Hosea Lesson 4
Parallel, Hosea talking to Gomer, God talking
to Israel Hosea, Part 2 - Hosea 2:5-13
Turn to Hosea 2, we’ll continue our study on the section on the passage
on judgment. Hosea is divided in two
parts and the first three chapters build up one part. The book of Hosea has a chiastic structure to
it, which is something we haven’t dealt with since we left Deuteronomy. A chiasm comes from the Greek word Chi and
it’s a way of relating four sentences or four paragraphs of material. Drawing the Chi, or an X type thing, you
associate statement A and statement D, statement B and statement C. So a chiasm
if you outlined it you’d have statement A and statement B, statement C and
statement D; A and D are associated and B and C are associated.
The first three chapters of Hosea are chiasm. From 1:1 to 2:1 is statement A; and 3:1-5 is
statement B. Both these parts of Hosea
are orders by God to Hosea concerning his marriage life. He was ordered to marry a prostitute in the
first statement, and in the third statement, after she went out and looked up
more business, he was told to bring her back home. Now in between these two parts, in 2:2-13 and
So we have this analogy or parallel that goes on and on and on in the
book, between Yahweh or Jehovah and
Last time we stopped with verse 5.
Verses 2-5 were a parallel; Hosea told his children in verse 2 to bring
lawsuit against their mother. Their
mother is Gomer, she is the prostitute, “Plead, for she is not my wife,” tell
her, “neither am I her husband.” In
other words the basis for the lawsuit was that she was acting out of accordance
with the marriage covenant, just like the nation
Now when we come to verses 6-7, which are going to amplify what God is
going to do to the nation, we are face to face with a peculiar kind of
discipline; a discipline which, for lack of any other purpose could be
described as a disciplinary strip, because what God does is that He takes
common grace, and to capture the imagery here’s where your background in Old
Testament will help you. If you don’t
have the background this kind of hits you the wrong way. But if you go back to Genesis 3, when sin
entered the world, the picture is people did not have clothes, man was made
like the animals, there was no need for clothes before the fall. After the fall man has need for something to
cover him; physically true but it’s not just physically, it’s also
psychological. Every sinner must be covered; he has a sense of guilt. And Adam
and Eve knew from the moment they had sinned that their marriage had changed;
their personal relationship had changed.
Now Adam and Eve’s personal relationship could not be a total one, there
could not be a total sharing because there was sin and guilt, so there would be
partial sharing in their relationship.
They drew away from one another to the degree, as explained in the
story, by putting clothes on and all the psychological things that went with
that.
Now God in common grace, or actually in saving grace, gave coats of
skin, literally, to Adam and Eve, and these coats of skin were to replace their
cover-up. The interesting thing is that
God does not deny Adam and Eve’s need for clothing. That’s not the issue; the issue in Genesis 3
is the kind of clothing used to fit their need.
Adam and Eve used fig leaves and God ripped them off and put on
something that was worthwhile, which is a picture of +R or imputed
righteousness. This is why in the New
Testament if you read the epistles carefully time and time again clothing
occurs in the background. Paul says “let
us put on the new man” and the Greek word to “put on” is the Greek word to put
on clothes. So this clothing, putting on
clothing is a metaphor that continues through all the books of Scripture
actually. So what is clothing? Clothing is imputed righteousness credited to
our account to solve the guilt problem.
Now, God, in grace, gave those coats of skin to Adam and Eve, but God in
grace also compensates for mankind’s sin at large. If we looked at the world and visualized the
extreme possibilities or extreme limits of suffering, let’s take, for example,
four people, person A, B, C, and D. By
virtue of the fall we as a human race are under a curse. Let’s never minimize Genesis; evangelicals
play fast and loose with Genesis. You
can’t learn anything without a literal Genesis, and when you find evangelicals
and Christians apologetic about Genesis you are finding people who are cutting
their own spiritual throat and it’s going to show up sooner or later. Now you can’t understand suffering apart from
the fall, and the fall means that we are under a curse which means that by law
we would get, if it were not for grace, the maximum suffering. By this we mean maximum psychological
suffering, known today as mental illness but not known as such in Scripture. We would suffer physically, that is in
nature, our bodies would suffer.
Oftentimes we are so used to grace that the suffering incidents appears
to be the abnormal thing. For example,
take childbirth, when a mother has a child with a birth defect we consider that
the unusual thing and we say what a horrible thing, yet if you’re thinking
Scripturally, every woman who ever conceived and ever bore a child is bearing
that child out of a body that is cursed, from union with a male sperm that is
also cursed, and therefore in a state of semi-chaos. And if God were to pull back the shelter of
grace every baby that would be born would be deformed; there would be suffering
in every person’s physical body. So
let’s concede the maximum suffering and sorrow possible because of the
fall. Ultimately it goes into hell; the
lake of fire is ultimately the maximum suffering the creature can take and it
is the suffering falling out from the fall.
It’s a logical result.
