Hosea Lesson 13

A godly inspired conviction of sin - Hosea 5:15 - 6:1-3

The book of Hosea is one of the Nabiim, one of the prophets and should therefore give you an idea of how God the Holy Spirit brings conviction of sin. God the Holy Spirit does not convict in generalities for the simple reason we can’t make corrections in generalities. The only way you can correct a thing in your life is to have specifics pointed out to us, and so in the Old Testament the Law consists of 613 specifics, and when the prophets go to bring conviction of sin upon the nation the prophets bring specifics from the body of 613 commandments. So as you watch how God the Holy Spirit brings conviction when you read the Nabiim, it should quicken your conscience as to how the Holy Spirit brings conviction today through the Scripture.

Now there’s an entire section which we finish this evening that began in Hosea 4:1 and continues through Hosea 6:3. This first section of the last part of Hosea, the last part being chapters 4-14, is an introduction of Yahweh’s or Jehovah’s lawsuit against the nation. It is a conviction on specific points and then it ends in hope. This last ending, in Hosea 5:15 through Hosea 6:3 is another feature of a godly inspired conviction of sin. God’s conviction should never be discouraging to godly motivation. Conviction of sin will only be discouraging to negative volition. But there’s always an element of encouragement with conviction of sin, and when Satan stirs up guilt consciences and so on, there is never this encouragement. But when God the Holy Spirit works in our hearts to bring us around to confessing our sin and making the changes that need to be made, then there is this under girding of encouragement and hope. He never leaves you hopeless. And so it’s fitting that this section ends on a theme of hope.

Now it just turns out that 5:15-6:3 is one of the most famous areas of the book of Hosea; it has stirred more controversies down through the Church’s history as to how it’s to be interpreted, it has also stirred controversy within Jewish circles as to what is really being prophesied in this passage. But however we solve that, let’s remember the overall message is one of hope.

We’ll begin in Hosea 5:15, “I will go and return to My place, until they acknowledge their offense, and seek My face; in their affliction they will seek Me early.” And they will say, 6:1-3, “Come, and let us return unto the LORD; for He has torn, and He will heal us; He has smitten, and He will bind us up. [2] After two days He will revive us; in the third day He will raise us up, and we shall live in His sight. [3] Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the LORD; His going forth is prepared as the morning; and He shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain into the earth.”

Now this passage of Scripture has to do, not with the Church, but with Israel. It has to do with Israel’s function in history. When you see the verb in verse 15, “I will go,” remember that Hosea is writing before the debacle of 721 BC when the Assyrian armies will invade the northern kingdom, they will attack the northern boundary of the southern kingdom, and will generally erase that entire part of Israel from history, at least from the human point of view. In 721 BC was the beginning of the withdrawal of God’s protection upon His people. In 586 BC that withdrawal of protection had become complete. Jerusalem had fallen under Nebuchadnezzar, the vision of Daniel 2 had taught very clearly that the scepter of world power was ripped from the house of David and given over to the hands of the Gentiles. World domination and imperialism is now the right of Gentile powers. God will allow the Gentiles from this time forward to have world dominion. That’s the leaving of God. And there are some historical principles with the departure of God from history and how history goes on, principles we ought to understand in our own day with the resurgence of Israel, and in our own day with the signs of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

So to see how Israel fits into world history let’s turn to Romans 11:11. Here we have a passage, a famous one, that deals with the future of the nation Israel. But in dealing with the future of the nation Israel, the passage shows us how Israel fits among all the nations of the world. Going back to the divine institutions, remember the fifth divine institution, that God has divided the human race into tribes. God’s view of history is genealogical; if you have the time and resources to trace your family history back it’s very worthwhile, not as a hobby but to train your children to see where they came from and to relate them back in time and try to uncover as much about your family background as possible and relate to which one of the sons of Noah did your particular family come.

If you train your children to think genealogically about history, you will train them to think correctly about history, for history in the Bible is not chronology, it’s not the way kids are taught in school, that this happened then in this year and that happened in that year and we’ll have a quiz in four weeks. That’s not the way history was taught in the Biblical days. A child would not memorize events as he would memorize those long, long lists of “begats” that seem so boring to us. I am the son of so and so, the son of so and so, the son of so and so, the son of so and so, etc. all the way back to Adam. The genealogies were memorized by the children, so the son would listen and sit at his father’s knee and the father would go over and over and over their genealogies until the son had memorized that genealogy. Even today in the Bedouin tribes of Arabia you can sit around the campfire and the Arabian chiefs can narrate hour after their genealogies, back some forty generations. It’s absolutely amazed archeologists who have had this experience. Before it used to be believed that these sections of the begats of the Bible were just put in there, certainly nobody could remember all that. And yet today we have Arabs who are alive and breathing that can remember back forty generations.

