Hosea Lesson 10

Baalism, fertility cult, demonic powers - Hosea 4:8-14

 

Beginning in Hosea 4 Hosea is laying out God’s lawsuit upon the nation.  Hosea is a place for you to learn how the Holy Spirit really, when He does it and not group pressure, how the Holy Spirit convicts of sin.  This is a good illustration, and following the logic of Hosea 4 will teach you how to watch for conviction by the Holy Spirit.  You will note that in Hosea 4:1-3 in a more or less capsule summary of how the Holy Spirit goes about His work.  In verse 1 you have the court procedure of the rib, or the lawsuit.  This would correspond to the fact that the Holy Spirit will convict by orderly procedures.  That is, He will take doctrine that you have learned, He will take Scriptures that you have read, with which you are familiar, and He will take your thought life and work it together to produce conviction.  The Holy Spirit does not, therefore, convict in an absolute moment of ecstasy; He does not necessarily convict when the emotions are high, He convicts, if Hosea is to be our norm, He convicts as a lawyer or prosecutor would convict in the courtroom.  There may be emotions in the courtroom, but there is an orderly lawful procedure.  And God, when He convicts Israel of her sin He does it by means of lawsuit proceedings. 

 

In Hosea 4:2 we found the indictment; the indictment was point by point, just as in a true court­room the criminal is convicted of his crime point by point.  Specific violations of specific points of law are made and therefore if Hosea is our norm, then the Holy Spirit will convict us of our sin, specifically by using departures from the known will of God taught in Scripture. 

 

Hosea 4:3 gives the sentence.  And this shows that God the Holy Spirit, when He convicts, threatens judgment, and there will be a sense of a threatened judgment.  In other words, as the Holy Spirit is convicting me, I will have the thought that if I don’t so something about it something is going to be done about it by God.  That’s the sense of the conviction of the Holy Spirit.  If, rather, you just have this sense, well I might have violated His will at some point or other, but don’t have the added sensation that God is hostile, that God may Himself do something about it, the chances are that you are not under the conviction of the Holy Spirit; at least far enough to be able to confess in faith that you genuinely have sinned with the point. 

 

So Hosea gives us a norm and standard and the people in Hosea’s day had engaged in mass idolatry; they are in compound carnality because of failure to apply the Word in their life.  Now we have been evaluating some of the material we have taught over the last year or so, we have developed four points of the divine viewpoint framework: creation, the fall, the flood and the Noahic Covenant.  This divine viewpoint framework, ordering the Scripture in the sequence God gave them to man, with each major event clearly specified, with the doctrine clearly associated with these events, here is where we base the solidarity and the stability or our souls.  These events and the doctrines associated with them is just first grade material; the advanced material comes in later and the details come in later, as you grow in the Lord and can absorb more Scripture and God gives you experiences that are designed to cause you to appreciate more points of Scripture, then you add meat to the skeleton, but this is just the bare skeleton; there is no major advanced doctrine in all this, this is just elementary stuff.  Now after you get to the point where these begin to be absorbed in your soul, then we face the problem of application.  So we’re going to, beginning tonight in Hosea, go through some of these techniques of application.  You have on your sheet two specific ways or techniques of applying doctrine. 

This is what was not happening in the northern kingdom in the 7th century.  These people went into idolatry and ultimately into disaster because they failed to do this.  They failed to apply the Word, and it led to the destruction of a nation as it will lead to the destruction of our nation if Christians do not learn to apply doctrine across the board.  It doesn’t do any good, in an immediate sense, to win someone to Jesus Christ and then leave them.  This is what has gone on, we have people who don’t even know if they’re born again or not.  Parents, you ought to be sure that your children are born again and that they are sure they are; that’s one of your responsibilities as a parent.  It’s your responsibility to lead your children to Christ, not the responsibility of the pastor or the Sunday School to do a job that you should have done. 

 

These three steps are increments, this is training by the increment system where you learn a complicated thing by learning first the simple steps involved in the procedure.  We make no claim that the temptations that you face are going to be met in a very simple way like these three steps.  We make no such claim; when you face a real life situation it’s going to be more complicated than this.  But at least this is the first step or the first level of applying and using that framework when you have learned it.  This is a way of developing a mentality about you as a Christian, that you ought to have. 

 

The three steps of applying doctrine, that we have on the sheet in the bulletin, fall back on a particular attack or temptation; don’t visualize this as an individual necessarily talking to you; this could be temptation that just drops into your mind; this is spiritual conflict in your soul.  It may incidentally involve people outside of you in a discussion, but the greatest spiritual conflict you will face will be involving absolutely no other person than yourself.  We live in a universe open to spiritual principalities and powers who at any time can drop their thoughts into your head.  If Satan can put thoughts into the mind of Jesus Christ, who was without a sin nature, then Satan can obviously put thoughts into our minds. And Christians get tubed out all the time because, even when they know the doctrine they can’t apply it, they’re not quick enough to apply it. 