Now, the creature doesn’t directly fall into the lake of fire, that’s
saved until the end. There’s a time of common grace, it’s known as
theologically, when God restrains. In
some people’s life instead of suffering instead of suffering to the capacity
you’ll suffer this much, other people will suffer more, some less, some more,
but no one ever suffers to the maximum that we earn and deserve as a result of
our fall into sin in Adam, corporately as a race. The degree to which we do not peak out in our
suffering is the degree to which God’s common grace is restraining, restraining,
restraining, restraining and blessing.
So how often do you think of thanking God just for what you consider
normal things in creation, a normal climate that gives rain. That’s not normal by virtue of the fall; if
the fall were to play out we’d have the most fouled up meteorological situation
imaginable, as will happen, incidentally, when the angels back off in their
restraining ministry during the tribulation and meteorological processes are
released into a chaotic state. Then you
will have all sorts of things happen described in the book of Revelation and
other passages.
Now, this restraint that God is placing on the creation is something we
become used to and we forget that we actually and deserve this much, so
therefore when things get as bad as things got in the northern kingdom in the 9th
century and 8th century under Jeroboam II we have a situation in
history where God does a peculiar kind of disciplining. This kind of disciplining is when He peels
back common grace and let the fall have its effect; so whereas if the person
suffered this much now they’d suffer additionally that much. In other words, God’s restraints have been
taken off, still not fully but somewhat.
He backs off and lets the chaotic processes work out of creation put in
there at the point of the fall.
Now the restraint, again, is taken for granted. We, as believers, ought to daily give thanks
for restraint and common grace. Don’t
expect the non-Christian to, he isn’t. Your neighbor, who may not be a
believer, in his physical body he may be healthy, the only reason he is healthy
is because common grace is restraining physiological chaos in his body. That’s the only reason, and that person can
sit next to you, maybe in his lifetime, for 75 or 80 years and never once, as
an unbeliever give thanks; he may sit there and gripe, gripe, gripe about all
the suffering he faces and never have a particle of illumination as to how much
suffering he deserves as a fallen creature.
So this will reverse a lot of your thinking, if you’ll think in terms of
suffering, it’s not why did this happen to me, but why didn’t more happen to
me, that’s the answer if you look at it biblically. Why aren’t we suffering more.
Now when we get into Israel we get into a situation where Israel was
going on negative volition, and in previous verses, for example verse 5, it
says that she has conceived them and has done shamefully; “for she said, I will
go after my lovers, that give me,” and “give me” is in the participle which means
continually give me “my bread and my water,” there are the necessities of life,
“my wool and my flax,” there’s clothing, “my oil and my drink,” which are the
luxuries of life. And during Jeroboam II
reign in the northern kingdom, by the way, remember the geography, Israel
divided into the southern kingdom and northern kingdom, the northern kingdom is
called Israel or Ephraim in your Scripture, the southern kingdom is called
Judah. This happened in the civil war of
930 BC; after 930 the nation was forever split, the northern kingdom died out
in 721 BC under the assault of the Assyrians; Judah was taken into captivity in
586 BC by the Neo-Babylonians. So you
have two nations existing side by side, Hosea lived in the northern
nation. It is going to be the first
nation that gets it. And the reason this
nation declines and goes into a national disaster is because of its negative
volition toward the Word of God. These people have heard the Word of God, heard
the Word of God, heard the Word of God and they’ve rejected and rejected and
rejected and God has had enough, and He’s going to restrain grace.
Not only has this nation gone on negative volition, but she’s gone one
step more. She has gone to the point
where the blessings of verse 5, which are blessings, these blessings are now
attributed to her lovers; they are attributed to the Baals and so instead of
not recognizing blessing we have a peculiar situation where believers are
attributing blessing that comes from God to satanic idols. So they’ve gone very, very far into
apostasy. This is not just a simple case
of not giving thanks, this is a case where you go from plus thanksgiving, which
would be the spiritual believer, to no thanksgiving, which is the average carnal
believer to now plus thanksgiving to idols.
Americans come close to this when they fool around with astrology; some
men won’t make a deal on the stock market until they consult their astrological
table. Astrology is a multimillion
dollar business in America; in the last four or five years astrology has
mushroomed. And when men begin to
consult astrological tables and these kind of things, you have a situation very
analogous to Jeroboam II reign when men are not only not giving thanks to God
but they are actually saying it’s in the stars or nature forces are what bless
me, because after all, what were the gods of the ancient world? They were nothing but nature forces, and what
is astrology? Nothing but some sort of
force the stars exert upon your life. So
if you fool around with astrology you are fooling around with fire and you’re
going to get burned. God is going to
discipline you by the strip method like God disciplined the people in
Israel.
Let’s see how this is going to work, verse 6. “Therefore, behold, I will hedge up thy way with
thorns,” now this is God addressing the nation.