And then when the children learned the generations and that they are the son of so and so, the son of so and so, then they relate events, not to absolute chronology, not to absolute dates, but this happened in the days of my grandfather, this happened in the days of my father. That would be the way they’d associate it, in the days of their fathers. And this was the genealogical view of history. The genealogical view of history goes back and recognizes this fifth divine institution, that ultimately the families of the world go back to one family, that history is not chaotic, but that we have a definite structure to history. Now the question is, where does the family of Israel, because Israel is not a nation’s name, it is a man’s name, it’s another name for Jacob. They’re the sons of a man’s name.

Romans 11:11, we have a very valuable piece of information given to us; God’s view of history, God’s view of the nation Israel. “I say, then, Have they stumbled that they should fall? God forbid;” Israel will never fall finally, they fall but God picks them up, “but rather through their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles,” the particular fall of verse 11 is their rejection of Messiah, and because they have rejected Messiah, because they caused Him, so to speak, by their rejection to be crucified, therefore “salvation is come to the Gentiles,” the implication being, if you look carefully at verse 11, that had the Jews not rejected the Messiah the Gentiles would never have been saved. “…but rather thought their fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles, to provoke them to jealousy.” That is, the Gentiles are being saved and God working through the Gentiles means that the Hebrew people be stimulated to respond to their own culture.

Romans 11:12, “Now if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles, how much more their fullness?” Now in this verse we have two contrasting historic events. The first one is, “if the fall of them be the riches of the world,” the “fall of them” is their negative volition as a nation toward Jesus Christ. The fall means that as a nation, though individuals were exceptions, as a nation they said no to Jesus Christ when He offered the kingdom. The kingdom has come, Jesus said, will you accept Me as your King. And they said no, and so therefore because they said no, Jesus Christ died and salvation went to the Gentiles. This is their fall. Because of the fall, the riches of salvation have overflowed the cup, they have spilled over, and now the Gentiles partake of it.

But in verse 12 there’s something else. How much more, if the fall of them resulted in an overflowing cup of salvation to all the nations of the world, “how much more shall their fullness,” not their fall, but their fullness? What is the fullness of Israel? The fullness of Israel is their national confession. When Israel makes a national confession of allegiance to the Lord Jesus Christ, when Israel nationally, not just individual Jews as are doing this today, not just individual Jews, but when the nation confesses Jesus, officially, to be King, when they don’t recognize Him just as a Galilean carpenter who led a big heresy straying from Judaism, but when the confess that Jewish carpenter to be more than just a Galilean peasant, but rather the God-man Messiah, that’s their fullness.

Romans 11:13, Paul says, “For I speak to you Gentiles, inasmuch as I am the apostle of the Gentiles, I magnify mine office. Romans 11:15, “For if the casting away of them,” Israel, “be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?” In other words, the nation Israel has a crucial role to play in the history of the nations of the world. Two of the greatest events of history are recorded in Romans 11; one has already occurred, it occurred in 30 or 32 AD, whichever chronology you follow, and the second event is yet future. The second event, which we’ll see in Hosea, the second event if the national confession of Jesus Christ.

Now when Israel restores herself to an allegiance to Messiah, then immediately Israel will be declared as the priestly nation. And when she becomes the priestly nation it means that world government will be centered in Israel. There will not longer be a United Nations building, organization. Now the world government will center through Israel, through Jesus Christ. And Israel will perform her destined function. She will be the One who will be the mediator between God and the nations, and so the nations will physically come to Israel, to the Middle East, to study and to learn God’s Word. And there’ll be embassies there, if you want to use an analogy, maybe like the Vatican city in Rome, where nations have embassies there. So there will be embassies, all the nations of the world will have embassies represented in Jerusalem. And Israel will be the center of world power, not because of who and what she is, but because of God’s plan.

Now if you turn to Hosea we have a prophecy of this. God says in verse 15, :I will go and return to My place,” it doesn’t mean that He ceases to be omnipresent, God is always omnipresent, but there are two concepts that you want to learn in the Bible. One is God is omnipresent, the other one is He is present. The two are NOT the same. Omnipresent means that God is always fully present every place. In other words, if you are 15 miles away from me when you talk to God and I talk to God, we are talking to God just as much as each other; you’re not talking to half of God and I’m not talking to half of God, you are talking wholly to God and I am talking wholly to God. That’s omnipresence, He is wholly present, not just present at every point but wholly present at every point—omnipresence. And that never changes because God is immutable. God is omnipresent.

Now the second idea that comes up in this passage is much more of an experiential thing. That is the idea of God’s presence. Now that’s conceived a little differently, that’s not His omnipresence. The presence of God in this case means the place where you talk to Him face to face. It means the location of the conference table; many of you work in organizations where there are various bosses and people in charge and they walk all through the various rooms, but there’s usually one place called the bosses office. And you know when you get called in there it’s either good news or bad news or both, but you know there’s going to be a conference. That’s the presence of the boss; you say I went into His presence. Well, it doesn’t mean he wasn’t present in the other rooms, it just means that in that particular room that’s where he was talking to you, there was a place of meeting. So the idea of God’s presence just means a place of meeting, a place where God schedules an appointment; the appointment is not made by man, the appointment is made by God. Man doesn’t tell God where he’s going t meet Him; God tells man where He’s going to meet him.

