Hosea Lesson 16
Ephraim’s iniquity; problems of
their foreign policy - Hosea 7:8-16
The doctrines that are associated with the decline and fall of the
kingdom are three: they are doctrines that we’ve covered with other events but
they are emphasized from a certain point of view. The first one is the doctrine of divine
essence, God’s characteristics. Actually
the doctrine of divine essence is taught by every event in the divine viewpoint
framework, but chiefly the creation because it’s the creation that separates
and makes God diverse from creation and makes Him over all things. But during the decline and fall of the
kingdom the essence of God became very evident in certain points and two
attributes in particular stand out, God’s righteousness and His justice. These are the attributes that you learn to go
through this period of history to see function.
This is a trick of using the divine viewpoint framework is that God
works apparently with certain attributes more in a given generation than in
other generations. If you can clue in to
the particular generation of history where these attributes occur, then you can
more quickly understand how God operates the way He does and why He does.
A second doctrine besides the doctrine of divine essence is the doctrine
of sanctification. The doctrine of
sanctification includes various points, one of which is the use of enemies of
God; the use of God’s enemies in sanctifying believers and during the time of
the decline and fall of the kingdom the use that God made of the Gentile powers
round about was peculiarly evident. And
therefore this points out a great truth of how God can use the Gentiles to
The third great doctrine is the doctrine of carnality. This is a doctrine which is taught nowhere
else in the Bible in such clear graphic terms as in the era of the
prophets. This is why, if you know your
way through the divine viewpoint it becomes very easy to open the Bible in a
time of pressure and go to exactly the kind of book that you need, even though
you have never studied that book because the Bible is divided into the Law, or
the Torah, the Prophets or the Nabiim, and the Writings or the Kethubim. The Law you basically go to when you have a
problem respecting a general basic concept, like we dealt with “thou shalt not
murder, thou shalt not steal” and we’ve seen that in the context of the Law it
meant a lot more than just simple thievery.
“Thou shalt not steal” is a command that you break when you don’t care
about your neighbor’s property. Even
though you never touch your neighbor’s property you can still be guilty of
violation of the spirit of “thou shalt not steal.” Children are frequently guilty of “thou shalt
not steal” by the way they handle their property and their friends
property. Parents who are lenient with
their children in the area of handling property are basically teaching them a
mental attitude toward property that in later life can lead to outright
theft. It begins with how you take care
of what you have.
But the Torah is the place you go to get the general will of God, the
most basic concepts of all; that is found in the Torah. Books of the Law that seem dull at first
reading, such as Deuteronomy, Leviticus, Numbers, that’s the area where the
general will of God is taught. For
example, “thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy
mind, with all thy soul,” what does this mean?
Amplified by the 613 different specific ways you can do this and not do
this in the Law. So the Torah is the
general direction book.
What are the prophets used for, under what conditions would the believer
go to study the prophets or to read through the prophets? You would go to the prophets when you’re
dealing with a matter of your own personal sanctification. The prophets are the place to go when you’re
looking for violation of God’s laws, when you’re looking for an area in your
life that seems to be causing you a problem, you can’t get your fingers on it,
you want to get specifics, go to the prophets; go to Jeremiah, go to Isaiah,
start reading the Nabiim in that case.
When do you go to the Kethubim?
When you are dealing with the general will of God and the details of
life; the book of Proverbs, for example, raising children is explained in the
book of Proverbs, education is explained in Proverbs; sex is explained in the
Song of Songs; philosophy explained in the book of Ecclesiastes. All these, early music explained in the book
of Psalms, so you go to the Kethubim for these kinds of details.
Now with Hosea we are in the Nabiim, and therefore as we would expect
here the theme is generally sanctification.
We have seen in Hosea 4:1-6:3 the introduction of Yahweh’s lawsuit. Yahweh brought a lawsuit against the nation
In Hosea 6:4-6:11, we dealt with the “thou shalt not murder”
commandment. And we showed how “thou
shalt not murder” is a commandment that the believer can be in violation of
when he has never committed murder in his life.
A believer can be in violation of “thou shalt not murder” when he
doesn’t care for the aged, when he doesn’t care for widows, for the neighbors,
for the poor, for the strangers, and even for the pollution of the land and the
soil that gets blood-stained by murder.
