Bible Commentaries

Threatened Destruction

Hosea 8:1-4.

"Set the trumpet to thy mouth. He shall come as an eagle against the house of the Lord, because they have transgressed my covenant, and trespassed against my law" ( Hosea 8:1).

The Lord pursues the evildoers, not in a spirit of vengeance, but in a spirit of expostulation, to be followed by such penalty as the evil deeds have provoked and deserved. When he commands the prophet to set the trumpet to his mouth he regards the prophet in the capacity of a watchman, whose function it was to notify the coming of God amongst the children of men in some form of judgment. Isaiah was commanded in similar terms—"Cry aloud, spare not; lift up thy voice like a trumpet." The trumpet called men to war, or alarmed them in periods of danger, or summoned them to concerted action on signal occasions. We are not to look upon the office of watchman as extinct. The term may indeed be applied to all trustworthy and vigilant leaders of society; we look to them to tell us the signs of the times, and to give us the signal either for flight or battle. When ministers of religion keep silent in the presence of social dangers or public calamities, they are not to be flattered as if they were exercising a wise prudence; they are to be condemned as unfaithful watchmen who consult their own interests rather than seek to defend and consolidate the welfare of the community. There is a great temptation to be silent in the presence of the wicked, for oftentimes the wealth of this world is in the hands of ungodly men, or it lies in their power to inflict great injury upon those who oppose their malignant will. It is under such circumstances that ministers of Christ are to show their intelligence, their fortitude, and their self-control. On the other hand, it must be borne in mind that neither political nor religious ministers are to unduly excite themselves about trivial subjects, or expend their strength in the consummation of frivolous purposes. There is a sad lack of proportion in any method or economy which expends energy upon objects unworthy of much consideration.

In the case before us it is the house of God that is in peril Strictly speaking, "the house of the Lord" relates to the Temple, because in that place the Lord had been pleased to record his name. We find it pointed out, however, with clearness that the expression "the house of the Lord" is not confined to what we understand by the word temple or sanctuary: for example, in Jeremiah 12:7 the Lord says, "I have forsaken mine house, I have left mine heritage; I have given the dearly beloved of my soul into the hand of her enemies;" and in Jeremiah 11:15 we read, What hath my beloved to do in mine house, seeing she hath wrought lewdness with many?" In these instances by the "house" of the Lord we are to understand the kingdom of Judah and Jerusalem. The title "God's house" should be preserved through all generations as peculiarly distinctive of the sanctuary; it is a larger and older title than the term "temple." In describing all his own people the Lord says, "My servant Moses is not Hosea 8:2).

The Hebrew has been put thus: To me shall they cry, We know thee; we, Israel, thy people, know thee. A parallel passage may be found in the gospel of Hosea 8:3).

The word "cast off" does not imply a merely mechanical or even intellectual action; that term is deeply tinged with moral significance, literally meaning, "to cast off with abhorrence." Israel not only cast off God, but abhorred all things good,—him who is good, and the thing which is good; for the word here employed includes both the person and the object. When a man rejects God he rejects all things good. He may not know it, he may even deny it; but he must be brought by consideration or by experience to know that to cast off the Fountain is to cast away the stream; to shut out the sun is to shut out the light; to forsake God is to accept the sovereignty of evil and darkness. What is the consequence of such off-casting? The consequence is stated in plain terms—"the enemy shall pursue him." The local reference is to the Assyrian, but the general reference is to the spirit of the law, the spirit that has been turned into an enemy by evil behaviour. "The way of transgressors is hard." "Though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not be unpunished." "Be sure your sin will find you out." "Whoso breaketh an hedge, a serpent shall bite him." The Bible is full of the revelation of this doctrine. We are not to consider the doctrine as one of mere retaliation, but as one of natural and inevitable consequence. The punishment which follows sin is a proof of the goodness of the law which would guard men against it. Fearful are the consequences which flow from sin, even in the sense of deprivation. Were there no definite or positive punishment inflicted on account of sin, yet the deprivation of blessing which follows the downfall of the soul would itself be overwhelming. No longer does the soul see light, or hear music, or respond to love, or enter into sympathy with the spirit of progress; doors are shut, lights are extinguished, voices are silent; all that made life a joy and a triumph, a victory and a hope, is taken away, and the sinning soul sits down in darkness, in sackcloth and ashes, mourning an irreparable, an infinite loss.