 

So these three steps are a simple way, a technique of using faith, and it’s just spelling it out.  Let’s go through these first two and I’ll give you an illustration, then we’ll go into Hosea.  I want to take these in the evening service and you go over them until your response becomes automatic.  This is not to say we don’t do our thinking, it is simply to say that when you are involved in an actual conflict you should have done your thinking days and weeks and months and years before the time of conflict.  It doesn’t do any good to sit there when you’ve just been hit so hard that you can barely think because of grief, because of shock, because of confusion, because of something else; in that situation at that time you don’t have time to think.  Now there is a time and a place to think, yes.  But there comes a time when you have to take the results of your thinking and get automatic response to this program in your soul, so you can start using this stuff.  This will give you more power and more flexibility in the spiritual conflict.

 

Let’s take the first attack; the first step in all of this is to get your attack thought out; be able to state what the problem is in a sentence.  Learn to do this, do it in your own vocabulary, don’t use my words, use your own words, but however you do it, do it.  And it means, in mastering these simple stylized versions of application of doctrine, and I’ve tried to pick areas that will come up often, so it will save at least some of the trials of you having to do it.  Here is the attack; it’s phrased in a sentence.  Now it may have come to you from 85 different directions but this basically is the thrust of the attack.  It may have come from a friend, from a family member who is suffering personal grief and you are the only Christian on the scene with doctrine who can stabilize the situation, it may be a non-Christian who is mocking the gospel of Jesus Christ, it may be any number of situations; it may just be the temptation dropped in your own mind because of the situation that you face.  But from some place has come this assault.  You have gone through the first technique which is to state it in a sentence.  The sentence is: this particular suffering proves that God is unfair, and it’ll come to you in a thousand different ways, but this is basically the attack—this particular suffering proves that God is unfair. 

 

Now here’s what you do; you develop a procedure of handling this thing so it becomes automatic.  You don’t get through the attack until you go all the way to the third step.  You don’t stop at the second one.  The first thing you have to do is plug into the proper place on the divine viewpoint framework.  Once you’ve stated the attack to yourself in a sentence, and it’s true this is slow at first, that’s why you ought to save these sheets and go over them and over them and over them to develop these responses.  In this particular thing you ask yourself what event can I pull in to make contact with this kind of thing; I’m not going to expect God it to write it in neon lights on my ceiling because I was too lazy to study it myself.  God has gone to considerable pain to write Scripture; He has invested the Church with the gift of pastor-teacher; He has invested you with the indwelling Holy Spirit to illuminate your heart, and that is the methodology of learning truth, not to sit and wait until the attack comes and then oh God, oh God, what was I supposed to do and go looking all around waiting for Him to suddenly reveal it at that moment.  That is not the way to meet these things.  Someday you’ll be caught where it’s just you, the Holy Spirit and the Bible; that’s what we’re training for, so you’ll be able to do it that way, you won’t be dependent on somebody else in that sense.  We’re all dependent on each other as believers, but when these attacks come you want to be basically spiritual self-sustaining so you can handle it and be strong.  And any believer can do this; that’s what God has designed the Christian life to do.  So the first thing is to go and plug into the divine viewpoint framework.  You’ve got to know it before you can plug into it.  So you go back and say okay, I’m hit with a problem of suffering, now where in the body of revelation, in the canonical Scripture where has God covered this thing. 

 

If you look on the sheet, there are three things, there’s the event, that’s where it is in the divine viewpoint framework, there is the text of Scripture, there is the doctrine associated with that event.  The fall is the place that gives you the picture of the origin of suffering.  That’s the place you go to orient yourself in time of suffering.  Where do you go to get the fall in God’s Word; know your way around the Bible, very few Christians do.  Genesis 3-4 is the place where the fall is. 

 

The third point, doctrine, what doctrines can you get out to use in the doctrine of suffering.  Now the second situation, after you’ve done that at least you’ve got one step accomplished.  Now when this thing becomes almost a reflex action and you can do the whole thing in a fraction of a second but right now we’re learning the steps; speed comes later.  Now we block the attack with doctrine.  Here’s where you use the doctrine.  The attack was this particular suffering proves that God is unfair; block the attack with the doctrine.  I’ve gone two things; this particular suffering is ultimately due to the fact that God created a responsible history in which we rebel.  That relieves the assault on God’s character.  You can tell this attack is basically originated in Satan, whether it comes through the lips of your spouse, your children,  your parents, anyone else, it has ultimately come from Satan because the thought behind that attack is to smear the character of God. 