All of these areas are covered in the Mosaic Law under the general
category, “thou shalt not murder.”
So therefore, God can pronounce the curse, you have murdered, upon the
nation when in fact they haven’t murdered by our present 20th
century judicial standards. All the
nation would have had to have done to be guilty of “thou shalt not murder” is
simply to not care for the sick, not care for the orphans, not care for the
widows; not caring for them would be murder as far as God is concerned. It’s a violation of that commandment, it’s a
violation of the spirit of that commandment.
So we see that “thou shalt not murder” is an all encompassing command.
Then in Hosea 7:1-3 we dealt with “thou shalt not steal,” and we saw
that acquiring property other than by labor, gift or inheritance is basically a
form of theft. Not caring for another
neighbor’s property, even though it is not your personal property, that is an
act of theft; concern for property, property incarnate, the labor of the creature
of God, and when we do not respect the property of another person we basically
do not respect the person. So these
verses amplify that commandment.
And then in Hosea 7:4-7 we had the message of the hot oven, and this was
Hosea’s way of explaining, again, to
In Genesis 4:7 the sin nature is pictured as a crouching lion about
ready to devour its owner, and the idea is that the sin nature may be
controlled by a person’s area of strength, so that on the surface there may be
no apparently noticeable outburst of the sin nature until whom, all of a sudden
there’s an explosion. And people say why
did this all of a sudden happen? It
happened because it was growing and building and building and building and
building all this time when –R learned behavior patterns were being fed into
it. The oven was being heated, and then
as it says in verse 6, “the baker sleeps all the night; in the morning it burns
like a flaming fire,” in other words, the thing erupts into one massive
conflagration.
In Hosea 7:7, the northern kingdom, “They are all hot as an oven, and
have devoured their judges; and all their kings are fallen,” these were the
kings of the last part of the northern kingdom, as you can tell by the dates
these men never lasted too long. None of
them received prophetic sanction and they succeeded one another very
quickly. So there was an instability in
the national leadership and it was basically, according to verse 7, because…
not of the sins of the leaders, but the sins of the nation collectively. You cannot blame leaders for all the problems
that are going on, it is the people that vote the leaders into office that are
just as much to blame as the leaders.
Now Hosea 7:8 we start with another section. Up until this time Hosea has been dealing with
domestic policies of the nation. Now he
shifts and beginning at verse 8 and continuing through the end of the chapter
he deals with the problems of the foreign policy of the northern kingdom. And he begins in verse 8 by saying, “Ephraim,
he hath mixed himself among the people; Ephraim is a cake not turned.” You’ve heard the expression being half-baked,
that’s where it came from. And it was
used by Hosea to refer to believers.
“Ephraim, he has mixed himself among the people,” this goes back to a doctrine,
the doctrine of election. The doctrine
of election says that “in Christ” I have a position. God the Father has chosen Jesus Christ for a
destiny; God the Father has chosen me in Christ for a destiny, and because I
have a certain destiny for all eternity, therefore I am called apart from the
world, I am operating on another tune, another frequency, and it’s foolish to
try to revert back and pretend I have not been called. When Abraham was called he was called out of
the land of his fathers, out from his kindred, to a land that God would show
him. And He had to separate Abraham from
his family in order that Abraham could be sanctified. It was a separation principle, it was an
election call to sanctification.
And that doctrine of election has been violated by verse 8, Ephraim has
not recognized her position. And so he
parallels the accusation that Ephraim has given up her position by saying that
“Ephraim is a cake that hasn’t been yet turned.” Now to understand what’s happened, the cake
that he mentioned looks look more like our pancake and it was cooked on hot
rocks, and the point was that as the dough cooked you had to flip it at the
right time or it scorched on one side and you couldn’t look under it and so on,
you had to time it. And this is a cake
that has been left burning, so that one side of this cake is burned to a crisp
and the other side, the dough is completely raw on the other side. So heat, instead of bringing the cake to the
point where it is finished, edible and a usable product, has ruined it. It has ruined it because the cake has not
been moved. It hasn’t been exposed to
different heat, it wasn’t flipped over.
