Hosea Week 2
Review Hosea 1-3
Hosea prophesies over a long period of time potentially 30+ years
The major theme in his book is spiritual adultery and he uses the imagery of physical adultery to demonstrate it.
Hosea acts out prophetic drama or “sign-act” by marrying Gomer who is unfaithful
Gomer has children: Jezreel, No Mercy, and Not My People.
God promises to restore his adulteress people and Hosea restores his adulteress wife
Summary of Hosea 4-14
Let me tell you about my struggle with 1 John. If you’ve ever read any of the letters in the New Testament, you understand that most of them have a basic outline and flow of thought that moves from one idea to the next. Each topic is talked about in turn. 1 John is the one that’s really an outlier. It does not flow. It has 3 or 4 major themes and it just brings them up, drops them, talks about a different one, then brings up the first one again. It jumps all over, back and forth. It’s frustrating for me because I can’t categorize it. But that’s intentional, 1 John is meant to give you a “feel” for God’s character and how we respond to him, not necessarily an outline of him.
Hosea chapters 4-11 are quite a bit like 1 John. They don’t have a clear outline or pattern. I checked in 4 different locations for outlines and every single one of them was different. No one could nail down the structure of Hosea.
However, there are themes that pop up all throughout the book repeatedly. And the themes will give us a feel for Israel’s unfaithfulness to God and God’s frustration and disappointment, but then ultimately God’s faithfulness and restoration of Israel
The best outline I can give is this
1st case against Israel (ch. 4-11)
Accusation (ch. 4-8)
Judgment (ch. 9-10)
Restoration (ch. 11)
2nd case against Israel (ch. 12-14)
Accusation (ch. 12)
Judgment (ch. 13)
Restoration (ch. 14)
So with that said, I will do my best to walk through Hosea in a meaningful way
4:1-3
These 3 verses form the introduction to this very long section of Hosea and we’ll spend some time here
His opening words are addressed to the inhabitants of the land. This is important because ultimately it’s going to be the people themselves who are responsible for being wayward. It’s not their leaders (though they’ve had bad ones). They can’t blame other people.
Put a box around “There is… the land” - this is a key phrase.
The reason Israel is failing is summed up here. They lack two things - commitment to God and knowledge of God.
Circle the words Faithfulness and steadfast love
Turn to Exodus 34:6-7. This is God’s description of himself. It’s God telling us what his character is like. We’ve seen this exact description twice already in the minor prophets. We saw it in Joel 2:13 and Jonah 4:2
The two character traits of God that get the most additional airtime throughout the OT are the ones it says he is “abounding in”. They are steadfast love, or in Hebrew “Kesed”, and faithfulness, or in Hebrew “Emet” my son’s name
Here’s what they mean - Kesed is a word that is a committed love. It is a love that is almost always associated with a covenant. Kesed is the love you have for your spouse and is distinct from the love you have for food or for entertainment. So it’s often translated as steadfast love to give the idea of it being unwavering.
Emet is a word that is translated sometimes as truth and sometimes as faithfulness. And it’s because there is not really an English equivalent. It carries the idea of being steady, unchanging, and unwavering. Just like truth never changes, a person who is faithful is always the same.
So you see how both of these words are related to God’s consistency and often are related to how he keeps his covenants and can be trusted.
Listen to these verses from Psalms:
As for you, O Lord, you will not restrain
your mercy from me;
your steadfast love and your faithfulness will
ever preserve me! - Psalm 40:11
For the Lord is good;
his steadfast love endures forever,
and his faithfulness to all generations. - Psalm 100:5
For great is his steadfast love toward us,
and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever.
Praise the Lord! - Psalm 117:2
Now turn to Hosea 2:19-20. Notice the words - forever, steadfast love, faithfulness
These words are definitive words for God’s commitment to his spouse - Israel
Now look back at your sheet and see that when there is no faithfulness or steadfast love in 4:1 it means that though God is completely committed to Israel they are not committed to him
The second thing you’ll see that’s missing in verse 1 is knowledge of God. Circle knowledge of God.
I’ve mentioned this before, but in Hebrew to know someone very often carries a sense of relational intimacy and not just factual awareness of them. Thus “Adam knew Eve and she conceived and bore a son”
So in Hosea we see knowledge as the understanding of someone that brings you closer to them. And this is what Israel lacks. If they had a proper understanding of God, they would have been drawn closer to him.
Let me use this to mention something that has become a little bit of a soap box issue for me recently. A proper knowledge of God will draw us closer to him. I was talking with a few of the guys about this a couple of days ago. So often we as Christians want to jump straight to the practical outworkings of our faith - How do I control my anger? How can I be a better parent? How am I supposed to share my faith? How can I battle lust? And we skip over any knowledge of God, who he is, and what he has done for us. We think about the facts of God and say “Yes, yes, I already know those. Now give me the life hacks that will help me do stuff” But if you’ve ever read any of Paul’s letters in the New Testament, you’ll see that he never skips over the stuff you need to know before getting to the stuff you need to do. All of his letters start with truths about Jesus and how he saves us. Then! In the second half he gets to how you should live. We can’t live for God properly unless we first have a knowledge of God. So to some of us who are struggling with sin or don’t find you have much joy in your Christian walk, I think the best way to start is to back up and learn about who God is and what he has done first. Ok. Soapbox done.
In these next sections he’s going to highlight some of these problems and as I mentioned there are not clear dividing lines between topics here. The themes keep popping up everywhere.
4:4-9
The themes that are heaviest here are bad leaders and lack of knowledge
First you’ll see the bad leaders listed. In verse 4 he mentions the priest, circle priest, in verse 5 there’s a prophet, circle prophet, in verse 6 there’s a priest, circle priest, and in verse 9 there’s the priest again, circle priest.
