Hosea 5 What God Sees and What God Does

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Don Filcek; Hosea 5 What God Sees and What God Does

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You're listening 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.
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Let's listen in. I'm Don Filsak. I'm the lead pastor here, and welcome to everybody.
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It's good to be together with all of you. I'm glad to be here. I'm really grateful for the love and unity that we've experienced here through Recast over the years.
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It's been a joy and a privilege to serve here as a pastor, and I mean that with all sincerity. I also appreciate the way that the church over the years has endured my strong conviction that all of scripture is
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God's word, and what I mean by that is just that the fact that I'm committed to God's word has us digging in, and we talk about some tough passages of scripture.
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We study it together, and we don't shy away from the tough parts, but instead we lean into those parts to understand exactly what
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God desires. This morning's message is, I've been rating all of the messages, and this one is PG.
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That's kind of from the staff's estimation. I don't just do that myself, but it's, so if anybody wants to let their kids go for a few minutes,
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Trent will be back there to keep them occupied in room five, so you can take them back by the cafe if you'd like to, and just as a kind of like a word of caution, like I rated this one
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PG. Last week was PG -13, but then we posted the podcast up to Apple, and Apple always scrubs it and writes a transcript, re -transcribes everything that I say up here, and after doing so, they actually called my sermon last week explicit, gave it a warning on there, so I don't know if that's worthy of clapping or not, but it's kind of like that's a first for me, so and I don't want to be known as a cussing pastor, but it definitely was, it definitely used the word whore a lot, so I'm just going to say that, and so I don't preach my handful, by the way, the kids, they can go back out the double doors, and then they'll come back with us during the worship singing time, and then they'll go back to their classes for their lessons during connection time, so I don't preach my handful of favorite topics over and over again.
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I think that would get boring for you, and it'd get really boring for me too. Instead, we walk through books of the
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Bible chapter by chapter, verse by verse, and we walk through, therefore, some heavy words that challenge us.
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Hosea is a book that is rich and deep and scandalous in our text, you know, as we study it, as we read it, and what we're looking at this morning is startling in the revelation of the wrath of God.
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As a matter of fact, when Lynn and I were talking about it, it's not even that it uses the word whore a couple of times, but it's a very stern word about the very wrath of God, and we will see this morning that God knows all of our sins.
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He knows all of our hearts, all of our thoughts, all of our deeds, all of our attitudes, all of the words we've ever spoken.
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Everything is laid bare before the eyes of the Holy One, and then we also understand this, and when that's coupled together, we realize what a predicament our lives were in.
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His wrath toward sin is genuine and real and terrifying, so what
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God sees, our deep sinfulness, leads to what God does judge sin in His wrath, and what
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God does, which is judge sin in His wrath, will, by the end of this passage, lead to a hope at the end of the tunnel.
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For it's often in the severity of His wrath towards sin, and the fact that we're covered in it, and the fact that we can't resolve it ourselves, and the fact that we are entrapped and enslaved to it, that often leads us to seek
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Him for help, and it's when we acknowledge our guilt, as we'll see by the last verse, as we acknowledge our guilt, seek
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His face, and earnestly, church, earnestly, earnestly seek Him, that He responds to us with grace and mercy.
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To come to the Gospel requires that we understand two very dark realities that we're going to plunge into today, and I'm going to encourage us to actually go in with both feet into these dark realities.
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We are saturated in sin, and His wrath is being poured out on all sin, and I would say it's good for us to jump into that reality before we talk about grace.
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So, as a matter of fact, many of us have a tendency, and we might have been raised, or we might have heard people say things that are like, well, there's a
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God of the Old Testament, really angry, and so He sent Jesus to kind of be like good cop, bad cop kind of thing, like Jesus is the good one who just kind of like lets us off the hook, and the
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Old Testament God is full of wrath and anger. Have any of you ever heard that dichotomy, that false dichotomy before? That's just not real.
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As a matter of fact, you can go to the New Testament, and you can find His wrath expressed there just as well. Paul, at the beginning of his tour de force on the gospel itself, we call it the book of Romans, says this.
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This is New Testament. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.
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Hosea continues in here to indict us. The New Testament emphasizes also that God's wrath is poured out toward ungodliness and unrighteousness.
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But what Hosea does has a tendency to continue to seek to terrify us with clarity about God's severe wrath toward all sin.
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This is a missing component, I would suggest to you, for much of American Christianity and for many pulpits today. We are rarely left to consider the devastating effects of sin, and God is often portrayed as a pushover.
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But one cannot read this passage. One cannot read Hosea chapter 5 and continue to see
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God like just merely a big grandfather in the sky who's got his little crystal dish of candies to hand out to everybody.
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We need passages like Hosea. Thanks, Dave. We need passages like Hosea to give us a more robust and full knowledge of the
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Almighty Holy One. And he is not, I mean, here's the thing, Yahweh is not playing around.
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Buckle up, because Hosea is about to tell us what God sees. All, all, all of our sin and what
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God does consistently. He pours out severe wrath for all sin.
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Now, I'm going to save the hope for the very end, lest we give in to the temptation that's all over our culture to try to solve the darkness with the light before we experience the darkness.
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I discourage us from softening our sin and softening his wrath with grace. We need a strong sense of our sin and a strong sense of his wrath before we can truly appreciate what
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God, what God was doing in sending Jesus to go up on that cross for us. And so let's open our
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Bibles or your scripture journals or your devices to Hosea chapter five, Hosea five. And Recast, I want to remind you, this is
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God's holy word. This is what he desires to communicate to us this morning. It's a, it's a, it's a stern word, but it's a real word.
