Hosea Lesson 9

Idolatry - Hosea 4:6-7

 

In Hosea we have the problem of idolatry.  We have been studying idolatry and we will be studying idolatry for the entire duration of the book of Hosea.  I have long felt a need in my own life to pin down the specifics of idolatry and to tie down loose ends so I can not only work with it my own soul but those who come to me with troubles that we can pinpoint faster these areas of idolatry.  And in Hosea 4 we have God’s lawsuit to the nation.  In verse 4 we began amplifying that lawsuit.  Verses 1-3 are the capsule summary of the courtroom case.  Beginning at verse 4 we have a point by point expansion of God’s argument with the nation, and you will notice that God does engage in argument. 

 

In Hosea 4:4-5 we have, “Yet let no man strive, nor reprove another,” then in verse 5, “Therefore you will fall in the day,” that is the time when you think you’ve had it made you will fall, “the prophet also shall fall with you in the night,” that’s the time when the going gets rough, and you go to someone who is supposed to be knowledgeable in the Word of God and God says in that day I’ll make him give you false advice and you’ll follow his advice and both you and your counselor will fall.  Why is God so harsh in verses 4 and 5?  Because of the last clause in verse 4, for you…”For your people are as they that continually strive with the priest.”  In other words, these people have progressed in the chaos of the heart; they’ve progressed in the upward scale of chaos.  They started with negative volition toward the little things in life, toward some detail that God might have wanted them to do.  Negative volition began there; as a result of the negative volition and disobedience, then the Holy Spirit stopped enlarging their heart; He stopped opening up their perception to spiritual truths like He had been doing till that point.  And the Holy Spirit begins to back off in His gracious ministry of illumination. 

 

And once this happens to an individual, or as this book teaches, this can happen to the nation, you can have a maximum number of people, an entire society go this chaos route, and after darkness, after the Holy Spirit ceases in His illuminating ministry, then that soul has a vacuum into which comes vanity.  The New Testament word, mataiotes, Old Testament word habel, from which, by the way, Abel is named; vanity.  Vanity, it’s a picture of a piece of vapor, it has form, its visible, but it’s not substantial and the first breeze that comes by blows it away; vanity, human viewpoint.  Human viewpoint is sucked into the soul; the old principle, when you go on negative volition and you darken down your perception in your soul your soul isn’t filled with truth the way it was designed to be filled.  It’s less than full, and so into the vacuum comes human viewpoint, and human viewpoint cycles around until you get –R learned behavior patterns develop because the way we think controls the way we behave.  And therefore if we think human viewpoint our overt patterns of behavior are going to be failing to meet God’s righteous standards.

 

And then finally we get to the point where our negative volition has expanded so much that it becomes an outright hatred for God expressed certain ways.  How is hatred toward God expressed?  Hatred is expressed toward God by hating those things that remind you of God in  your external environment; hating those or despising those that stand for truth, hating the Word of God, despising people who are living up to their conscience, and you’ll see that.  Maybe you’ll be involved in these kinds of situations where you may be with a group of people, you may be one Christian who is submissive to the Word, you may have 3 or 4 unbelievers in the group, you may have 4 or 5 Christians in the group who are out of it, and the people that will give you the hardest time in the group will be the 4 or 5 Christians out of it, not the unbeliever.  The people who always give you the hardest time are believers who are out of it.  There’s a reason for this; the reason is because you, when you are in fellowship, you act outside of them as a conscience and they are expressing to you what they have been previous to that expressing toward their own conscience.  You’re just a lightening rod, you just picked up the blast.  But whatever it is that they have been expressing toward their conscience they now express toward you because you have become identified with their conscience.

 

Then finally, the end state of this thing is massive frustration.  Now somewhere up here after human viewpoint has entered into the soul, and we might remember that this doesn’t happen all across the board; this idolatry, or this chaos in the heart develops slowly.  Here is a chart depicting the divine institutions; a person has their bottom circle, let’s say this is the bottom circle and in the bottom circle or God’s will for your life there are various spheres of doctrine, spheres of doctrine that you must use daily.  But spheres which there is an issue in; for example, over here in the area of responsibility, you may have negative volition toward the idea that God has set up the universe so that he who does not work does not eat.  And because God has set up the universe from the point of creation in this way, this offends you, you don’t like it.  And so you begin to invent ways of trying to get around this creation ordinance.  And the further you go on negative volition then you begin to develop a darkness in this area, a darkness to common sense, you don’t see things that you used to be able to see before when people were making deals with you; you make screwy deals and you wonder why, why is this happening to me now?  Because somewhere along the line  you went on negative volition.  And then sooner or later human viewpoint begins to infiltrate and you have all these schemes that labor and money somehow become the end all, that there is some­how a real security obtainable in these things.  False!  And finally you develop a hatred for God. 

 

Now while all this is going on in this area of your life over in another area, say in the area of history, diplomacy or something, you may have much less positive volition, so you’re area may be warped; in some areas you have a lot and in other areas you don’t, so in one particular part of your life you have this problem but in another part you don’t.  Now that’s all right until you come across another believer who may be having problems with his children, he may be one of these sentimentalists, who every time a child cries you’re supposed to give him anything he wants, can’t stand to discipline, can’t stand to teach anything that has authority with it, and so you may have a problem over here; you’re on negative volition over here, and maybe out here you’ve developed human viewpoint.  You’ve developed yours over here and this other person has developed theirs over here and you get together and the first thing you know you’re going to be looking down on all of his human viewpoint and he’s going to be looking right back at your human viewpoint.  And you’re just sharing dirty linen, it’s just sticking out in a different place, but basically the problem is the same, it’s just in a different area.