Now when it says, “I will go and return to My place” it means that there will no longer be a place of meeting for the nations on earth. No longer will there ever be a place of the Shekinah glory, Hosea is saying, until something happens. The nations will not actually physically come to “a” place. There’ll be no more Jerusalem, there’ll be no more temple for a while, there’ll be no more place where, say an inquisitive Greek can travel on a pilgrimage for hundreds of miles and study at the feet of the priests to learn the Law; he can’t come into the temple, he can’t even look in the temple, he can’t offer sacrifices, there’s no place for him to meet God.

Now the Church, from the time of Pentecost on till the rapture, during this interval there is as it were, a place where you meet. The place where you meet God is very interesting. It is not a particular geographical point; the place where you meet God, the presence of God, in Church history has to do with two or three believers gathered together; the concept of the body of Christ, where two or three believers are gathered together. But this is a spiritual meeting, you can’t argue that the nations are actually getting much law out of this. There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that Jesus Christ is not physically visible in His power and glory to the nation. So, “I will go and return to My place, until” obviously has not yet been fulfilled. It is still future, this prophecy of verse 15. “I will go and return to My place, until they,” they refers to the nation Israel, “until they acknowledge their offense,” or their punishment, until they bear their punishment, “and until they seek My face,” now there are three “untils” here; there are three conditions. Lest you think this is something that just pertains to Israel, there’s a principle here for all of us as believers in Jesus Christ. Israel caused all this mess in verse 15 because of her compound carnality.

So the principle is that when we are in compound carnality and God turns His face from us, which He does in compound carnality, when God turns His face from us there are three conditions for restoration. So just as the nation is restored, and you look at verse 15 you see the conditions for the restoration of the nation, so this is giving you a clue about believers in compound carnality when they are restored. That God will bless believers that have been out of it for a long time providing that these three conditions are met, or at least that this kind of thing is happening. “…till they acknowledge their offense,” until they bear their punishment, or until they admit their guilt. So obviously that is a prerequisite for restoration.

So we’ve learned something, this isn’t just restoration of Israel, it’s a principle true of individuals. How is any compound carnal person restored? God will turn His face until they admit their guilt. And, when you see the word “seek” in verse 15 just remember it’s until, “until they seek My face.” Somebody told me Martin Luther, someone who studied it, I haven’t seen the passage, but they said Martin Luther had an interesting way of training his children. Luther was part of that Christian group, the old fashioned traditional Orthodox people that thought it was the job of the parent and not the pastor to teach their children; that was before the 19^th and 20^th centuries when parents dismissed all responsibility for children. Luther had an imaginative way, he decided he was going to teach once and for all this concept of confession to his children. He came up with a very simple procedure, but it gets the point across. So for a while, whenever his children disobeyed and they’d be in the house running around, Luther would be there studying, Luther would not permit them to come into the room where He was studying until they confessed their sins. That’s all he did. In other words, Luther was present physically in his house, but the child could not see his father’s face, the father would turn his face away from the child until that child straightened out. It had a powerful effect, that there could be no communication until the child admitted to his guilt. That’s the point here’

“…until they seek My face,” not just God’s omnipresence but until they seek God’s face. God, turn around and look at me, that’s what it’s saying, look at me, talk to me. Those of you who are married, you know what it is to not have somebody’s attention; all right, same concept here. “…seek My face; [in my affliction they will seek Me early],” they will seek me the first thing in the morning, so that just amplifies the third point, it just means seek urgently. There is a persistent seeking.

Now to come out of compound carnality or as one of the seminary boys put it, toulies trips to come off of one of these toulies trips requires some persistence. I’ve never seen anyone yet come off of one of these things, where they’ve been out of fellowship for years and gotten involved and their soul is all fouled up and mixed up, without a dogged persistence. It’s painful, like withdrawing from alcohol or smoking or something, you’ve got withdrawal symptoms and it’s the same thing with coming off of one of these toulies trips, when you’ve been out of it for so long. There are withdrawal symptoms. There’s no other way of explaining it, but God says when you have the persistence to seek Me urgently, and never give up, keep after Me, keep after Me, keep after Me. Now it’s not that this is salvation or confession by works; it’s not that at all.