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It's true and our hearts need to hear it. So Hosea chapter five, starting in verse one. Hear this,
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O priests, pay attention, O house of Israel, give ear, O house of the king, for the judgment is for you, for you have been a snare at Mizpah and a net spread upon Tabor.
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And the revolters have gone deep into slaughter, but I will discipline all of them. I know
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Ephraim and Israel is not hidden from me. For now, O Ephraim, you have played the whore. Israel is defiled.
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Their deeds do not permit them to return to their God. For the spirit of whoredom is within them, and they know not the
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Lord. The pride of Israel testifies to his face. Israel and Ephraim shall stumble in his guilt.
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Judah also shall stumble with them. With their flocks and herds, they shall go to seek the Lord, but they will not find him.
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He has withdrawn from them. They have dealt faithlessly with the Lord, for they have born alien children. Now the new moon shall devour them with their fields.
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Blow the horn in Gibeah, the trumpet in Ramah. Sound the alarm at Beth -Avon. We follow you, O Benjamin.
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Ephraim shall become a desolation in the day of punishment. Among the tribes of Israel, I make known what is sure.
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The princes of Judah have become like those who move a landmark. Upon them I will pour out my wrath like water.
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Ephraim is oppressed, crushed in judgment, because he was determined to go after filth. But I am like a moth to Ephraim and like dry rot to the house of Judah.
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When Ephraim saw his sickness and Judah his wound, then Ephraim went to Assyria and sent to the great king.
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But he is not able to cure you or heal your wound. For I will be like a lion to Ephraim and like a young lion to the house of Judah.
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I, even I, will tear and go away. I will carry off and no one shall rescue.
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I will return again to my place until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face and in their distress, earnestly seek me.
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Let's pray. Father, what an overwhelming word.
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Your judgment is just. Your assessment is accurate.
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Your observations of our sinful brokenness are true. If we're honest, we know what you have seen over our lives.
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The darkness, the brokenness, the waywardness, the sinfulness, the overtness with which we have opposed you.
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And then scripture testifies of your holiness, your justice, your righteousness in terms of judging and sending wrath on such sin.
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What a dire and dark circumstance. What a tragic and terrifying circumstance that we found ourselves in.
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Father, I pray that we would recognize the power and the potency of the darkness that is in our lives.
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The extremity of your wrath towards sin. That that would transform to greater heights of joy, greater heights of delight, greater forgiveness to others, greater humility in the way that we work and live and do our lives together here now because you have rescued.
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Because you have sent your son to bear that wrath that we deserved on his shoulders and face you in your wrath, him being torn instead of us.
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I pray that that would settle on each heart fresh and new. I know that it's an old, old story. It's a story we've been telling ourselves since our salvation.
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It's a story that we're at risk of being forgetful of. It's a story we're at risk of just seeing as simple and, oh, that's just the basic gospel.
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Father, I pray that we would not lose sight of the awesome glory and wonder of what you have done for us in the cross of your son.
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The great darkness that was waiting for us, the great judgment, the great wrath, the great tearing and rending of our very souls and instead him taking that for us.
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Father, I pray that you would receive these songs as worship and we would offer them up in hearts elated and joyful this morning in Jesus' name.
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Thanks to the band for leading us and I encourage you to get comfortable and reopen your Bibles or your devices to Hosea 5.
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We're gonna walk through that and we're gonna walk through it at some pace and it's really helpful for you to have that in front of you so that you could see what
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I'm saying is coming from God's word. I'm not making this stuff up. So Hosea was a prophet that was called to expose the sins of his people in his generation.
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And so from that standpoint, we're reading, whenever we're looking at scripture, we can kind of tend to think we're reading somebody else's mail, right?
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It was written to somebody else in a different time in a different era. But his words are recorded for us in scripture in order to serve all of God's people down through the generations, even here to Matawan, Michigan in 2025.
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And they serve as a stark reminder of both our sinfulness and God's intense wrath toward that sin.
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And I'm gonna encourage us as much as possible to lean into the darkness before we get to the light at the end of the tunnel.
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And so I think that it's good for us at times to take in the darkness, the sinfulness of our own hearts, and God's righteous, real wrath toward that sin.
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These passages continue to be intense because we rarely have anybody talk to us this way, if we're honest.
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Like hardly anybody would ever talk to us like Hosea talks to us here in these minor prophets all throughout the minor prophets.
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And the fact that the minor prophets aren't preached very much is, I think, to the detriment of the church in America. But the minor prophets express a facet of reality that makes us uncomfortable.
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And that might be part of the reason why many don't preach them. But in this new covenant era that we live, many have even questioned the benefit of studying a book like Hosea.
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Because don't we live under grace? Can you imagine somebody saying that? Well, don't we live under grace? Jesus has set us free from guilt and judgment.
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Why talk about guilt and judgment? Why talk about those things? So why should we concern ourselves with our own sinfulness and God's severe wrath towards sin, if it's already resolved?
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And I would suggest to you that a proper understanding of Hosea chapter five will lead us to high points of rejoicing, to exuberance of praise, to the ability to forgive others who have wronged us deeply, to walk in this world in humility.
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Because one must understand just how dire the circumstances were in order to more greatly appreciate the rescue that they've been given.
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And that's us. So let's allow the text to come at us like the brick bat it's meant to be. Our pride needs to be put in its place.
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Our understanding of God needs to be corrected for most all of us, myself included. And our appreciation of grace needs to be elevated, church.