 

So understand that you can develop these patterns of complicated carnality in some areas of life and not in others.  For example, we have many people who are straight in many areas, who may in the doctrine of the local church be tremendous, and they have a very good insight here, and yet when it comes to their home life they may be way out of it.  How is that possible?  Every once in a while you hear somebody say oh, so and so can’t do that, he’s not a Christian.  So and so could do that, that’s probably why he’s doing it, because he is a Christian, he’s an out-of-it Christian.  And so these various things have to be taken into consideration.  Don’t think of carnality developing in all areas of life at once, it doesn’t happen that way.  Now when you get into advanced stages of it, yes; when you get into what we call compound carnality, which is the time when you not only have negative volition and you’re out of fellowship, but you’ve been out of fellowship so long that learned behavior patterns have developed, when you get in that position and you’ve reached that stage of frustration, when that is reached, now carnality does spill over into every area of life and you’ll have a person who goes off to the funny farm some place.  This kind of an individual is the kind of individual who is all screwed up all across the board.  It took him a long time to get there and it will take the Holy Spirit a long time to get him straightened out, but the point is that in advanced stages all of these things show.  And when you reach a person who is in this shape, you will find them putting out more gobs of human viewpoint per second than you ever saw anyone put out before.  And it will be so thick, and come at you from so many directions you say Lord, where do I begin, I can’t say hello to the guy without contradicting something that he stands for. 

 

When it gets that bad you really have a problem, but that’s the state of the nation in Hosea, the northern kingdom is in that state collectively.  And Hosea is written toward that national problem but the application to the individual believer is that what you see and read in Hosea is what applies in our soul.  So we have a lot to learn from Hosea and a lot to learn about how he handles the problem of idolatry. 

 

In Hosea 4:4-5 he gives you reasons why God, at this point, when everything has reached compound carnality, whether it’s a massive decay among believers, and when there is a group of unbelievers that dominate and they are involved in rank heathenism, at this point God backs off and lets them to go the pigpen; this is the prodigal son principle being applied, that when normal means of exhortation and correction do not work, when a believer has had the opportunity of listening to the Word and rebels, and has this “I don’t give a damn” attitude, then from that point of God says okay, hands off, you want to run your life that way, go right ahead, and He lets the person go to the pigpen. 

 

So God is announcing in verses 4-5 that the nation, the northern kingdom, is going on to the pigpen and He’s instructing through Hosea to all prophets and pastors of the day, verse 4, don’t bother and give any more counseling to this people.  Lock your door and take a long vacation, they’re not going to listen to you anyway so save your breath.  And this is instruction that is directed to whatever there remains of the believing involved in the prophetic circles of the northern kingdom or the capital at Samaria.

 

Hosea 4:6 which we began last time, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge,” and we said in the doctrine of knowledge that knowledge in the Bible is not just intellectual knowledge that we’re used to thinking about in school and so on; that knowledge in the Bible involves: first, it involves the whole person.  When Adam, who is the model of this, go back and use your divine viewpoint framework, when you deal with the problem of knowledge don’t just sit there duh, I don’t know what to about it, use your divine viewpoint framework and go back; where logically would you find something about knowledge, just knowing what you know about the sequence of events in the Bible?  Obviously the place to go for knowledge is the first place, creation. That’s where it all started, go back there and see if there’s something in that creation narrative, and if you’ve learned the doctrine of creation you’ll know where to go in the Bible to find creation, namely Genesis chapters 1 and 2.  So you go to the first two chapters of Genesis because you now associate Scripture with this event,  you’ve plugged in the doctrine, you’re dealing with man and nature, you know that man and nature are taught in creation because this is a knowledge question you go back to Genesis 1 and 2. 

 

And when you go back to Genesis 1 and 2 you find the first scientific investigation, the zoological investigation of Adam, and when Adam responds to certain things he learns, namely he finds his right woman, as he is investigating the animal world around him, he finds there isn’t any there, God finally presents him with a woman.  And when he responds to this knowledge it is a response of his intellect, his volition and his emotion; intellect first but it’s not just intellect with which Adam responds because he writes the first song, a love song to the first woman who ever existed.

 

Now the second point of the doctrine of knowledge is that it is revelatory of God, that all knowledge in some way is revelatory of God.  And that is why Hosea says in verse 6 that, “My people are destroyed because of lack of knowledge,” in other words, this is saying they have reached the point through negative volition where the darkness of the soul has begun, and when the darkness of the soul began, because the Holy Spirit stopped His gracious illuminating ministry, He pinched off illumination, so it got less and less and less until they were filled with human viewpoint distortion and therefore they couldn’t know God, and so since it was revelatory of God they stopped getting the revelation of God.  “My people are destroyed for lack of this kind of knowledge.” 

 

The third thing we found about knowledge is because, and it follows logically from the second one, because knowledge is revelatory of God all knowledge depends on a predisposition of the heart, either positive or negative volition.  If you are on negative volition and God reveals things to you about Himself and you spit in his face, He is not under any obligation to continue the revelatory process.  In fact, human viewpoint will come into your soul and the revelation process, the education process will cease.  So we have the fact that knowledge depends, and is a function of your spiritual state, always.  You as a Christian, whatever age you are, whatever you are learning, whether it’s how to run an office, whether something new, a new schedule or something in your house, whether it’s some group that you belong to or whether it’s in the classroom, you are involved in God’s creation and you always ought to pray for illumination to this area of God’s creation that you are now seeing, wherever it is.  You’re never going to live your life outside of God’s creation, so obviously everything that you encounter is part of God’s creation and ought to be studied and ought to be met with the proper attitude, “Lord, show me Your truth in this situation.” 