The principle is that when we are out of fellowship and on negative volition our volition is actually weakened; it’s weakened to the point where we have permitted our emotions to influence us; we don’t take a firm stand against our emotions, we let them rule us like was saw in Nebuchadnezzar, fly into a fit; we allow our feelings to rule, we get up in the morning if we don’t feel like doing something we just don’t do things. We do things because we have responsibility to do things. So it’s the concept of when you are given responsibility that you do it. Now volition is weakened under a position of compound carnality and so God has a therapeutic way of pulling someone off these toulies trips, and the therapeutic way He has it is forcing them to constantly desire Him. Whereas we would rock along, say the average believer, in fellowship, out of fellowship, and so on, and we’d say we don’t expend that effort to seek the Lord because it’s kind of automatic with us, but when you have been out of it so long it’s as though God says okay, I’m not punishing you but I want you to train back into that old way, and the only way you can train out of this rut that you’ve got all fouled up, to get rid of all that, is to “seek Me urgently,” and literally the way it reads in the Hebrew, verse 15, if you want a concrete practical thing, it’s seek Me the first thing when you get up. That’s what it means; “seek Me early,” or seek me the first thing of the day.

Now in Hosea 6:1 for this is part of the same concept of 5:15, we have the recitation of this desire. Verse 15 gives you the three conditions, verses 1-3 is a verbal expression on the part of the nation, or if you want to apply it to the Christian life, verses 1-3 give you the mental attitude of the soul coming off a toulies trip. Now when was this fulfilled? We know it was partially fulfilled, I’ll say “partially fulfilled” after the 70 year captivity in 516 BC. Daniel sought God’s face, and we had a restoration of the nation. But that’s only a partial fulfillment; we will have the final fulfillment… we have the rapture of the Church, the tribulation, and then Jesus Christ comes again; right toward the end of the tribulation which is known in the Bible according to Jeremiah 30:7 as “the time of Jacob’s trouble,” during the end of the time of Jacob’s trouble, Israel will acknowledge the Messiahship of Jesus. And when she does, then Christ returns. And this verse will not only tell us that He will return, it tells us how quickly He will return, it gives us the exact number of days.

So Israel is going to say this and keeping in mind the application to the Christian life, these are the principles we use. Hosea 6:1, “Come, and let us return unto the LORD; for He has torn, and he will heal us; He has smitten, and He will bind us up.” Now “Come, and let us return unto the LORD,” shows you, and we would do this if we were out on toulies trip, we would have to recognize that we have, in fact, departed from the Lord. See, most people in compound carnality don’t realize how bad they are. They realize a lot of things are screwed up but they don’t realize where the real seriousness is. Usually a person in compound carnality has his eyes on all the stuff that’s happening in his life, chaos, confusion, -R learned behavior patterns, and all the junk and trash, and they’ve got their eyes on that and are worried about that. But the Lord says that’s really not the problem; the problem is you haven’t seen how dangerously far apart you are from Me, so the attention starts to shift, “Let us return to the LORD.” Nowhere in here does it say anything about the sinful baggage that has been generated while they were on the toulies trip. Nowhere in verse 1-3 is there ever mention about the learned behavior pattern. True, they’re going to be changed, but that’s not the point when you come back off of one of these things. The attention is on the character of the Lord, not on the character of all the fruit of the sinful toulies trip.

“Come, and let us the LORD; for He has torn, and He will heal us,” “has torn” is a reference to 5:14, God said “I will be unto Ephraim as a lion, and as a young lion to the house of Judah:” now the lion was an animal of ferocity in the ancient world and he is pictured for the ferocity of God, the wrath of God’s love. So you have this picture. Here is God, God loves Israel and God disciplines Israel as a lion. Now the intermediate link between God and Israel is Satan. The ferocity of God is actually expressed in history by demonic agencies. So, for example, Satan is a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, 1 Peter 5. So the lion image is ferocity and the lion image is an emblem of Satan’s attack. But notice the confession here and how it works together. The tearing is a picture of what Satan does to us when we’re out of fellowship. Satan hates us; if you’re a believer in Jesus Christ Satan hates you in fellowship or out of fellowship. It doesn’t make any difference and in spite of the temptations you may run into there is nothing you can do to make peace with Satan. He may lead you along to think that the pressure will be reduced if you compromise here a little and compromise there a little—negative!

Satan hates you and his ultimate goal is to destroy you, whether it’s the salami technique, a little slice at a time, or not, that’s what he wants, and he’ll never change. So don’t ever be persuaded that compromise is going to relieve you of Satanic pressure. Never! Satan’s out to get you simply because you are identified permanently forever with the Lord Jesus Christ and because you are, you are flying a flag that he hates, and as long as Satan sees the flag flying he’s going to shoot at you, and you can’t pull it down and you can’t send up a white flag, no matter how painful it is, no matter how hard you’re under pressure, it doesn’t make any difference, Satan is still after you and will continue to be after you.