And so when you block the attack you go back to the fall and the fall testifies that suffering originated, not because God directly created it, but because man brought it in by his own rebellion.  The second point in this block in the doctrine of suffering is that the suffering is only a fraction of what we deserve because he graciously restrains the full effects of the fall and works it all out for our good, that’s Romans 8:28 basically.  Now you see what’s happened; you’ve had the attack, instead of falling apart or worse yet, instead of suppressing it and saying I won’t think about that, when you know darned well you’re going to, and like Nebuchadnezzar it’ll come back up in your dreams to haunt you because you haven’t dealt with it.  The Holy Spirit will give you no rest until you’ve dealt with it.  We are considered to be mature people; in Ephesians it says we wrestle, not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers.  What’s that wrestling all about? 

 

So let’s develop some techniques; you plug into the doctrine, you block the attack with that doctrine.  That’s what cuts off the attack, but you’re still not out of the woods.  Just because we’ve blocked the attack isn’t sufficient, because at that point you’re still vulnerable to another attack. Satan can come along with this attack, rephrase it with another approach, a new situation develops in your life, someone else comes to you saying the same thing a little bit differently.  And after while you begin to say well, maybe he has a point.  So if you just break off your contact at the second step you’re vulnerable to repeat performances.  That’s why we go to the third step.

 

The third step is the counterattack, here’s where  you take the offense.  Up to this time you’ve been totally defensive.  You’ve blunted the attack, now you take the offense and that’s necessary.  Why?  Because it discredits the source of the attack, that’s why, and that source of the attack, Satan and human viewpoint must be discredited honestly before your heart before you’re prepared to believe with peace.  As long as there’s lingering doubt there, gee, there really might be something to this, you know… as long as that doubt harbors in your soul you will not be stable as a believer; you are vulnerable as a believer.  So you’ve got to press all the way to the third one, then you’re in the clear. 

 

Now when you get to the third one, let’s just think, let’s put the whole Bible in the ashcan, and say okay, what would happen, let’s just see, what does the non-Christian have to offer at this point; they’re discrediting Christianity, what do they have?  Here’s what they have; they have to passively surrender to suffering as a permanent feature of existence because they have no fall, evil always has been here, and that’s why in all the world religions the gods and goddesses are always cruel.  Why are they always cruel?  Because existence is cruel.  On a non-Christian basis this is always cruel; this is why evolution is taught in the schools, evolution is basically anti-Christian because by evolution it means that God brings good about through evil means; death and destruction is the source of the good.  And the second thing, this is the only thing a person can do when trapped by the realization that evil is always in the world, evil is there, I can’t deny it, what do you do?  The only thing you can do is pretend things are going to get better, things are going to get better, things are going to get better, and it develops into auto-hypnosis, positive thinking kind of thinking.  Now that’s all that you’ve got on the other side. 

 

So if you proceed to counterattack at this point you discredit the whole pressure against you.  This is what we want to develop, a mentality that would say one, two, three, real quick, and this is how you develop strength in your soul.  Now the second attack is basically the same kind of thing, it can hit in a variety of ways, you can use your own creativity, you plug into the divine viewpoint, in this case you go to the doctrine of suffering, you remember six reason why believers suffer, and you recall those reasons, that blocks the attack and then you counterattack and destroy and discredit the source of the temptation, what have you got on your side Satan, nothing but continued hell, and you move on.

 

That’s the cycle of applying the divine viewpoint framework.  Now we do not mean that this is all you relying on your own effort.  The Holy Spirit in His gracious enabling is required to make this work.  This won’t work if you’re not filled with the Spirit, but the point is that though you can talk about being filled with the Spirit and not being filled with the Spirit, still your mind has to be occupied with some thing, and this is what it ought to be occupied with.  So as we study these steps we’ll hit a variety of situations in life.  Those are the techniques and we’ll review these until we develop that mentality and when Satan hits you with a temptation, he’s going to get blasted.  Give him the bloody nose instead of you taking it all the time.

 

Let’s look at Hosea and see what happened to a group of people who never did this.  Hosea 4:6, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee,” and you remember verses 6-7, God is announcing a coming catastrophe. We left off last time at the end of verse 7.  Now tonight we pick up the passage in verse 8.

 

In Hosea 4:8 Hosea goes on to describe certain things that have happened in the nation.  We’re going to learn some truths about our own nation in verses 8-10, and something that many conservatives have failed to see, the solidarity of the people before God, that both leaders and grassroots people are together culpable.  It is not just the leaders that are bad; it is the whole solid society that is bad in God’s sight, and that’s what’s taught in verses 8-9.  “They eat up the sin of My people, and they set their heart on their iniquity. [9] And there shall be, like people, like priest; and I will punish them for their ways, and reward them for their doings. [10] For they shall eat, and not have enough; they shall commit whoredom, and shall not increase, because they have left off to take heed to the LORD.” 