 

The fourth point was that human viewpoint starts with negative volition or autonomy which is another vocabulary word, it means the same thing, starts with autonomy and ends in idolatry.  That’s always the path and tonight we’re going to see that and we’re going to use two illustrations of idolatry.  Let’s read through the text.

 

Hosea 4:6, after it says, “My people have been destroyed for lack of knowledge,” he says, “because you have rejected knowledge.”  In other words, these people had knowledge but they rejected what they already knew, a Romans 1 type situation.  No one ever winds up in hell because they didn’t have a chance to hear.  People have all sorts of chances of hearing, that is, at least about God’s existence and because they do they are held responsible.  All of us are responsible. Therefore, because they have rejected knowledge, it says, “I will also reject you, that you shall be no priest to Me; seeing thou have forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget your children.”  This is an announcement that God is going to carry the discipline into their generation, not just the generation to which Hosea spoke but their children.  In other words, the judgment is coming up and it will take, maybe 30, 40 or 50 years to bring it on, but it is surely coming upon this country. 

 

Now when this judgment falls upon the country, at that point these people are going to complain to God and they’re going to say that God, You have marred our testimony and the complaint they’re going to use, turn back to Exodus 19, this is the complaint they will make, it will be based on Exodus 19:6, they will say in that day, they’ll quote God’s Word back to Him, they’ll say but God, didn’t You promise us back at Sinai that we will be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, didn’t You promise us that?  That was part of the agreement we made, didn’t we make a deal back then and therefore can’t we lie back and relax and say okay, it’s automatic; they failed to realize that the sentence that’s contained in verse 6 began in verse 5 and it began with an “if.  Exodus 19:5, “Now therefore, if ye will obey My voice” then these things will follow. 

 

Now this takes us into the politics of the day.  In Israel there were two politics, two types of political collision over Bible doctrine.  One group of people favored the Abrahamic Covenant and the Davidic Covenant; the other group of people favored the Mosaic Covenant.  The people that favored the Abrahamic Covenant and Davidic Covenant were saying that priesthood, the priestly function or the glory of the nation is automatic, God has decreed it, therefore it surely will come to pass, therefore we ought not to do anything, and therefore we do not have to worry about the consequences of our sin because it’s automatically cared for by the Abrahamic Covenant and the Davidic Covenant.  These are analogous to people today who take advantage of the doctrine of eternal security, they were people who said Jerusalem is our security and since God has vowed to save Jerusalem all we have to do is sit back.  Then the prophets came along, Isaiah in the south, Hosea in the north, Jeremiah in the south, and many of the other prophets and they came on and reminded them about that little “if” you see in Exodus 19:5, and they say yes, the Abrahamic Covenant and Davidic Covenant certainly promises to come to pass, but when it comes to pass it will be with positive volition, and when it comes to pass God will have His experiential sanctification worked out. 

 

Don’t think of God’s goals as independent of the means to those goals.  Yes, God has promises that the nation would one day serve as a global priesthood, the mediating nation.  Yes, that’s all very true and there’s nothing that Hosea and Isaiah says that would contradict that; all they want to do is restore a balance between the “if” of verse 5 and the decrees of the Abrahamic Covenant.  Said another way, and elevated into our generation, here we are, if we have accepted Jesus Christ we are in Christ, that’s our position, we are the ones who are elect, we are chosen, we are predestined to be conformed to the image of Christ and that certainly will come to pass, that is 100% secure. But also associated with that is our temporal relationship with God and the details of that temporal relationship with God.  And here is where our “if” is; our “if” is here, if we submit to God’s will we will be in fellowship, and if we don’t submit to God’s will we’re out of fellowship and will fall under chastening.  So we have either/or just like Israel had and we can’t sit there forever looking at our position in Christ without also looking at the fact that there is an “if” we are filled with the Spirit then we will be sanctified and so on. 

Now God promises in the Abrahamic Covenant to take care of every detail and He promises, for example, if you choose to go out of fellowship, and here we are on negative volition, fat, dumb and happy, and we think we’ve got it made, all of a sudden because we are elect God says huh-un, I’m running the show and you are not going to stay there, because the longer you stay there the more I’m going to clobber you; that’s the doctrine of discipline of Hebrews 12.  And therefore He puts the heat on and finally we decide it’s a lot better back here.  The reason God keeps after us when we are out of fellowship is because He loves us and because He has made that promise.  If it were the case that God had not made the promise, if it were the case that we were not elect in the eternal sense and it were just the case of playing spiritual footsies, in and out of this circle, then God wouldn’t bother with us.  If we were out of fellowship, so what, hell’s big, it’s got lots of room, that would be the attitude.  But that’s not God’s attitude, God’s attitude is that you are elect and He is going to see to it that we spend eternity with Him because He loves us.  And because He loves us He’s going to apply pressure, He’s going to spank, He’s going to use all sorts of severe forms of discipline to get across the point. Where Christians fail they can expect this.