And the idea is that in the course of sanctification God will move us
into different positions. You can’t stay
forever where you have been, and the pressure that God brings upon a believer
will be constructed, up to a point, and then if we don’t move out of the way
it’ll become destructive. Then if we are
foolish enough to stay in the position we just simply get destroyed. God has a time for pressure and He has a time
to back off from the pressure, and the cooked and the uncooked sides are the
nation, the northern kingdom, where they did not move. For a while it was God’s will that the cake
be cooked, you can’t eat it raw. And if
it was cooked, then it would be a usable product; the cooking is the
sanctification, and the sanctification of Ephraim has been badly
distorted. In areas where she needs
sanctification she registers a big fat zero.
In other areas where she should have been sanctified early she has
remained under pressure, she hasn’t moved, hasn’t gone on to new things. So Ephraim is half baked; her sanctification
has been, apparently, from the human point of view, thwarted and stopped, but
from the divine viewpoint the sanctification is never stopped because it’s part
of the doctrine of election. God elects
believers to be conformed to Jesus Christ and we will be conformed to Jesus
Christ regardless.
Hoses 7:9, he goes on to describe the half baked nature of Ephraim. “Strangers have devoured his strength, and he
knows it not: yea, gray hairs are here and there upon him, yet he knows not.”
The point is the strangers are the people who spread human viewpoint throughout
the northern kingdom. They are in
carnality, the northern kingdom, they have had negative volition, result of
darkness, so the conscience has been glossed over and they become dull and hard
to respond, and then they have human viewpoint, an influx of human viewpoint. Now who gave the human viewpoint to the
northern kingdom. It was the strangers;
The “strangers have devoured him, and he does not know it,” now this shows one
of the subtleties of compound carnality that we can become in compound carnality
and not be aware of it. The northern
kingdom was not aware of its own disastrous situation, even though Hosea tried
to show the northern kingdom how bad things were, the northern kingdom knew it
not. Notice the verb in verse 9, it is
repeated twice, “he knows it not,” in other words he’s stupid.
Now let’s go back in history and ask ourselves a question so we can get
the principle and apply it to our lives.
If compound carnality cannot be spotted by the individual that is
involved, then how is that individual ever going to know when compound
carnality has occurred. And the answer
is the same way the northern kingdom did.
The northern kingdom could have known had they responded to the words of
the prophets; it was the words of the prophets that came to the northern
kingdom; it was those words. God didn’t
say to Samaria and the northern kingdom, well, now I will expect you to
recognize when you having difficulties.
God isn’t that kind of a God, God does not abandon His elect
objects. He doesn’t leave it to chance;
He doesn’t hope that we might find the problem.
God always patiently gives us a solution and the solution always is the
preaching and teaching of the Word of God.
So where you have people who are not exposed to the Word of God, where
you have people who are slack in their attendance of face to face teaching of
the Word of God, you will find people who can become involved in compound
carnality and not have the foggiest notion that’s the problem. The same thing with Ephraim, they did not attend
to the teaching and preaching of Hosea, or the other prophets that were
involved with Hosea. So “they knew it
not.”
And then in Hosea 7:10 we have reiteration of a phrase that was repeated
several times earlier in the book, “And the pride of Israel testifies to his
face: and they do not return to the LORD their God, nor seek him for all
this.” “The pride of Israel” is the
business prosperity under Jeroboam II; this business prosperity has begun to
collapse. Remember that Hosea operates
over s 40 year period of time. When Hosea begins his ministry there is
prosperity; he is not believed, the population can’t believe that things are
that bad and so they laugh at Hosea. But for 40 years this man patiently
teaches the Word, teaches, teaches, teaches, and finally before it all goes
down there is tremendous adversity.
Now this particular section was written sometime between the prosperity
and the absolute adversity and so they know that “the pride of Israel,” the
business prosperity of Jeroboam has begun to collapse. The national economy is going and so he says
that “testifies to his face” that something is wrong. Now how does the lack of business prosperity
“testify to his face?” It is an
indicator. Back in Deuteronomy 28 and
Leviticus 26 God said there would be a specific set of disciplinary actions
taken when the nation went on negative volition and that these particular areas
of discipline would show up. Now when it
says he “testifies to his face” it means that when the business world collapsed
people should have remembered Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26 and said okay,
our business is falling apart, why; what has gone wrong? And they should have said wait a minute,
Leviticus 26, Deuteronomy 28, business failure means we are in the fourth
degree of discipline. That’s the
equation they should have thought of.
