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Don Filcek; Hosea 9 Celebrating to Death
Welcome to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak preaches from his series on the book of Hosea, a study in God's relentless love. Let's listen in.
Well, good morning and welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Filsak. I'm the lead pastor here. And there are several different reasons why people go to church, and I think you could probably identify in your own heart why you're here today.
But I think despite the fact that there's a variety of different reasons, I think there's only one good reason. And the good reason is God. His design for us is to be social. His worthiness to be worshiped is evident.
His revelation of himself through his word is our need, and his commitment to grow those of us who are his into obedience from our hearts is his intention. And so he does that through community and in the gathering of his people, and that's why he's created this cadence for us to gather in worship of him once a week.
So let me just ask you, and I'm not looking for a show of hands, I'm asking you to think this through here at the start of this service.
Are you here for God today?
Are you here for him? It's good for us to consider why we do what we do, and in part because as we're marching through the book of Hosea, Hosea follows a fairly consistent theme of calling out false religion and empty religion.
Empty religion being I'm just here to check a box because my culture says it's a good thing to do. The book follows the prophetic ministry of a really bold and vocal prophet who is speaking indictment of judgment against God's old covenant people, the old covenant people being Israel.
And I'm reading this sermon in the Bible reading this morning, PG 13. This is the highest caution that I have given to a sermon, and it's for two reasons this morning. I'll tell you what you can do now before I give you the reasons.
If you want to take your kids out, the double doors back there, Trent and Ben are back there, and they'll be available to keep the kids occupied, and then they can come back in to sing with us and then go back out.
So you can do that now before I start talking with some words here. There's a theme of heavy promiscuity along with words of harsh judgment from Hosea in.
This text.
And so, like I said, if you'd feel more comfortable having your kids step out just for a few minutes, and it really will be a few minutes, they can come back in and sing with us here in a minute, and then they'll be released to their classes during connection time.
But I've said before, I don't want to be the one that introduces your kids to words you didn't want me to introduce them to, or the text of scripture to introduce to that. The enacted metaphor in the life of Hosea is one of prostitution and whoring.
He was told to go marry a promiscuous woman as a lived out metaphor of God and his people. Really, the imagery there is that God entered a covenant like similar to marriage with Israel, and they've been messing around with other gods, according to Hosea.
They're unfaithful while he continues to pursue them with his love, and what they're doing is mixing the worship of the one true God with the worship of pagan idols. That's what's really happening on the ground in Israel.
They're involved in empty worship, sometimes doing the right things with the wrong heart and often doing the wrong things with the wrong heart. So in our text this morning, the people of Israel have been engaged in all kinds of festivities and worship celebrations, and these celebrations include cult prostitution.
This worship wedded the old covenant holy days with sacrifices and worship of Baal and Asherah and even Molech, terrible demonic gods who were worshiped through shameful sexual practices and even human child sacrifice was occurring in Israel during this time.
The thought I want to plan in all of our minds this morning before we read is to consider the way that we also could be found guilty of celebrating ourselves to death, the way that we might celebrate the wrong things or even celebrate the right things with the wrong.
Motives.
False religion is celebrating the wrong things. Empty religion is celebrating the right things with the wrong heart, and I think either one of those can trip us up. By the end of the text, we're going to see the results being so much lost potential in God's people.
There is so much potential and so much promise within each image bearer of God. God sees what we could be, and He sees usefulness and blessing in us, but we can squander that potential through rejection of the one who is worthy of our genuine love.
He is worthy of our fervent celebration. He is worthy of our moment-by-moment and day-by-day worship. So let's open our Bibles or your Scripture journals or your devices to Hosea 9. Again, Hosea 9, and we're going to read this passage in its entirety together.
Hosea 9, God's holy word, what He desires to communicate to us here in this gathering.
This morning.
"'Rejoice not, O Israel, exult not like the peoples, for you have played the whore forsaking your God. You have loved a prostitute's wages on all threshing floors. Threshing floors and wine vats shall not feed them, and the new wine shall fail them.
They shall not remain in the land of the Lord, but Ephraim shall return to Egypt, and they shall eat unclean food in Assyria. They shall not pour drink offerings of wine to the Lord, and their sacrifices shall not.
Please Him.
It shall be like mourner's bread to them. All who eat of it shall be defiled, and their bread shall be for their hunger only. It shall not come to the house of the Lord. What will you do on the day of the appointed festival, and on the day of the feast of the.
Lord?
For behold, they are going away from destruction, but Egypt shall gather them, Memphis shall bury them. Nettles shall possess their precious things of silver, thorns shall be in their tents. The days of punishment have come.