 

Now what is this talking about?  All right, verse 8 is a pun on the word for sin.  The word looks like this, chatath, hard “h” and this word has two meanings, and the pun is on the two meanings. It can mean sin, or it can mean sin offering.  It can mean either one.  And so what is happening, the background of all this, is the priesthood.  The priesthood “are eating up the sin of My people,” now it’s taken two ways.  The sin offering was eaten by the priest, that’s Leviticus 6:25 and that passage.  When these people would sin they’d have to come down and offer a sin offering; part of that sin offering would be eaten by the priests.  So the priests literally made money on people’s sin.  Now that’s all right, that was ordained that way, since every time somebody sinned that required counseling, it required some time of the priest, God said okay, pay the priest, so the priest was paid out of the sin offering that the person brought when he came to the temple or he came to the place of offering.  So that was the legitimate practice, Leviticus 6.

 

But what’s happened is that in the northern kingdom, and keep in mind, Hosea is ministering to the northern kingdom which was called Israel.  The southern kingdom was called Judah.  The break, 930 BC, that was the time of the civil war.  In the northern kingdom it was supposed to have been a separate political system but the same religious system as the south.  However, Jeroboam, the sin of Jeroboam mentioned repeatedly in Scripture, was the state setting up religion.  In other words, religion now came out of the state.  Going to our chart on the divine institutions, it means that the fourth divine institution, the institution of the state, came to interfere with the sphere of grace.  And the state began to dictate and design a state religion; instead of having its shrine at Jerusalem it had its shrine in two places, one at Bethel and one at Dan.  And so there was two cultists, two places of group worship.  Now the priests were not Levites; all the Levites when this happened, and they saw the handwriting on the wall, that the state was going to set up a new religion, the Levites got out.  They said we’re not going to take it, we refuse to be hamstrung by the fourth divine institution, and we’re leaving.  So they evacuated and left the northern kingdom with no priests.  So the priests that were left were appointees by the state.  And so since they had been appointees by the state and not appointees by God, they were people who were in high places uncalled…. Uncalled by God, called by men but not called by God.  And so when they got into these high places the temptation came, hey look, how are we earning our money, we’re earning our money on the chatath, we’re earning our money on the sin offerings of the people. So look, we’re kind of stupid if we’re going to try to reform this people, the best thing to do is let them go ahead and sin and then we’ll make our money on their sin.  That was the situation that happened at that point in time. 

 

Now this corresponds, and you see this in different forms today.  We see the same kind of interference going on, they eat up the [can’t understand word] people, we have people who are unethical in the area of psychiatry and psychology, and they really aren’t interested in solving a person’s problems as long as they’re getting a counseling fee; who wants to solve problems, you’re getting lots of solution to your own problems at $50 an hour.  So whose interesting in solving problems; we eat up the sins of the people, we feed on them.  Then we have other analogies, we have the people in the media who always love to feed on the faults of great men.

 

You’ll notice this is a tendency in history; it’s a tendency particularly on the media; small people cannot stand great people and so they always want to run down somebody that’s bigger than they area.  It’s just a picky little way at getting back at people.  This is why people always run down the Puritans.  The Puritans were great people.  Now they had a lot of areas where they fouled up, we’re not saying they’re infallible, but as a whole the Puritans were a very great people.  So we have small people teaching in college classrooms that like to malign great people.  Some of the greatest men who ever walked the face of this earth as far as politics is concerned happened to be together in a galaxy of leadership in 1776 in this country.  No country in the world was ever blessed with so many great people all at one time as this country was.  And since that time we’ve had great men but we’ve never had a great cluster of men as we had when our constitution was written.  So we have small people trying to malign the great people. 

 

Every generation, every group has their social parasites.  And this is the point Hosea is making, they’re just a parasite, these priests, these state-appointed priests, “they set their heart on their iniquity” and it’s more powerful in the original language, the word “set” literally means to lift up their soul.  The best way to translate it into contemporary Americaneze is to say it turns them on. They’re turned on by this kind of thing, they love it. So we have this concept that the leaders and the people are all in decline.

 

Hosea 4:9, “And there shall be, like people, like priest,” and the point is when God goes to judge a nation in Scripture and this always is true, this ALWAYS is true, God judges both leaders and the grassroots.  Now this is what is wrong with a lot of conservatives; they always try to blame it on some conspiracy, there’s always a plot, always a group of communists in a smoke-filled room.  Now communists do go to smoke filled rooms, but the point remains that they are not God; Karl Marx and Lenin and Trotsky and all the Wall Street people that back them are not the people that run history in the final analysis. God runs history and when you have conservatives always worried about a plot you have basically Satan worship; Satan is more powerful than  Jesus, it is the plot, the conspiracy that is more powerful than God’s Word. 

