Hosea Lesson 5
God’s declaration of future plans - Hosea
2:14-17
To review, the book of Hosea is divided into two parts, chapters 1-3 and
chapters 4-the end. In the first three
chapters we have a chiasm; a chiasm is a simple arrangement of truths;
statement A is related to statement D, and that the second statement, statement
B is related to the third statement, statement C. So you have the first and fourth statements
and the second and third statements tied together.
This chiasm was built as follows.
The first statement, Hosea 1:1-2:1; the second statement, Hosea 2:2-13;
the third statement, Hoses 2:14-23; and the fourth statement, Hosea 3:1-5. That is a chiasm; it’s a chiasm because the
first statement, the first chapter plus one verse, deals with Hosea and his
marriage to Gomer. He was required and
called to marry a professional prostitute, because he, in order to communicate
truth of God’s covenantal relationship to
We’ve learned many things and we have many more things to learn in this
book, but of all the details the one thing that stands above them all, and the
thing for which this book is most noted is that nowhere in God’s Word do you
have such a dramatic portrayal that God is a personal God who responds, that
God, in a sense, can be hurt, that God can be jealous, that God loves the elect
so much that when they do not respond to Him He is as hurt as a human being who
faces a situation where one who loves does not respond.
This may sound like a trivial truth until you realize that what this is
saying is that God is very much more like you are than you think. It is wrong that to be human is to err;
that’s false. Adam didn’t err before the
fall, it’s only normal for the fallen human to err. Don’t ever demean your status as a man made
in God’s image. You don’t have to
apologize for that, that should be something for which you in a correct sense
can be very proud. That we do not differ
by the apes simply by a few chromosomes, we differ because we are made in God’s
image, we have personality, we are language speaking creatures. We use conceptual thought; animals don’t and
therefore human beings love, animals only mate.
And God loves
So when we came to Hosea 2:2-13 we found another chiasm, and out of this
chiasm we learned something about how God reacts to our sin and secondly how
God disciplines us for our sin. In verse
3 it was the image of nakedness, for Hosea was telling his children to go threaten
Gomer with divorce and simultaneously God was threatening
Now all of this goes back to the imagery of Genesis 3. You can’t understand this without the imagery
of Genesis 3. The mortal body that Adam
and Eve had from the moment of their creation was somehow marred by the
fall. Many scholars have thought, which
is only speculation, but the reason for the awareness of the nakedness was
because of physiological changes that happened, the metabolism of the human
body shifted at the moment of the fall, something drastic happened; the organs
of procreation now became the organs of elimination and these things which were
signs of the fall had a very direct and outward and physical effect on the
body. And so Adam and Eve were embarrassed,
and from this point forward in time fallen creatures cannot get to know one
another perfectly. In the best of
marriages there will always be a hindrance, and there will always be a “you
will come thus far and no further,” you
cannot know me because to a degree all fallen creatures retreat, they want to
be known only partially, not fully by another creature. And so in the imager of Genesis 3 naked man
creates for himself the first set of clothes; fig leaves.
From this point forward the fig leaves represent self-righteousness,
always self-righteousness, trying to cover up the nakedness that can never be
covered up by self-righteousness. The
fig leaves don’t cover. So God gives
them a second set of clothes, the grace-given clothes; the clothes of imputed
righteousness. He gives them skins which
have been torn off a creature that had to die in order that the first pair of
humans could have clothes. God had to
murder, so to speak, using the term lightly, God had to murder the first
animals in order to provide clothes for sinners who needed them. So the fig
leaves versus God’s skins become two concrete manifestations of the works of
self-righteousness, trying to cover up our sins versus the work of forgiving
grace and imputed righteousness.
The point that we learned in carrying this figure over to the history of
It goes back to something else in creation called common grace. And under common grace God withholds the full
effect of the curse. Everyone of you
here tonight, all of us here are breathing.
That is a sign of common grace because the sentence of the fall will
finally work out to where we’re not breathing.
We will die, everyone, barring the generation that lives to the point of
the rapture. But apart from that one
generation every one of us is going to die because the curse will work in your
body; all of us will die, it’s just a matter of time. How long do we have before we die? The curse can be postponed but it can’t be
avoided, and it’s common grace that postpones it, that for a while gives us a
chance around it so that we do have relatively normal children born and not all
deformed because the genetic codes are in chaos because of the physical curse
on creation.