That’s why it testifies to their face, the loss of prosperity was a
signal, but the signal went unheeded.
Notice what it says in Hosea 7:10b, “they do not return to the LORD,
their God,” and it’s a gnomic perfect which means they never do. This has been going on for decades, there’s
been a gradual decline. There’s been an increase of political instability with
one king being assassinated after another and still “they do not return to the
LORD, their God, nor seek Him for all this.”
Hosea 7:11 includes some specific attacks against their foreign policy;
notice it is specific. The prophets and
the Holy Spirit, when they point to our sin point to specific areas of sin, not
generalities. “Ephraim also is like a
silly dove without heart: they call to Egypt, they go to Assyria.” The point was that the northern kingdom was
vying for a position of influence between the two super powers of her day,
Assyria and Egypt. Assyria was the
nation that occupied the fertile crescent before Babylon. So you have these two super powers vying for
Palestine. Why? Palestine is the area of the trade route;
Palestine is the area where you can get to a seaport just to the north. So therefore this is an important area and
the Jews are trying to manipulate by diplomacy, by negotiation, by human
viewpoint gimmicks for security. Their
security, they think, lies is making a good treaty with Assyria against Egypt,
or making a good treaty with Egypt against Assyria. It’s the reliance of a believer on negative
volition with some gimmick. You’ve got
to always trust in man, if he can just get this business deal then he’ll be
set. And believers are like that, silly
doves without heart; without heart means without conscience. These believers are so far in negative
volition that they can’t think right or wrong and therefore because they can’t
they go to all these gimmicks, first one, then the other, back and forth, the
Hebrew would indicate running to Assyria, running to Egypt, always running to
some person except the Lord Jesus Christ.
He is always the last one to be the object of affection.
Hosea 7:12, God loves Israel, and now He says something about them that
applies very much to believers, “When they shall go, I will spread my net upon
them; I will bring them down as the fowls of the heaven; I will chastise them,
as their congregation hath heard.” Now
the net is a net that was used to capture birds. It is a net that occurs again and again in
the Psalms, the fowler, the snare of the fowler. Now why is theme a recurrent one in
Scripture? It is because the birds for
the man in the ancient world represented the maximum freedom, and so the fowler
with his snare and the man with the bird net was the one who destroyed
freedom. And so therefore believers who
are on negative volition are going to have their freedom destroyed, whether
nationally or individually. God will see
to it that their freedom is lost; He will deliberately cause the loss of
freedom because He loves them.
And then He says, “I will chastise them, as the congregation has
heard.” Now the word “chastise” is a
word that we ran into many times when we were going through the book of
Deuteronomy yacar, it’s the word from
which we get musar, severe training,
and I will train them means that God has so much love toward these people in
the northern kingdom that He is going to force them to become sanctified. If they have not been sanctified through
their own efforts then they will be sanctified by God’s efforts, but they will
be sanctified. God has decreed their
sanctification and nothing will stop it; nothing can interfere with it. These believers can go as they did in 721 BC
and commit mass suicide in Samaria and it doesn’t make any difference, the nation
will be sanctified. So this is why when
God says I will yacar them, I will
put them through a severe form of training and discipline in history.
“I will chasten them, as the congregation has heard.” The congregation heard, again through
Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28; that was the clear program of musar that God had spelled out centuries
before. It is not going to be a new
training program; it is simply going to be the old training program
enforced. Yacar, I will train them.
This means that the believers in the northern kingdom would be treated
to exactly the kind of pressure they deserved from the standpoint of their
training. They needed some severe
training and suffering and so therefore God is going to give it to them. Now believers today can avoid the yacar; we can avoid the musar to a degree.
