the quality of the one who we have rejected. To place a piece of old chewing gum on a park railing defaces and dishonors that railing, to place a piece of chewed up bubble gum on the Mona Lisa though is a whole different category of dishonor and defiling. Our sin has not been against someone who would be comparable to a park railing, our sin has been against someone who far outshines even the most magnificent of paintings in His worth and glory, and yet we have rebelliously cast dishonor upon Him by rejecting Him, rebelling against Him and saying we would rather have things our way! It is the fieriness of this righteous indignation that we have seen on display in this chapter that points us to the worth and quality of the one we have rejected! If this part of chapter 2 was all we had things would be pretty bleak, however we know that verses 14 and on are coming. We saw that even today the aim of this dishonored lover is not divorce but rather we look forward to learning about the great restoration that takes place through the redeeming love of our endlessly faithful husband!