God is gracious; when a nation goes on negative volition, when a nation
has had a clear testimony to the Word of God as this country has had and
policies upon policies are made that deny the authority of the Word of God it’s
an affront to Him. It was pointed out
that our leaders talk one way and vote another, and Gary North was very quick
to respond, yes, and so the constituency that supposedly put these people in
office talk Bible but they vote anti-Bible.
It’s the same thing, the duplicity isn’t in all the leaders, it’s in the
citizens that vote.
So here we have a negative volition occurring under the reign of
Jeroboam II. Even though there is
negative volition that should in all manner bring down cursing upon the nation,
there should not be business prosperity, there should be business failures and
there isn’t at this point; business is booming. And at that time we can see
common grace. God is gracing out the
people of the northern kingdom, in spite of their sin He’s a gracious God, and
in spite of their rebellion against Him He continues to bless them economically
and so they continue to forget Him.
Then we come to the vital point.
Now we don’t have insight into just when this point occurs, it would be
nice if you could predict it in your life but unfortunately we can’t. But at some point God, in His common grace
looks down and checks out whether the blessings of common grace are having a
restraining effect, or whether in fact the very blessings that are intended to
restrain sin are actually working to increase sin. Now since God’s long-range and primary
objective is to bring you back to Himself, if He continues to grace you when
you are on negative volition and you misinterpret those blessings for His
personal approval of everything you’re doing, and you begin to reason
irrespective of the Word of God and what your conscience tells you about the
Word of God, to say well, all these blessings are because I’m such an obedient
believer, when in fact you’re not, when you begin to misinterpret God’s common
grace blessings in your life, then you’re in for a strip and God is going to
take your clothes off, God is going to take off the works of
self-righteousness, and He’s doing it because He loves us. He’s looking at the long-range, not the
short-range. In the short-range it hurts
but for the long-range it will bring us around and if that’s what’s necessary
to bring us around then that’s what’s going to happen. The works of self-righteousness will be
ripped off. And so we have the
disciplinary strip.
Now beginning at Hosea 2:14-23 we have the opposite side. Hosea is full of what looked like
contradictions deep in the heart of God Himself. In one place you have God’s fuming judgment
against the people, then you change suddenly, you’re in another verse and God
is pouring out His love on the people.
How can God be both? Because God
is holy and God is love, that’s why.
Hosea 2:14, God declares His future plan. This is also a chiasm; verses 14-15 is the
first statement, that’s the statement of God’s future plan. Beginning at verse 16 the key is “at that day,”
and verses 16-17 form the second statement, which describe the covenants. Then verse 18, “in that day,” which is the
signal that’s the third statement beginning, and that runs to verse 20, and
that’s the second statement of the covenant.
And then finally verse 21, “in that day,” there’s the fourth section,
and that’s again a declaration of future plans.
So you have a chiasm, verses 14-15, future plans. Verses 16-17 the covenant. Verses 19-20 the covenant. Verses 21-23 the future plan. See, it’s a
style of Hosea’s writing, whether he preached this way I don’t know but when it
was written, that’s the way it was written.
Now let’s look at Hosea 2:14-15, the first statement in the chiasm. God declares His future plan. The overall statement of verses 14 all the
way down to verse 23, that whole emphasis is the doctrine of ultimate
sanctification. It goes back to this
simple diagram; at one point in time you are positionally sanctified. That
happens at the point of your regeneration; you may not feel it, you may not
experience it, it’s there however, you are regenerate. Phase two of the plan of salvation is
experiential sanctification, that’s the hard knocks, that’s when we’re
learning, all the way from the time you’re a Christian until the time you die
or the rapture, whichever occurs first.
And then phase three is ultimate sanctification; that’s the finished
product. Experiential sanctification is
never finished, therefore when we read verses 14-23 and it’s clearly ultimate
sanctification, the only conclusion you can come to is that we are now in
prophecy and eschatology. This is a
prediction of the final end of history, this is the goal of history. So we are now involved in great passages of
prophecy.
Hosea 2:14-15, the theme of the marriage relationship continues. “Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and
bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably [tenderly] unto her. [15]
And I will give her her vineyards thence….”
Verse 14 begins with “therefore.”