Now how can a believer today avoid musar? One of the ways he can do it is to get
involved in a local church where the Word of God is being taught. I have no sympathy for believers who are the
classic church tramps who hop around from one church to another, always doing
some ministry but never settling down in local church. These people are disobedient to the Word of
God. These people never bother with a local
church because they think there are to many hypocrites and all the rest of it,
funny it never becomes an issue in any other area of their life. What they really are saying is the same thing
a person says when they get a divorce; as they usually say, we’re incompatible. Well, there never has been a couple that has
been compatible this side of Eden. And
so therefore that is not a sufficient excuse. Translated, the person who goes
for a divorce with that attitude is a copout, he’s a quitter, he is a weakling
spiritually, he can’t take the pressure that comes with close association with
other believers, like some people can’t take the pressure of marriage and so
they get a divorce, break God’s covenant, what do they care, smash it.
We need to go back to the three-step solutions to various attacks that
you will face in the Christian life.
We’ll learn how to take a doctrine and study certain attacks that as a
believer you will see in your life, in your thought life, not necessarily in a
discussion. This isn’t so you can carry
on an argument with somebody, the most vicious argument you’re ever going to
have is going to be with yourself, in your own soul. That’s where the most vicious arguments
occur. So if we can show people how to
apply, go step by step and drill and drill and drill on simply applications of
doctrine to experience and develop an attitude, then hopefully when they’re
involved in a real problem they’ll use the same concept.
Let’s take, for example, the doctrine of election and let’s think of an
attack. There are three particular attacks that most believers get that can be
met and headed of by the doctrine of election.
One attack is the fact that the Bible is a relative doctrine, and this
comes in various ways, what about the other religions and why are you such a
bigot, that kind of thing, and it also can come in as a private disbelief in
Scripture, a private disbelief in the sufficiency of Scripture, that
concept. And so the first thing that we
are going to train to do is to state what that temptation and what that thought
is in a sentence. You have to get a handle
on it, don’t respond emotionally. See,
this is where believers go off the track; the first thing that happens under a
pressure situation is we start feeling, cranking up the feelings, do I feel
spiritual or don’t I feel spiritual. And
immediately what happens, when you start the feeling response you use the wrong
part of your soul. And now you can’t get
the other part started, which is your mind, the intellect. Therefore the first thing we must be trained,
and this is why this takes repetition, over and over, is that when we get into
an attack type situation, be able to state it, that we can think when we get
hit with it.
Now after repetition of 75-100 times on say just one of these things,
you can find yourself responding to it in a second, going through all these
steps and never even really using that much energy, it becomes very easy to
handle these kind of situation, you don’t even have to think, as quick as you
can blink you’ve solved the problem. That’s what we’re aiming at.
Now taking this simple thing, the Bible is a relative type of document,
relative truth concept, and why is the Bible for you the absolute norm and
standard, the place to plug into the divine viewpoint framework, which
presupposes that you know it, that’s the first thing you go to after have
translated the attack into a sentence form.
Go to the divine viewpoint to pick out an area most likely to be used in
defense. Here the best one is to think
back, when did this become an issue in history; when did the Bible’s uniqueness
become an issue. It became an issue with
the call of Abraham, so immediately we’re back to the call of Abraham. What part of the call of Abraham, there’s the
event, that’s moves us to a passage of Scripture, immediately we should say
what the text is, Genesis 12:1-3 and use that as a text. Then say okay, what’s the doctrine associated
with that event that I can best use to block this kind of an attack. The doctrine that I use is the doctrine of
election. God chose Abraham; God said to
Abraham I call you out from Ur of the Chaldeas, I will show you a land and all
the peoples of the earth will bless themselves in you. That’s God’s call, that’s God’s
election.
So the first part of the attack response has been completed. This is practice shouldn’t take but a
fraction of a second. So you recall the
doctrine, the doctrine of election, that’s the doctrine that’s coming under
attack, that’s exactly what Satan is using at that point to hit you with. Then you come to the use of the doctrine, how
do you use that particular doctrine to head that off? You use it by some statement or thought to
the effect that it’s an affirmation of belief that God has chosen to operate
this way in history as the free undetermined God; He didn’t consult with man
how He would and how He would not do it, and therefore the Bible is the
absolute norm and standard simply because God designed the universe that
way. He didn’t consult with you, He just
did it, like He just called Abraham out.
And that’s the application of election.