 

Now there’s a warning in Scripture against this and every conservative ought to know this passage of Scripture.  Turn to Isaiah 8:12, this is the divine viewpoint of the so-called conspiracy theory of history.  The word “confederacy” is the word that is equal to the word “plot.”  In verse 12 God tells His people, don’t you say, “a plot [confederacy] to all them to whom this people shall say, A plot [confederacy]; neither fear their fear, nor be afraid.”  It’s not the plot, God says, don’t make that the center of your attention.  He’s not denying there are plots, of course there are plots, there always has been plots. Satan was the first plotter; we have had a lot of plots; we have had men in the background at Yalta, men in the background at Potsdam, we have men involved in the United Nations negotiations in Korea, we’ve had all sorts of things like that go on in history but God’s Word says if you start to make these plots, these conspiracies the focus and the center point of your attention you have turned your eyes from Me.  The focus of attention, God says, should be on none other than Me and My Word.  I should occupy your attention, not the plot.  God says if you will adhere to My Word, I will take care of the plot.  On the other hand, if you want to try to fight this thing by some program of works, you’re going to waste your time, absolute waste of time.  You can’t even track all the plots down, leave alone trying to deal with them. 

 

All we can do as citizens who are Christians is to adhere to the Word of God.  Now, if we would do this, think what would happen.  First of all you would have a maximum effective evangelism.  You would have a maximum number of people witnessing clearly for Jesus Christ in every area.  You would have the professional people reaching those people with the gospel who would never be open to the gospel from a minister.  You would have doctors witnessing to doctors, lawyers witnessing to lawyers, people in high places in civil government witnessing to other people in high places in civil government.  You’d have a maximum amount of evangelism because you’d have trained believers.  What would happen as more and more people were won to Christ and more and more people got into the Word.  The conspiracies would dry up.  You would break the back of these things.  Which is more productive doing it that way or going around crawling after every conspiracy that one thinks exist.  The divine viewpoint is Isaiah 8:12, remember that verse when someone says to you, hey, did you about the latest plot.  Tell them yeah, Isaiah told me about it a few years ago. 

 

Hosea 4, so, “like people, like priest,” the judgment will come on both.  [“and I will punish them for their ways, and reward them their doings.”]

 

Hosea 4:10, “For they shall eat, and not have enough,” the “they” of verse 10 refers to both the leaders and the people.  “They shall eat” speaks of the eating done in the Baalism orgies that they had in the high places.  Remember the doctrine of idolatry; in the doctrine of idolatry you always have something like this.  Idolatry has various forms but it always amounts to this; God and man both are on the same plain inside nature.  So think of it, for example, do you remember reading the stories of mythology.  What was true of the gods and the goddesses and all the myths.  What was true of them?  They all have arguments, they all have fights, they all reproduced, they were all subject to the same natural law the people are subject to.  In other words, the gods, God has brought down into nature and kept there and imprisoned there.  That’s idolatry.  So you’ve got something now above God, behind God, in back of God, and so God is no longer the ultimate issue, it’s getting behind God to something else.  That’s idolatry.  What is the something else? 

 

In Baalism it was the fertility principle, they simply looked upon their crops and they drew one straight continuous line from the ground, the fertility of the ground for agriculture, the fertility of the animals for their flocks, for their meat, and the fertility of man for people and large families to work the fields and to be productive.  So the key to success and pleasure was fertility, always fertility, fertility, fertility, fertility, fertility. And because they had the unified concept of nature such as evolution teaches today, that there is no distinction between the inorganic and organic, that there is no distinction between animal and man, therefore in these orgies that they would have they would have bestiality and so on go on.  To them it was not anything, if you want to copulate with a cow go ahead, the point was that sex was sex, fertility was fertility, it didn’t matter where it was. 

 

And they had some things that would make 20th century pornography look trivial.  If you think 20th century pornography is bad, it hasn’t even caught up to the Canaanites yet; give it time, but it hasn’t caught up yet.  The Baalism of the Canaanites was just absolutely… they took things to the logical conclusion all the way and that’s what’s going on here, “they shall eat, and not have enough,” this refers to the meals that they would have before they had their little orgies.  In the meal they would all get bombed out of their minds, this would make things go better, and then finally, “they shall commit whoredom, and shall not increase.”  In other words, they can have all the orgies they want to up in those high places but the fertility of the field is not going to increase any more; the fertility of the flocks is not going to increase. 

 

Now here’s what had been happening.  See these poor people operated like a lot of believers.  We all operate on this same principle, we distort grace.  Here we are on negative volition, we do not earn, we do not deserve any of the prosperity that we have.  So these people are on negative volition and they were going down to the First Orgy Church and going on with this fertility thing.   And so they thought oh well, we can go and have these orgiastic rights and go on through the fertility cult and all the rest of it, and what we are doing is we are manipulating processes; we are manipulating the gods.  See, this is the ultimate in sanctification by works, it is sheer manipulation.  It isn’t that they are going into these orgies to ask God if He might do something; that’s not the mentality of this at all.  That’s reading the Bible into it; don’t read the Bible into it.  These people were anti-Scripture, they go to the orgy saying if I do this, then this automatically comes to pass, there’s got to be fertility after we do this. 