“Therefore,” why, for what reason will He begin to allure Israel; for
all the reasons enumerated from verses 2-13, for all those reasons, Israel is
God’s covenantal nation who has rebelled against Him, who has rejected His
love, and so God says, “Behold, I, even I” literally, “am about to allure her,”
now we have to go to a Hebrew verb that’s translated as “allure.” This verb is the word that back in the
Proverbs series is the word from which we get “petty” or “naïve,” the word
petty or the simple-minded person. In
the verb form it could mean to make simple, and then it came to seduce, and the
way this is used properly is in Exodus 22:16.
Turn to Exodus 22:16 to give you an idea how this verb is used so you
won’t say I’m reading something into it.
Back in the Law it says, “If a man entice a maid that is not betrothed,
and lie with her, he shall surely endow her to be his wife.” The word “entice” is the word used here, so
it obviously means to seduce. But the
interesting thing is, and this should strike you right off the bat, that the
woman who is being seduced is not the virgin, she’s not the simple woman. She, in this case, Gomer, Hosea’s wife, is a
professional prostitute. And in the
larger case, the nation Israel is obviously already married, she’s already in a
covenant relationship. Why use this
particular verb?
Now here’s one of those little things, those little details about God’s
Word that cause you to just say whoa, let’s just stop and see what’s going
on. It’s obviously at first glance a
break in the whole theme of Hosea 2, until, and I will show you as we go on
what has happened with the introduction of this verb is that God is saying that
in His mind He has not only forgiven Israel of her apostasy, He has forgotten
it, and all the early years of that marriage are erased in his mind and it’s
like wooing her into the marriage relationship for the first time. Now that little point about the verb shows
you the fantastic way God forgives us. It
shows you the tremendous grace of God.
Now every fallen creature carries a burden and a bunch of baggage in
your subconscious; baggage of sins and so on, violations of Gold’s Word. And while we’re on this earth, since we have
a fallen body this residue sits there, even after we’re Christians and we’ve
been forgiven, or if we’re Christians and we’ve done something and God forgives
it, and you can get very, very fouled up in your life if you allow Satan to
reach down in the cesspool of your unconscious and start bringing all this
stuff up, recycling it. You don’t need
that kind of recycling. And when Satan
would tempt you in the ecology of sin to recycle all this stuff, you just take
these pictures of God’s grace and reject it.
To allow Satan to recycle crud out of your subconscious is to deny God’s
Word. It is to take a position against
God’s grace. It is to deny everything
the cross stands for. So when you get
this temptation to recycle all the crud, you put the lid on it with grace.
This little verb, “I will allure her” will give you an accurate picture
of how God in His mind is able honestly to look at Israel. This is not a big game that’s being played
here, this is real, that God can actually sit back and enjoy the process of
wooing Israel back to Himself as though she had never sinned, as though she had
never apostasized. To me it’s one of
those things where oftentimes you’ll see in your life times when you wish you
could rewrite history; you wish you could somehow just rewrite your life and
just wipe out a few chapters out of the book and rewrite those chapters. God is doing that for you in Jesus
Christ. God Himself, who is omniscient,
as far as He’s concerned as a person, it’s gone.
Now that’s hard to believe; that is very hard to believe, and this is
why you have to be introduced to the grace of God gradually. Many of you cannot believe that because you
still haven’t got a big enough picture of the grace of Jesus Christ, and you
won’t until you grow further. But I’m
trying to encourage you to stay with it, it’s possible to have the divine
viewpoint of yourself, and that divine viewpoint of yourself looks at yourself
in the way God looks at you, and that’s the only way to go through this life in
a relaxed way. When you see Christians
that are always up tight, always defensive, always like sandpaper, you’re looking
at somebody who’s recycling crud from their subconscious; they can’t
relax. This is why if you come out of a
highly religious background the prognosis for grabbing hold of grace is bad. The people that are most appreciative and the
fastest to latch onto God’s grace are the people who have blown it all over the
place, because they don’t have any hypocrisy, they don’t have any clothes on to
rip off; any piece of clothing is great because it’s better than what they’ve
got. So they appreciate the Lord Jesus
Christ and they respond to Him.
Sometimes they don’t respond the way religious people like but that’s
all right.
Here in this one verb you have how God is gracious. Now we have to look at something else about
this verb, we’re not finished. We have
to look at the tense. In the Hebrew this
is a participle which is called the future [can’t understand word] and when you
see this participle in Hebrew it should be translated the following way. “Therefore, behold I am about to seduce
her.” In other words, it’s in the works;
“I am about to seduce her.” Now this was
spoken during the reign of Jeroboam II and God announces that it is in the
works to seduce the nation, to win her back to Himself. And He’s going to give three points on the
seduction of the nation. These three
points apply to the seduction of any female; now watch all the guys pay
attention to the text.