Up to this verse we’ve had kind of a dual thing, we’ve had God saying
this to Israel but also Hosea saying this to Gomer. But now in verse 6 it becomes very, very
direct. “Therefore,” for this reason, the
Hebrew looks back, this is a reflexive connect conjunction that reflects back
on verses 2-5, for what reason? Let’s
look at the reason, let’s look analogously at Hose and Gomer and Yahweh and
Israel, and let’s look at the analogy, what is the reason. Let’s pin it down. Hosea—right man; Gomer—right woman. God—the right God; Israel—the right
nation. They are locked into a covenant
agreement. God elects Israel from many
nations. Hosea is to elect Gomer from
many women. This is the first act of
love, it’s called ahav in the Hebrew,
ahav is election love, it is not the
love that occurs after an agreement has been made, it is the man who chooses
his wife and the act of that choice of the woman, and that is called an ahav love, it’s an elective choosing
love. God has elected the nation and
Hosea has elected his woman.
Now after the election of the love we have another word, chesed love; this is loyalty, and this
word means love after you’ve established a covenantal agreement. ahav
you select the person; chesed after
you’ve selected and after the oath has been made and the covenant has been
established now we have a functioning within the covenant. There are two distinct words here, two
different kinds of love, one is a choosing love and one is a love that
functions within a framework. So what
God is after is that the woman was supposed to respond to the man’s love inside
the marriage covenant and the nation was supposed to respond to God’s love
inside the Mosaic Covenant. The nation
was built to respond, and the second divine institution is going to be used,
that is marriage, marriage is going to be used as an analogy to God’s
relationship with believers.
God established marriage in the Garden of Eden and throughout history,
and we may get more insight into this when the prophets come back in the
tribulation and Jesus Christ establishes His millennial kingdom, we may find
added revelation clueing us into even more details of what is wrapped up in
marriage, but so far in history we know that marriage is a pattern of the
God/man relationship, and it’s a pattern in the sense that the man functions as
the one who initiates, and any marriage will be healthy to the degree that the
man is the initiator, he’s not some milk-toast yes dear kind of thing. And the woman is the one who is built to
respond; she can’t help it but she’s built that way and she needs to respond,
she needs to have somebody to respond to.
All right, man is built the same way, he needs somebody to respond to
and he is going to respond to someone, this is why Gomer is picked up, as a
female she’s got to respond, but as a female on negative volition she’s going
to respond to the wrong man. And as
people we are built to respond to God and we can’t stop that; don’t kid yourself,
the atheist is responding to his false gods, either the god of the intellect or
something else, but he’s responding; he can’t stop that response in his soul,
all he can do is reorient the response but he never can destroy the response. And Gomer has to respond. You see that in homosexuality; homosexuality
cannot destroy, ultimately, this structure, you still have to have this kind of
a response.
Hosea 2;6, “Therefore,” for this reason, for the reason that a covenant
has been violated, God says I elected the nation, just like Hosea married
Gomer; the point of marriage is the oath; the point of marriage here, Mount
Sinai, when they agreed to enter into a covenant agreement, and inside that
covenant agreement chesed love has
not functioned, and so for this reason, “I will hedge up thy way with thorns,”
now this is the kind of discipline that goes back to this idea of stripping, it
goes back to the concept of the curse.
The curse is always associated in Scripture with thorns. Keep these analogies in mind; the prophets
are speaking to Jewish people who had been educated in the Old Testament and
when Hosea says “I will hedge up thy way with thorns” it would have rang bells,
thorns, thorns, where are the thorns—Genesis 3, curse! So there would have been an immediate
understanding of this. “I will hedge up
thy way with thorns” means that God is going to take off the hand of
restraining grace on natural processes.
Simply stated, look at thorns; thorns apparently are some botanical
result of the curse; there was something that physically happened in the plant
kingdom at the point the curse was imposed.
Whatever it was it generated plants with thorns and thistles that were
not there before the fall. There was
actually a multilogical transformation in the plant kingdom, just as there was
in the animal kingdom. When this
happened you have the rise of thorns, so thorns are always a picture in the
Bible of the effect of sin in nature.
So when he says, “I will hedge up thy way with thorns” what He is going
to do is He is going to let the results of the fall play out on the nation
Israel, that for years this nation has gone on and on and on and on and sinned
and sinned and sinned and sinned and by all virtue of cause/effect should have
experienced economic disaster; she should have experienced business collapse,
she should have experienced meteorological and climatological disaster in the
crops, the crops should have been failing, but business was booming under the
reign of Jeroboam II. Which means that
the nation misinterpreted until God says okay, you people have had grace,
grace, grace, grace and you don’t learn from grace, I’ve tried to be gracious
toward you, over and over I’ve tried to love you; I’ve tried to express my love
to you and you don’t respond; all right, I still love you and God still loves
the nation Israel but what He is going to do to generate a response to His love
is He’s going to back off from the obvious manifestations of love. He is going to back off from restraining this
work of the fall and Israel is going to now begin a path of sorrow.