He’s talking directly to the priests in this section (vs. 4)
In vs 5, the mother of the priest is Israel. Israel is the priest’s mother because she provides for him and gives him his needs
Israel will be destroyed, because the priest has failed to do what he was required to do. He was supposed to teach people about God and give them God’s laws. Underline “You have rejected knowledge” and “You have forgotten the law of your God”
Vs. 9 - “Like people, like priest” The people of that day were more interested in finding priests and prophets that told them things they liked to hear already. They didn’t want people that would challenge their sin and tell them truths about God.
This is all too familiar with many churches across the US. They have hired pastors who don’t teach the knowledge of God and the law of God, but simply tell people what they want to hear. If the things you think God is saying sound an awful lot like things that you already believe and agree with, then it’s not God you're hearing from, it’s yourself.
4:10-19
The major theme here is adultery and false worship
I won’t make you underline all the times that it mentions whoredom, adultery, and prostitutes, but you get the idea that this section is highly sexualized
But you might also notice lots of words like sacrifice, offerings, and idols. The reason they are adulterous is because they are engaged in false worship
You’ll notice in this section how confused and foolish the people are. In verse 10 they’re eating but never satisfied. Well that’s odd. I thought this meal would satisfy. It goes on to say that they play the whore, but do not multiply. Having children was extremely valued in those days and there was no birth control so sleeping around should result in multiplication and having treasured children. But they don’t. That’s odd. They’re confused.
But they are also absolute fools. Look at verse 12. They’re asking a piece of wood for information. Hosea is basically calling them dumb.
But how did they get here? Why are they such confused fools? It’s because sin has a debilitating effect on your mind and your ability to reason. When you are caught in sin, you cannot think clearly.
Look at verse 11, underline “take away the understanding”
Look at verse 12, underline “a spirit of whoredom has led them astray”
Look at verse 14, underline “a people without understanding shall come to ruin”
Look at verse 19, underline “a wind has wrapped them in its wings”. The word wind here could also be read as “spirit” similar to vs 12.
When someone is engaged in sin, their mind is darkened and their thinking is clouded. That’s why a drug addict will not make wise decisions for himself. That’s why a teenager who wants to sleep with their significant other will make horrible choices.
I once confronted a married man who was having illicit sexual conversations with women online. His wife found out, was understandably hurt, and wanted a divorce, but he was convinced that he wasn’t committing adultery because he hadn’t met up with any of these women physically. “Sure maybe it wasn’t a great idea, but it’s not THAT bad”
If you’re stuck in sin and you want to get out, you’ll have to start trusting the judgment of others who are thinking clearly, because you cannot trust your own understanding
5:1-7
In this section pride prevents them from returning
Ephraim is a name for Israel because Ephraim was the biggest tribe in Israel. It’s going to show up a lot in Hosea
Put a box around verse 4 and the first line of verse 5
You see our phrase again “the spirit of whoredom is within them”. Underline that.
They are caught up in the spirit, they are caught up in their deeds, and their pride prevents them from turning.
5:8-12
I don’t have any thoughts here, but I’ll just read these verses
5:13-15
Here in vs 13, they see that they are sick and wounded. Israel recognizes they aren’t doing as well as they used to. So they look to the king of Assyria for help. Well that’s a bit ironic because Assyria is the nation that will completely destroy them. Hosea points out he is not able to cure you or heal you. But they will be torn apart and taken away. Which is what Assyria does to them.
Occasionally, someone who is caught in sin will come to their senses enough to recognize that there is a problem. But recognizing that you have a problem is only one step, where you turn to for a solution is a completely different step. How many young women have felt like they had no value and they hate themselves so they think, maybe if I get in a relationship I will feel valued, only to discover that the relationship is outrageously destructive and leaves them more torn apart than ever.
In verse 15, the Lord says he’ll wait for people to turn to him and seek him.
6:1-3
Here Hosea gives a very impassioned plea to return to the Lord. Put a box around this whole section because it works as the opposite to our previous box.
Circle the word return. Remember that’s probably the biggest theme in Hosea. God wants the people to return. And remembering that God wants his people to return is the only way to make sense of the rest of this verse.
God is the one who tore them and God is the one who struck them and so they should return to him. That’s unusual right? You wouldn’t stab someone and then say, come here I can put a bandage on that. It seems as if God has been cruel and wants people to just forget that part.
But remember, God’s goal is always to get people to return. In the previous chapters we saw that God made the adulterous wife’s paths difficult and he removed all of the blessings he had given her. Why? So that she would return.
What God’s doing here has been commonly understood as discipline. When you discipline your child, it may seem at the moment as if it is something cruel, but it always has restoration and reconciliation in mind. That’s how discipline is always designed to work. It’s painful for the purpose of restoration.
Because God loves his children, he disciplines them. He wants their relationship to be restored.
Read Hebrews 12:7-11
We often want to avoid disciplining someone else because it seems unloving. But the truth is that discipline is a loving action meant to draw people back. Letting somebody careen down the pathway to their own destruction without intervening in the strongest ways possible is not loving.
I’m not sure what your experience with church discipline has been like in the past, but the goal of discipline should always be restoration, God wounds so that he can heal if they will return.
Vs. 2 - Hosea says the nation of Israel will be raised up to life on the third day. Jesus of course will ultimately do this in Israel’s place. This is why Jesus is able to say in Luke that the scriptures tell us the Christ would suffer and be raised on the third day. This is the only reference to third day resurrection in the Old Testament.
Vs. 3 - Finally Hosea pleads that they would press on to know the Lord. If you don’t truly know the Lord and have an intimate understanding of who he is and how he acts then you will just get caught up into the spirit of the age, the spirit of sin