The days of recompense have come. Israel shall know it. The prophet is a fool. The man of the Spirit is mad because of your great iniquity and great hatred. The prophet is a watchman of Ephraim with my God, yet a fouler snare is on all his ways and hatred in the house of his God.
They have deeply corrupted themselves as in the days of Gibeah. He will remember their iniquity. He will punish their sins. Like grapes in the wilderness I found Israel, like the first fruits on the fig tree in its.
First season.
I saw your fathers. But they came to Baal Peor and consecrated themselves to the thing of shame and became detestable like the thing they loved. Ephraim's glory shall fly away like a bird. No birth, no pregnancy, no conception.
Even if they bring up children, I will bereave them till none is left. Woe to them when I depart from them. Ephraim as I have seen was like a young palm planted in a meadow, but Ephraim must lead his children out to slaughter.
Give them, O Lord.
What will you give them? Give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts. Every evil of theirs is in Gilgal. There I began to hate them. Because of the wickedness of their deeds, I will drive them out of my house.
I will love them no more. All their princes are rebels. Ephraim is stricken. Their root is dried up. They shall bear no fruit. Even though they give birth, I will put their beloved children to death. My God will reject them because they have not listened to him.
They shall be wanderers among the nations.". Whew, let's pray. Father, I thank you that you are faithful to show us what is true, to warn us, to identify for us your righteousness and our brokenness, your just judgments over sinful and corrupt people, people like us.
How good it is for us to reflect and be reminded of what we're made of and what it's like to be a people who live under rules and laws that we don't keep and that our hearts war against and your righteousness and your holy standard, your perfection that you require and our inability to produce it.
Father, if we're left with Hosea, we're left with a terrifying thought that we cannot fix it on our own. But we thank you that your word goes on to convey to us great grace and hope in a new covenant you have made with humanity through the blood of your son, him paying the just penalty for our sins, that we might be set free to love you and to live for you.
Father, I pray that that reality would press on each heart. Even though I pray this regularly, I ask that that would be fresh and new for all of us this morning, a great joy and gladness that would sweep over us as we have an opportunity to sing songs of rescue and songs of hope and songs of salvation and songs of trust in you, your glory, your majesty, your beauty, your excellence, our inability and our corruption and our brokenness and you loving us nonetheless.
And so, Father, I pray from that place of your love and your rescue that we would sing these songs and worship you and listen to you and heed you and live for you and walk with you all the days of our lives.
We ask this in Jesus' name, amen.
Amen.
Yeah, you can go to be seated and get comfortable and reopen your Bibles, your devices to Hosea chapter 9. And this is the passage that God has for us to be discussing and going over this morning. And so, I want you to see that the things that I'm saying are coming from God's word.
The fall of God's people away from relationship with him in the old covenant as revealed in the book of Hosea is like watching a slow motion train wreck. Now, you'll notice that there's 14 chapters. Some of you have noticed that already and gone like, how long are we going to be here?
Well, just a few more weeks, but it's a lot of judgment. Anybody raise your hand and say, man, it's been a lot of judgment. There's a lot coming from Hosea, a lot of tough words that are coming here and watching the people devolve into pagan worship in the midst of their calling to be God's chosen people is tough.
And their slide though and watching them slide into these things is really such a temptation to all people down through the ages. It's why it's recorded for us in Scripture is it's going to be a temptation to us as.
Well.
And so, we see in this text a simple two-point outline, two points this morning. Broken revelry, celebrating the wrong things, verses 1 through 9, and then lost potential, sending away his blessings, verses 10 through 17.
So, that's the two main movements of this text. And these two divisions in the text represent two ways that temptations war against our relationship with God because it's all about relationship. It's all about being in a knowing, loving, connecting, walking with kind of relationship.
With God.
And we're going to be tempted to worship the wrong things and we'll be tempted to send away the great privilege we have been given. So, in this new covenant, this looks like first trying to have God plus other things that are contrary to his worship.
And let's be honest, and I don't need an assessment or a raise of hands, we can all get caught up in celebrating the wrong things. We can all get caught up in being entertained by the wrong things. Can we get caught up in sprinkling a little God into the middle of a life filled with many other loves like I just give him my Sunday mornings and that's enough?
Or I give him a little bit of time at the start of my day and that's enough? As if what God desires of us is just a little bit of our time. And so, we can be caught up into that like the Israelites were.
And secondly, we're tempted to sow this life to ourselves, not realizing the potential for which we were made. Satisfied, we can become satisfied to slink around in the shadows when we've been invited by the king to his glorious mansion on the beach.
While he has good works for which he has called us, we can get caught up in sinning away our.
Blessings.