And at that point you’re using the faith technique. The faith technique is being used here but
we’re not actually stating it because at the second point, when you take that
doctrine and you say okay, at this point I trust in God’s election, I trust
that God knows what He’s doing, that He’s at the helm of the universe, that He
has chosen to use Israel and her documents as the means to reach the world, as
Genesis 12:3 says, “in thee,” that is, in Israel, through Israel, “in thee
shall all the families of the earth be blessed,” and therefore I apply the
doctrine of election to this particular attack.
Now I’m not out of the woods yet because we are teaching you go through
to counterattack the human viewpoint opposite.
Again this will take a fraction of a second with practice. But the point remains that you don’t stop
with just applying the doctrine, if you do stop here you are going to be
vulnerable for another temptation a second later over the same subject. So what you have to do is break through
completely to this third step, and the third step is when you
counterattack. How do you counterattack? You simply expose the human viewpoint in the
light of the divine viewpoint. Example: the
Bible is a relative doctrine; the Bible is relative and all religions have
something. The answer is the divine
election of God, that’s the divine viewpoint, and the opposite of that is that
man, the human viewpoint man that has come up with this kind of attack, Satan
augmented the attack, that kind of person is basically saying that I legislate
how God must run the universe. That’s the sheer arrogance behind this that
looks like such a sweet little sentiment, now isn’t it sweet, all the religions
of the world have a little good in them. That sounds so nice, and yet that
thought is the most satanic thought that anyone could utter. What it is saying is that it pleases me if
God would work that way, and therefore since it pleases me that God work that
way that’s the way He has to work.
That’s the thought content behind that statement.
Now this is an expose of that human viewpoint and when you hit here you
realize you vanquish the source of that temptation. Now in a real life situation obviously you may
have to run through four or five of these things to come out of it, but the
point remains the technique stays the same, all that changes is the doctrine
you use. For example let’s use the same
doctrine illustrated another way. Again
this is the concept of training ourselves so God doesn’t have to train us. It’s a lot easier to train yourself than be
trained. And you either train yourself
or you will be trained.
Let’s to back to Hosea 7 and look at this yacar again. “I will yacar them as the congregation has been
told.” So this congregation didn’t have
divine viewpoint, they never used it, they invented all sorts of excuses why
they couldn’t to Hosea, and so now they’re going to get their training. So as believers we have two options, either
we get the training by putting out gradually on our own, taking advantage of
what materials we have as we can or we will be trained. That’s God’s training program, train or be
trained. And here the news is dropped
that they are going to be trained from this point forward. From 721 BC on down through the entire Jewish
Diaspora these people are being trained.
Now Hosea 7:13, God says certain things about them and there’s going to
be a surprise in this because at this point you have this big conjured image of
God as a big meany. And we’re going to
go through and show some of these big meany passages and then we’re going to
see what God is really thinking. “Woe
unto them! for they have fled from me: destruction unto them!” “Havoc to them” He says, and in the Hebrew
it’s quick, it’s said very quickly, with a dozen exclamation points after
it. This is an excited form of Hebrew,
“havoc to them!!!” The hell with them is
the way we’d translate it, that’s exactly what He means, “because they have
transgressed against me: though I have redeemed them, yet they have spoken lies
against me.” Now that represents God’s
reaction, a personal reaction to a believer.
Now look at Hosea 7:14, this is a verse that really exposes a
characteristic of compound carnality, if you want to look at it, you see it in
various people in the Bible, you see it in Saul and others, “And they have not
cried unto me with their heart, when they howled upon their beds,” you see, the
howling on the beds is the believer who’s being disciplined and they’re crying
and screaming and falling apart but God says in spite of the fact that you have
laid on your bed and you have howled and yelled and screamed and carried on,
you still haven’t cried to Me, all you have cried is stop the pressure, stop the
pressure, stop the pressure, but you haven’t said Father, I confess my
sins. And there’s a world of difference,
and believers that are in compound carnality at this point are going to howl on
their beds but they do not cry unto Me with their hearts. You see the difference.
