Reading through the Bible in One Year: Mark 3-4

Good Morning Brothers and Sisters,

Hosea 9:1-3

Do not rejoice, O Israel, with exultation like the nations!

For you have played the harlot, forsaking your God.

You have loved harlots' earnings on every threshing floor.

2Threshing floor and wine press will not feed them,

And the new wine will fail them.

3They will not remain in the Lord's land,

But Ephraim will return to Egypt,

And in Assyria they will eat unclean food.

Israel is warned not to rejoice over their crops because they were not in fellowship with the Lord.  God had blessed their harvest, but they were not to rejoice, the blessing of the harvest was to make them more appealing to the Assyrians.  God did not set them up for a fall, they had set themselves up for a fall, and God was bringing punishment on them for their turning from Him. They had become a plum ripe for picking; the Assyrians were on their way.  They also wanted to eat the unclean food, so God was going to allow them to, in captivity.  God was giving them the desires of their hearts, only the pleasure of sin was to be removed by the blight of captivity.  As an illustration of the falsehood of prosperity check out this remark from Dr. McGee:

“I believe that one of the methods God has used to judge the United States is that He has judged us with prosperity. After World War II, I predicted that we were going to have to suffer as the other nations had suffered during the war. We did not have any bombing as did England, France, Germany, and Japan. We escaped all that, but I felt at the time that God would judge us somehow. After the war we became the most prosperous nation in the world, and it seemed a contradiction of the statements I was making. It took me about ten years to see what God was doing. God judged us with prosperity, and that is what He did to Israel. He said, “I have provided everything for you, and you’re giving credit to your own ingenuity and your own ability. You’re a proud people, and you’re not looking to Me nor giving Me credit at all.” That is the picture of Israel and, my friend, that just happens to be a picture of my nation since World War II.”^[1]

Deut. 16:13-17

"You shall celebrate the Feast of Booths seven days after you have gathered in from your threshing floor and your wine vat; 14and you shall rejoice in your feast, you and your son and your daughter and your male and female servants and the Levite and the stranger and the orphan and the widow who are in your towns. 15"Seven days you shall celebrate a feast to the Lord your God in the place which the Lord chooses, because the Lord your God will bless you in all your produce and in all the work of your hands, so that you shall be altogether joyful. 16"Three times in a year all your males shall appear before the Lord your God in the place which He chooses, at the Feast of Unleavened Bread and at the Feast of Weeks and at the Feast of Booths, and they shall not appear before the Lord empty-handed. 17"Every man shall give as he is able, according to the blessing of the Lord your God which He has given you.

The rejoicing at the Feast of Booths, or harvest time was ordained by the Lord.  However, Israel had chosen to turn away from Him in the daily worship, turning to Baal, and had chosen to hold to the fun festivals.  They were living in a state of hypocrisy, holding to a form of godliness, yet denying God's power in their lives.  Look at what Paul had to say about this, as a student of the Word, he saw that things were going full circle:

2 Tim. 3:1-5

But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come. 2For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, 4treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God; 5holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; and avoid such men as these.

Hosea 9:4-6

They will not pour out libations of wine to the Lord,

Their sacrifices will not please Him.

Their bread will be like mourners' bread;

All who eat of it will be defiled,

For their bread will be for themselves alone;

It will not enter the house of the Lord.

5What will you do on the day of the appointed festival

And on the day of the feast of the Lord?

6For behold, they will go because of destruction;

Egypt will gather them up, Memphis will bury them.

Weeds will take over their treasures of silver;

Thorns will be in their tents.

Dismal times were ahead for Israel.  They wanted to turn away from God and to offer sacrifices to Baal, joining the pagans in their worship, and now God was allowing that to happen.  All the glory and fame of belonging to the most powerful and feared God in the land was to be washed away by their striving for sin. This should be a note to us, that in an effort to strive to sin, they forgot that they should be striving to follow God.  It is the attitude of the heart, and the passion of life that counts, if the passion is to follow the world, and then sure, God will allow the wishes of His children.  But, that doesn't mean that following the desires of the heart will end up in good times.

2 Kings 17:6

In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria and carried Israel away into exile to Assyria, and settled them in Halah and Habor, on the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.

Since Israel had refused to worship the Lord, God set it up so that they would not be able to worship Him according to the Law.  They were figuratively removed from His presence as He cut off the hypocritical sacrifices that they were offering.  The remark on Egypt is probably referring to their returning to the way they were before the exile.  Memphis had a burial ground which was famous; the reference here is that they would be joined with the Gentiles even in burial.  There was also a literal fulfillment of this prophecy, as is indicated by the prophecy from Jeremiah 44:1-14.

Hosea 9:7-9

The days of punishment have come,

The days of retribution have come;

Let Israel know this!

The prophet is a fool,

The inspired man is demented,

Because of the grossness of your iniquity,

And because your hostility is so great.