Now that’s the tearing; Satan is allowed to tear up believers, and the word to tear means to tear like a lion, it means to eat, it means to bit into the flesh and rip a few pieces off, and that’s the imagery, it’s a fierce imagery. It’s not just a sweet little talk that Peter is giving about “beware of Satan, he’s look around to whom he may devour,” as though the lion is going to lick you or something, he’s not going lick you, he’s going to eat you, devour, pain. That’s the tearing, that’s the pain, and God says He’s going to be that lion, He is going to commission Satan to do it and Satan is going to tear it.

Now watch what happens in the confession, a very, very interesting principle: the LORD “has torn,” not Satan, the LORD “has torn, and He will heal us.” Now what does that recognize? It recognizes that though I as a believer am down here and I am getting hit with satanic attack and all the rest of it, I, when I confess my sin, I don’t worry about how I’m getting hit, I go right back to the source. I don’t stop here, oh God, I’m getting hit by this and I’m getting hit by that and I don’t understand why You’ve loosed Satan on me and why you’ve done this and why you’ve done that. We go right back to the source. God has commissioned this satanic attack to occur, and so the admission in 6:1 is that God has torn.

Now the word “heal” is again a reference to what happened in chapter 5. “He will heal,” the healing refers to Hosea 5:13, and you recall back in verse 13 what had happened? The northern kingdom was squashed geographically between two super powers, Egypt to the southwest and to the northeast Assyria. And between these two super powers the political leaders tried to bargain, so it says, “When Ephraim saw his sickness,” in other words, when I started to administer discipline, “and Judah saw his wound, then went Ephraim to the Assyrian, and sent to King Jareb; yet could he not heal you, nor cure you of your wound,” the Hebrew “wound” of verse 13 means a puss-dripping wound. So the puss-filled wound could not be healed by the Assyrian; in other words, no human gimmick would work.

So today, by analogy, when we are in a case of discipline and we are getting hit by Satan, it’s not going to do you any good to go trotting off to the nearest psychiatrist; it’ll do him a lot of good, you’ll fatten his pocketbook but you’re not going to solve your problem. There is not a psychiatrist on earth can solve your problem when the problem basically is sin and you’re getting disciplined. You’re just wasting your time.

So here in Hosea 6:1 they recognize that God is the one who has torn and therefore God alone is the one who can heal. It’s a confession of the sufficiency of God’s character. It’s a confession of the fact, going back to God’s character, He is sovereign, He is the One who tore me, I don’t care how many demon powers, I don’t care what my problems were, whether it was oppression, depression, influence or whatever it was, it doesn’t make any difference, God is sovereign. That’s part of the recognition, “He has torn, and He will heal,” that’s a confession of His love, His gracious love. God is willing to heal me. God can heal me, that’s a confession of His omnipotence, it goes back to God’s character again.

“He has torn, and He will heal us; He has smitten, and He will bind us up.” He can do what the Assyrian king couldn’t do, He can solve our problem because basically the Lord is the One who gave us the problem, so notice that when we work with confession. When the Lord works us over it continues, His working over does, until this point is reached. When we can accept the discipline as from the Lord with thanksgiving we are well on our way out of the toulies trip…. Well on our way. But when we still have that hatred, that resentment against the discipline and all the stuff that’s coming in, and all the mess, why did God let me get into this mess and why did God let me do that, you’re not out of it yet. You have to come here, to the point where God has torn me and He’s going to heal me. There’s no psychiatrist here, no minister here, there’s just you and the Lord here in verse 1.

In Hosea 6:2 we have a prophetic statement and a principle. “After two days He will revive us; in the third day He will raise us up, and we shall live in His sight.” Now I said the fulfillment of this was not the resurrection, remember I said the fulfillment was partial at the end of the 70 year period in 516 BC and would be again at the end of the tribulation. I didn’t mention the resurrection of Christ, even though there are three days in verse 2. This applies to the resurrection but it’s not fulfilled in the resurrection. I’ll try to show you the difference as we go on. “After two days,” this means at one point in the future the nation is going to issue a proclamation. It may come seven years from now if the rapture occurred or it may come centuries from now, but some day the nation Israel, probably from the city of Jerusalem will issue a national decree, and will say that we as a nation erred historically in rejecting Jesus Christ, we now accept Him as our Savior and as our Messiah.

When they say this…turn to Zechariah 12:10, then shortly, within two or three days, they’re going to see a most miraculous sight. “O will pour out upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the Spirit of grace and of supplications;” in other words, they’re going to make that confession of Hosea 6:1. Now look at this, “…and they,” who is it that’s doing the pouring, it’s God, “and they shall look upon Me whom they have pierced,” confession of the deity of Jesus Christ, the same One who pours out the Spirit is the One they pierced, “they shall look upon Me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for Him,” conversion back between the Father and the Son, “as one who mourns for his only son, and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his first-born. [11] In that day there shall be a great mourning in Jerusalem, as the mourning of the Hadadrimmon, in the Valley of Megiddon.” And so you’ll have a national confession, and they’re going to look “upon Him whom they have pierced,” Jesus Christ.