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It needs to be raised high so that we understand just from what a pit we have been rescued, it's really important.
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Our outline this morning looks like this. What God sees, verses one through seven. What God does, verses eight through 14.
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And the hope at the end of the tunnel, the final verse, verse 15. So we begin with what
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God sees in these first seven verses. It really comes down to the fact that God sees our sin.
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I could have entitled this first point the sin we commit or the way we roll.
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But instead, I think it's valuable for us to see all of this is written from God's perspective. Verse three emphasizes that God knows
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Ephraim and Israel is not hidden from him. In other words, the emphasis here is that God knows all the sins of his people of all time, in all places, in all ways.
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He knows that Ephraim has played the whore, he says, and that Israel's defiled. And I take verse three as the basis of this entire first section of text.
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You see, here's what's the point. God sees, nothing is hidden.
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God knows all of it. He doesn't have to launch into an investigation to try to piece together our sins against him.
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Do you know what I'm talking about? He already knows. He knows, he knows, he knows. And I remember when
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I first came to realize that God is watching us, and I remember me in Sunday school at a Baptist church when
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I was growing up. I got this concept of God seeing everything. And does anybody remember that fear? Did anybody raise like me where there was that fear of like, oh no,
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God is always watching? Yeah, and maybe three of us raised our hand on that and said, yeah,
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I remember that. And some of you are just realizing that for the first time and that fear is just now settling on you,
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I don't know. But it's good for us. It is good and right and helpful for us to let that settle on us with like a little chill that runs down your spine when you realize it.
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Like a little bit of holy and righteous fear is appropriate when we recognize that God has been with us every moment of our lives, every moment of every day.
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There is one who knows every single evil thought I have ever thought, every evil deed I have ever done, every evil word
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I have ever spoken. Do you know what I'm saying? And what he sees, he sees all of that.
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And what he sees in these first seven verses is chilling. And I'm gonna break them down into seven things that the
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Lord sees, one for each verse. In verse one, he sees his leaders causing others to stumble.
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He calls the priests, the people, and the king and his royal court to all pay attention. Really kind of the emphasis in the language there is he's calling all the leaders to pay attention.
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And he says, they are all under judgment because they have all been a snare and a trap. Now, leaders can be a snare and a trap for any people.
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And it can be governmental, it can be political, it can be religious. But leadership has a tendency to lay snares and traps for the people.
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The two locations, a snare in Mizpah, a trap in Tabor, they're likely named for their historical context and importance to the nation of Israel.
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You see, whenever you see a place name, it's good to go back and say, why would these places have been significant to the people?
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These are places of significant historical victories in Israel's past, places where God delivered them.
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So it's quite possible that the snare and the trap that's being mentioned here is simply the trust that God will come through for them again and again and again and again and again.
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God will just keep giving you victories. The snare in the net is simply this.
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The leaders are telling the people and each other, we can do whatever we want. We can ignore
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God and God will continue to be with us and defend us just like Mizpah, just like he was at Mount Tabor.
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So they think of God like a victory dispenser. He just gives out victories. They do not love him.
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They do not obey him. They are not honoring him. They are not making sacrifices to him, but they expect things from him.
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Sound familiar? Sound quite possible that our own hearts have been there at times. Using God for our own ends while ignoring him and rejecting his ways is a sin of deep, deep folly.
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He is the living God, church. He is not a dispenser. He is not a token.
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He is not an artifact carried into battle to guarantee victory. And he certainly isn't a genie in a lamp ready to give you your three wishes.
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He is personal. Our God has will and he sees our heart attitude toward him.
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And so in this first point, woe to the spiritual leader who leads those following them astray.
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The second thing that he sees, so he sees the wicked leaders causing the people to stumble, but he also sees their wicked sacrifices.
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That's the second thing. Things escalate quickly. It says God sees the slaughter and the revolters have gone deep into the slaughter, but I will discipline all of them.
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What slaughter? Are we meant to have a vision of Israel? Like everybody's killing everybody in the streets and it's complete riots and chaos and everybody's dying.
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No, this is a high point for Israel. They're wealthy. Things are going well for them. What can be meant by slaughter is well attested in the pages of all of the other prophets and scholars all look into these things.
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And all of the commentaries that I read on this passage this week identify the same thing. What is the slaughter that's being referred to here?
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And it's quite specific. The revolters have gone, those who are rebelling against God have gone deep into slaughter.
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The commentaries led me to conclude it's this gruesome reality that this slaughter is quite likely a reference to their child sacrifices, sacrificing infants on altars.
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God's people in one of their greatest acts of rebellion against him ever recorded for us are offering up their children on altars to Molech in exchange for rain, in exchange for rain and wealth and abundance.
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They are deep into the blood of slaughter is the indictment. This is what God sees.
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We live in a culture and I would suggest to you, I can't help but make the comparison. We live in a culture that is deep into slaughter as well.
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We hide it probably better than they did. We don't sacrifice children to Molech. We don't sacrifice children to Baal or to Asherah, but we are a culture deep into the slaughter of infants.
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Is that fair? Am I being fair? I think it's fair. I think America is deep into the blood of infants offered to other gods.
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And we might as well, I would be for naming them because I think we've got names. Capital C, convenience.
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Capital E, ease. Capital P, pleasure. Capital A, apathy.
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Oh, they have names, church. Our culture worships gods and goddesses. We don't call them
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Molech or Baal. But sacrifices have to be made, don't they? The pagan idols demand a sacrifice in exchange for wealth and abundance.