Now the howling need not be, any believer can confess his sins and if he
would God would stop it. But God is not
going to be impressed with you throwing fits, tantrums, howling on your bed, it
doesn’t impress Him in the least until you get down and do business with Him on
the basis of 1 John 1:9, and there is no other way of turning off the
pressure. Because God has said they’ve
howled, they’ve continued to howl on their bed but not once while they were
crying and carrying on with their tantrum, not once did they ever look up, and
He literally says it down at the bottom here, “they assemble themselves for
corn and wine,” these were the orgies they had to forget their pressure, they’d
gone to the gimmicks, “and they rebel against me,” while they do it.
Hosea 7:15, “Though I have bound and strengthened their arms,” now the
word “bound” is the word musar again,
“though I have trained their arms,” this is a policy that any man in the
military ought to take advantage of, there’s this promise and there’s a promise
in Psalm 18:33-34 that any Christian in the service can claim as his own; Psalm
18:33-34 and Hosea 7:15. “I have trained
their arm,” and it means I have taught them the technique of killing, I have
taught them how to be soldiers, and who was it God, because God happens not to
be a pacifist. God has trained them
militarily, “I have strengthened,” “I have trained and strengthened,” the word
“trained” means I have gone through the yacar
and the musar, I have put them
through the sword drills, the spear drills, the hand to hand combat drills,
I’ve put them all through these exercises over and over, I was the one that
designed this. Apparently the book that
God used is the book of Jasher which is a lost book, but that was the book that
men used to train for war in the Bible, and it consisted of music and dances
that they did along with training. The
dancing was to provide agility and balance to their body so they could be
accurate in hand to hand combat. So God
trained them, He designed the perfect training program, Psalm 34 is one of the
Psalms associated with that training program, “and I have strengthened their
arms.” In other words, after I have
trained them I have empowered them to kill.
So when these men of the northern kingdom went into battle they had been
personally trained by Jesus Christ and the were empowered at the point they
were killing the enemy. Notice the
empowerment there, not only were they trained, they were empowered to
kill.
Hosea 7:15b, “yet do they imagine mischief against me.” In other words, while I have taken care of
all the strength, I’ve taken care of all the international problems, they sit
and dream; the word “imagine mischief” is the word to sit passively and toy
with imaginations in your heart. While I
have done all this they sit there and dream.
Instead of thinking and drilling themselves in the Word of God, what do
they do? They dream up all these human
viewpoint gimmicks, they let their vain imaginations fill them.
Hosea 7:16, “They return, but not to the most High,” but “not upward,”
the word “high” is ‘al, the King
James translators thought this meant alah
which would be the Most High God, by the way, that’s where the Arabs also get
their word for God, this word, the one who is most high. Now it says “they return,” it means that when
I discipline them, when God brings pressure upon the believer he gets a turn
all right, but they’re not turning the right way, they’re turning the wrong
way. They howl on their beds but they
don’t cry unto Me; they return but they don’t return to Me. They don’t look up, “they are like a
deceitful bow,” now the deceitful bow we can study from other passages of
Scripture.
The “deceitful bow” is a term that was used, and they used a bronze bow,
in some cases steel, but in David’s day it was mainly a bronze bow, some wooden
bows, but the war bow of Israel was a bronze bow. And there would be two things wrong with the
bow that would happen at times; one of which the man would get fatigued, and
the guy would pull it out, and if you’ve ever worked with archery you know the
tremendous force you put on a bow. When
that thing pops you’re going to know it real quick because you can pull of the
end of the bow and drive it right inside of your temple if you have a strong
bow and there’s a lot of pressure to it.
Or, the other thing with this kind of bow, if it’s strung wrong, and if
the guide where the arrow goes by the bow is displaced or there’s friction on
the thing, or the arrow itself is not properly feathered, it won’t go to the
target. But the principle that God is
bringing out is “they are like a deceitful bow is that you never really see
this until you’d try it. The bow is
relied upon, here’s a soldier in battle, he goes into battle and he thinks he’s
got a good weapon, here comes the enemy, he pulls back, bang, no weapon. “The deceitful bow” in other words, is what
failed when it’s needed, and God is saying the northern kingdom are a group of
believers who flunk the exam. When I
give them an assignment they are like a deceitful unreliable bow, they fold.