 

That’s Hosea’s position.  So back to Hosea, that’s why it says you rejected Me and I’m going to reject you. That doesn’t have reference to the top circle, that has reference to the bottom circle.  You’ve rejected Me down here in what I’ve revealed… let’s take an Old Testament saint, here’s an Old Testament saint who lived in Samaria in 740 BC.  Let’s draw his top circle; what is his top circle? The Abrahamic Covenant and Davidic Covenants.  He is given certain promises, he is regenerated, he is a member of the Abrahamic Covenant and that means that for eternity he will dwell in that land, it means that he will share with Abraham Abraham’s spiritual blessings.  It will mean many things.  The Davidic Covenant will tell him that he is going to be a future subject of the greatest person who ever lived, the Lord Jesus Christ, through the Davidic Covenant.  He is going to be assured of all these things, even though right not that particular believer is out of it.  

 

And Hosea comes along and says look, the Mosaic Covenant gave you some 613 different things to do and not to do and that’s God’s will for you and you’ve disobeyed it point after point after point after point and you are out of it, out of the bottom circle, you are carnal. And because you are carnal and because you are carnal, because you are disobedient to God, God because of the Abrahamic Covenant comes down and He’s going to discipline you to get back in.  You see, it’s the Abrahamic Covenant, it is election in other words, that forms the base for every move of sanctification that God has toward you.  When we come back out of carnality into fellowship it is not because we’re so good, pure people that we decide that gee, that’s the right thing to do, etc.  All that is subjectively involved but it never would have occurred to you to get back in fellowship once we’re out because we enjoy it outside of fellowship.  I’m carnal and I like it, I’m going to stay out for a while.  This is our natural nature, that’s the way it is since the fall.

 

All right, if that’s the way it is since the fall, we’d always be out of fellowship if God didn’t take steps to bring us back into fellowship and that system of taking steps sometimes involves very severe forms of discipline, which we are seeing.  So when you see in verse 6 that “thou hast forgotten the Law of thy God,” the Torah, that’s the bottom circle, there’s where the Torah was, that’s the Law, you’ve forgotten the Law, you’ve forgot everything I taught you, you’ve forgot My will for you, you could care less, so I’m going to forget you and your children, I’m going to bring discipline upon this national entity that will last for at least one generation, probably two generations, actually 70 years.  For seventy years they are going to have a special treatment and the special treatment that was given to them was a treatment designed by God to remove something from the soul of the Jew, and historically this is work.  The Jew from this point, after 516 BC when the nation was purged, the Jew has been a heretic in many different ways but never the same way like he was a heretic before.  Before the exile the Jew had this problem, a problem with idolatry; after the exile the Jew has problems but it’s not in this gross way.  There’s been something that has been purged out of his soul through the fiery furnace of trial and tribulation, the sins of idolatry.  That’s what this book is all about; that’s why we want to understand it because if you and I have idolatry in our souls we are asking for it; we are asking for the most severe kind of discipline that God can dole out to children that He loves.  It is the fastest way to get beat down, is to have this idolatry concept operating in your soul.  That’s why idolatry is an important topic.

 

So he says, Hosea 4:7, “As they were increased, so they sinned against Me; therefore I will change their glory into shame.”  Before we get into the examples we want to understand something about verse 7.  It says “as they were increased,” in other words, during the very time, this is contempor­ary, during the very time that they were increased, that means blessed economically, blessed physically, blessed in all ways, while they were being blessed, during the very moments of their blessing, “they sinned against me.”  Now how they sinned we covered back in Hosea 2:5, where it’s the picture of Gomer running out on her husband and she is a woman who has her right man, and she has been given that best man and that woman is fulfilled only when she is loved by her best man; she is made for him, she is that persons helpmeet.  Now Gomer in this case is all fouled up, she’s on negative volition, she’s got –R learned behavior patterns, and she’s playing the field and she thinks that her fulfillment is going to come from this guy, this guy, and this guy, and Gomer had quite a list.  And none of these men, no matter how many times they make love to her, these men can never satisfy here; there’s no satisfaction in her soul.  And the reason is they’re the wrong men, they’re not the men that God picked out for her.  There’s only one man, Hosea, one of the greatest, most patient husbands of all time, it’s Hosea that is Gomer’s best man.

 

But what is she doing?  Hosea 2:5, “For their mother has played the harlot; She that conceived them has done shamefully; for she said,” and here’s what’s happening and here we’re introduced to the specific form of idolatry, “I will go after my lovers, that are giving me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.”  In other words, what is she saying?  She is saying that all these men, they give me my fulfillment and in practice what she’s saying is that my blessing is coming through those men.  She’s attributing the blessings flowing to her alone from God to these men; nationally what was happening, if you’ll notice all of these things, bread, water, wool, flax, oil, drink, what is that? Agricultural production and the Hebrew farmers were saying aha, all the Baalim, or “Nature” as it is written our 20th century textbooks, with a capital “N,” we always must kiss it as we read it, you can’t mention God’s name but you have to talk about Mother Nature, and this idolatry was the source of the farmer’s economic wealth, he thought. 

 

And so here God was, standing on the sidelines like Hosea was, being very gracious that even though here this woman was on negative volition he was gracious, gracious, gracious, gracious, still he was pouring on the economic blessing at the same time the nation was going on more negative volition, more negative volition, more negative volition until it got to the point where these people were misinterpreting the blessings of God for approval.  Now I don’t know whether you’ve ever had this kind of a situation but you can get caught in a situation in life some day when you will have at your disposal the means to help someone, it may be financial means, it may be by advice, it may be some skill that you have that they need desperately, you may be a doctor and the only doctor in town with the skill necessary to save this individual.  Or you may be a person that has been through that kind of experience and you’re the only one that can give the right advice.  One of the most frustrating situations you’ll run into is when you get a person who is completely out of it spiritually and the more you help them the worse it becomes with them.

