They Will Be My People

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Transcript:

If you’ll turn with me to Hosea chapter 2, Hosea chapter 2. I told you for a while that, well, I’ve told you a couple times now, I didn’t know if we were going to immediately go from Hosea to the next book or do something else in between, but that I wanted us to take some time to look at some of these minor prophets, as some of you have said, the little books at the end of the Old Testament that nobody ever talks about. And I thought, well, we ought to do that.

And I’ve quickly realized why people don’t teach on them very much. It’s hard. To study in the book of Hosea, my goodness, if I’d realized what a challenge it was going to be to wrestle with some of these scriptures and try to make sense of them to present them to you, I might have picked something a little easier.

But it’s hard. And also it can be at times a little bit depressing, some of these prophetic books, to read through them and see the message of judgment on people who’d strayed away from God, see the message of condemnation and doom and gloom. It can be a little hard to handle sometimes.

And we’ve gone through about a chapter of the judgment punctuated by points of hope, points of restoration, but we really begin to see God’s plan in chapter 2. God’s plan for the restoration of the nation of Israel. And as I read through this, even the first half of chapter 2 is still a lot of the doom and gloom stuff.

As I was reading through chapter 2 this week, the change when God goes from talking about the judgment to what comes after the judgment, when God talks about the chastening and the discipline to what comes after, that God has an intent for there to be restoration and for there to be a relationship with Him on the other side. It was refreshing to go from over here, where Hosea is talking about this is what you’ve done and this is what’s going to happen. Now here’s God’s long-term plan.

It was refreshing to go from one to the other. I don’t know if any of you ever feel that way. I don’t know if any of the rest of you are like me or if I need to see a doctor, but I feel like when I sleep, my breathing slows down.

Your breathing is supposed to slow down when you sleep, but I feel like I don’t ever take deep breaths the whole time I’m sleeping. So you get eight hours, that would be nice, with kids at home, five or six hours of sleep, and you wake up in the morning and you take that first deep breath in the morning, and it’s just so refreshing. To get to the message of God’s mercy, to me, reading this felt like that first deep breath in the morning.

That’s what we’re going to look at this morning. God goes from the point of saying, this is what’s going to happen to you, to here’s my long-term plan, here’s the reason why this is going to happen to the nation of Israel. We left off last week with God talking in the end of chapter 1 about eventually the people of Israel would be as numerous as the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured nor numbered, but it shall come to pass.

And he says they’ll be gathered together, they’ll appoint one head. I believe it’s talking about Jesus Christ as the Messiah. And they shall come up out of the land, for great shall be the day of Jezreel.

Well, he starts along these same lines in chapter 2, verse 1, where he says, Say unto your brethren, Ami, and to your sisters, Ruhamah. And this goes along with the previous thought of when they’re going to be restored. If you’ll remember, the latter two of Hosea and Gomer’s children were named Loh-Ruhamah and Loh-Ami.

Loh-Ruhamah means no mercy. And Loh-Ami, I’m sorry, I got those backwards, didn’t I? No, I don’t think I did.

Loh-Ruhamah means no mercy. And Loh-Ami means you are not my people. And so what God was saying through the birth of those children was that Israel would not be his people and they would not obtain mercy.

It’s not as though God arbitrarily just decided, hey, I’m done with Israel. Israel in their hearts had not been God’s people for quite some time. Because when you get right down to it, they had worshipped everyone and everything except God.

Now, they might have worshipped him occasionally, but their hearts as a nation were far from God. And so when God is talking about the future restoration, when He’s talking about making them numerous in number, when He’s talking about them being gathered together and appointing the Messiah as their king, and incidentally this refers, I believe, not to Jesus’ first coming, but to His second coming, He also tells Hosea to tell His brethren, Ami, in other words, you will be My people, and say to your sisters, Rehama, which means you’ll have mercy. Say to those who have not been My people, you are now My people, and say to those who have not obtained mercy, you now have mercy.

So he finishes this thought, but he goes back to the chastisement of Israel in verse 2. Plead with your mother, plead, and he’s speaking of the nation of Israel. Plead with your mother, plead with the nation of Israel, for she is not my wife, neither am I her husband.