All right, the first thing in verse 14, I will “bring her into the
wilderness,” and this goes back to forty years wandering in the wilderness,
this is all predicated that you understand Israel’s history. Now what happened when Israel was in the
wilderness for forty years? Why was she back in the wilderness? It was so that God could get her
attention. God has spoken the Ten
Commandments at Sinai and they could care less, they weren’t interested, while
the Ten Commandments were being spoken the people were apostacizing down at the
bottom of Sinai, so they obviously weren’t paying attention to the Word of God
in the Hebrew sense of paying attention which means to submit to what you
hear. So the first thing that God is
going to do, He says I’m going to bring her into the wilderness. And this is the word, the word “wilderness”
encompasses all of the discipline in verses 2-13. So the first step is I’m going to get her
attention. And no man can do anything
with a woman until he gets her attention.
The second thing that God is going to do, it says in your King James,
this is rather a sad translation, “and speak comfortably [tenderly] to her.” Now God didn’t speak comfortable to Israel,
particularly I the wilderness. He spoke
very severely and actually this should be exactly the opposite, I will speak
very seriously and severely to her, for the word actually and literally
translated means “I will speak upon her part,” when My words come to Israel
they’ll be etched in her heart. It’s not
going to go in one ear and out the other this time. That’s what happened last time, this time
when they have the trip in the wilderness in 721 BC when the Assyrians come in
and destroy Samaria and in 586 BC the Babylonians come in and destroy the
southern kingdom and they get shipped across the Arabian desert, when they get
into the wilderness this time they’re going to listen. I’m going to impress My Word upon them.
And the word “to speak on” or “upon” her heart is a signal that at this
point in history God is unraveling a new addition to His revelation. Up to the time of Hosea things are kind of
fluid in the sense that we have the Mosaic Covenant, we have the idea if Israel
obeys then they will be blessed; we have the Abrahamic Covenant that tells
they’re going to be ultimately blessed, we have the Davidic Covenant in the
sense that the king is going to be the Messiah, but there’s a missing element. How are we to be sure that the existing
nation Israel will make it to the end of history? Now that truth is the truth of a fourth
covenant called the New Covenant. Here
is where in the progress of divine revelation you begin to have the hint that
there’s something in the mill for Israel, because this exact terminology of
speaking upon her heart… turn to Jeremiah 31:33, Jeremiah comes after Hosea in
time, even though you’re turning backwards just because you’re turning
backwards doesn’t mean Jeremiah was written first. Jeremiah actually came after Hosea in
time. So Jeremiah has more revelation
than Hosea on this point.
Jeremiah 31:33, here’s the grand announcement. It’s first made in complete form through
Jeremiah and Isaiah, then amplified by Ezekiel.
By the way, it was this covenant that Jesus was talking about to
Nicodemus when He said don’t you know that whoever enters the kingdom must be
born of the water and of the spirit, he’s referring to the passage in Ezekiel
that describes the New Covenant. Verse
31, “Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant
with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah,” it doesn’t say with the
Church, it says with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. [32] “Not according to the covenant that I
made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them
out of the land of Egypt,” in other words this covenant is not going to be a
repeat of the Mosaic Covenant. Well, how
isn’t it going to be a repeat; he goes on, “which, my covenant, they broke,
although I was an husband unto them, saith the LORD. [33] But this shall be the
covenant that I will make,” now here’s the mechanics of this New Covenant,
“After those days, saith the LORD, I will put My law inside them” or “in their
inward parts,” and here’s the word now, I will “write it on their hearts” and
it’s the same expression here, I will speak it on their hearts. The idea is a piece of clay and God has one
of these things that they used in the ancient world and he cuts it down into
the clay of their hearts, that’s the imagery that’s being used, “and I will be
their God, and they shall be My people. [34] And they shall teach no more every
man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD; for they shall
know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD; for
I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” In other words, there will be a total change
in national culture and climate. That’s
the official announcement.
Now turning back to Hosea we see the preliminary announcement, this is
just a hint of what was going to come.
See, in the middle of all this judgment God is still going to carry out
His sovereign plan. Those of you who are
always worried about losing your salvation, just notice the big picture, just
back off a minute and look at the big picture.
You’ve got a nation that is chosen of God in history; the nation drops
the ball, it screws up and what does God do.