When you see this doctrine in Scripture, that is that nature is cursed
and that nature cannot provide blessing, you are rubbing up against a mentality
that you’re not used to thinking; there’s going to be a battle if you seriously
grasp what I’m saying tonight. There’s
going to be a battle because you can’t help it as an American, you’ve been
submerged into a whole era that thinks that blessing is inherent in physical
processes; that’s why you hear in the average vocabulary, good luck, or chance,
or something like this. This is where it
comes out in our very vocabulary. We are
used to thinking of the sufficiency of nature.
Now the shock is in the Scripture nature by itself is not sufficient to bless
man because nature is naturally in a process of decay and the only reason that
nature exists so that we can work with it and get food out of the ground is
simply because God is gracious.
Now to show you that nature truly is cursed, I think probably the best
way of getting this across in a manner that will shock intellectually, think of
the ecologists. Over and over in the
past five years Americans have been treated to this bologna that man is
polluting nature, that we are the ones that are dumping carbon monoxide into
the air, and if you look at the smog, isn’t that terrible. And all these
industries and what they’ve done, the strip mining and so on. Now this is not to say that man hasn’t abused
nature, we’re not saying that all of these claims are illegitimate, but greatly
exaggerated. And to show you this,
someone who’s active in horticulture dropped me an article this week and here
are three interesting points that have been brought out recently in the American Horticulture Association News and
Views in the October 1973 issue. And it shows you that nature pollutes
itself, not just man polluting nature but nature pollutes nature. For one things, plants do not produce any net
gain in oxygen. It’s often thought that
the oxygen is there in the atmosphere because plants in the evolutionary scale
came into existence and when you have chlorophyll working, you have
photosynthesis, now we have oxygen built up in the atmosphere. Such is not the case because plants
themselves consume oxygen in the night cycle.
The Oregon National Laboratory found that nature produces 90% of the
carbon monoxide in the atmosphere; man only produces 10%. In fact they did one study in which they
correlated the carbon monoxide levels in the northern hemisphere and the southern
hemisphere. There are 9 times as many
automobiles in the northern hemisphere than the southern hemisphere, much more
industry in the northern hemisphere. You
can do this because there’s very little exchange on the earth between the
atmosphere in the northern hemisphere and the atmosphere in the southern
hemisphere, it just turns out the equator is a very good barrier. So basically you can consider the earth as
two different atmospheres functioning.
And it’s a very interesting test, you would expect carbon monoxide
levels in the northern hemisphere to be significantly greater than in the
southern hemisphere, because after all, the ecologists have been telling us man
is polluting. Interestingly there is no
measurable difference in carbon monoxide levels between northern and southern
hemispheres. Which obviously testifies
to the fact that the amount of carbon monoxide put into the atmosphere by man,
by his industries, by his cars is highly insignificant compared to nature’s own
emitters, and this is through various systems of decay in nature.
The University of Utah study points that sulfur pollution from bacterial
action in mud equals that of industrial pollution. You can take some areas where you have
tremendous sulfur in the air from various petroleum products put forth into the
air in industry, nature puts almost as much in by decay in mud. See, nature pollutes itself; nature is under
a curse. So why should we sit here
absolutely astounded that nature is a bigger polluter than man; both man and
nature were cursed in Genesis 3 so therefore we are both emitting pollutants.
Now, think of this, do you think the federal government is going to pass a law
against nature polluting nature? You see
how stupid it is for us to think that we’re somehow self-sufficient. No government on earth is going to stop
nature from polluting nature; are you going to sentence the bacteria to 30 days
if they produce sulfur? No way, because
the creation has been cursed.
So when we see these thorns in Hosea 2:6b, “I will hedge up the way with
thorns,” God’s simply saying I’m just going to let some of these natural decay
processes function in an extravagant way and I’ll “make a wall, that she shall
not find her paths.” Now the “paths”
here refer to the paths to her loves, and this is very interesting because it
shows you what happens when you go from positive to negative volition, at least
in the female of the species. [tape
turns] …to the man who loves her, she has a right man, she’s responding. She goes through this cycle on negative
volition and what is she doing? She is
pursuing her lovers, and that’s the point that Gomer is doing and the nation
Israel. She won’t find her path, why
does she need paths, the lovers should come to her, not her to the lovers. So the fact that we have a reversal of the
process shows that the very relationship has decayed.
“…she shall not find her paths,” in other words, God is going to make it
so that her lovers being the Baals, being the idols, will not give her
blessing. She has seen rain, let’s take
some examples, she has seen rain, she has seen natural fertilizer because it
was an agrarian economy, and she has seen these things and she’s attributed it
to the Baals, Baal did this, bail did that, Baal did this, God says okay, you think
Baal did that, I’ll fix it so you won’t get any rain, now you see if Baal did
that, and they’re going to start praying to Baal, Baal, Baal, Baal, Baal, give
us rain, give us rain, give us rain and Baal can’t give rain because Baal
doesn’t exist. And they’re suddenly
going to realize that it wasn’t Baal all along that ever gave them rain, it was
Jehovah, Jehovah, their covenant God, He was the One that gave them rain. So they’re going to have an empirical demonstration
of God’s love.