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And while I can't soften the gravity of this devastating wickedness that has captured our culture for as long as I've been alive,
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I was born on a marker day, January 24th, 1973. I just aged myself.
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You can do the math. Yes, you probably already knew I was that old anyways. You probably thought I was older. But the day before I was born was the day that Roe v.
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Wade was officially ratified. So I am the age of Roe v.
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Wade. I am the legality of abortion in America is me and under, just younger than me.
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And it's devastating, isn't it? I do want to speak words of hope to anyone here in this room.
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And I recognize that a church our size has been impacted by someone making a decision to end the life of their child, maybe even somebody in this room.
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And maybe you haven't even shared it with anybody. God's grace is available to you. His forgiveness is real.
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And hope can be found in Jesus Christ, amen? I'd be open to talk through the grace of God and pray with anybody who is in that hard place.
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But I recognize that many women would not even want to come and share this with me, would not want to talk to a man about this.
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But I'm confident that we have many women who would love to talk with you and pray with you and express God's grace to you.
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You could start with my wife. She's right here. I think almost everybody here knows you, but some of you don't.
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So you could talk and start with her. And she would be glad to connect you with someone. My wife has in her top five on the
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Strength Finder Relator, she loves being able to connect people. And that's one of her gifts. And she would love to be able to do that for you.
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There's grace available, but I cannot soften the blight of the slaughter in our culture. You get those two?
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There is grace available for anybody that was caught up in it. There's also a great devastation that we need to be mindful of and be praying for our country.
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Praying more, maybe more so now than ever. God sees and knows all the sin, all the sins of the nation, all the sins of the individual.
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And their refusal to repent will result in his stern discipline of his people. Verse three, I've already kind of emphasized as the overarching theme of these first seven things.
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He sees their idolatry and their filth. He knows all of it. He knows the ways that they have betrayed their covenant with God and played the whore, the text tells us.
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He knows the filth and the defilement that Israel has engaged in. He sees it all. The fourth thing in verse four, he sees the spirit of whoredom that has enslaved them.
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They are enslaved by their sin. Look with me at verse four. It's astonishing what it says. Their deeds do not permit them to return to their
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God, for the spirit of whoredom is within them and they do not know the Lord. Their deeds have led to them being enslaved, to being captured.
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Sin will run your life. Sin will be a master. And their capture results in a lack of relationship with God.
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There's a scary, scary truth, spiritual truth that's being expressed in verse four that is good for us to think about in our daily lives.
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Good for us to take in and consider here this morning. There is a point where we can be carried away into the,
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I'm gonna give it an air quote, joy of our sin. Do you know what I'm talking about? Where our sin becomes a delight to us, where we enjoy it and it begins to fulfill us and it begins to meet a need for us and we begin to love it and we begin to cherish it and we begin to hide it from others, but we keep it for ourselves.
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And there comes a point where you are enslaved to it. There comes a point where it begins to run the show and we don't get to decide when that is.
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Did you know that? You don't get to decide whether that's after the first time or the 10th time. But there will be a point where it will own you.
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There will be a point where the sin will begin to run the show and we can never therefore play with just a little sin assuming we'll have it under control.
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The sins of Israel hold the people and will not let them run back to God. Do you see it in verse four?
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Won't let them run back to God even if they wanted to. The sin is holding them.
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So here's the thing, church. We can never sin today with a plan or a scheme or a plot to repent tomorrow.
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I've had people say that to me. Well, God's gracious. God's forgiving. I'll just ask for forgiveness later. I'll do what
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I want this week and have a bender at the end of the week and then I'll go and then I'll go and ask for forgiveness on Monday, right?
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And it'll be a great fun weekend, but then I'll just ask for forgiveness. Have you ever? And just being honest,
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I think all of us have wondered that. Like, what does grace do? What does that mean for us? And here's what
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I love is just this reality. It's worth leaning into. You don't know whether you will want to repent on Monday.
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It's possible that you just fall in love with it to the exclusion of your God. You just say,
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I'll take this over him any day. That's what the people of Israel are doing here. He sees this.
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He knows this. We may become so enamored and blinded by our sin like Israel that we refuse to give it up and it may wrap us up and carry us away to our very grave.
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Sin will run your life if you give it a chance. They started doing some things.
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That's how it all began for them. Just doing some stuff, some deeds. Those deeds became a spirit of whoredom and that spirit took up residence in them and they no longer knew the
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Lord where no is a relational word, not a mental word. Like they forgot that God was God and they forgot everything they had ever learned about Him.
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No, not that kind of not knowing Him, but that kind of not relating to Him. You see, the animating principle within the people of Israel as of the writing of Hosea is a spirit of whoredom rather than a spirit of God.
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They don't know Him and quite likely are blinded to Him because their lust has eclipsed their view of the Almighty. The immediate gratification of sexual sin has gripped their hearts so that a relationship with God seems unnecessary or at least undesirable.
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Think about that. God's people relating to Him in a way that it's kind of undesirable to follow Him, kind of undesirable to have
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Him because how many of you know that when He enters your life, He begins to call some shots? He begins to tell you what to do and what not to do and God is seeing all of this, church.
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Can you imagine the fact that the God who hears every prayer, you think about His omniscience and omnipresence, you think about all that He knows,
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He hears every prayer, amen? He also sees every sin. He knows every sacrifice and good deed, amen?
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He's with you when you help somebody, when you're doing good, when you're sharing the gospel, when you're reading your Bible, when you're praying,
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He's there, amen? Oh, glory. But He also sees every abuse, every murder, every betrayal.