So, starting in verse 1, we see broken revelry, celebrating the wrong things, verses 1 through 9. And I want to point out that a mechanistic expectation of pagan worship, those ideas of God being a vending machine don't work with our God.
They don't work with our God. They work with the…they're kind of like the pagan notions, the central notion of pagan worship that Israel is starting to get wrapped up into, a central notion of pagan thought is that we need to figure out the right inputs to get the right outputs.
If we, in the spiritual realm, if we can figure out the right thing to do, then we'll get the right stuff that we want. And in this sense, pagan idolatry has always been pragmatic. Pray to a certain saint, you'll get safe travels.
Pray to another saint and your kids will be blessed. Pray to…and do this and find the right God, find the right goddess, and then offer a little offering to them and then you'll have fertility or you'll have great crops.
You know what I'm talking about? Anybody? Is that tracking with you? What this idea is of pagan worship? In this sense, pagan idolatry has always, always, always been very practical, very pragmatic. If you find something that works, just keep doing it.
That's the notion of pagan worship. And I jokingly do this when I watch sports. Michigan is scoring while I'm standing, then I remain standing. Anybody have like a favorite sweatshirt that you don't wash or you wear it for the game because you know they'll win if you're wearing…uh-oh…Lynda, you didn't wash the sweatshirt, right?
And then it's like they're going to lose. You know they're going to lose. So we all get that kind of superstition where we think we're driving things and, of course, we know…I mean, those are joking things, hopefully, for you.
But the human heart, here's what I want to point out. The human heart looks for patterns and then likes to believe that the outcomes have to do with our performance. We do the right things, we get the right outcomes.
Israel was caught up in this. They thought they discovered patterns to their bountiful harvests. A little sacrifice to Baal, sprinkle in a little worship to Yahweh, cult prostitution at a shrine for Asherah, and boom, the grain is popping and the wine is flowing.
That's their mindset. That's what's going on during this time. We're all a little pagan in our worship. We will all be tempted to do what we do to try to get blessing and benefit for self, to try to get ahead for ourselves.
And the minute we accept that there's an Almighty God, which I hope everybody in the room already has, that you believe that there is an Almighty God who is over it all, we will begin to try to manipulate Him.
That's what it means to be a fallen human. We begin to try to manipulate Him to get our way. Tempted to think of, you know, we attend worship or sacrifice our time or give the right amount and then we'll get what we want, right?
If we do these things, and so much of American Christianity is wrapped up in this false worship. We're trying to get wealthy? Well, then go to church. We're trying to get healthy? Give some money. Proper worship doesn't, if you get anything out of this message, it's this sentence, proper worship doesn't produce blessings.
Proper worship doesn't produce blessings. Don't worship Him for what you can get. Worship Him because you have met Him, and therefore know He is worthy of your worship no matter what. No matter what, He is worthy of your worship.
Do you know Him? If you know Him, if you've met Him, if you know who He is and what He does and how holy He is and how righteous He is, how His creator, the one who made you, then you will naturally want to worship Him.
Verse 1 is a shocking statement to God's people.
Cut it out.
Stop rejoicing. Stop your praise. All over Scripture, we're commanded to praise and worship, and here we see this really shocking.
Statement.
Cut it out. And all the commentaries that I've read on this passage see the context of the delivery of chapter 9 as unique. They all believe that by the words that are used and the phrases that are used, that literally Hosea has entered into a festival, interrupted a harvest festival celebration in northern Israel, likely in the city of Samaria where the king is, and in order to declare chapter.
9.
That chapter 9 is an actual delivered message to the people in the midst of a celebration. He shows up as the king has sanctioned a royal festival. Revelry and partying is already underway when he walks up and in walks the mysterious socially awkward and scary prophet.
And I imagine some shouts from the crowd, who invited him?
Oh great, there goes the party.
And he gets everyone's attention by pulling the plug on the DJ's rig and shouts,.
Stop it.
Quit the worship.
You are all playing the whore. You have loved prostituting yourselves, obtaining grain in exchange for your work. But he goes on, those won't satisfy. The threshing floor and the wine vat will never satisfy you.
Abundance will not quench the hunger and thirst that you have in your souls. And man, oh man, church, is this a contemporary question for us to answer? When will you reach your fill? When will you reach your fill?
When will you say, I need no more stuff. I need no more cars. I need no more in my 401k. I need no more emergency fund. What are you going for? Is it not self-evident that those who are pursuing wealth and goods and material possessions will never have enough?
Is that self-evident to you? Raise your hand if you think that's pretty self-evident. It's never enough. It's never enough. There's just always just a little bit more. Just a little bit more. Hosea interrupts this syncretistic revelry telling them to stop rejoicing and to stop exalting because they're celebrating the wrong things.