Hosea 2:7, “And she shall follow after her lovers,” you see the reverse
pursuit, the process is reversed through the normal process, “she shall follow
after her lovers, but she shall not overtake them; and she shall seek them, but
shall not find them. Then shall she say,
I will go and return to my first husband; for then was it better with me than
now.” Now this is nothing more than the
prodigal son type operation, or phrased in American terminology, operation
pigpen. This, unfortunately, is the way
God has to deal with many of us. You can
minimize the suffering in your Christian life and you’ll do yourself a favor;
don’t get wiped out by some operation pigpen.
See, what God’s going to do is He loves you enough to put your nose it
and when you go down in this situation on negative volition, negative volition,
negative volition and you don’t respond to God’s grace at this point, God says
okay, I’m going to make it tougher for you and so He lowers your status in
life. Maybe economically He lowers you,
it may be in your personal relationships He lowers you; maybe He lowers you
emotionally or psychologically, but He gives you a hard time and you still
don’t respond. So God says okay, I’ll
lower you some more and He just keeps on lowering and lowering and lowering
until you get down and it’s very obvious.
Oh, it was obvious for other people during this process that something
was wrong, but finally when you get down to the pigpen and everything is bad,
hopefully finally you wake up. And
that’s the prodigal son. Now this is
what has to happen oftentimes.
In fact, this is what has to happen frequently in evangelism; if you’ve
read Frances Schaeffer’s book, The God
Who is There, basically the methodology he uses is to bring gently, but
firmly, the non-Christian out to the logical conclusion of his own
non-Christianity and he makes them live out his anti-Christianity, no man
really likes this. On a non-Christian
basis, for example, if you accept evolution in the large sense of the word
there’s no base for morals; Hitler was right, and Hitler can be vindicated on
the basis of evolutionary dogma. But
nobody seems to like Hitler too much and nobody seems to like the direction he
moved in, and yet everybody likes his [can’t understand word] which was
basically evolutionary. Now how do you
account for that, apart from the fact that the non-Christian at this point is
being tremendously inconsistent and hypocritical. On the one hand the force of his own position
would have him vindicate Hitler, that let’s help the evolutionary process out,
that it is not the meek that shall inherit the earth, it is the fittest that
shall inherit the earth, and therefore might makes right.
Now that’s the logical conclusion, and this is what oftentimes in
dealing with non-Christian you will have to do in the course of discussion;
before you can even mention God, the Bible, Christ, sin or anything else,
you’re going to have to stop and listen to what the non-Christian is saying to
you or you’re never going to get to first base.
This is why missionaries have to study the culture; it requires some
prior study, even on a personal basis, before you just drop the gospel bomb in
their lap. And after you see this, and
after you’ve listened, sympathetically and open-mindedly, help them see that
their own position is full of holes, not in the sense that you’re trying to
beat them down, but in the sense that their own position is incapable of
handling life’s problems. Then they’ll
be ready to listen seriously to an alternate answer. But if you come charging
in and say “Believe on Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved” they’re not ready
for that and they’re not going to give you a serious hearing. You have to dismantle them. Now God here has tried and tried to be nice
with these people and they wouldn’t listen to Him so now He’s going to strip
them down.
Hosea 2:7b, notice where it says, “Then shall she say, I will go and
return to my first husband,” now that is a prediction of the return of Israel
that has not yet occurred. Israel will
go out in 721 BC, in a disaster. Judah
will go out in a disaster in 586 BC.
They will come back in the land and they will go out in another disaster
in 70 AD; they will go out in 135 AD under the revolt of Bar Kokhba, they will
go out under the Hitlers, under the Spanish Inquisition, the Jews will be
tortured and raped and stolen from and beaten and imprisoned down through
history to the point where the Jewish theologians themselves will say God died
at [can’t understand word] The Jew will
go through this, but God says because I love Israel, eventually she will return
to Me. In 1948 with the rise of the
nation Israel we have the first step.
Israel is going to come back; the Jews has a destiny in history and he
is going to fulfill it, even if he doesn’t want to fulfill it himself. It’s all predicted right here, “I will go,
and I will return,” and they will return and find out that the Jewish carpenter
from Nazareth was the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ, and when they do so that
nation will enjoy peace and so will the world through Israel. It says, “…for then was it better with me
than now.” I empirically recognize, from
my experience I see it clearly now, I am not being blessed because I am out of
it with God, I am under God’s wrath.
Hosea 2:8, this describes more of God’s judgment, He’s made a gracious
prediction at the end of verse 7, but now very quickly in verses 8-9 He comes
back to the theme of judgment, and this shows you the mentality of sin in the
person. Now it’s been my experience and
those who have had a long struggle with sanctification, some who have gone
through terrible times of suffering, times which probably the secular
psychologist would give these people up.