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He sees the captivity of His people wrapped up in a spirit of whoredom, lying and cheating and stealing and thieving.
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He sees every man trapped in pornography. He sees every woman trapped in pornography.
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What He sees is going to lead to what He does. And He sees it all.
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What He sees is going to lead to what He will do. The fifth thing that we see, that He sees their pride in verse five,
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He sees all pride. And it seems so ironic to say that the same people who have fallen into a trap of whoredom, the same people who are offering infants to idols are the same people trapped in pride.
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How can they be proud? Well, I think we can all relate to that. Anybody else? Anybody ever been caught in a life of sin and proud at the same time?
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Anybody ever just like, like just basically lay into your spouse and the next minute you're thinking you're all that and a bag of chips?
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Any of you? Anybody? Like, I mean, we can be moved from like sin to pride very quickly. And that's exactly what's happening here.
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And God can't help but see their pride when their pride is testifying before His face, the text says.
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It's like they're flaunting it before Him. Their pride is ever before Him. He never stops seeing their intense and obnoxious pride of His people.
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They shall stumble in guilt and the southern kingdom of Judah will stumble with them. And this is by the way, the first mention that we understand that Judah is also gonna go away too.
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They also are going to stumble. Now, within this declaration, Hosea is saying, the failure of God's old covenant people will be complete.
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The old covenant has succeeded in showing all humanity that we will not be able to be justified by laws or rules.
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The end of all aspiration of self -fix and self -remedy is found in the Old Testament. It's over back then.
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But unfortunately, we have not been good students of the Old Testament. So I was raised in a church that taught me to act like Noah. They never mentioned the drunken part.
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They told me to act like David. But in Sunday school, they didn't cover Bathsheba. Do you know what
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I'm talking about? So I learned, I learned that this is like the hall of faith, right? These amazing people, be like them, live like them.
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And the Old Testament exists to show us you can't please God through law. You won't make it.
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You cannot get to him that way. And that's what it exists to show us. David messed up.
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Joseph messed up. Peter messed up. I mean, in New Testament as well. But all of these people messed up needing a rescue.
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The terrible blight of false pride is alive today. Where anyone holds to the notion that we are good enough or we can be good enough, there should be a reminder of verse five.
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Circle verse five and come back to it when you sense a spiritual pride welling up within you. The pride of Israel testifies to his face.
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Israel and Ephraim shall stumble in his guilt. Judah also shall stumble with them. Our pride before his face is not a good thing.
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His eyes are full of our sins. And so what I'm getting at here, church, this is kind of important. You can never convince the one who sees your heart, who sees your actions, who sees your attitudes, who has heard every word you've ever said, you will not be able to convince one like that that you're basically good.
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Do you see the folly in that? Do you see the folly immediately in any attempt to try to convince
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God that you're okay? To convince him that you're doing basically good? That's folly, isn't it?
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That's silly. He has seen it all. He has known it all. He's observed it all.
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Everything that you've ever done is laid bare before him. The sixth thing that he sees is their empty worship in verse six.
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They go to the wrong places to worship him. I am reading through the Bible in two years right now.
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I'm going through the Christian Standard Bible and I'm taking it slower. I've been going a little bit breakneck pace the last couple of years and I wanted to slow down.
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So I'm nearing the end of Leviticus right now in my daily reading. And all throughout that stretch is a stretch that really bores people a lot, right?
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Like it's all the sacrifices, the laws, the rules, how to worship him, how big to make the temple, how big to,
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I mean the tabernacle, how big to make the altar and how to burn sacrifices on it and all that stuff. But the point being that one thing that impresses me as I go into Hosea is how detailed he was in his instructions to them, right?
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Very detailed in the instructions so that they couldn't get away later and say, well, we didn't know where you told us.
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We didn't know where we were supposed to worship. We didn't know what sacrifices we were supposed to bring. We didn't know what kind of altar to make.
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We didn't know. We didn't know. No, he's very explicit. Do you get it? So he shows them exactly what to do.
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And he said, go down to Jerusalem and take your sacrifices there to the priests there.
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And so they go to every green hill where they made it easier for people because it's a long trip to Jerusalem.
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Who has time for that? Nobody got time for that. So they go to every green hill where they made their own places of worship and they go with their herds and their flocks, but God will not be found there.
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They go to the wrong place. God will not be found in the midst of their false worship. God sees our pretense.
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He knows when we're putting on a show for others instead of genuinely worshiping him as he has set forth. He knows when we're trying to buy him off with offerings or other external shows.
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Our God sees the motivations of our heart. He knows why every one of you are sitting here. He knows what got you up out of bed and got you around and got you here.
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He knows that some of you are here because you think you just checked a box and God's gonna love you better this week. And he might even bless you and he might give you good things because you sacrificed an hour and a half of your time for him this week.
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And he knows you're trying to buy him. And he's not pleased with that. He wants us to worship him because we see how glorious and beautiful he is and how awesome he truly is.
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He sees all of our pretense. He sees our false worship. What he sees will lead to what he does.
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What he sees will lead to what he's going to do. He sees lastly in verse seven their faithlessness.
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They have betrayed the Lord in breach of covenant. This is like a marital relationship kind of word and they have been unfaithful.
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They have cheated on him. They have deserted him and he sees. Their union with pagan gods has produced strange fruit in their lives.
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That's the word that's translated, I think alien, what is it in verse seven? Alien children, it's a weird word.