He disciplines the nation, they suffer, but what does He promise
ultimately, that they’re going to lose their national salvation? NO, He is going to win them back to
Himself. God is the perfect lover and He
will succeed. He has chosen the one whom
He has loved and He will succeed in getting a response from the nation.
So the second thing, “I will speak on her heart,” not about things on
her heart which is what led to the translation “speak comfortably.” The second thing in this seduction, first He
got their attention, and then God had to speak with authority “upon her
heart.” Now what’s the analogy with the
second divine institution? In the second
divine institution the man basically is the initiator and the woman is the
responder and the man has to give the woman something to respond to. And that means the man has to communicate to
the woman and he has to show His love in concrete ways or she has nothing to
respond to. She’s built to respond so
she’s sitting here looking. He sits
there and grunts a couple of times, where’s the coffee, get my… and this is a
tremendous amount of material for a woman to respond to and then the guy
wonders why can’t I turn her on? Because
you just turned her off, that’s why, you not only turned her off you taped the
switch on off because you act like an ass.
So in the second divine institution the man is to give the woman
something to respond to and God is going to… when He says “I will speak upon
her” what He is saying is I’m revealing Myself to her, that is Israel, so she
will have something to respond to. And
the word “speak” means verbal revelation.
When Israel gets through, 721 BC, they get the message real quick. And this shows you that sometimes in a love
relationship there is severity in the communication but its communication. And it’s communication of character. What is communicated when God teaches Israel,
721 BC, that God is a serious lover, that’s what’s communicated, that God means
what He says, that God has character that backs up His Word, that’s what’s
communicated. So therefore we have “I
will speak upon her heart,” I will speak impressively to her, I will
reveal. And that’s the model. Now in the day that Hosea wrote this he
didn’t have to explain the second divine institution, the people had been
brought up in the Law at least enough to know the basic ideas of the second
divine institution. But I’m going
through this because we face, in the 20th century when sociologists
have done their best to cast all sorts of dispersions on marriage, when we have
the unisex crowd wanting to eliminate all sexual differences, with the equal
rights amendment, etc.
The men are to initiate and this speaking impressively, viewed
historically, God reveals Himself. The
man has to reveal himself to the woman, he can’t hide and just expect her to
respond; he’s got to reveal his character to her.
In verse 15, now this is the third step, and that is, “And I will give
her her vineyards,” so here you have an overt, concrete expression of
love. The second step was the
verbal. The third step is the work, and
you have that over and over and over in Scripture; words and works, words and
works, that which is spoken and that which is done, those two, the mouth and
the hand. And so, “I will give her her
vineyards from thence,” that means from the wilderness, Israel will be given
back her prosperous land, “and the Valley of Achor for a door of hope,” now
what is “the Valley of Achor.”
Again, Hosea presupposes that you understand history. Since that’s not a safe assumption, turn to
Joshua 7. What is “the Valley of Achor”
and what’s that got to do with being a door of hope? All you have to do is go back to Joshua
7:24-26 and it becomes very clear what’s happening here. During the days of the invasion, about 1400
BC some 600 years before Hosea, Joshua led the people in from the east in a
thrust of the most vicious kind of warfare man has ever known, charem war, holy war. You think modern war is bad you haven’t seen
anything until you’ve seen holy war. And
the holy war began with the annihilation of a key Canaanite fortress called
Jericho. After that a second fortress
was known as Ai. And because the Jews
had been so miraculously successful at Jericho, they made that fatal conclusion
that all of us as believers make one time or another, that just because I’m
engaged in doing some overt activity that the Word of God says I should do,
therefore, I am being loyal to God, when it fact it’s a bunch of pseudo
obedience. The main aim of
sanctification is loyalty.
Back here in Joshua 7 you have the nation fighting the Canaanites, which
God told them to do, but losing.
Why? Because they’re not loyal to
God, and so Achan was the one who stole and in Joshua 7:24, “Joshua, and all
Israel with him, took Achan, the son of Zerah, and the silver, and the
garment,” these were all booty and loot that had been taken out of Ai and
instead of being burned and destroyed and sacrificed to God they were
kept. “…the garment, and the wedge of
gold, and his sons, and his daughters, and his oxen, and his asses, and his
sheep, and his tent, and all that he had; and they brought them unto the valley
of Achor. [25] And Joshua said, Why hast thou troubled us?” Now this is a pun on the word, here’s “the
Valley of Achor” and what it looks like in the Hebrew, and here’s the word to
trouble somebody and it’s off of that root.