 

So since it was automatic it was ritualistic, it was salvation and sanctification by works.  Now what was really happening?  They were saying hey, you know we went down to the First Orgy Church last night and we’ll go next week, and then along comes the end of the growing season and they’d have a fantastic crop, and they’d begin to say hey, look at this, this works.  Not only is it fun it works, and so they’d have large crops come in.  Now who was the source of their crops in reality?  It had nothing to do with that, it was God in His grace; in spite of the fact that they were on negative volition God blessed them, He blessed them, He blessed them, He blessed them, he blessed them, He gave them happiness, even though they were all out of it God still blessed them because God is a gracious God.  Now things have gotten so bad that they’re reinterpreting grace.  They say oh, I see, going to the First Orgy Church produces large crops.  See, they got the cause/effect wrong.  So that’s why God says okay, they “shall not increase.”  And the word to “increase” in Hosea 4:10 is the word which means go beyond the limit and the limit was their current production per acre, say.  They’re getting  X amount, X shekels per acre of production; that’s the limit.  Now what God is saying, okay, that is the highest price you’re going to get and you can sit here and go to the First Orgy Church and have a revival if you want to, and still you are not going to have any more production of crops; I’ll see to that. 

 

So God begins to turn off the grace spicket; He begins to turn off the supply.  And this is one of the cruelest forms of discipline, one of the most painful forms of discipline for us as believers, when God begins to turn off His grace.  Now hopefully we don’t get ourselves into this mess, but when it happens it is because we have gone out and presumed upon His grace, gone out and raised all sorts of hell, we’ve done something, we’ve gotten in rebellion against His Word at certain points and we’ve looked at God’s grace and we say well, I’m getting away with this, doesn’t the Bible say that you’re supposed disciplined, so this can’t be sin because I’m getting away with it so I’ll just do it some more, as long as God isn’t going to blame me for I’ll just keep on with it. That’s the attitude that eventually leads to the turning off of grace.  God begins to contract the size of His grace, and that’s what He’s announcing here.

 

Now in Hosea 4:11-12 things get more serious, because in these verses, 11, 12, and 13, God warns them that they have already encountered demonic powers.  And that from verses 11-13 the religion of the northern kingdom in the 7th century has become totally subject to demonic control.  Now when any national entity goes so long on negative volition and rebellion against the Word of God that you have an infiltration of demonism to a maximum form, that nation is in great danger.  There have been nations known in history for their demonism.  One of the great nations was the Carthaginians; the Carthaginians went down into Rome, remember Hannibal, he was the last great Carthaginian general.  So the Carthaginians are the descendants of the Phoenicians.  The Phoenicians were the ones who introduced Baal worship into the Middle East.  And at a very late date the Carthaginians were one of the people in the Mediterranean who were still offering human sacrifices.  And so God wiped out the Carthaginians, the Romans cleaned them out.  That’s how God operates, from 600 BC as we’ve seen in Daniel, God operates one Gentile power against another and He eliminates nations that are highly demonic. 

 

Another recent illustration is Tibet.  People wondered why the Chinese communists went into the Himalayas, into Tibet.  Lowell Thomas was invited by the Dali Lama to Tibet early in the 50’s to prepare the way of open communication to the west, so hopefully the west could come to Tibet’s rescue when the Chinese attacked.   And the west didn’t and that was in the providence of God because Tibet was under the control of one of the most demonic groups that has ever walked the face of the earth, the famous red-hooded monks of Tibet.  These people were involved in demonism to the point where they had and were able to call upon tremendous demon forces; they would move matter, tables would fly through the air and so on, and these were all that they had managed themselves into by a demonic kind of religion. 

 

Now when any group of people, say in Tibet or the Carthaginians succumb to this kind of thing, we can’t be dogmatic, but the Scripture seems to suggest it is irreversible, that when a group of people becomes this far involved that it does something to the third divine institution and their children so that either one of two things happens in history; either the people become childless and to the third and fourth generation are cut off, as for example many of the people who practiced witchcraft in Germany wound up, and it’s been proven in studies, childless.  God cut the large families off.  But when it gets larger than a family, and it’s a whole nation, God destroys that nation. 

 

Now in verses 11-13 God outlines the true seriousness of the northern kingdom.  Hosea 4:11, “Whoredom and wine and new wine take away the heart.”  That’s the first step of entering demonic religion, “take away the heart” is reference to destruction of the conscience.  Now demon powers don’t just automatically visit, they are invited in by certain actions that we ourselves commit.  It looks something like this; here’s our conscience, there is always the battle going on between the mind and the conscience.  The conscience has the norms and standards of the Word of God and when the conscience warns the mind about something and the mind says no, and it’s on negative volition, at that point there is a barrier that’s created between the conscience and the mind and this cuts that communication off.  This is what the Hebrew is talking about here when it says these things “take away your heart.”  Now it’s not talking about tea-totaling in the wine and the new wine of verse 11.  This is talking about the food mentioned in verse 10 when they are in these religious ceremonies.  All that is mentioned, “the whoredom and the wine and the new” would be the sex and drugs of the day, these kind of the day. They have always gone together, always will go together because these things operate to open the body up. 