"They have set up kings, but not by me: they have made princes, and I knew it not: of their silver and their gold have they made them idols, that they may be cut off" ( Hosea 8:4).

The whole history of Israel is a history of protest against Hosea 8:5-14

"Thy calf, O Samaria, hath cast thee off; mine anger is kindled against them: bow long will it be ere they attain to innocency?" ( Hosea 8:5).

The history of this calf is recorded in the early books of Scripture, and is referred to again and again in the course of the revelation. "They made a calf in Horeb, and worshipped the molten image"; "The king took counsel, and made two calves of gold, and said unto them, It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem; behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. And he set the one in Beth-el, and the other put he in Dan." As Israel had cast off God, or good, in abhorrence, so the calf had cast off Israel as a thing that was detested. So it must be with all the idols made by men's hands. The history of idolatry is a history of failure. We need not go to heathen forms, or pagan ceremonies, or plunge into the darkness of savage life, in order to know what is meant by idolatry, for we ourselves daily practise it; and even in the midst of our spiritual worship there may be a subtle action operating upon the heart, seeking to seduce it into false trust and homage. It is marvellous that men learn so little from the history of their own race; it is still more marvellous that a man seems to learn next to nothing from the development of his own consciousness. We have seen money take wings unto itself and flee away; we have seen attractive forms wither and decay; we have seen the strongest associations of friendship dissolved or turned into positive enmities; we have observed how health is sapped, and how the strongest man but delays for a moment or two the accomplishment of his journey to the tomb; yet we go on worshipping at false altars and soliciting help from false sources, as if there were no history behind us to tell us the truth, to remind us of our errors, and to point the most useful morals. It should be regarded as the simplest truism in philosophy that only he who worships the true God can offer true worship; yet because God is invisible, or supposedly distant from us, we seize the seen, and the near, and the apparently strong, and offer bribes to things temporal. The heart must be cleansed of all this false trust, and be led in simple, humble, childlike trustfulness to cast itself upon the living God, caring only for pureness, and leaving all consequences in the hands of him who is the righteous Hosea 8:7).

This was proved by the whole history of the people. The calf of Samaria was broken to pieces. There were indeed two calves, but as they represented one and the same thing they were called as one—the calf, not the calves; the calf once worshipped was broken in pieces, and was treated as so many chips or fragments for the purpose of kindling a fire. We say we shall reap what we have sown; but we must not omit from the reaping the element of increase. We reap, it may be, of the quality which we have sown, but we certainly reap with an awful increase. Men who sow the wind do not only reap the wind, they reap the whirlwind,—literally, a mighty whirlwind. Nor do they garner the whirlwind as men might garner a crop; the whirlwind is not theirs, they rather themselves belong to the whirlwind, they are blown away by it, they are as chaff before its violence, when they cry their voice is not heard, because of the answering tempest; when they put forth their hands in prayer they are carried away violently as those who have no helper. "Be not deceived, God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap." The apostle, even in this passage, does not omit the element of increase, for he adds, "He that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption"—that is to say, he shall not only reap flesh, body, or dust, he shall reap each and all of them in its vilest form. There is a tone of contempt in the description which is given in this verse, "It hath no stalk;" although it looked well, yet there was no column of strength, there was nothing abiding; much was promised, but nothing came of all the promise; the seed should not send forth the corn with the ear; there should be no meal, there should be no satisfaction of hunger. The whole process is thus one of failure, disappointment, and mockery. The sinner is going to have a great harvest, and behold when he puts forth his sickle to reap he cuts down but handfuls of darkness! The sinner says he will make a universe of his own; he will construct it on his own pattern; he will govern it by his own laws; he will fill it with his own spirit; he will turn it to his own account; and behold the boaster is overthrown, and he lies down in humiliation and shame at the feet of the living God whose sovereignty he denied. All this is true, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. "I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree. Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not: yea, I sought him, but he could not be found." "The arms of the wicked shall be broken: but the Lord upholdeth the righteous." "The triumphing of the wicked is short, and the joy of the hypocrite but for a moment." Alas, all these great truths are proclaimed until they become so familiar as to lose much of their spiritual emphasis and accent. We are accustomed to this judicial thunder. For a time it would appear as if the enemy of souls were stronger than the Redeemer, for though we know the right we pursue the wrong, and although we confess in theological terms our errors, our sins, our shortcomings, and all our infirmities, we yet take our lives into our own hands as if we were invested with omnipotence.