And they are worshiping to death. They are celebrating to death. Worshiping the wrong things they've been using. Worship as a means to an end. He says, cut it out. Just stop it. Better that you don't sing.
That you sing thinking that you're gaining favor with God by doing so. Better that you just don't do it. I mean, what the prophet is saying is don't go to church. Don't worship.
Don't sing.
Don't do community groups. Don't even go to church and be involved if you don't love God. He's saying just draw in. Come in with love for Him. Don't use worship as a means to an end. Oh, the poor prophets.
I feel bad for them. I read them and I'm just like, oh, man. What a terrible calling. The poor prophet who wasn't good at parties gets to break in and pull the plug, stop the music, push his glasses up on his nose, and declare in verse 3 that they are all going to go into exile or die.
God's land is going to vomit them out, he says. It's His land that grows the grain that you're using to pay the prostitutes. The return to Egypt is a metaphor for exile back into slavery. Whenever Egypt is mentioned, you ought to think, wait, isn't that where they were slaves?
That's what it's there for because the actual location of their exile is mentioned at the end of verse 3 and it's Assyria. That's the place where they will eat the foreign food and no longer be able to even obey kosher laws.
They won't even be in charge of what they eat. Now, they're in Assyria when they're in exile. He's looking forward and he's there and everybody, he's got everybody's attention and he says, there you people of God will be far removed from the sacrifices, offerings, and holy days of celebration that God had graciously given to you.
Instead, their food will be the bread of mourning. Defilement will be their lot. Their only meals will be to slake their desperate hunger. Now, I think we understand food in different capacities, right?
We know the difference between a bowl of life-saving rice to a starving person, right? You understand that that's food, right?
That's food.
And you also understand a filet mignon with blue cheese and red russet potatoes with asparagus on the side, right? Both food, you know, and especially if it's bathed in creamy buttery sauce, right? But both are food, but Israel is used to the latter.
They're used to the opulence. And in exile, here, Hosea is saying, you better get used to the former because the only food you will eat will be to barely satisfy your desperate cravings and hunger. And there will be no more sacrifices to the Lord, he says.
While in exile, all of this celebration, all of this revelry, all of this partying is going to go away, he's saying. While in exile, they will no longer have the freedom to celebrate their holidays or holy days.
I imagine, similar to just kind of declaring what we know to be true, imagine that Christmas Day came and went for POWs in Vietnam without decorated trees, a Christmas ham, or even an exchange of presents, right?
Like, those were desperate times, and I don't think the Viet Cong had much interest in the ability for the prisoners to celebrate their own holidays, right? Nor do the Assyrians have an interest in the Israelites being able to celebrate to their God.
They are celebrating now, in this context, to death. All of their revelry, all of their pagan rituals, all of their immorally shameful celebrations are coming back to this end result. No rejoicing, no more worship of their God, exile, devastation, no freedom, and no more celebrating.
According to verse 6, Hosea explicitly tells them that they are going to be carted off after their destruction. They will be carried away after destruction. Egypt will gather them, they will be buried in Memphis.
Memphis, I think, is a euphemism there. Memphis was the ancient city of burial in Egypt, and likely here serves as a metaphor for a place of mass graves. And weeds will grow up around their treasures.
The imagery is one of devastating consequences, thorns growing right up in the middle of their tents and their property. Spoken probably just several years before the siege of Samaria by the Assyrian Empire, Hosea declares that the days of punishment have come.
The days of recompense, the day of paybacks have come. This is issued in the middle of verse 7, and is assured in the middle of verse 7 with the phrase, Israel shall know it. You're going to experience this, he says to the people.
And it's likely that Hosea records the attitude of the people toward him in this gathering. While he is ruining their harvest party, they are deriding him as a fool. They consider him to be a madman, the text tells us.
Their iniquity and great hatred has blinded them to what he's really trying to do. They don't understand his role, they don't understand his function. And so they just think, fool, madman, come on, let's get back to the party.
And someone here at church asked me earlier in this sermon series, how in the world did Hosea get away with saying these things? How is he getting away with it? How are they not just jailing him, or how is the king not putting him to death?
How is he saying these things and getting away with it? And I think our answer is found right here. I think to his culture, he was just an oddity. He was just bizarre, he was the weirdo. He was considered about on par with a court jester.
When he showed up, people rolled their eyes. They might gather around just to take in the spectacle. But he was taunted as traditional, taunted as on the wrong side of history. I actually kind of imagine in my mind the DJ plugging back in after Hosea leaves this party, saying into the mic, that was weird, as the rave kicks back up to speed, right?