Now turn back to Hosea 6:2 and pick up this prophecy. They will issue that decree some day, let’s call that day X, some day in the future, the day of the decree. Then on X + 3 Jesus Christ will return. It will take Jesus Christ three days to return from wherever He is. “After two days will He revive us; in the third day He will raise us up, and we shall live in His sight.” Now living in His sight, literally in the Hebrew reads, “we shall live in front of His face.” And it goes back to the concept of meeting the boss in the office. We will be, not in God’s omnipresence alone, but we will be in God who is facing us, He won’t be turning His back, He will be turning toward us, and we will be forever in His face. So this is a restoration, and in principle this is what happens when we get off compound carnality. We dwell in His presence, the presence being a clean conscience.

Now Hosea 6:3, more of the attitude of true restoration. See all this, basically in the Nabiim is how to confess your sins, and if Christians would only read the prophets more than they do we would have a lot quicker recovery from carnality, because it’s the prophets that show you to confess. Why did God the Holy Spirit keep all these books? Just so we could have prophecy conferences? No, so we could be convicted of our sins. Now verse 3, the King James says: “Then shall we know, if we follow” a better translation is, “Let us know, let us follow on to knowing the LORD;” it’s “let us,” it’s a cohortative, it’s just like the word “come and let us return” in verse 1, it’s an exhortation, come on, let’s do this. And this ought to be our attitude when we come off a toulies trip.

Notice the motivation in verse 3 is not let’s get off the toulies trip because I’m tired of getting hurt; that’s not the motivation for coming off the toulies trip. In verse 3 Israel is to come off her trip, not because it’s smart, not because she’s been persecuted in the inquisition in Spain, because Hitler killed six million in the Third Reich, not because of all those horrible things in history, that’s not the motivation, but “let us know, let us follow on to knowledge of the Lord.” In other words, it’s not a revulsion over pain, it’s an attraction to the character of God. Lots of people want to come off toulies trips, but the Bible would say they really don’t; what they want to do is get rid of the pain and still stay out of fellowship; that’s what they really want to do. That’s what I want to do and that’s what you want to do on a smaller scale and we’re just out of fellowship. We want to avoid the consequences of being out of but we don’t really want to get back in fellowship either. So in verse 3, that’s the heart of true repentance, “Let us know, and pursue further knowledge of the LORD,” there’s a tremendous attraction to God’s character.

Hosea 6:3b, this is a summary statement of the prophecy, “His going forth” that’s His return, He’s coming forth out of the place where He is; see, the idea He’s in a house some place in the universe, we don’t know where it is, and He’s going to come out of that house, so “His going forth from my place,” mentioned in Hosea 5:15, “His going forth is prepared as the morning;” now the word “prepared” means has been ordained. What does this mean, “has been ordained.” It’s a word that is usually used for decrees and statutes; “it has been ordained as the morning.”

Turn to Genesis 8:22, “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” What is that? That’s the Noahic Covenant, go back to the divine viewpoint framework again, here’s where it helps you. Think this way, get these images in your mind, backwards, forwards. Noahic Covenant, what do we learn from the Noahic Covenant? We learn the doctrine of nature. What about the doctrine of nature? That stability in nature is not because nature is made like a machine; stability in nature is only because of one thing, God says so. I take my boys out and we look at a rainbow; I don’t want them to think of a rainbow just as refracted light through prisms of droplets of water. I can sit there and go into the meteorology, I can tell them how the diameter of the drops are by the color spectrum, but that’s not my point, I’m not going to teach my boys just the physical mechanics, what good is that going to do; that’s not going to give them stability because they can measure the drops, is that going to help them in a time of pressure. No. What’s going to help them in a time of pressure? That behind the prism, behind the trigonometry of refracted light through a droplet, behind all that is a verbal decree of God that says that’s the way it’s going to be by My order. The universe is not popping up out of some “it,” it’s not an impersonal mechanistic process. It is a personal Word of God.

If you want a picture of creation, and the Noahic Covenant, and the power of the verbal Word of God, if you want a place to go to fill your mind with an imaginative picture or if you’d like to get this across to your children, read the portion of the Gospel where Jesus is on the boat in the middle of the storm. And if you read it in a modern translation, I think the NASV has it correctly translated here, Jesus stands up in the boat, the storm, the wind is blowing, all sorts of things are going on, and Jesus doesn’t even yell, the wind’s blowing, it’s raining, it’s probably thundering, and Jesus gets up and without shouting He just says, “Be still.” He’s not heard because He shouted it across the Sea of Galilee; He’s heard of the inherent power of His Word. He said: “Be still,” and immediately, the Greek says “immediately” the wind stopped and the water went calm.