 

In other words, they may be out of if on negative volition and you say all right, I’ll be gracious to that individual, I’ll go over to their house and I don’t care, they may be out of it spiritually, they may have cut of fellowship as far as I’m concerned but I’ll still be gracious, they’re still a child of God, they’re still regenerate, they’re still a member of the body of Christ, and I will exercise grace toward them and work with them.  So you work with them, and then they begin to infer from your helping them that oh, this is just God working through and God is pleased me, see how God is blessing me through you, you, and you, and completely miss the point of dealing with this negative volition.

 

That’s what the nation Israel has done, they have completely missed the point.  God’s just being gracious to them to sustain them so hopefully they’ll get out of it before He pulls the plunger on them.  Finally, as you will find if you haven’t had this experience, some people you must stop helping because the help that you give them is turning into something which is evil because of their own presuppositions that they’re looking at you with.  And the most gracious helpful thing for you to do when you’re in that kind of a situation is to stop all help, just cut them off.  You may have to do it; oh, Christian parents would do that? You bet Christian parents would do that, wise Christian parents.  You can always change when they straighten up.  Sometimes this is the way it has to go and God’s doing this to the nation at this point in Hosea 4.

 

What Gomer is doing is that she, as well as the nation, infer that God’s gracious blessing comes from Baal.  So in Hosea 2:9, “Therefore will I return,” God says, and I will “take away My grain in its time, and my wine in its season, and will recover My wool and My flax given to cover her nakedness.”  I’m going to take all that away and I’m going to take away these blessings so she can see that these false guys aren’t providing a thing.  God says I’ve been taken for a sucker; here is negative volition, they’ve been going to the Baalim all this time and crying oh Baal, Baal, do this, do that, do this, and I’ll get so much more grain off my acreage and so on, I’ll give you some of it, this kind of thing.  And all the time God has been blessing the field so these Hebrew farmers say oh, I’m getting much more production on my acreage than I did last year and I’ve given more to Baal, it must be Baal that’s helping me and it wasn’t Baal at all, it was God, so God says okay, I’m going to stop this subsidy and you can see what Baal gives you.  If you want to play the subsidy game, go to Baal, see how much subsidy He gives you.  And God just pulls back the grace. 

 

Now there are two examples of idolatry.  We want to see what’s happened; last week we spent some time in the doctrine of knowledge, tried to break some ground work on the fact that knowledge is not what you are taught in school, it is not just a matter of manipulating neutral facts.  That is not the Biblical concept of knowledge.  Now tonight we come into a little insight into idolatry, and I’m going to use a modern illustration first because this one will be most familiar to you, then we’ll go back using what we’ve learned in the modern illustration to an ancient form of it in Baalism.  Now let’s look at the modern illustration.

Let’s take evolution in the mega and cosmic sense; large scale evolution, amoeba to man thesis and so on.  Evolution is a modern form of idolatry.  Evolution has two gods, Chance and upward development, the idea that Chance somehow is operating over time to bring things into existence, yet at the same time there’s some sort of a mysterious force called progress that’s directing all this to some sort of goal.  Now this basically is a bastard form of creationism because Chance is nothing but a sophisticated replacement for God.  Chance is the source of all things in the evolutionary position.  You ask an evolutionist where did it all come from?  Well, it was just there, the absolute ultimate contingency, and so what we call God they call Chance. 

Now the second part of their god, their god upward development, is a borrowing of our covenant; our God has made a covenant that says He is directing history toward a goal.  The evolutionist wants progress but he doesn’t want God or His covenants so he replaces it with this man-made idea, and all it is, upward development; it’s sheerly an imaginary product, it is a fiction, it doesn’t exist.  Chance as defined here doesn’t exist.  Both of these gods are as much a produce of imagination as statues.  These things are simply products of your imagination, or collective imagination as apostate men.  There is no such thing as upward development.  You can sit here and I don’t care how many people testify to the contrary, there is no factual evidence for mega and cosmic evolution, period.  Never will be either because these are imaginary constructs.  But I want you to notice something, that in all of this the gods of evolution are man-made.  That’s going to be Hosea’s theme song, made-man, made by man.  And all of evolutionary thought bears that out. 

 

Immanuel Kant laid it out very clearly years before Darwin when he said this in his universal natural history: “Give me matter and I’ll construct a world out of it.”  (end quote)  You bet, and they sure have, and he laid it on the line just as clearly as it could be; you couldn’t have a clearer quote.  “Give me matter, I’ll build a world out of it.”  And Darwin came along and added a few biological observations to it and so we have evolution, which everyone says oh, but that’s neutral.  It isn’t; it is idolatrous, it is idolatrous, it is grounded completely on a man-made concept.  Here’s what the picture looks like and here’s how to see the idolatry.  Down here you have the level of fact; here’s the fact of, say something in one of the animal phylum, here’s maybe the genetic mechanism, this is another fact over here, another fact, here’s a fact, another fact, facts that you can talk about, facts that can be observed but these facts are then organized into theories to account for these facts.  So we may have various theories but these theories are informed by prior presuppositions, and it’s up at this level of the presuppositions, or the world view where the idolatry is occurring.  Up here people are convinced of the gods of Chance and upward develop­ment and because they are convinced these imaginary gods exist, therefore the theories are constructed looking to those gods to supply the dynamism and the direction behind them.  Idolatry takes over, and then the facts are arranged within this framework. 