Like that's what's going on here. People are just like, bizarre weirdo. Almost kind of like, I imagine some kind of intrigue and interest when he showed up, and everybody kind of hushes and like, what's the weirdo going to say today?
But what is a prophet? What is the prophet for real? What is he doing? Look at verse 8. The prophet is the watchman of Ephraim with my God. What is the prophet for real as he comes to break up our addiction to entertainment, or to revelry, or to celebrating the wrong things?
What to make of the spokesman for God who would warn against the dangers of premarital sex? Can anything get more passe than that? What about the one who would challenge us to think about the righteous judgment of God towards our quote-unquote socially acceptable sins?
Is it the fool who warns? Is it the madman moved by spirits who comes with tears and shouts saying, Hell is real! Hell is hot! God is fed up with our sins! Judgment is coming! Is that the fool? Is that a madman ranting and raving?
No, no, no.
The prophet is not here entering the celebration as a killjoy seeking to destroy all revelry. He doesn't delight in breaking up the party. But he does come as a watchman over people's souls. He comes caring for the security of the people.
He comes warning when God declares that judgment is imminent. Most preachers of truth will appear a bit unhinged at times. We will say things out of touch with our culture. A preacher can choose to be acceptable to our modern culture or a truth teller.
I don't think there's much room for both. Appear a little unhinged and strange to our culture or a watchman for God. They called Hosea a fool and a madman for warning them. You're celebrating and partying yourself right into the crosshairs of the Almighty God.
Can you see Hosea's heart? Can you see what he desires to change in the people and how he just wants to be God's mouthpiece? But they made his job hard, it says in the text. They set snares for his path and they have nothing to offer him but hatred even when they enter the house of God.
Hatred for God, hatred for his prophet. The calling of these prophets had to be one of the most lonely callings on the planet, I think. I look forward to meeting Hosea someday, to hear the behind-the-scenes things he endured in his faithful ministry to be a watchman over a wicked people.
Again, a really tough calling, a really hard calling. Those will be fun conversations. But let me just ask you, just pull back for a second. Maybe some of us are tempted to think Hosea is a bit dramatic.
Maybe he's just got a flair for drama and he just gets himself a little worked up and really it's not that big of a deal. How bad could it be in Israel? We might be tempted to think, come on, everybody sows some wild oats from time to time.
Nobody's perfect.
Why isn't Hosea coming in with grace and saying, hold on, let me just turn the music down for a little bit here and just kind of say, okay guys, I think that we might be kind of going off track a little bit and I think we need to just get back.
Okay, everybody, everybody good? Let's get back to the party. Why is he not responding that way? These people are celebrating in wickedness,.
But only on the weekends.
It's just a little sin, right? Why get so bent out of shape, Hosea? But verse 9 rounds out for clarity the depth of the sin of Israel during this time. Now if I were to get into the details of what Hosea is literally saying in verse 9, I think it would be probably the most rated R message I've ever preached.
But what he's referencing here when he talks about Gibeah is crazy. I haven't preached the book of Judges yet and that's going to be one of the hardest books. God inspires Hosea here to refer to a particularly gruesome and heinous event in Israel's history to illustrate how bad the people are being during this time.
During the time of Judges, there's an account of the disgusting depth of depravity that Israel had fallen to during that time. The account is found in Judges 19, 20 and 21. Three chapters dedicated to it.
It occurs in Gibeah.
The sin was of particularly gruesome and grotesque sexual sins in nature. The entire tribe of Benjamin defended the sin of the city of Gibeah that was within their boundaries. And all of the other 11 tribes rallied the troops and literally attacked one of their own tribes and nearly decimated it as a result of the sins of the men of Gibeah.
Now you can go back and read that on your own. I'm not going to get into the depth of the depravity that was going on in Gibeah. But it is so disgusting. I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to say what happened there.
But you can read it in Judges 19 through 21 for yourself. The purpose of this being brought up in Hosea is to remind the people of Hosea's time that God takes sin seriously. He says, remember Gibeah.
Remember what happened there.
He says, God remembers iniquities. He punishes sin. And the sins of Israel during this time, he says, are relatively similar to what was going on in Gibeah. Recast, what do we celebrate in our culture that ought not to be celebrated?
In what ways do we get caught up in pagan revelry? We might be tempted to give ourselves a pass. Our sins are not like Gibeah. They're not that bad, right? But be warned, church, when we approach God through a mechanistic, vending machine kind of worship, we are bringing paganism into his house.
And he will not stand for this. Let's not be those who celebrate ourselves to death. Not only will we be tempted to celebrate the wrong things, and even for the wrong reasons, but we will be tempted to sin away his blessings.