Now that’s the power of the verbal word. I’d just love to see some evolutionist, especially a theistic evolutionist who thinks that God’s Word really means a long process of time, let them sit there, okay, take the watch, time it, how fast does it take these waves to stop after Jesus said “Be still?” A big long process of time. No it wasn’t, and that’s what caught the author, that’s why in the Greek it says, and the waves, they stopped immediately. These men were fishermen that wrote this, they’d been on the Sea of Galilee many times, they’d seen a storm subside, there would be nothing miraculous about the water taking two hours to subside, that wouldn’t even be worthy of note, they’d seen that plenty of times out there on the Sea of Galilee. But when all of a sudden a man gets up in this bough of the boat and says calmly, “Be still,” and all of a sudden the waters fell, that’s something you might write home about.

So that’s the power of the verbal Word of God. Now, come back to this little phrase in Hosea 6: “His going forth has been ordained as the morning,” now what does He mean? If you know your divine viewpoint framework you can start plugging in here, you know the Noahic Covenant, the Noahic Covenant is God’s Word, God’s Word has fixed nature within boundaries and what this is saying is that Jesus Christ’s Second Advent is covenantally guaranteed. This is as sure as the morning; don’t misread verse 3, if you’ve got the human viewpoint of your generation you’re going to misread what that’s saying. Here’s the way you’ll probably want to read it, and I know it’s probably in my soul and I want to read it this way; that’s not the way it should be read. The way we want to read it is: His going forth is as sure as the laws of the universe, because it says “as the morning,” as the sun rises. That’s the way we want to read it; wrong. The way to read verse 3 is “His going forth,” or “His return from His place is as certain as His past decree.” There are no such thing as laws of nature, there are laws of God in nature but not laws of nature.

“His going forth has been ordained as the morning,” and then it says how He shall come, “and He shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain into the earth.” “As the latter and former rain” is just reiterating… the latter and former means the seasons again, a reference to the Noahic Covenant.

Now we want to summarize by taking you to the fulfillment of this and then answer that question we raised a while back and still haven’t answered: what has this got to do with the resurrection of Christ, when all during the 19 centuries of church history all the church fathers said hey, this is where Paul is talking about, Jesus Christ, 1 Corinthians 15, “and He rose the third day according to the Scriptures.” Now it just so happens there is no passage in the Bible known except this one that talks about anything happening on the third day. So it’s got to be this passage that somehow applies to the resurrection of Christ and yet it doesn’t seem to. It seems to apply to the resurgence of the nation. So we’ve got to solve that problem.

First we’re going to solve the fulfillment. Israel has a calendar. The calendar has a spring portion and a fall portion. In the spring portion of Israel’s calendar she has the Passover celebration which is 14 n, or the 14^th of Nisan, which is about our April, it’s a lunar calendar but on that day the Passover begins. And then they a Feast of Unleavened Bread from the 15^th to the 21^st of Nisan; the Feast of Unleavened Bread, in that all the leaven is thrown out of the house and for a solid week you eat nothing but unleavened bread, and that is to show that when Passover comes there must be a break, there must be a break between the world system and that which you have [can’t understand word] and so to impress upon them they just had to diet, just non-leavened material.

Then the Firstfruits plus fifty days is Pentecost. And at Pentecost they would have a feast from the spring harvest. So you have two harvests. Remember you have the spring rains and the fall rains, they had a dual seasonal system in their agriculture. When the harvest was finished, 50 days it took them to harvest, the Firstfruits was the day they brought the first harvest in from the field and they offered it to the Lord and they waved it before Him. When Pentecost came the offering was in the form of bread, not raw grain. And this is a picture of the fact that what has been produced is now put into a usable body.

Now those were the three major feasts. Now it just turns out, what day did Jesus die? He died exactly on the day of Pentecost. Was that an accident? No, the calendar is an actual schedule that will tell us the day of the month when certain events will happen. And so Jesus Christ died on the Passover. Jesus rose on the day of the Firstfruits, and the Holy Spirit came on the day of Pentecost. No accidents, a perfectly engineered calendar. But so far we haven’t applied it to Hosea. Let’s do that.

Let’s turn not to the spring but to the fall of the Jewish calendar and watch something interesting. There is a day that is celebrated called the Feast of Trumpets; it’s celebrated on the first of the month Tishri, which is approximately our month of October. On this day the trumpets are sounded for a momentous event. They announce the coming of the fall harvest and the final harvest before winter: the Feast of Trumpets.

And then, on the tenth day is the Day of Atonement. That is the day you read about last year when they had the war, the Jewish word for day is Yom, and the Jewish word for atonement is Kippur. See, even the Jews have their wars on days that fit in with the calendar, the Yom Kippur war. The Feast of Trumpets on the first of Tishri, the Day of Atonement on the 10^th of Tishri. All this is in the book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy if you want the source references. Then on the 15^th of the month they have the Feast of Tabernacles. The idea of the Feast of Tabernacles, which is the 15^th to the 21^st of Tishri, the idea of the Feast of Tabernacles is that all the harvests are finished; the agricultural production is done, it’s complete, and now we enjoy the fruits of our labor.