People have gone through hell and have come out fantastic believers, and
almost every one of those people, after they go through this process and are
restored, and when I’ve talked with them I said I want you to summarize how God
worked in your life; I’ve tried to give you help, tell you what verses to go
to, and the thing that I’m finding is that inevitably the Holy Spirit leads
them to read the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and prophets like Hosea. There is something about this kind of
mentality that is healthy for people in this state. When you have a person
having great, great spiritual problems, have them read prophets like Isaiah,
Jeremiah and Hosea; there’s something about this and I’m not sure I can connect
it up myself, I just observe this. This
helps believers.
All right, the mentality then, Hosea 2:8, God explains what goes on in
your soul under these times of great pressure.
God says, “For she did not know that I gave her grain, and wine, and
oil, and multiplied her silver, and gold, which they prepared [it all] for
Baal.” Now this is something that is
going on, there’s not a connection. When
you have a person in deep depression, suffering psychologically, it’s always
one symptom of this, that I believe God is there but He’s not personal with me
any more, He’s distant, and I can’t get any sense that He’s really close,
there’s no sense of answered prayer, it’s always this distant thing. But the distant thing, if we read verse 8
correctly, is actually brought on by the people themselves, not God. What has happened is that these people have
gone on negative volition, the soul darkens up because when you go on negative
volition you’re not allowing the Holy Spirit to work through your conscience so
you have a darkening process that sets in, then you have the acquisition of
human viewpoint sucks it in, the vacuum of the soul sucks this kind of thing
in, you have a hatred for God produced.
And during this hatred phase you have idolatry and the attributing of
blessing to nature forces.
So when it says “For she did not know” it doesn’t mean Israel didn’t
intellectually… oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I believe Jehovah exists, blah, blah,
blah. They gave lip service to the
existence of God. So the verb “to know”
in verse 8 isn’t that kind of a knowing, it’s not a lack of intellectual
knowledge; these people aren’t the heathen who have never heard. These people know, but with the verb yadah, is a verb for personal knowledge,
it is used of sex between a man and a wife in Scripture, obviously personal
relationship. So “she did not know that
I gave her” means that in her day by day existence there was no
thanksgiving. She did not give thanks
until right here, we’re back to that same rule that we see in the New
Testament, we’ve seen it in Genesis, we’ve seen it in Samuel, one of the key
indicators, a spiritual litmus test for your soul is how thankful are you. That is one of the first things that will go
when you’re having spiritual difficulty is thanksgiving and it will be
probably the last thing to return after you’ve come off one of these “toulies
trips.”
“For she did not know that I gave here corn [grain], and wine, and oil,”
now these three are agricultural products that were sold in the market places
of the ancient world during the reign of Jeroboam II. During this reign, corn, which is the old
English word for grain, it doesn’t mean American corn, it means wheat, grain,
that’s one of her products, and wine and oil.
Now all those three were the main produce of her economy. It depended on first a good climate; it
depended on good soil, it depended upon fertilizer, they didn’t have commercial
fertilizer, they had natural fertilizer plus they rotated crops according to
the Mosaic Law. But all these things
were there in nature. Now what God says
is look, I blessed your climate, I blessed your soil, I blessed your
fertilizer, your whole economic production was possible in a cursed fallen
world only because of my common restraining grace. And what did they do?
Hosea 2:8b,“…and multiplied her silver and gold,” now how did her silver
and gold multiply? Because she was
producing agricultural products, and please notice, monetarily she did not use
fiat currency, even here, where you had
an apostate regime you don’t have paper money floating around. Of course they didn’t have paper so it’s not
quite fair, but they had gold and silver coinage. “…they prepared for Baal,” literally it says
they made this for Baal, they gave it to Baal for the offering. Now that’s what’s really insulting to God. You see, it’s like this. Hosea initiates love to Gomer; Gomer responds
toward some other man. Hosea is putting
out, putting out, putting out, putting out, and this woman is responding to
some other man. And she’s pleasuring
another man, that’s the point. And now
we come over here and God’s doing the same thing to the nation; here you have Yahweh,
He is blessing Israel, through her soil, through her climate and what does she
do? She takes Yahweh’s blessings and
pleasures Baal with them. God refers to
this as He goes on in the text.
Hosea 2:9, “Therefore” God says, “I will return, and I will take away My
grain in the time thereof, and My wine in the season thereof, and will recover
My wool and My flax to cover her nakedness.”
Now notice the number of times in verse 9 that the personal pronoun “My”
occurs. Count it; actually in the Hebrew
there’s 6 but you’ll see 4 in the English translation. Four times, My, My, My, My, and this recalls
something from the Proverbs series; the fact of eminent domain. Who is the Lord of the earth? Eminent domain is the legal doctrine that the
state ultimately can tell you as an individual what to do with your property;
they can give you just compensation but ultimately it’s the state that finally
owns it. Under Israel’s economy, because
she was in the kingdom there was no such thing as eminent domain. The families had been given capital by
Jehovah in the form of land holdings.