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They have dealt faithlessly with the Lord for they have born alien children. Their faithlessness with God has resulted in them going with idols and the idea is getting with the idols has produced wayward, wrong, strange fruit, monstrous fruit in their lives.
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Like what do you see when a life is connected to Jesus and the spirit is alive in them? Fruit like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self -control, right?
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Like that's what you see in a life that's connected to God. But what if a life is connected to say, convenience?
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Capital C, convenience. What if a life is connected to capital E, ease? What if it's connected to pleasure?
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It bears all kinds of gross fruit in a person's life. Do you know what I'm talking about? It just produces all kinds of corruption from within.
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Lies and cheating and stealing and all kinds of coverups and all kinds of things that come up out of that.
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Rather than good fruit that we experience through being united with Christ and his ways, any connection with idols will produce monstrous offspring.
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And in his seeing, God pledges to devour them at a time of feasting and revelry. That phrase, the new moon will consume you and your fields seems strange, but it's really talking about a time of festivity.
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Especially celebrated in the pagan cultures, they had celebrations around the new moon. And he's basically saying, at a time of your revelry, at a time when you are celebrating, at a time when you are like celebrating paganism is a time when
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I will destroy you. See, God sees the sins of his people. And so in all of that, he sees all of this mess.
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And now we come to the point where we see what God does in light of what he sees, verses eight through 14.
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There's an abrupt call to battle in verse eight. Blow the horn, sound the alarm, lead the way into battle,
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Benjamin. Most of verse eight is highlighting an attack that is coming from the south, but moving swiftly northward.
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Benjamin was indeed the first to be attacked by Assyria about 20 years after Hosea wrote these words.
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And he says, lead the way, Benjamin, you're gonna get attacked and then you're gonna lead the way. And then, but it's all coming north.
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The southern tribe of Benjamin was miraculously rescued by God, but the north will not be. And verse eight only highlights the northward trajectory of enemy forces that are coming for the northern tribe of Israel.
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He's predicting in part the way that this is all gonna go down. How is God's judgment gonna be meted out? It's gonna be through the
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Assyrian lion, the Assyrian military complex, literally represented by a lion in all of their art.
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God's wrath toward all that he has seen is going to take two forms in this passage. So we saw seven things that God sees.
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We see two things really that God does in response to that, both related to the word wrath, both expressions of his wrath.
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And it's important that we recognize both metaphors we are given for the wrath of God toward all that he sees of the sins of his people.
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He sees our sins, he responds in wrath, and that wrath takes two forms. Back in verse six, it was said, the first form is in verse six, with their flocks and their herds, they shall go to seek the
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Lord, but they will not find him. He has withdrawn from them. This is an emphasis on God's passive wrath.
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His withdrawal is always an image of the removal of protection. Now, I wanna just point out that there's something that's obvious here that some of you might miss, and that's that it's said, it's stated here, that God has withdrawn from them.
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It's also stated in scripture that God is everywhere at all times. How can that be?
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Is God opening up some kind of rift in reality in which God is not present there?
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Not at all, that's not what we're meant to think. This is a metaphor. It's to help aid us in understanding how
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God is responding to people. There is nowhere that God is not. He cannot withdraw in any real way from any space.
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It's a metaphor for his judgment, his withdrawal of his protection.
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But there's a second, more often overlooked metaphor that we must turn to and really turn to the prophets to see more clearly, because you don't see it much in other places.
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There's some places and spots in the New Testament that will emphasize God's active wrath, but not many. They're primarily in the book of Revelation, some places and some stories in the book of, like you're wondering what
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Ananias and Sapphira judge dropped on the spot, that kind of stuff. Like you see some places where his wrath is applied in the
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New Testament as well, but in an active way. But this is, in the minor prophets, it's all over the place.
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And we must turn to these books. And our absence of knowledge of these books leads us to a wonky view of God, an unbalanced view of God.
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Because here we see his active wrath that tears and rends like a lion, his active wrath that consumes our goods like dry rot in the granary or moths in the closet.
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We find it, you know, there's illustrations and examples of this, but there's a song that we sing occasionally, and we've actually changed the words.
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It overemphasizes, I think, one side of this equation, but the passive wrath of God is comfortable to us in a sense, like,
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I mean, none of it's comfortable, but it's at least more palatable. Like, we don't mind it. So we can sing a song that has the lyrics, the father turned his face away.
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You know what I'm talking about? How deep the father's love for us? How many of you know the song I'm talking about? We sing it here occasionally. The father turned his face away from the son on the cross, right?
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And the passive wrath of God, withdrawing his protection, turning away, sounds really helpful.
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Sounds kind of, sounds better than, for example, what we might consider to be poor taste to say, to sing the father tore his flesh that day.
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Anybody less comfortable with that one? A little less comfortable, if that's the way we change that to, but it's just true.
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It's absolutely true. The wrath of God is not just merely him, like, looking away, I'm gonna take a break while they abuse you.
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It's literally on the son that day, his active, fierce gaze on his son on our behalf.
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Do you get it? Active wrath poured out on sin, your sin and mine.
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The father tore his flesh that day. Both are metaphorical for his wrath. Both need to be held in tension.
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His withdraw that removes protections is one aspect of his wrath, but his active application of wrath is an equally accurate metaphor.
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Remember that God has had a front row seat to the wicked sins of his people show. I don't imagine that he had much of an appetite for popcorn as he took that show in.
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As his wrath is built up patiently for centuries, observing the sins of his people.