Now it’s interesting, if we’d back off from this and look at this calendar for a minute, you notice something strange about this calendar. If we go back to the spring we notice Passover has been fulfilled, something actually happened at Passover; Firstfruits has been fulfilled, something happened, the resurrection of Christ; Firstfruits plus fifty days, Pentecost, that’s been fulfilled. But you notice something, the fall part of the calendar hasn’t yet been fulfilled. In other words, Israel’s calendar is still open and still predicting certain events that had not yet transpired. So we know that some day in the future, we don’t know the year, but we do know the month and we know the day it’s going to happen, some day in the future in the fall of the year, in the month of Tishri, September or October, on the first of that month there will be a startling event that will happen to Israel. We don’t know what that event is going to be but something is going happen to awaken them to coming events. Something is going to deeply stir the national soul. Prophecy doesn’t tell us what, it just tells us something is going to happen.

Then on the 10^th of that month of whatever year it is, on the tenth they will make the decree of Hosea 6:1-3. On that day, on Yom Kippur, the Jews will recite Hosea, “Let us return unto the LORD, for He has torn, and he will heal; He has smitten, and He will bind us up,” and the nation will make a full confession on that 10^th day, and the prediction in verse 2 is that by the 13^th of the month Jesus Christ will return. And so if we are to say that the fall part of the calendar is going to be fulfilled literally, like the spring part of the calendar… this is not date setting because we don’t know the year, so there’s no way you can use this as date setting, all it tells us is that when Christ comes back and does His work He’s going to do it in synchronization with the Jewish calendar like He did when He was here before. And so when the proposal is made on the second and third day, Jesus Christ will return, and then the 15^th to the 21^st will be a tremendous global celebration, centering on Israel, that the millennium is about to be set up. It won’t be set up immediately, but the 15^th through the 21^st of that month will be a tremendous week-long celebration, a celebration of the return of Jesus Christ to earth.

Now, what still does verse 2 have to do with the resurrection? The thought of verse 2 is that all the years, let’s figure out the number of years, 721 BC to 1974 AD, 2,695 years have passed since God withdrew His face. Now you could multiply by 365; you can multiply the number of days that have gone by since God withdrew His face. What verse 2 is saying that all the thousands and thousands of days that have gone by, don’t worry about it, when you confess your sin it will only take a day or two for Christ to return. So the idea of Hosea 6:2 is the immediacy of God’s grace, sitting there waiting for someone to confess their sins and it will be a speedy return. It will not take thousands of days again to be restored, it will be almost immediate, just take two or three. You might say that God has a three-day repair service. That’s the way to capture the thought of verse 2, He has a quick, not a 24 hour repair service but a 72 hour repair service, and it’s that quick that He’ll return.

Now how does this apply to the resurrection, why does Paul say “He rose the third day according to the Scriptures?” Because if you turn to Psalm 22, Jesus prayed a prayer on the cross. Psalm 22 is what Jesus said on the cross; we’ll note verse 1, often preached around Easter as the last words of Christ on the cross. “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” And all the way down through verse 18 is the petition. Psalm 22:16, “For dogs have compassed Me,” the word for “dog” is the word for Gentiles, the dogs, the Gentiles, “have compassed Me; the assembly of the wicked have enclosed Me; they pierced My hands and My feet,” please notice verse 16, “they pierced My hands and My feet,” [17] I may count all My bones; they look and stare upon Me. [18] And they part My garments among them, and cast lots for my vesture.” Now Jesus prayed this prayer, [19] But be not Thou far from Me, O LORD. O My strength, hast Thee to help Me.” See the word “haste,” “haste Thee to help Me. [20] Deliver My soul from the sword, my darling [only one],” which is a synonym for soul, “My soul from the power of the dogs, [21] Save Me from the lion’s mouth,” see the same imagery.

Now in Psalm 22:22 is the answer to this prayer, “I will declare Thy name unto My brethren; in the midst of the congregation will I praise Thee.” This petition has been answered somewhere between the beginning of verse 21 and the beginning of verse 22. The point is, there’s an answer in there, and how this Hosea passage got tied in with the resurrection of Christ is that the Father came to Jesus’ aid within two or three days. That’s the picture. God the Father was hasty in His return; Jesus Christ was in a jam, He was in affliction, not due to His own sins in this case, like in Hosea, but it’s the picture that God has a very quick return.

And so historically Hosea 6 came to be associated with the resurrection. It applies to the resurrection, but Hosea 6 doesn’t have the resurrection central; it’s just a principle that when God goes to work and to come to the aid of His redeemed people, He does so quickly. Jesus is the elect person par excellence and you’d expect the Father to come in those two or three days, and Jesus was resurrected on the third day.