 

Now we can’t spell out the exact mechanism but it goes something like this.  First the conscience is severed from the mind.  That happens to a degree in us all because we’re all fallen creatures.  By grace when we become Christians and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior, and are born again, at that point the Holy Spirit indwells and He begins to work on this thing and re-sensitizes our consciences.  But when these people go on negative volition they build this thing up and then because the mind no longer has a superior control, the mind is left subject to the emotion; the emotions are tied very much to the body, and so now the body, as it were, gets completely out of control, and when this thing is reached, aided by drugs and the sex orgies that are going on in verse 11, when this kind of thing happens it opens the body up, apparently through the central nervous system, to demonic contact.  So God warns them, when you start engaging in this kind of process you are destroying yourselves and you are going to pay the price, and not only are you going to pay the price individually, you are going to pay the price nationally.

 

Hosea 4:12, this spells out the process, it’s already gone on, these people have engaged in this kind of thing and now we find that the effects show up with their religious practices.  He says, “My people ask counsel of their stocks [idols],” but in the Hebrew it’s far more poignant than this.  If I wrote this the way the Hebrew emphasized it, “My people ask of their wood,” the emphasis is on the pronoun, MY people, of all the people on the earth, “MY people ask counsel of their stock,” of their wood, he’s talking about the statues made of wood.  When I give them the Word they’re the only nation on earth with the Word of God, and having been given this as a source of truth and divine guidance, what do they do, they “ask” and the word “ask” means they continually ask, over and over and over and over and over and over and over this thing is going on.  The “wood” that is mentioned here is also mentioned in other places in Scripture.  An example in point is Jeremiah 10:2, “Thus saith the LORD, Learn not the way of the heathen, nor be dismayed at the signs of heaven, for the heathen are dismayed at them.”  The “signs of heaven” were apparently catastrophic things going on in the solar system at the time of the 7th century, that Immanuel Velikovsky and other men are now investigating.  They terrified the nation.  The planet Mars began to be worshiped about this time, that’s why the Romans worshiped Mars; before that nobody worshiped Mars.  Something apparently happened to the planet Mars at this time in history.  And God’s saying all right, I see those things in heaven, but Israel, who is the Lord from the Noahic Covenant, who is in total control, don’t get your eyes on those planetary phenomena any more than on all these plots.  Keep your eyes on the God of Scripture, not on these minor things. 

 

Jeremiah 10:3, “For the customs of the peoples are vain; for one cuts a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe,” notice that, you’ll see that again and again in the Nabiim, in the prophets of the Bible, “the work of the hands of man,” that’s always the constant theme of the idols, the work of man’s hands.  Verse 4, And “they deck it with silver,” see this is the sarcasm of Jeremiah, “they deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it might not move.”  See the sarcasm, they’re going to worship this thing, but you’d better hammer it down, it might fall over.  [5] “They are upright like the palm tree, but speak not; they must needs be borne, because they cannot go.  Be not afraid of them; for they cannot do evil, neither also it is in them to do good.”  See Jeremiah’s sarcasm, you stupid people, you’re worshiping the work of your own hands when you’ve got Me to worship. 

 

That’s the wood, now that’s what Hosea is talking about in Hosea 4:12, “My people,” “MY people,” idiots, “asking counsel of their wood,” the things they’ve made.  “…and their staff declares unto them,” this is rhabdomancy, it’s taking two sticks and holding it up, they did this in the ancient world, in fact Nebuchadnezzar chose to go to Jerusalem by this in 586 BC, but you hold these two sticks up, and the priests would hold these sticks up and they’d start incantations, and one priest would hold the sticks up and another would start chanting, and these sticks would be thrown, and then they’d go and they’d look at how the sticks landed on the ground and from the orientation of the sticks they would supposedly tell you the future, sort of like someone putting tea leaves on your palm or something to heal you.  So in verse 12 we have them doing the same idiotic thing, throwing sticks around and this is supposed to tell the future.

 