These land holdings were God-given to family units and the state could
not take them away, 1 Kings 21, the Naboth vineyard incident shows this. So eminent domain ultimately is apostate. We can’t do much about it, we live in a
Gentile nation and we’ve chosen to work this way, but under the kingdom of God
eminent domain goes back to Jehovah, not the state; Jehovah is the One who owns
the land.
And so in Hosea 2:9 He’s coming back, He’s going to take His property
away, I’ll take My own property. And
notice it’s not Israel’s; that’s a sobering thing. But the natural processes that we take for
granted all around us, they’re God’s.
Those cumulus outside that are dumping those raindrops all over the
ranch lands are God’s cumulus or cumuli if I want to be correct. They’re God’s, not mans. So all of these processes are God’s and He’s
coming back, and notice the last phrase of verse 9, “given to cover her
nakedness.” Now what do you suppose that
refers to? All through here there’s that
theme of stripping. What’s the
point? The point is that God was
blessing these people while they were on negative volition. If He had not, suppose He backed off and said
okay, negative volition, I’ll let the results play out in nature. Okay, zap the climate, that’s out; soil, it
will be alkaline when you want to seed the soil, when you want a low PH I’ll
give you a high PH. When, in the area of
plants and bacteria, when you work with fertilizer and the various of growth,
they’re not going to multiply. That’s
what would have happened had God let cause/effect take over. Israel would have been naked in the sense
that everyone would have realized look, there’s a nation that sinned against
Jehovah and look at it; it would have been naked. But God has given the wool and the flax to
cover her nakedness. He has blessed her
in spite of her sins; in spite of this He’s given her a good climate, He has
given her the good PH levels in the soil, He has given her the proper bacteria
active in the growth processes, in spite of her sin. See how gracious God is. Grace, grace, grace, grace, to the point
where it has been misinterpreted.
So verse 10 begins the last part of the chiasm and this completes this
part of the chapter, verses 10-13, this is the final announcement of
judgment. Hosea 2:10, “And now” this
means He is making a formal announcement, “And now will I uncover her lewdness
in the sight of her lovers, and none shall deliver her out of Mine hand.” Now the word “lewdness” is a word that means
minus conscience. It is very important
to go back because I believe the Holy Spirit designed these prophetic portions
of Scripture to unravel the messes we get ourselves into, and if we pay
particular attention to the vocabulary we’re going to learn some things about
our own souls and why we get all these hang-ups. When we go on negative volition our minds
says no to the conscience. The
conscience this is right, this is right, this is right, this is right, the mind
says no I don’t want to, I don’t want to, I don’t want to, and so you begin to
erect a barrier and finally the conscience becomes invisible to the mind. Now it’s still there, Proverbs 20 says the
conscience is like a tape recorder, it goes on and on and on. And even though that tape recorder, and the
indicator light, so to speak, isn’t visible in your mind because you’ve turned
it off so many times and not paid attention to it, it’s still plugged in and
it’s still hot.
Now the mind here, after a while shorts out, so that people actually
short out their conscience, to a large degree.
People lose the sensitivity of conscience. This is why, if you have a person who’s
negative volition for a long time, they become a Christian, not got any
doctrine, not got any leadership, and then generally went out and raised hell
for about 20 years, and then decide it’s time to get with it, they’re “over the
hill” and they’ve come a long way and not got a long way to go, and they’ve
wasted all this time, they haven’t done anything and it’s time I got some roots
in my life and decide I’m going to go somewhere and do something, if I died
tonight I couldn’t say my life is worth anything. What happens; they get back on a program, they
get filled with the Holy Spirit, they confess their sin and they have problems
because they’ve got such a lot of –R learned behavior patterns and one of the
worst ones that they have is this thing, right up here in the soul,
conscienceless-ness. In other words, it
is customary when faced with a situation in life where the conscience says,
very weakly because the signal strength has decreased so much, but very weakly
the signal comes through, no, no, no, but because of the –R learned behavior
patterns you’re so programmed that when you say no you say yes, good. So this is one of the first and most
dangerous habit patterns.
Now it’s that pattern that is described in verse 10, I will discover her
conscienceless-ness, literally, her spiritual insensitivity, and the word
“discover” means to lay bare, again it refers to disciplinary stress. “I will lay bare her conscienceless-ness,” in
other words, Israel is spiritually insensitive; she makes all sorts of goofy
decisions. And I am through bearing her
out of her goofy decisions, so from now on when Israel makes goofy decisions,
I’m going to let her sit in her own mess; I’m going to let her experience the
results of her goofy decisions. That’s
what it means to “uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers,” the lovers
are the gods, the idols. And as she goes
to worship, the word “in the sight of” means in the very place, the high places
where these people are going to worship the gods, and right while they are
worshiping the gods in the high places they are going to experience disaster
upon disaster, whether it’s in the form of physical sickness or something else,
something is going to happen right in the very process of worshiping their
gods. “…and none shall deliver her out
of My hand,” that means no man, no god, nothing will have the power to release
her from My curse; only God Himself has the reigns and the buttons to get us
out from His own curse. He put the curse
there and only He can remove it.