And the rest of chapter 9 explains this in the lost potential, sinning away his blessing, verses 10 through 17, a second point here. In verse 10, God begins to express some of the history of his people.
He found them, he says, like an unexpected vine of grapes in the wilderness. Like the first figs on a tree in its first fruit-bearing season, it's estimated about five years of maturity for a fig tree before it produces its first fig.
So I don't know how many of you know, you don't plant an apple tree and harvest apples the next year. It takes time for these orchard-bearing trees, fruit-bearing trees, to actually produce, and figs take a few years.
But the first time that a farmer goes out and plucks a fig tree off of that new tree, how many of you think that's a cool thing? It would just be like, celebrate, I've been investing in this tree for a while, and now it's getting ready to give back some.
The point of this imagery is agricultural hope and anticipation that God bears for his people. He sees their potential. He anticipates and is hopeful for their future. A tree that finally bears fruit gives hope for the harvest in years to come.
Grapevines in the wilderness represent a delightful, refreshing surprise, along with hope for more to come. You find an unowned grapevine in the wilderness, you transplant it, take it back to your property, and hope that it continues to grow.
So think about this. God sees potential in all of his image-bearers.
All of us.
But particularly, his relationship with Israel was one of covenant hopefulness. Like a married couple. The illustration being a covenant, why not just go right into marriage? I've stood with many couples at the altar and officiated their weddings, and I watched the anticipation.
You watch the groom's face when the bride comes down. Watch the anticipation. Watch the joy. Watch the occasional tear. These guys who don't cry, and there it is. A married couple stands at the altar, and their whole life stretches before them.
I get to see that.
I see that often. And they're anticipating highs and lows and illnesses and health, times of want and times of blessing as they declare in their vows. And that moment is full of anticipation and hopeful potential in the future.
Isn't that the point of it? All the future ahead of them, all the love and all the sacrifices and the ups and the downs and the twists and the turns. How many of you know what I'm talking about? Oh, man, there's a lot of married people in the room that don't know what I'm talking about.
Where did all that potential go?
Where did all that potential go? Where did all that potential go for God's people? But what happens when things turn sour and rotten quickly? Look at verse 10. Like grapes in the wilderness, I found Israel.
All kinds of anticipation. Like the first fruit on the fig tree in its first season. Oh, yes, it's going to start producing. I saw your fathers like that in the early days of Israel. But then they came to Baal Peor and consecrated themselves to the thing of shame and became detestable like the thing that they loved.
This is a historical event in Israel's marital history with God. This is like a married guy saying, Hey, remember we were just married a few weeks when we went to that weekend at Billy's Cabin and we went away for the weekend and they caught you sleeping with one of the other guys.
Remember that?
Well, that's shocking, isn't it?
But that's what God is saying here. You see, at Baal Peor, the people of Israel consecrated themselves to the worship of Baal through pagan prostitution before they even entered the promised land. They haven't even been in the promised land yet.
Baal Peor comes in the exodus. They slept with pagan prostitutes literally of the nation of Moab. And they consecrated themselves to shame. Shame is a really funny word because it actually only takes a letter change to get to Baal in that word.
And so it actually is a shift there. And often the word shame is... I'm sorry, it's not a letter change. It's interposed in the place of Baal. So shame is often what the Old Testament scholars and the ancient Jews would actually use shame in the place of Baal's name.
And they did detestable things there. But so much potential squandered on their own pleasures and their own delights and their own control. Israel thought of their present as their own while it wasn't their own.
They had entered an agreement with Almighty God. And church, neither are we our own. But we've been bought with a price. The greatest lie on the face of this planet is that you belong to yourself. Your life is yours to live in any way you see fit.
You belong to God one way or another. And you will give an account to Him one way or another. Ephraim, which Hosea likes to use as a catch-all term for the entire northern tribe of Israel, they have sacrificed their glory.
He had great glory.
Ephraim had great glory, great potential, and a great God to worship, and a great calling to be His people, to be an exemplary people, a great calling to demonstrate to the nations the glory of their God.
But they gave up all that potential for pleasures and selfish gain and selfish, elusive control. How much of what we do in our lives is about our own control, maintaining our own control over our own lives?
Isn't a lot of it? And they who once were the promise of a people as numerous as the stars of the sky, think about that promise, you're going to be as numerous as the stars in the sky, and they will be barren, no birth, no pregnancy, no conception.
God is withdrawing His blessing from His people according to verse 12. Childless and barren is a euphemism for their destruction. This is not a literal declaration that Jews won't be able to have kids or something like that.
Not saying that they won't be able to have offspring again, it's figurative. It means basically this is the end of the line. Israel is like a date palm planted in a meadow. He goes on again to talk about potential.