Now, there’s a causal clause in the middle of verse 12 and that’s the thing that should alarm believers of this generation; that was a warning that Hosea gave his people of his time.  When the believer read this he should have evacuated from that area, move out, because when this thing begins to happen the nation is in deep, deep trouble, “for the spirit of whoredoms has caused them to err, and they have gone a whoring [played the harlot] from under their God.”  Now “the spirit of whoredom” is a seducing spirit, and in Scripture the demon powers are always looked upon as a male would seduce a female; it is always this way.  The demons aren’t presented as having sex, but the idea is seduction, and the picture is this: here you would have a Hebrew believer or member of the Hebrew nation; here you would have Jehovah and here you’d have the demon spirits and the idea that Jehovah was the right man for that believer who would be in this case the right woman, that right woman was created to be fulfilled by that right man and she only had one right man, the nation only had one God that could fulfill it, but rather the demon powers come in and they seduce them, they are trying to attract the right woman around for them, promising her all sorts of things.  So he says “the spirit of whoredoms has caused them to err,” the word “err” means, actually “to cause them to err” is one verb in the Hebrew and it means to seduce, the picture goes back to Hosea’s marriage with Gomer.  That’s why God had Hosea marry Gomer.  Here is Gomer again in the illustration of the first three chapters and Hosea; Hosea was Gomer’s right man and Gomer was seduced by these people, but it’s not the picture most believers have, oh, poor believer was a victim to a seducing spirit.  Huh-un, because verse 11 said these first, by disobedience, destroyed their conscience, they invited it in.  So the seduction cannot be blamed on the demon powers, demon powers just came in when they saw a juicy target, that’s all. 

 

So, “they caused them to err,” and then the last part of verse 12 shows a very interesting thing of how these demon powers work; “they have gone a whoring [played the harlot],” that’s the believers, “from under their God,” now what’s that mean, “from under their God.”  It means from under the authority of God’s Word.  You see, this is the right woman, while she is in a marriage relationship with her right man she is under the authority, not necessarily of the man but the whole structure of the institution of marriage; the woman is built for that institution.  And she is under the husband’s authority.  This doesn’t mean the husband is to be a dictator but it means the husband basically is responsible.  So if that’s the situation it means this woman is under his authority until she goes after these demonic spirits, the nation is seduced, and now she is seduced out from under the authority.  It’s still a marriage analogy, the first three chapters.

 

In Hosea 4:13 the result, “They sacrifice upon the tops of mountains, and bur incense upon the hills, under oaks and poplars and elms, because the shadow of them is good,” to do this thing when not many people would be around.  Now at this point God really gets really gets funny about the thing because, as we saw in the 2 Samuel series, nothing makes God laugh harder than self-righteous people.  Remember what God did to Saul?  How could you forget.  Remember how God worked it out with Saul’s daughters, that beautiful dowry David had.  See, God has a fantastic sense of humor and He just can’t wait to laugh at believers that think they are so prissy and so right and so goody-good.  And here we’ve got a problem and it’s a very funny thing that happens here in verse 13, and here’s another part of the satire of Hosea.  He says, “therefore your daughters shall commit whoredom, and y our spouses shall commit adultery.”  It isn’t “shall,” it’s they are! 

 

Now the very fact of the word “therefore” should suggest something.  Why is it “therefore,” everybody knew it was going on, why does Hosea have to give us “therefore.”  The only interpretation we can come to with the last of verse 13 and considering what God says in verse 14 is this: that the Jewish men were hacked because their wives and their daughters were going to these orgies, and they were resenting this kind of thing.  In other words, it was okay for them but it wasn’t all right for their wives to do it, it wasn’t all right for their daughters to do it; this is the original double standard.  They could do it, but boy, my wife better not be doing it, and my daughter better not do it.  And God says you jerks, who was it that made the high places.  That’s what He’s saying, that’s the “therefore,” He said “they,” that’s all of them, the men too, “They are sacrifice upon the tope of the mountains,” they “are burning incense upon the hills,” so what do you expect, of course your wives are in it.  Again the solidarity, you can’t have one part of society rot without the whole part.

 

So in verse 14 God says okay, you’re worried about your daughters and wives are you, okay, I’ll make a deal, “I will not punish your daughters when they commit whoredom, nor your spouses when they commit adultery,”  I’m not going to punish your spouses when they commit adultery, “for themselves,” that is all the men, “for the men are separated with whores, and they sacrifice with harlots,” they go in, the Hebrew word here is the kedoshim, the kedoshim is the Hebrew word for holy, kadash; kadash is the Hebrew word for holy one or consecrated one, and when you see this with the “im” on it means the priestesses, and these priestesses were part of the fertility cult, and when a man went in to worship his act of worship was having sex with a priestess; that was their fulltime job, a professional religious whore.  And that’s how this cult got started and how it maintained itself.   They would take girls, the priest would indoctrinate these girls, teach them how to be effective prostitutes and they would run their cult this way. 

 

And so God says aren’t you guys and all your self-righteousness funny, what do you do when you burn the incense.  You expect your wife and daughter to sit over in the corner while you go in and fornicate, they’re going to have a good time too while they’re here.  That’s the point of verses 13-14, and God says so don’t you look down your nose at your wives and your daughters because I’m going to see to it that they get no special punishment whatever.  When I pull the plunger on this nation in 721 BC and the Assyrian walks in here and he cleans out Samaria he’s going to clean out the men and the women and the children, you’re all going to get it, but I’m not going to pick out special interest groups to judge. 

 

Next week we’ll finish chapter 4 and we’ll see how God’s judgments apply to all of society.