Achor means to trouble somebody, and this valley is the valley where
they stoned Achan. And it’s called the
valley of trouble, and doctrinally, now that you’ve had the divine viewpoint
framework you ought to be able to go back and say hey, what’s the doctrine that
I can apply in my life out of this historic event? Well, what’s the doctrine
that you learned out of the conquest and settlement period? Doctrine of
sanctification. Then what does this
valley of trouble mean? All right,
what’s the problem here? Lack of
loyalty, a pseudo obedience to God on the outside that does not emanate from a
loyal heart to Him. I’m doing it to
impress my girlfriend, my boyfriend, by husband, my wife, my pastor or
something else, I’m doing it out of false motivation. I am, in fact, covering myself with fig
leaves and Achan was one of these people, covered himself with the good works
of conquering Canaanites, when as a matter of fact he was hording treasure to
himself. So therefore he caused
trouble. And the Valley of Achor is a
monument to the fact that our sanctification is never finished in this life. Our sanctification is always hindered by this
problem that we have, -R in our soul.
Let’s turn back and see what God promises? What does it mean that He’s going to turn the
Valley of Achor to “a door of hope?”
Because, as the Israelites march into the land… [tape turns] … Jesus
Christ will tell them before I had you call this valley the valley of trouble,
because I wanted you to remember that your sanctification is never finished as
long as there is a spec of disloyalty in your heart. Now you’re about to enter ultimate
sanctification; history is about to be finished, and as you pass through this
valley, this is the door of hope. Now
the hope is secure. “The word “hope”
doesn’t means something ethereal, it means something that’s real and there. So “the door of hope” means that now
sanctification is ultimate; sanctification is complete.
And that’s the third thing He does in verse 15. “I will give her her vineyards, and I will
make the Valley of Achor for a door of hope,” now the result of the seduction
in verse 15, “and she will sing there,” now the word is not “sing,” I don’t
know where they got “sing” out of it, the word means two things, to answer
somebody that asks you a question, or to respond to a lover. And here it means to respond; the female is
responding because she is loved. And
God’s act of seduction is victorious. “I
have allured her” by those three points, I got her attention, I revealed My
character to her, I showed My love to her in overt ways, and as a result she
responded, and notice what it says, tie that in with the first verb where I
showed you that it’s just like the marriage is beginning all the way from the
start, “as in the days of her youth, as in the day when she came up out of the
land of Egypt.” And when Israel came up
out of the land of Egypt she responded, that response, one of them is recorded
in Exodus 15 with a great hymn that they sang on the shores of the Red Sea as
the dead Egyptians floated to the surface and their carcasses would drift by,
the Jews would say Yahweh is a man of war, bless His name, one of the greatest
hymns ever written.
So in the last part of verse 15 the result of the divine seduction is
that the female now responds because she has something to respond to and the
point about this is is that here was a woman who was on negative volition and
God won her around. She was God’s right woman, Israel is pictured as God’s
right woman, and God’s right woman loved in God’s way will respond.
Now Hosea 2:16-17, the second statement in the chiasm and we’ll just
have time to touch on verses 16-17. “And
it shall be at that day,” or “in that day,” that’s the signal that we’re
entering another statement. “It shall be
in that day,” that is at the end of history when Jesus Christ returns, “It
shall be in that day, saith the LORD, that thou,” and notice the shift in
address, not longer is it about Israel, but it’s to Israel, it’s a personal
word, “it shall be, saith the LORD, that you will call me Ishi, and shall call
Me no more Baali.” Now what is
this? Isn’t that a sweet name for a
husband, Ishi. Here’s what the trouble
is, ish is the word for man, ish is the Hebrew word for the male, adam is mankind, it can be male or
female, ish is for male, meaning men
in the male sense of the word. And then
this little thing added on is “my.” “My
man,” in other words, my right man, she’s responding. “…you will call Me my right man,” here the
female has been loved, she responds and one of her responses is that this man
is my right man, this is the one that is God’s choice. Translated nationally
and the primary application of verse 16 is that Israel recognizes that God is
in a covenant with her. The word “my
man” implies the existence of the second divine institution and she is
covenantly locked in agreement with Yahweh.
So Jehovah is the husband, Israel is the woman. And she recognizes the existence of the marriage.