A promise of agricultural abundance. A reasonable hope for a harvest was there when God called out Israel to be His people. But now, instead of fruitfulness, Israel will go out with their remaining children to the arms of the ravenous Assyrian armies.
He'll grab their children's hands and lead them to destruction. In what way? Well, let me describe just very briefly an ancient siege. In a siege, when an enemy army is trying to choke out a city and trying to keep them from getting food in and out and trying to keep them from getting water in and out, in that ancient siege context, to stay in the city is to starve or to die of thirst.
To give up is to go out to the surrounding army, go outside the walls, and go out to the surrounding army and trust them. Ephraim, in her destruction at Samaria, had many opt to grab the hands of their children and take their chances with the wicked Assyrians, the wicked, violent, invading Assyrian horde.
The prophet proclaims an imprecatory prayer in verse 14. Give them what you will, God. Give them what you have for them. Empty wombs and dried up breasts. Fruitlessness is the image. In verse 15, God gives another example of lost potential.
Here he references the start of their kings. At Gilgal, the potential for the first royal line came to failure. Again, still talking about potential. The very first royal line was King Saul, according to 1 Samuel 15.
By the way, he becomes king at Gilgal and his kingdom is torn from him. The crown is torn from him at Gilgal. You see, the first king of Israel compromised for personal gain there at Gilgal. That's why it's mentioned.
Saul was told to destroy the Amalekites, to wipe them out and save no spoils, but Saul kept the best of the livestock for himself, but he claimed that he kept them for sacrifice. And further, Saul compromised with empathy toward King Agag of the Amalekites,.
The ruler of the Amalekites.
Saul expressed empathy toward a pagan king he was supposed to by God's order put to death, and this resulted in judgment. You see, I think in essence when it comes to Agag, Saul wanted to be more kind than God.
Think that through.
Saul thought himself more kind than God. God said, put Agag to death. Saul said, I'll keep you around. It is way back then at Gilgal, at the tearing of the throne from Saul that God's love for his people began to grow cold in that old covenant.
Verse 15 is full of divorce language. It was all the way back at Gilgal under the first king Saul that God began to despise his people for their faithlessness. And so he pledges to drive them out of his house, a technical term that's often used for divorce in ancient writings, and he will love them no more, he says.
And in verse 15 we see even harsher words, don't we?
I won't skip them.
We see the words hate, and we see the phrase love them no more. And this word and this phrase hits our ears as harsh and unkind. But let me just tell you, I have got a better category for you than harsh and unkind when it comes to reading God's Word.
The category is true. That's the category we need to think over these words. They sound harsh and unkind to us, but ought we not to just merely think these words are true? I'm not sure it matters how much we feel about them, that God would hate these people for what they're doing.
I think this is one of those passages telling us a hard thing about our God, a hard thing that's not often preached, a hard thing that we have to get into the prophets to see, that often is the purpose of our diverting our attention from the prophets, that we don't want to see it.
There are things about God revealed in these books that we don't want to know. Here is a hard truth. For God to withhold His love is for God to hate.
Those are synonymous.
The degree of our feelings towards people do not work when we're talking about God. We have degrees of feelings, don't we? We can be kind of tepid and kind of like, I don't really care that much, not for God.
He doesn't withhold ever just a little bit of Himself, coyly hoping that, I hope they come back. God will never be a little against something. How many of you have ever been a little against something?
You know what it's like to be a little against something. God is never a little against something. To withhold even a fraction of Himself is to remove the greatest good that we are made to experience.
Understanding what you have when you have God is to understand what you are missing when He withholds Himself from you.
Everything. God is everything.
The one who has God has everything. The one in relationship to God has a life qualitatively defined. What's the best adjective for a life that is connected to God? Eternal. That's how it's defined. A life that has God is defined as abundant or eternal life.
But the one for whom God withholds even the slightest bit of Himself is rightly under His just judgment and can rightly be said to be hated by Him. That's not the wrong word. Rebellion against the Almighty is dangerous business.
Sin ought to come with a warning label every time. Oh, that's right, it does. It's called the Bible. Which includes watchmen like Hosea who are faithful to tell us the truth. Sin. God hates it. With a terrifying animosity.
This is the testimony of His Word. Watchmen like Hosea may be a bit crazed, may be a bit wild, and yet completely true when Hosea warns us not to send away our blessing. Israel wants the surprising grapevine in the desert.
Israel wants the fig tree in the meadow in Ephraim. Wants a fig tree on the first season of good fruit. Is stricken. An axe has been laid to his root. However you say that word. I always say it wrong and I get made fun of for the way that I say it.