"Because Ephraim hath made many altars to sin, altars shall be unto him to sin" ( Hosea 8:11).

The Lord will not permit the plural form of any word which he has consecrated. The word "altar" is right, but the word "altars" is wrong. The word "temple" is permitted, but when Israel buildeth "temples" he offends against God. Ephraim became busily religious. It was not enough for Ephraim to have an altar; he must have an altar everywhere! Thus his very religion became irreligious. His piety became practical atheism. Ephraim tried to do what men are in every age attempting—to make up for the complete, solemn, grand, overwhelming idea of God by the creation of an endless number of petty and distracting details; hence we have creeds, standards, dogmas, forms, tests of orthodoxy, and other altars innumerable and unnameable. We should not pluralise God's singularity. We must not attempt to complicate that which God has made strikingly simple; so simple that a child-mind can approach it and comprehend it. The altars which Ephraim built were to be unto him as occasions of sin. Where Ephraim meant to pray he was to find a new temptation created by his own evil genius. We are led astray by our own craftiness. Our theological wisdom often becomes the means of our practical impiety. We turn religion into a scheme, a plan, a philosophy, something which human genius can create, invent, administer, overrule, patronise, and thus we drag down an idea which ought to be infinitely transcendent within the limits of our own understanding, and within the influence of our own humiliating patronage. The time will come when men will be ashamed of their formal mechanism and creeds which they intended to be as altars and final tests of religious correctness. Let us beware of our inventions, for they come out of a heart that is not right; let us beware of our formal orthodoxies, for they may be the offspring of a cleverness that is itself perverted. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord; there is one Lord, one faith, one baptism; there is one Mediator between God and Hosea 8:12).

A very notable word is this word "written." It is everything to have definite law put down in definite expression, and to have it written, so that it can be made matter of immediate and final reference. The term is the more important that the grammar may be so altered as to give the present instead of the perfect tense; then the statement will read, "I write to him the great things of my law." By "great things" understand manifold things; God had written again and again; he had repeated his law in every possible form; it was written in history and Hosea 8:13).

The point to be noted here is that the people in offering their sacrifices supposed themselves to be giving gifts unto God. They were the victims of what is now a popular sophism, namely, that worshippers are always giving. The people in the days of Hosea regarded their offerings as so many donations, which showed their liberality; and yet they felt those offerings to be taxations, penalties. They gloried in their sacrifices as if they were conferring some honour or obligation upon God. The Lord on his part denounced them, would not accept them; he remembered the iniquity of those who sacrificed, and visited their sins upon them. What they meant, or should have meant, as a sacrifice, became nothing but mere "flesh" under their impious hands; the sacrifice was not offered in the proper spirit, and therefore it was never transmuted into a holy and acceptable offering. It is the same with our prayers. When we pray perfunctorily, pray in mere words, pray only formally, as if we were doing a duty which we would gladly escape, then our words, how eloquent soever they may be from a rhetorical point of view, are never sublimated into prayer, and never find their way to heaven; they are words, words only, empty letters, carrying no magnetism of the soul, no fire of the heart, and they fall back upon the listener, not as answers, but as reproaches. The people in the days of the prophets actually ate the flesh which they offered as sacrifices. They thus profited by what appeared to be an act of benevolence, an act of worship, or an act of giving. Here was an instance of making religion an investment, a profitable speculation; giving away with one hand, and taking back with the other. What was the upshot of all this in the days of the prophet? His answer Hosea 8:14).