 

Whereas we as creationists, start with the same facts and we interpret them as God has revealed in the divine viewpoint framework.  Both evolution and creation share the same facts but they’re interpreting them in two entirely different and totally mutually exclusive set of presuppositions. 

 

So Hosea, describing idolatry is actually describing something that we see around us; evolution is the form of popular idolatry today.  The proof that it is indeed an idolatry and indeed a religion is find out what happens to you when you seriously collide with it.  When you seriously and academically collide with evolutionary dogma you can expect everything from getting your graduate program torpedoed on down to being fired.  And the very emotional response you get to this kind of thing proves that it is far more than just a question of neutral discussion.  It involves very deep commitment.  But evolution, based on a process, based on nature, and from nature, by the way, in the evolutionary theory and there’s no way around it, here you have the amoeba and here you have man; if you want to make it in a nice gross way you go from a germ to Christ, and that’s what evolution is saying, from bugs to our Savior, and there’s no difference between, it’s an absolute continuity between a bug and Jesus Christ.  And there’s no difference, it’s all part of the same molecular structure, just rearranged differently, that’s all.  Now that is evolution, and nature is the god from which everything comes, from the first dinosaur, back before him to the first thing that was slurped out of the ooze we have nature producing, nature the mother out of whose womb comes all these things.  And the imagery fits perfectly.

 

Now to show you that basically is not a new idea we have to go back into the Bible to Baalism, and to start off we’ll go to Genesis 20:3 for information in the word “Baal.” [“But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night, and said to him, Behold, thou art but a dead man, for the woman whom thou hast taken; for she is a man’s wife.”]  The word “Baal” started off as a common noun; it looks like this in the Hebrew, ba’al, it meant in Genesis 20:3, she is a ba’al’s wife, so the word literally meant the lord or the master, the leader, it had reference to the man’s responsibility in the family unit.  It was a good word, it was used by many Jews in their name, Ishbaal, and so on.  And at that time in history it hadn’t been colored by subsequent development, but Baal originally meant the one who was lord. 

 

Now we had a group of people shortly after Babel that went on negative volition, we had darkening of the illuminating and we have sucking in of human viewpoint, hatred toward God, and when this process started in we have the word “Baal” out here in the vocabulary of the people and we have divine nature in the mentality of their soul and somebody, somewhere along the line got the idea of calling nature forces “lords,” or “Baals” and so you have the Baal of Peor in the Bible, or the Baal of some other place.  And you would divide nature up into spheres.  Here you’d have the sphere of weather, here you’d have the sphere of the sea, here you’d have the sphere of the sky, and so you’d have a Baal, a Baal of the weather, a Baal of the sea, a Baal of the sky, and nature would be divided.  This is how you get polytheism, you have these compartments in nature all running this way, the different Baals and their domains.  And they all have one thing in common, they are strictly imaginary beings, they never existed, absolutely totally the product of man’s imagination. 

 

Now here’s what happened; of all the things in nature what do you suppose most concerned, particularly, early men?  The nature that was closest to them, the part of nature that would have directed the attention of everybody’s mind.  It was the issue, basically of fertility; fertility of three things, fertility of the soil, fertility of animals, and fertility of men, fertility of men because you prospered with large families and you were able to subdue the earth this way, in a much more effective way.  And so the concept with the process of fertility arose.  And we have the emphasis from this point forward on fertility, the fertility cult, etc.  So you have fertility of soil, animals and man.  Now notice what happened; they have taken all of these and lumped them together. 

 

Do you know why they lumped them together?  They lumped them together because nature is the source of all of this.  See, back here is nature, man are in nature, animals are in nature, soil is in nature, so the fertility process of the soil, the fertility process of the animal, the fertility process of man are basically the same process.  This is why they had bestiality in many of their sex orgies, where they have sexual intercourse between men and animals.  And the reason was because they believed that fertility was basically unchanged, from bugs to Jesus, it’s all the same, and from animals to men, it doesn’t make any difference, there is no boundary between men and animals.  So they would have bestiality and it would be perfectly acceptable in many of their cults.

 

But out of this we have an emphasis always on sex, and in many of the drawings you’d have the picture of a serpent; this is found on many, many pieces of pottery, always the serpent.  Now how did this serpent get tied into this.  We know basically, not only is he behind this distortion, but the fertility was married to the concept of the serpent because in Genesis 3:15 it was the serpent’s seed that was going to do battle with the woman’s seed, the prediction there of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Now I will leave a picture here of early figurines and these are the fertility goddesses and you can obviously see what was on their mind.  This was the prevalent thing in the ancient world and I’ll show you some verses that go into the detail on this, Hosea 4:13, one of the verses we’re coming up to, but it shows you they engaged in these fertility rites.  I only want to convey one point now and that is emphasis on fertility as a natural process, but they personalized it as a god of fertility and goddesses of fertility.

 

So in Hosea 4:13 we find the Jews getting involved in this, “They sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains, and burn incense upon the hills, under oaks and poplars and elms, because the shadow of them is good;” in other words, this is the 10th century to 7th century BC version of the back seat, “therefore your daughters shall commit whoredoms, and your spouses shall commit adultery. [14] I will not punish your daughters when they commit whoredom, nor your spouses…” and he goes on, that’s something else we’ll get to.  But they were engaged in sex orgies in connection with the worship of the god of fertility and the goddesses of fertility. 