Hosea 2:11, this amplifies it some more.
“I will also cause all her mirth to cease, her feast days, her new
moons, and her sabbaths, and all her solemn feasts,” now verse 11 refers to the
destruction of the national culture.
When a nation no longer has a calendar such as Israel had established in
the Mosaic Law, when God is predicting something of the magnitude of verse 11,
it’s tantamount to saying I will totally disrupt the national culture, there
will be no more holidays, because it was those holidays when they should have
been going down to Jerusalem to worship in the temple of Solomon that they were
raising Cain with the Baals. It’s like
God says if you won’t do it My way then you’re not doing it.
Hosea 2:12, “And I will destroy her vines and her fig trees,” this is a
total destruction of her agricultural industry, both the vines and the fig
trees are elements that the farmers had to cultivate many years before they
would produce, so when God speaks to the vines and the fig trees He’s speaking
to large capital investments that have been made in businesses that have not
produced, the kind of business investment that many men have to make before
they see any return on their capital investment. For years and years a man may go through his
business and never see black, until one day he finally makes a profit; he’s
finally got out from under the pile, it’s a long, long hard struggle,
particularly today with inflation. Men
are under tremendous pressure because of this problem. It’s the same thing here, these men would
sweat it out until those vines would get into a production level, until those
fig trees would be large enough to produce; they had to fend off the bugs, the
insects, the climate and all the rest.
So God says I’m going to destroy that, I’m going to wipe out all your
capital investment. I’m not going to
destroy your industry today, I’m going to destroy your capital investment so
you’re not going to have industry for years to come. This is the kind of seriousness.
And why am I going to be so severe with you, because you’ve said this,
“of which she has said, These are my rewards that my lovers have given
me.” In other words, you have attributed
business success, you have attributed blessings in life to someone other than
the God of the Bible. “And I will make
them a forest, and the beasts of the field shall eat them.” I will release the insect life, I’ll let
chaos reign in the zoological realm, the animal kingdom. You thought you saw chaos before, wait till I
get through, God says.
Hosea 2:13, “And I will visit upon her [judge her for] the days of
Baalim,” all those celebrations you had, you’re going to celebrate, I’m going
to rub your nose in it. “…unto which she
burned incense [to them], and she decked herself with her earrings and her
jewels, and she went after her lovers,” and then tragically, this ends very
abruptly in the original language and there’s just no way of translating this
so it comes out. If you had a
professional reader it, he’d just go into a real minor key at the end, “and
they forgot me, saith the LORD.” The
note that you see at the end of verse 13 is what I told you we’d encounter
again and again and again in the book of Hosea.
God is so personal that He can be hurt by your sin. Now you may never have thought about this,
but the God of the Bible is the infinite God, true. He’s not finite, He’s not at all man in a
rocking chair; He’s a dynamic wrathful deity who passionately loves you, and a
person who passionately loves you is going to be hurt by mediocre
response. You can see it in marriages,
you can see it in the dating game.
And the neat thing about this little verb, “forgot me” tells you
something tremendous, if you think about it for a moment. What you experience
when you experience this, when you experience someone who you think loves you
and they just forget you, just forget you and that kind of a feeling you get
when that happens is because you are made in God’s image. Now a lioness and a lion don’t have those
kind of feelings, if a big lion goes away a lioness doesn’t have that kind of
feeling. That hurt feeling comes from
man; man’s the only animal that cries.
Now what’s different about man from all the animals, if we are to accept
creation and not evolution. Obviously
it’s the possession of he image of God in him.
And so this makes those sensations that you experience in your life, the
hurt that comes, those hurts are analogous to what goes on in God’s soul. God Himself can be hurt because He’s
personal. He is not a stone statue and
you’ve got to get away from this principle; we’ve been infiltrated with grief
thought in Christianity, this is Hebrew thinking and the God of the Hebrews is
a personal God, so personal that He can be hurt.
Now we’re not saying this is not a self-pity session for God, God
doesn’t need your pity so don’t cut Him down to a finite size; we’re not saying
that, if that’s your reaction you’re misinterpreting it. What we’re saying is that God is touched by
you and what you do and what you don’t do.
Don’t think of God as just kind of sitting there with His arms folded,
kind of waiting for it all to get over, get to eternity, that kind of
thing. God isn’t that kind of a God, as
the clock ticks and as decisions are made in history, God is passionately
concerned. He couldn’t be anything less than that to react the way He has just
shown Himself; the Holy Spirit wrote verse 13 and He’s trying to teach us
something. Do you see, God is hurt by
being forgotten, and you see what He did under the reign of Jeroboam.