Israel had not only forgotten the law, but had forgotten the Lawgiver. Israel had not surrendered some highly spiritual or metaphysical religion—had not abandoned some finely-spun and hardly intelligible theory—but had actually forgotten his Maker, and had supposed himself to be made by his own hands. To such abasement may the mind of man come! First the mind surrenders a doctrinal position; then it gives up a practical duty; then it denies a moral obligation; then it dismisses God from the higher ranges of thought; and finally the mind forgets that it ever had a Maker at all! This is the downward path; this is the infinite incline! Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall. Men do not generally give up their religion as a whole, instantly, furiously, and ostentatiously; little by little it slips from them, a line at a time, a point in a day, but the end of the process is depletion, famine, death. In the use of the word "temples" we come again upon the thought which we found in connection with the word "altars" in the eleventh verse. God had commanded one temple to be built, namely, that at Jerusalem, so that to add to the number of temples were itself a sin. Thus we are brought back to the doctrine that there may be an irreligious religion, an impious piety, a fussy and too energetic devotion that soon brings itself to the level of mere superstition. God charged the sin of idolatry upon Ephraim and the sin of self-confidence upon Judah. All this was done under the pretence of being excessively religious. God will tear away our vain disguises, and show us that in spite of an action that almost rose to the degree of violence we were in heart far away from himself, corrupting the simplicity of his law, and complicating the direct demands of his truth. God is consistent with himself when he says he will send a fire upon the cities that should devour the palaces thereof. Israel and Judah had forgotten their Maker, but God would not forget them. There comes a time in the history of the human soul when, nothing but vengeance can be understood. There is an hour in which the Gospel is no Gospel; its charm is gone because it cannot be appreciated by the deaf ear and the hardened heart; there is a time when music itself becomes but a knell of judgment. Against all such apostasy we are warned in faithful and tender language, under every possible form of expression, so that if by any means God may reach our souls, and arrest them in their downward career. If we will not listen to love we shall feel the sting of fire. If we will persist in building palaces for ourselves when God has made a house for us, the fire shall leap upon our palaces, and utterly devour all their strength and beauty.

Prayer

Saviour of the world, we bless thee for the Cross. We can never understand it, but we can feel its love. We need the Cross; all we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way. There can be but one hope for us, and that hope we find in the Cross of Christ. God forbid that we should trust aught else; God forbid that we should glory in aught else. We are not ashamed of the gospel of Christ; it suits the heart, it meets the agony of the spirit with healing, it saves the soul. We cannot find a light in the midnight of our self-accusation; there is no light in ourselves, there is no light in men, for we are all in one condemnation. There is a Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world; there is a Light above the brightness of the sun upon the Cross; to that Cross we look night and day evermore, and to that Cross no loving heart ever looked in vain. May thy Word be precious to us; always an old word, yet always new; always an eternal thought, always an immediate message. Lord, evermore give us this bread: if a man eat of this bread he shall hunger no more: Lord, in thine house there is bread enough and to spare, why should men perish with hunger? Feed the souls that love thee, and bring back the souls that are far away, that they may fill the vacant places at their Father's table. Pity the poor, the weak, the wandering; pity those who have none to pity them; help the helpless; lead the blind by a way that they know not; and thus in all the providence of the day, and in the history of all time, magnify thyself, thou Son of man, thou Son of God. Amen.