 

Now there’s another prophet that says the same thing, the prophet Amos.  Amos 2:7-8 again proof that by this time the Hebrews were engaged in these fertility rites.  “That pant after the dust of the earth on the head of the poor, and they turn aside the way of the meek; and a man and his father will go in unto the same maid, to profane My holy name. [8] and they lay themselves down upon clothes laid to pledge by every altar,” and in these Canaanite fertility cults they would have an altar and the altar was a bed, and they would go through these orgies on these beds, these beds have been uncovered, they’re cement things, and they were a picture of what the gods were supposedly doing in heaven to make the land fertile. 

 

So we link now, because… we’ve worshiped the God of nature, we’re caught in the same thing that modern evolution is caught in, from bugs to Jesus, so they were caught in the same thing, from soil through the animal to man.  So you have the priestesses who were the professional prostitutes and you would have men visit the temple, it would be an act of worship to have sex with one of these girls, and conversely they had situations where they had male prostitutes and it would be an act of the female to worship by having sex with one of these men.  And as they would have sex on this bed this would be an act that would portray what the gods were supposedly doing, the thinking being that if we have enough sex we can start the fertility process going that will give fertility to the land.  And obviously with that kind of theology you can’t go wrong, it was a very popular cult. 

The point was the fertility cult was now becoming something else that’s sinister.  Up to this point we’ve just discussed the mess that’s happened; the mess has happened why?  Because the doctrine of creation with categories was denied from the start.  What have we insisted in creation?  There is a difference between the earth, a difference between soil and men and animals, and there’s a difference most profound between nature and the Creator. We insist on categories, the evolutionist just wipes them all out, there is no categories, none at all, they’re all trapped in one big blob.

 

Now we come to something more sinister; not only as this sex was going on and these girls were going into this thing and the men were too and the fathers and the mothers, as all these people were engaged in these sex orgies there was now another thing, far more serious than just the sex that was going on.  What it amounts to is one of the most obvious historical proofs for salvation by works.  What was happening was, again because of nature, they believed that the various Baals, and what we’ll call the sister Baals, or [can’t understand word; think it’s a Hebrew word, then says something that sounds like anath] was one of them, Venus, she later became Venus in history, the gods and the goddesses themselves, now watch what’s happening here, you’ve got to follow this to see why Hosea is going to make some of his remarks. 

 

Here you have these people down here and they’re engaged in some wild sex orgy.  Their objective in this sex orgy was to get a process of fertility started; these were Hebrew farmers, and they wanted the soil to be fertile, so they went to men because men differ basically not from the soil, we’re all part of nature, if we can get the fertility process begun in men then the fertility process begins in the soil.  The idea was that the gods and the goddesses that were responsible for the fertility in the soil would be caught up in the same process.  So what you have are these gods and goddesses themselves part of nature, both men and god part of the same system.  The gods reproduced the same way the humans reproduced.  The gods have sex the same way men have sex. 

 

And so therefore if that’s the case in the ancient system, what was the source of all?  The gods or nature? Nature.  Even the gods who fell in the final analysis were not the authors of fertility in the soil, it was a natural process that was involved.  Why is this important?  Whenever we deal with God and we ruin God’s character, and this is the argument of idolatry and here’s one of the central, central, central points of idolatry, and here’s one of the things how it can slip on you and you’ll never be aware of it.  You can start thinking in idolatrous categories and never even catch it until you’re way down the line, hundreds of miles down the line and you say how did I get here, I made a mistake some place.

 

All right, now watch this, because they made the same mistake.  Their mistake was to say here’s the world, there is God, and there am I.  Now in that picture what’s biggest?  The world, God and man together live in the universe.   God and man together run the universe; instead of saying God is nowhere in the universe, God is over and above the universe, God is the Creator of all things and of all nature, they believe that the gods and goddesses were part of nature too.  And so starting with that assumption, lower gods, put down inside nature, make Him subject to natural law and then you can manipulate Him like you can manipulate  genie.  So God becomes manipulate-able.  The sex orgies that Hosea cries against were basically orgies of manipulation, of salvation by works, if we do this, then automatically we can secure by our works our salvation.

 

To show you the extent of this, turn to 1 Kings 11 and we’ll make our acquaintance with some of the gods and goddesses that had come into the land at this point.  1 Kings 11:5, “For Solomon went after Ashtoreth,” this is the famous Ashtoreth, she was a goddess of love and it was to her, she was a fertility goddess and so on, the perpetual virgin.  These perpetual virgins were always having children, a most interesting thing.   “…the goddess of the Sidonians,” that was one god that had come into the Jewish land.  Another god is also listed, “and after Milcom, the abomination of the Ammonites.”  Milcom was Molech, and Molech was the god that you sacrificed your babies to, and these poor Jewish women would have to bring their babies and they would actually think, destroy the child, let him fry and sizzle on this god, this statute, as the baby screamed his life away they would chant and they’d clap and play harps and music and so on because this appeased the god, Molech determined, in order to please him you must have human sacrifice and the best kind of human sacrifice would be an innocent baby. 