8Ephraim was a watchman with my God, a prophet;

Yet the snare of a bird catcher is in all his ways,

And there is only hostility in the house of his God.

9They have gone deep in depravity

As in the days of Gibeah;

He will remember their iniquity,

He will punish their sins.

The forms of righteousness that were left in the land were mere shadows of the true righteousness.  God called them fools, demented and immersed into sin, not a good position for a prophet of God. 

The reference to the depth of their sin was illustrated by the reference to Gibeah.  (Read Judges 19 to get an accurate picture of the story.)  Things at Gibeah had become very bad, when you read through the account it sounds like Sodom and Gomorrah, only there is a difference, the men of the city were bi-sexual.  Their desire was to have relations with the male travelers, yet they were offered a virgin girl instead, and they abused her to death.  Great judgment came in the following chapters.  If Gibeah was considered to be in deep depravity, what does God think about the world today?  Bi-sexuality and homosexuality are common today; many who are not involved in this are involved vicariously through pornography.  The world is too sophisticated today for the depraved to rule the show as they did in Gibeah, but how long will that last?  As this is entertained in the homes of our nation, the real question is how long will it take before people will act upon the impulses that they are feeding? 

Hosea 9:10-14

I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness;

I saw your forefathers as the earliest fruit on the fig tree in its first season.

But they came to Baal-peor and devoted themselves to shame,

And they became as detestable as that which they loved.

11As for Ephraim, their glory will fly away like a bird--

No birth, no pregnancy, and no conception!

12Though they bring up their children,

Yet I will bereave them until not a man is left.

Yes, woe to them indeed when I depart from them!

13Ephraim, as I have seen,

Is planted in a pleasant meadow like Tyre;

But Ephraim will bring out his children for slaughter.

14Give them, O Lord-- what wilt Thou give?

Give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts.

God was ashamed of His people, and as a result of His judgment, their wombs would be closed.  The children that were born were to be snatched away by the enemy, I am not sure if this was in reference to being taken for slavery, or being used for sacrifice.  Either way, their children were to be removed from their lives.  The glory of being God's chosen was to be removed, the promise to Abraham that his children would multiply was placed on hold, and God would bring judgment upon Israel for their wandering from Him.

The reference to "Baal Peor" is covered in Numbers 25, where the Jews had become involved with the daughters of Moab.  They had sexual relations with them, and participated in their idol worship.  As a result of their straying, God brought great judgment upon them, execution of the leaders of the people was ordered to turn away God's wrath.  In all, 24,000 people died before the wrath of God was satisfied. 

Hosea 9:15-17

All their evil is at Gilgal;

Indeed, I came to hate them there!

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.

16Ephraim is stricken, their root is dried up,

They will bear no fruit.

Even though they bear children,

I will slay the precious ones of their womb.

17My God will cast them away

Because they have not listened to Him;

And they will be wanderers among the nations.

Whew!  Imagine being in that position, God was really mad at them.  There are three key things in these verses, first they were to be driven from their land, second, they were to be cut off spiritually from God, and third they were cursed to be wanderers among the nations.    This prophecy came to pass in the Old Testament times, and to a degree is still happening today.  God has started gathering His children, the Jews, from among the nations today with the forming of the nation Israel, but for the most part they are still dispersed among the world.  Spiritually they are still dried up, because they have rejected the Messiah that had come for them.  But that is slowly changing, there is a great messianic movement among the Jews today, and they are coming to know their Messiah, Jesus, in great and powerful ways.

One note on these verses, in the Hebrew, it is indicated that there was a domestic squabble going on here.  The idea is that Israel was like an unfaithful wife, and the Lord, the husband was very displeased with her, wanting to kick her out of His house and remove His protection from her. 

A note of correction, in the commentary on Revelation 1:1-8, I had stated that a bondservant was born as a servant.  I screwed that one up, Erik emailed me and straightened out my thinking, for more information refer to Deuteronomy 15:12-17, it gives a picture of what a bond-servant is. (Thanks Erik!) The tremendous thing about this is that we choose to follow the Lord, we are not coerced or forced to follow Him.  This is also evident from our study today in Hosea, God allowed the Jews to follow Him of their own free will, when they chose not to, they incurred judgment on themselves.  God does not force His kids to follow Him, but He makes it very uncomfortable when they don't.

The shoe-leather of this passage today is that we are just like the people of Hosea's time.  Praise God that we have Jesus and salvation to preach to the world.  As we go about in our everyday lives, isn't it time that we start infecting the world with the Gospel?  It's time that we as believers speak out to those who are believers and those who are not regarding turning to Jesus.  Our Gospel is no better than the Gospel of the Jews if we keep it bottled up and refuse to share it with the world.

Father, as we consider Your word today, open our eyes to the world around us.  Enable us to reach out to others, to encourage the brethren and be a light to the world in these dark times.  Show us how to share our faith with others in order to turn the tide.

In Him,

Joe Turner.