Right, Dave? Dave maybe just said to me this morning. He was like, I hate the way you say that word. I don't even know how I say it. I don't know if it's Midwestern or if I made it up myself. Root. I can't even say it now because it's in my head.
The axe has been laid to his root. Did I say it wrong? Somebody give me some enunciation lessons later. Root. Root. Did I get it? Root.
Root. Root.
I don't know.
The point. I don't know if that's West Michigan. I think you guys are correcting me so I think I'm off. They will be unproductive. Their potential will be unrealized. They will be conquered. They will be exiled.
They will be fruitless. They have squandered their incredible blessings as God's chosen people. Hosea tells us his God will reject them. Because they have not listened to him. Oh man, this is key church.
Grab this. Verse 17. My God will reject them because they have not listened to him. They shall be wanderers among the nations. They're consigned to dispersion among the nations. Diaspora is a technical term for that.
A shocking prediction. Here in Hosea that has well defined the Jewish people for centuries and centuries and centuries and centuries of their history. Dispersed. Out among the nations. Now we know that they're back in their land now.
But man, that's been a blip on the radar of human history. Centuries and centuries and centuries in exile. Dispersed among the nations. Church, heed the word of the Lord today. God's old covenant chosen people celebrated themselves to death.
And further they squandered their blessings exchanging so much privilege and so much promise for sin. That which God hates. And verse 17 lands me at a central application that ought to lead to a smattering of potential boots on the ground kind of ways to apply this passage to your life.
I'm going to trust the Spirit to lead you into the nuances of what He desires you to do today. But grasp this main thing and then do this exercise. The central application is found in verse 17. Listen to Him.
Pay attention to the warnings of the watchmen. My God will reject them because they have not listened.
Heeding.
Paying attention.
Listen to Him.
Pay attention to the warning of the watchmen who is sent by God to warn us before it's too late. Listen, church.
Listen. Listen.
To Him. To Him. To Him.
Not to this fool of a preacher. Not to this madman ranting and raving against Netflix or speaking against premarital sex or warning against pornography and pride and greed and gossip and gluttony.
Take a moment right now, church, and ask Him to speak of this text to you. First ask Him this question. Real thing that I want you to ask Him this morning.
I want you to ask Him.
In the quiet of your soul, am I yours? Am I yours? His Spirit can testify with your spirit that you are His child, and He will faithfully if that's true of you. And if you are His, then my encouragement to you is this.
Keep listening.
If you are not His child, then I would encourage you to come talk with me or anyone that was up here on stage, the elder on duty, Dave, a friend that brought you here. We would love to tell you how to become His today.
But if you are His, then ask Him to show you anything you are celebrating that is not of Him. And this is where I'm trusting His Spirit to help bring this to bear in your lives. Where is your life compromised?
And further ask Him, where are you squandering the blessings that He has given to you? It's quite possible that God wants to point out to many of us today the ways that we are sending away the great blessings that He has given to us.
You see, church, He has a plan for each and every one of us. And a life given to sin will squelch and quench the good things that God saved you to do. Be open to God, rooting out some things from your life that don't belong there this week.
How can we rejoice after a message of such heavy judgment? It's a heavy message. Hosea is a heavy book. And the answer, I believe, is found at the tables. It's why we end here every week. God has instituted a new covenant in His blood, the blood of His Son, Jesus Christ.
On the cross, He took the punishment we deserve for our sins, His body broken in our place, His blood shed for us. So if Jesus Christ is your Lord and Savior and you're at peace with others here, during this next song, I encourage you to come to the tables to take the cracker to remember that His body was broken, not just for you, but for us.
And take the cup of juice to remember that He has saved you into community with us. His blood shed for us. And then let's go out from here celebrating and rejoicing over the right things. And let's go out from here grateful for the blessings He has given to us so that we can, in turn, discharge the ministry that He's called us for.
He has good for you to do. And sin, very well, might be getting in the way. Confess it. Confess it. Confess it today. Let's pray. Father, I thank You for the call to listen to You. And I pray that even now, before we come to these tables, You would be working in us and through us to bring about life change and heart change.
A desire to confess and repent where we have been sinning against You in broken relationships. Father, I pray that You would clarify for us the call that You have for each individual. And I thank You for the cross.
I thank You for the hope that we have there. A chance for us to gather in these lines for just a brief moment and to reflect on the fact that You didn't save us alone. You've saved us into a community and You have rescued us and paid the price.
That these passages of judgment are no longer over us who are Your children in a new covenant sealed by Your blood, sealed by Your glorious and powerful Holy Spirit that seals us to redemption and that guarantees that we have a helper who we can follow and lean in on.
Father, I pray that You would guide us and direct us out into this week with power in Jesus' name. Amen.