Hosea 7:16b, “their princes shall fall by the sword for the rage of
their tongue: this shall be their derision in the land of Egypt.” In other words, they looked to Egypt for
security, this was their gimmick, their little thing they had going. And in Isaiah 30 he amplifies what Hosea is
talking about. By the way, Hosea and
Isaiah were contemporaries, one is in the north, one is in the south.
In Isaiah 30:3, here Isaiah says, “Therefore, shall the strength of
Pharaoh be your shame, and the trust in the shadow of Egypt your confusion.”
Verse 5, “They were all ashamed of a people that could not profit them, nor be
a help or profit, but a shame, and also a reproach.” What’s God’s point? They had looked to an alliance with Egypt for
military security the day the Assyrian came into the north. In 721 BC when Sennacherib and Sargon came
south, they called, they got on the little hotline and called, hey Pharaoh,
we’ve got problems. Do you know what
Pharaoh told them? I’ve got problems too
and hung up. And that’s what the
reproach is, their little gimmick that they had substituted for the Word of
God. God let them, okay, if you want to
trust in that instead of the Word, I’ll let you. But the day the crisis hits it’s going to
fall completely apart.
Now all of this so far looks like God is one big meany. And you can get this [can’t understand word]
image of God from these passages. So to head
off at the pass that kind of reaction, I want to turn to Hosea 11:8-9. If you’ve gotten the impression that God is
an ogre who is out to torture believers, look at this verse. After all this sermon that’s been going on
and on and on, how God is going to blast them and He’s going to do this and
He’s going to do that, verse 8, “How
shall I give thee up, Ephraim? How shall
I deliver thee, Israel? How shall I make
thee as Adamah? How shall I set thee as
Zeboiim? Mine heart is turned within Me;
My repentings [compassions] are kindled together.”
Now this is one of the most mysterious verses in Scripture. It looks very simple but it involves a
theological dilemma that has never been
solved. In the 1900 years of Christian
church history no man has ever explained this particular revelation. The revelation is that in the heart of God He
is so much like us that there are, as it were, contrary motions, so that on the
one hand God wants to smash in anger and hatred towards sin, but on the other
there is an attitude of love that curtails this. And you notice how it is put at the end, very
graphically, you can’t deny that this is just words, this is actually
revelation of something in God’s very being, “My heart is turned within Me; My
repentings [compassions] are kindled together.”
In other words, the direction to do one and direction to do the
other. But then the solution is in verse
9.
Hosea 11:9, “I will not execute the fierceness of My anger, I will not
return to destroy Ephraim; for I am God, and not man, the Holy One in the midst
of thee, and I will not enter into the city.”
Now that phrase goes back to the doctrine of election and God says
though I will yacar thee, though I
will spread the net over you and frustrate every human viewpoint attempt, and I
will see to it that you are going to be trained, whether you train yourself or
I train personally train you you will be trained, nevertheless, in all that, “I
will not execute the fierceness of My anger.”
The believer, when he is under musar,
is not receiving justice. God is a God
who is sovereign, who is righteousness, who is just, and who is love, His musar comes from His love, not His
righteousness and justice. The sting and
the smarts that come from being disciplined by Jehovah do not come because He
is executing His wrath against you.
Do you know why? He’s already
executed His wrath against His Son, Jesus Christ, and because His wrath and His
justice have been executed and fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ on the
cross, this is why He says, “I will not return to destroy Ephraim, I am God and
not man,” in other words, I have eternal stability in my character. Verse 8 said “My repentings are kindling
together,” now if it had been just a men he would have wound up in a dilemma,
but God says I am not man, and though I experience in some way, which we don’t
know as finite creatures, He responds in some way to us that is somewhat like
the way you feel when you have the attitude of striking and yet the attitude of
loving, that kind of ambiguity that you feel, God also feels.
But to head off at the pass any undue deductions, He says but remember,
“I am God and not man, and I am the one in the midst of thee,” “I am the one in
the midst of thee” is a reference to election, this is my position, God says I
have elected you Israel and Ephraim forever, you are part of the seed of
Abraham, and I can’t violate you without violating My own words to Abraham, I
promised that Abraham’s seed would be successful, My plan would succeed. So even though I feel like it I won’t do it,
I am God and not man.