But there is a play on the second clause and this gives us a key to what
the shift is. “You will now no longer
call me Baali,” and this is the word again, Baal with an e on the end, “my
Baal.” Now there’s a pun intended on
this word, the word Baal means two things, it means properly the name of their
god that they were worshiping and secondly it means lord. The picture is that here is a woman who is
responding to the man because the man loves her, not because the man forces
himself upon her. Before she would call
him “my lord” she would recognize the existence of the covenant, she would
recognize the fact that she’s married to him, but all she could do in her heart
would be respond to his authority but not respond to his love. Now she says he’s my right man, it’s not just
he’s my superior, he’s the one that I got stuck with for the rest of my life,
but he’s the one who loves me.
Now translated nationally the idea is that “you will call me Ishi,”
meaning now the covenant will not be one just of law but it will be one with
the indwelling Holy Spirit, one based on a willingness to abide by the Law, an
excitement, a personal response, not just the bare naked law, not just bare
authority but a response. And as I said
before the second divine institution is mirrored in this passage, and you can’t
get to verse 15 and the response, and you can’t get the response in verse 16
unless you go through the same process that is described in verses 14 and 15,
that’s the way the thing was built and that’s the way you have to work with
it. And there’s no other way, God made
the woman that way; if you want to fight the universe go ahead and try to work
the relationship out on your own terms and you’ll fail every time. They were made to operate in a certain way;
follow the operating instructions.
“And you will now no longer call me Baali,” this is also intended to be
a little dig, because if you look back in verse 8, you recall that God had
blessed these people and what did they do?
They attributed it, they took the blessings and gave them to Baal
because, verse 8 shows you they gave them to Baal and verse 5 tells you why
they gave them to Baal, because they thought Baal, the nature deity, had given
them blessing. So they had taken the
blessings of common grace and misinterpreted it, just like in Hosea’s marriage
you have Hosea loving Gomer and Gomer, because her soul is all fouled up,
negative volition, this woman cannot accept the love of Hosea and she says my
happiness comes from this guy, this guy, this guy, this guy, this guy, this
guy, this guy, and that’s why she’s in the prostitution business, because she
thinks that’s the source of her happiness and that’s not the source of her
happiness, and God has designed Gomer with such a soul that it’s only going to
fit one man, Hosea. And Gomer can sit
there and waste all of her life messing around with one guy after another and
never find happiness until she locates the right one and Hosea is the right
one. Hosea is the one who, now when he
loves Gomer instead of Gomer misinterpreting and saying my happiness lies
somewhere else, when Hosea is restored to Gomer then she’s going to say my
happiness comes from my right man. And
that’s the response Israel is going to have.
In Hosea 2:17, there’s one added detail to all of this that kind of
fills it all out and explains how this transformation occurs. “For I will take away the names of the Baals”
literally, you see the “im” ending, that’s the Hebrew plural, “I will take away
the names of the Baals out of her mouth, and they shall no more be remembered
by their name.” Now this is a very, very
interesting thing, and how far this operates in the human level in the second
divine institution is a matter for investigation but apparently what God is
saying is that when you have a right man right woman situation and the right
man operates according to a Scriptural norm, and he loves this woman and he
allures her and he seduces her as God seduced Israel, the mechanism that God
apparently operates in that woman is that in her soul she forgets all the
competition, because the vacuum in her soul is filled up. The vacuum is filled up by memories and by
the experiences that she has with her right man, and they’re so overwhelming
that they fill up that place and she doesn’t have to suck in all these memories
about this guy and that guy and somebody else. It’s not necessary to do that
because her vacuum is filled. She’s
filled with the character of her lover, and so here, when it says “I’ll take
away the names of the Baals” it simply means that Israel in the millennium is
going to have such an awesome revelation and such a fantastic response to Jesus
Christ that there’s no room left, Baal can’t even compete with this.
Now there’s another ultimate thing that operates behind this. In verse 17 you have a hint of the exclusion
of the demon forces from the earth during the millennium, I’ll show that from
Zechariah, a parallel passage. God is
going to remove idolatry by removing the demon powers at the beginning of the
millennium. And so in the national sense
verse 17 requires the elimination of demonic forces; it’s the demon powers that
are the teachers of false doctrine and the amplifiers of false doctrine and
these have to be dealt with.
This is ultimate sanctification; you’ve seen God’s seduction in verses
14-17, now in verses 18 and following you’re going to see even more amazing
things as to all that is involved when He began this seduction process.