 

In 1 Kings 11:7, “Then did Solomon build an high place for Chemosh, the abomination of Moab, in the hill that is before Jerusalem, and for Molech, the abomination of the children of Ammon.” Chemosh was very much like Molech, so right away Solomon introduces three gods, Ashtoreth, Molech and Chemosh.  Then in 1 Kings 16:31 you have the infiltration of another god, this is the one that we are familiar with because he’s named Baal, but his real name was Baal Melchart, in other words he was the lord, Baal is just a title, just like the Lord Jesus Christ.  Verse 30, “And Ahab, the son of Omri, did evil in the sight of the LORD above all who were before him. [31] And it came to pass, as if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nebat, that he took as his wife Jezebel, the daughter of Ethbaal, king of the Sidonians, and went and served Baal, and worshiped him.”  Now this girl that he married, happened to be the daughter of the high priest of Baal Melchart, so he not only married a Gentile woman who was an unbeliever, and violated therefore the basic principle that you cannot marry and unbeliever; two believers can marry, two unbelievers can marry but never a believer and an unbeliever.  You have him marrying an unbeliever and this unbelieving girl turns out to be a specially coached daughter of her father who was one of the greatest and most famous priests in the ancient world, Baal Melchart, and obviously this brings a fourth god called Baal into Israel.

 

Finally in 2 Kings 21 you have the important of others.  This is a man by the name of Manasseh, one of the most ferocious unbelievers in Israel.  He’s in Judah as far as terminology of the northern and southern kingdom goes, it’s in the southern kingdom here but if it’s going on in the southern kingdom you know what must have gone on in the northern kingdom. “For he built up again the high places which Hezekiah, his father, had destroyed; and he reared up altars for Baal, and made a grove [an idol], as did Ahab, king of Israel,” all right, so he continues all the other ones, then he “worshiped all the host of heaven, and served them.”  And “the host of heaven” were the Ashtoral deities, coming over in Greek mythology as Chronos, Saturn, Zeus, Jupiter, Mercury and so on.  So you have all the Ashtoral deities being worshipped, the gods of the planet. 

 

So this is a wholesale infiltration of idolatry and we have the culmination of it all and God’s attitude in Jeremiah 7, here’s what God said to the whole thing.  This is the attitude God then toward idolatry and since God is immutable and His righteousness changes not, therefore this is God’s attitude toward us when we let idolatry creep into our souls.  The doctrine of election is one of the greatest doctrines to destroy idolatry that the church of Jesus Christ has.  If you are straight on the doctrine of election you cannot be an idolater.  Those two doctrines are very highly correlated.  Jeremiah 7:8, “Behold, you trust in lying words that cannot profit. [9] Will you steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense unto Baal, and walk after other gods whom ye know not; [10] And then come and stand before Me in this house, which is called by My name, and say, We are delivered to do all these abominations?”  In other words, what was happening was that these orgies were being conducted on some of the sacred ground of the land, and the word “deliver” is our word to “save.” 

 

And so we can paraphrase what is said in verse 10, you do all these things and you come to Me and say, well we’re saved so we can enjoy all the hell-raising we want to.  That’s what God’s attitude is.  Don’t think you are saved so you can do all these abominations.  God’s attitude is when you have idolatry in your hear and I have idolatry in my heart, when we are in that kind of a situation, God sees us as abominable.  The only reason we stay saved is because by imputation we have Christ’s righteousness.  But it means that we are in for some very, very, very severe sanctification, when we get to the point where this idolatry is in our soul.  Now when we become Christians we might just temper what we said about this in this way; when you become a Christian, regardless of your background, since we all come out of a basically Gentile culture, we have, all of us, ALL of us have degrees of idolatry in our soul; you can’t help it, we come out of a Gentile culture that has not been worked with since the time of Babel, and since the time God abandoned it with the call of Abraham.  So we come out of an idolatrous culture.  Now we get led to the Lord Jesus Christ, and you remember this when you lead people to Christ, a person can trust the Lord Jesus Christ, be born again, respond to the knowledge he has and yet still in his soul harbor this residual idolatry.   Now as the sphere of light gets bigger and bigger and bigger in that person’s soul, as the Holy Spirit sanctifies him, he will expose these things; as you grow He’ll expose it.  And you’ll begin to see hey, my concept of God, God isn’t like that, I always thought God was like this; no He’s not, He’s bigger.  And as sanctification proceeds your God picture is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

 

Now what you have to watch for and this is the only point, as you go on and grow in the Christian life, don’t hit a snag, whereas this picture is getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and then finally there’ll be an area where you’ll see that you’re completely out of it, that you have a tendency… maybe in your prayer life, it may be some other area, you have a tendency to operate in a certain way and what you are learning in the Word of God begins to start to threaten that habit that you are used to.  And it begins to develop a tension in your soul, that if you’re to believe all this doctrine that you’re being taught, it just seems like it’s changing my thinking, so I just can’t think that way and operate that way, and you begin to develop a collision.  At that point God demands that that, whatever it is, be eradicated, and if it’s not eradicated, that is going to be the source of compound carnality for you as you go on.  In other words, that source, instead of getting removed, grows like a cancer and takes over the previous area that had been sanctified, and  you begin to fall victim to this idolatrous thinking.  It is aided by doctrines of demons which we’ll also study in the book of Hosea, because when we’re disobedient our natural protection to the external demonic forces decreases and the demon powers have, as it were, a Trojan Horse operating in our soul, and they just kind of input energy into it until this idolatry takes over our soul. 

 

Remember the words of Jeremiah, don’t think you’re going to come to God’s presence in His name and say I was saved and not I’m going to think this way or live this way or act this way.