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But now he says in Hosea to his Old Testament, Old Covenant people, battle is coming. The day of stumbling is soon and his people will be made a desolation in verse nine.
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And he says, this is assured. Look at the end of verse nine. This is a sure word to the Northern nation of Israel.
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But the South is in trouble too. They become like a people who steal the property of others, moving boundary markers, a grave sin in that ancient culture.
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And his wrath will be active toward them like a flood. Another expression of active wrath. The Northern kingdom will fall to a terrible siege of the
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Assyrians in 721 BC. The Southern kingdom hangs on a bit longer, but will fall to the
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Babylonians in 586 BC. Wiped out their entire way of life comes to a conclusion and they are carted off to exile in their foreign lands to learn pagan languages and serve as slaves.
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And Israel called Ephraim in verse 11 will be oppressed in judgment because of his pursuit of crap, the text says.
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Filth, excrement is the word here. They have just pursued just trash and garbage and crap.
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The wrath of God is indeed a crushing blow, but it's coming back on Ephraim's head as a result of his own decisions.
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And don't read any karma into anything that you see in scripture. There's only a personal almighty
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God who will not be trifled with, not some impersonal force of karma. We are able to ignore the personal almighty
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God, but it's only to our peril that we would ignore him. In his wrath, it says
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God will be like a moth that consumes the valuable clothes and cloths of Ephraim. He will be like dry rot infecting the granaries of Judah.
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Now, I'm just gonna be honest, I'm probably like most of you in the room, I prefer some of the kinder, softer parts of scripture like God is love,
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God is merciful, God is our Prince of Peace, things that make for good coffee mugs, right? That's good to have like on your coffee mug in the morning or on a poster to hang on your wall or a little thing to like decorate from Home Depot, not
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Home Depot, that's not the one I was looking for. What's the one? Hobby Lobby, thank you. Hobby Lobby has all those cutesy things. I don't know,
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Home Depot has all the cool stuff. But, distracted myself.
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We like the softer things, right? Like the things that make for a good plaque, the things that make maybe for like a comfortable cozy home.
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Try putting on your wall, God is like dry rot. Or put on your wall, God is like a moth that consumes, like right, like that just doesn't seem to be comfortable.
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But He is, the text says, He is the moth that consumes. He is the dry rot in the granary of those who betray
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Him. Can you say amen to that? We rejoice in the soft parts. We rejoice in the parts that are comfortable.
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But do we rejoice in all of God's revelation? Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. How do you feel about that? Does that make for a good coffee mug?
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I've never seen anything along those lines on a Christian poster or coffee mug. But can you picture that mug? God is like a consuming moth.
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God is like dry rot. Or in verse 14, God is like a rending lion tearing into His people. For I will be like a lion.
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I, even I will tear, says God. Is that your God? Is that your
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God? Is He like that? Unfortunately, I would suggest to you that God's people, particularly as revealed in Hosea, are foolish in our diagnoses.
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The people of Israel were. They misdiagnosed the injury. They think they are suffering politically or economically.
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And their circumstances are bad, so they just need to fix the circumstances. But their ailment, their problem, their deepest problem is spiritual, church.
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Don't we do the same thing? We try to fix our circumstances instead of seeking the remedy for our hearts.
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And so in verse 13, Ephraim turned to the very one who would eventually destroy them. Man, there's irony on irony on irony in that.
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The idea that he would turn to Assyria for help. Who did I say was gonna cart them off?
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Who's gonna come and attack them and finally destroy them? The one to whom they turn for help.
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They turn to Assyria and begin to pay tribute to, literal, physical, like gold and silver, and tribute to King Tiglath -Pileser
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III. And they begin to pay tribute for his protection, turning to a pagan king instead of coming back into covenant with their
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God. And that alliance will break. But consider, are we any better?
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Where do we turn to try to find the cures to our circumstances and our pains and our ailments and our difficulties?
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Where can we go to find healing? We try all kinds of cures. We try workouts, diet fads, pleasures, entertainments, drugs, politics, wealth, family.
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You name it, we can turn it into an idol, right? You name it and we can create a dependent -type relationship with it.
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The places we turn for healing are endless. But there is only one name given under heaven by which we may be saved.
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Only one place to turn. Bazillions of places. Bazillions of false gods and goddesses.
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One true and living God who can rescue and save you. Verse 14 is overwhelming in its explicit teaching.
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It's a teaching that tests the loyalty of many Christians regarding our commitment to holy scriptures. Is Hosea really right here?
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Does he get this right? Will we see Hosea as accurate in his representation of God? Will we accept that our
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God is like a lion, even a young, strong lion, toward his wayward old covenant people? Will we take on the lesson that our
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God is not a pushover when it comes to sin? You see, he sees it all. And what he does is withdraw protection in verse six, pour out his wrath like water, verse 10, destroy their provisions, verse 12, tear them apart like a lion and carry away their carcasses, verse 14.
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Note the active nature of God's judgment. He is not passive when Assyria destroys Samaria and exiles the nation of Israel, nor will he be standing by watching as the
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Babylonians sack Jerusalem and cart off Judah. He will be rending. He will be actively tearing.
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Jonathan Edwards wasn't being extreme when he preached his famous sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. He was just being biblical.
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We need the scriptures to understand our God. Otherwise, we end up crafting a God in our own image who never rends, never tears as a pushover.
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We'll turn a blind eye to our evil and wicked deeds. We will abuse grace. We will never be in awe of salvation.
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We won't have the force to forgive or to be humble. We will not understand the violence of the cross without an understanding of the darkness of our own sin and his great reasonable wrath toward it.
