Hosea 8
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Lament
Lament
Set the trumpet to your lips!
One like a vulture is over the house of the Lord,
because they have transgressed my covenant
and rebelled against my law.
To me they cry,
“My God, we—Israel—know you.”
Israel has spurned the good;
the enemy shall pursue him.
They made kings, but not through me.
They set up princes, but I knew it not.
With their silver and gold they made idols
for their own destruction.
I have spurned your calf, O Samaria.
My anger burns against them.
How long will they be incapable of innocence?
For it is from Israel;
a craftsman made it;
it is not God.
The calf of Samaria
shall be broken to pieces.
For they sow the wind,
and they shall reap the whirlwind.
The standing grain has no heads;
it shall yield no flour;
if it were to yield,
strangers would devour it.
Israel is swallowed up;
already they are among the nations
as a useless vessel.
For they have gone up to Assyria,
a wild donkey wandering alone;
Ephraim has hired lovers.
Though they hire allies among the nations,
I will soon gather them up.
And the king and princes shall soon writhe
because of the tribute.
Because Ephraim has multiplied altars for sinning,
they have become to him altars for sinning.
Were I to write for him my laws by the ten thousands,
they would be regarded as a strange thing.
As for my sacrificial offerings,
they sacrifice meat and eat it,
but the Lord does not accept them.
Now he will remember their iniquity
and punish their sins;
they shall return to Egypt.
For Israel has forgotten his Maker
and built palaces,
and Judah has multiplied fortified cities;
so I will send a fire upon his cities,
and it shall devour her strongholds.
I mentioned briefly last week that the next chapter would be all Lament and I wanted to read all of it so you would feel the weight of sorrow and judgment here in chapter 8. Both God and Hosea have shared now this experience so painfully of unfaithful wives. We’re going to get a picture of conflicting realities here for the next few chapters. Israel had their truth and God had His. There is a sense that Israel did not understand reality as it was. We see them responding in verse 2 We know you! to God. but like Mat 7:21-23 ““Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ And then will I declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness.’” and that picture of the people of God claiming God as their God when God denies knowing them is tragic and it’s terrifying. Their confidence has been entirely misplaced like the husband of a prostitute who expects a wife.
We see God’s narrative here of how self reliant and self determining Israel has been starting in vs 4. They made theire own Kings, They made their own idols. 1 Kgs 12:28-29
So the king took counsel and made two calves of gold. And he said to the people, “You have gone up to Jerusalem long enough. Behold your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.” And he set one in Bethel, and the other he put in Dan.
God has rejected their calf and is angry. He even asks the rhetorical “How long wil they be incapable of innocence?” Wow
Paul well aware of the scripture probably thought back on this passage when he caused so much trouble in Asia by disrupting this normal practice. Acts 19:24-29
For a man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought no little business to the craftsmen. These he gathered together, with the workmen in similar trades, and said, “Men, you know that from this business we have our wealth. And you see and hear that not only in Ephesus but in almost all of Asia this Paul has persuaded and turned away a great many people, saying that gods made with hands are not gods. And there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis may be counted as nothing, and that she may even be deposed from her magnificence, she whom all Asia and the world worship.”
When they heard this they were enraged and were crying out, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” So the city was filled with the confusion, and they rushed together into the theater, dragging with them Gaius and Aristarchus, Macedonians who were Paul’s companions in travel.
This was the norm for people, have your own little idols and things you worship. You can claim like Israel or the Roman Catholics we know God! but what are these idols you have in your household? You can claim they aren’t idols, you can claim you don’t worship them, but God knows your idols, your devotion, and to whom it goes. Do not pick that calf, the statue, the book, the story, the entertainment… to worship. Be intentional and remain focused on God! NOT fooling yourself by being in his Word and not abiding by it… Be doers of the word not just hearers is our call.
We need to learn through lament the troubles of Israel and stay clear of those troubles in our own lives. I know it’s our tendency to sin, we want to set up the things we enjoy, that we can control, that we can have some power over but we are called to be slaves, bought with a price to serve a good God.
We shouldn’t waste our time on pointless things, like sowing in the wind where what we’ll reap is a tornado of drama and brokenness instead.
Like Israel and the nations surrounding it they should not seek their aid to bolster their position of sin and rebellion against God. Have we, Are we, Will we do the same with the people around us? Do we keep in close confidence the ones who prop up our corpse to sin just a little more or do we let the old man rot while we walk in new life?
Have we doubled down in sin and setup an altar for adultry, have we elevated things of the world far above God’s plans, like Ephraim did altars for sinning?
At some point it is clear you aren’t God’s children and God will bring in destruction from outside. Whether outside is nature and a storm that floods the world, A fire from heaven that rains destruction upon your city, A nation who comes and takes you captive to spread you throughout the world, or strife that tears apart your home, you will go into destruction or you will turn to God.
I have seen a lot of pain this last week. Not the scrapped your knee pain but the pain of loss, the pain that death brings. There is lament over death. We’d like to shoo it away maybe by blasting trumpets at vultures over your house because they sense the death inside, like verse one has implied.
What do we take away from such dread, such lament, and such dire proclamations of dom? Do not die through rebellion of your own doing. Live with Christ who is not a God of the dead but a God of the living. We mourn, we lament, but we live and show Christ’s love to others. If we don’t we might just be hearers of the Word who have but to wait the vulture sitting atop our house.
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