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Church, do you feel the weight of this passage? Raise your hand if you're feeling a little weight. Does it seem a bit heavy?
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It is. He sees it all. He sees all of it and it looks like wicked betrayal.
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He is completely righteous and holy and he will pour out his wrath like a flood on all sin. And this is what
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God does in light of what God sees. And he has done all of this for us as well.
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He's faithful. He's not some Old Testament God that we're talking about. And oh, praise God for the New Testament God.
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Glad for the good cop that showed up. We don't have to deal with the bad one. He's done all of this and he's consistent.
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He is consistent. The flood of his wrath poured out on our sin.
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The dry rod and moth of his depriving judgments actively sent out in judgment for your sins.
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In his wrath like a lion rending and tearing. The flesh of his son for you.
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The flesh of his son for me. The lion tore his people and carried them off into exile.
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And then it says he returned to his place awaiting an era and time when his people would acknowledge their guilt, seek his face and earnestly seek him.
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He had a plan for a day and a time. When we would turn from our sins, repent and earnestly come back to him.
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And this is the hope at the end of the tunnel. That's verse 15 that I just said. But I think it's worth reading again.
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I will return again to my place. This is the lion carrying off, the lion tearing, the lion rending. And then he will return to his place awaiting a time for them to acknowledge their guilt and seek his face and in their distress, earnestly seek
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Yahweh, the Lord God. Church, there's hope because God was setting up the greatest and most amazing story of redemption in human history.
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Everything stated in Hosea is true. God has seen every single sin you or I have ever committed and ever will commit.
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His terrifying wrath though has been spent and it has been spent on his son.
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So that everyone who believes in Christ and has asked him to save them from their sins has been set free by his payment for us.
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Sound too good to be true? Well, it is true. Hosea helps us lean into the darkness so that we are moved to dance in this undeserved amazing light.
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This is better than winning the lottery. This is better than a trip to Disney World. This is better than a promotion to CEO. This is more startling and shocking than the word that the cancer has gone into remission or whatever it might be.
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Do you realize everything that your God has seen over your life? Do you realize what he's seen?
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All of it. Anybody just kind of like, just a little throw up like in your thoughts and like that little like fear like the hair on the back of your neck.
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He saw that? Go ahead and catalog for just a minute a couple of the things in your life that he saw.
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I wanna see the expressions on your face as you think about it. It's just like, it's just torturous, isn't it? The things that he has seen you do, the things that he has seen you say, the attitudes that you have had.
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You thought you did a good job not expressing them, but you thought you had just muttered under your breath. He got that too.
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All of it true. All of it reprehensible. All of it a betrayal against him. All of it worthy of his wrath.
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And then do you know what his wrath is like? Like a flood, like an incessant creeping rot, like a moth that consumes, like a lion attacking and rending and tearing.
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An image that we didn't even put up here because we started to Google and like look over, unsplash and stuff and the images were a little disheartening.
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You can get a lot of pictures of lions tearing flesh. Do you get his grace, church?
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Jesus took it all for you and me. Church, come to the tables in gladness and maybe even some glad tears.
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Come to remember our savior, our hero, Jesus Christ, the rescuer and redeemer who willingly took that wrath on himself for us.
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He was indeed, as we sang earlier, stricken, smitten and afflicted by the Father for us.
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How can one of the harshest passages in scripture regarding the wrath of God be turned into hope? Because the cross is the place of a new covenant.
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The sermon, this sermon, I thought about how to land it and what are some application points and I just couldn't,
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I couldn't come anywhere close to a to -do list from this. What am I supposed to say? Stop leading others astray, stop the slaughter, stop playing the horse, stop the pride, stop the false worship, start being faithful.
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Would that scratch the surface of what this passage is calling us to? Not at all. It must land at an acknowledgement of what he has done for us and a deep and abiding thankfulness for it.
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You might find that to be too nondescript and you're like, Don, I need a list. I need things to do, but I can't land it anywhere else.
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He who has seen all of our darkness, who would be right to consign us all to his wrath instead has poured out that wrath on his son for us.
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If Jesus is your Lord and Savior and you're at peace with everyone else here, then I encourage you to come to the tables with joy this morning.
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Come in awe, come in shock that he would see every bitter thought and every evil deed and every evil word uttered on your lips and make a way for us to be set free by grace through faith in Jesus Christ our
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Lord. Let's pray. Father, I thank you for a trip through the darkness that you are,
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I mean, I can't imagine the things that you see daily, the things that are played before your eyes. It's burdensome to know my own sin and you know the sins of the world, not just corporately, but individually and explicitly, and you have loved us.
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I can't imagine why, but it's for your glory and for your honor and for eternity.
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So Father, I pray that we would approach you with awe and wonder and an appropriate level of respect and reverent fear and awe.
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You're holy, your wrath is just and right toward all sin and we're covered in it until Jesus came and set us free.
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Father, I pray that as we come to these tables, you would help us to just delight and rejoice.
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I know that this could become routine, it could become something that we do, get up out of the seats, go to the table, take the cracker, take the juice, drink it, eat it and done and onto our day.
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Father, I pray that this would be a time of legitimate reflection on what you have done for us. The great and amazing and glorious grace given to us through your son, the forgiveness, the redemption, the propitiation of your wrath, the taking of your wrath, the substitutionary nature of this, that he stood in our place, taking our sin.
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Father, I pray that you would empower us and strengthen us through this activity this morning of reflecting and remembering what we deserved, what you do to sin and you did that to your son for us.