Let her therefore put away her whoredoms out of her sight and her adulteries from between her breasts, lest I strip her naked and set her as in the day when she was born and make her as a wilderness and set her like a dry land and slay her with thirst. Okay, we’re back to the judgment part. And he’s reminding, again, I guess Israel didn’t get the message the first time when God sent Hosea out and said, tell them Jezreel and Lo-Ruhamah and Lo-Ami, tell them I’m going to break the bow of Israel, take away the kingdom, tell them I’m going to take away their mercy, tell them that they’re not going to be my people anymore, and they just didn’t get it. And so he tells them again, Go plead with your mother.

Go plead with the nation of Israel. And he says, plead with her and let her stop her ways of spiritual infidelity. Get her to stop this.

And when he talks about taking away the adulteries from her breasts and all these things, what he’s talking about is they, I guess, they used to, when these ladies of the evening were advertising for clients, they would dress in certain ways. And what he’s talking about is taking away the ornaments that she would use to allure people. I don’t know if they wore a certain kind of jewelry.

I didn’t get that far into the study. But whatever it is that they would wear to say that they were open for business, he was going to take away from them. So they couldn’t advertise.

In other words, spiritually, they could not commit adultery. They could not cheat on the Lord anymore by cavorting with these false gods. He continues on with the comparison of the nation of Israel with a prostitute.

He says, I will strip her naked and set her as in the day that she was born and make her as a wilderness and set her like a dry land and slay her with thirst. Folks, none of that sounds good to me. None of that sounds inviting to me. I’m going to make you like a wilderness.

I’m going to make you desolate. I’m going to slay you with thirst. And I will not have mercy upon her children for they shall be the children of whoredoms. For their mother hath played the harlot. She that conceived them hath done shamefully.

For she said, I will go after my lovers that give me bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink. I’m going to try my best to explain these verses to you, but I don’t want to camp out too much on these because I’ve already, I think as well as I can, explained to you in chapter 1 the connection that God makes between Israel and spiritual adultery. He continues on with this here, but I really want us to get to the end of the chapter and see what comes next.

But what he says is that the nation of Israel has run away from him and all these things a person would need for life, bread and water, the wool and flax, you think, why do they need that clothing? Protection from the elements. All these, the oil and the drink, all these things that you would need for survival, especially in their desert environment.

The nation of Israel looked to other places. They didn’t recognize that God was the one providing all these things for them. It’s as though God were the husband working his tail end off to provide everything that the wife needs while she’s running around with other men and saying, oh, well, they give me everything I need.

Well, the husband’s not getting any credit here, and she’s betraying his love, betraying his trust. The Israelites were looking after their false gods and saying, all these things that we need, it’s these false gods. Of course, they wouldn’t call them the false gods, but it’s these other gods. It’s the pagan countries around us.

It’s all of this that’s providing what we need and not recognizing that anything that they had, they were dependent on God for. Therefore, Therefore, behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns and make a wall that she will not find her paths. So he was going to put up a roadblock, so to speak, where she could not continue on the path that she’s gone down.

He says that he’s going to hedge up her way with thorns for the nation of Israel, so she could not continue on her way. When I saw this, I immediately thought of what, not that I was there, but what they called hedgerow country in Normandy during World War II. And from what I understand, after they landed on the beaches of Normandy, they began trying to push through northern France to get to where the Germans were, to chase them through hedgerow country.

But on these farms in northern France, for centuries, when they had had tree stumps and thorns and various things, they would take them as they’d plow the fields. Anything that got in the way, they would throw along the property lines. And so you had stumps and you had thickets of thorns and you had all kinds of other trash that were piled along the property lines.

And then for, so they’d stack trash up there basically for hundreds of years. And on top of that, vines and vegetation had grown for hundreds of years. And they ended up with what they called these hedgerows in between the property lines.

And the Americans and British discovered very quickly as they were trying to go through these that these hedgerows were all but impassable. And they had, it took some very ingenious GIs who came up with some scrap steel that they could weld onto the front of a few tanks. and they only had enough stuff to do it with a few of them, but they realized we cannot get through hedgerow country because if we try to blast a hole in the hedgerows and try to go through there, the Germans know exactly where we’re coming through there.

And so they were fighting for acres a day instead of making the progress that they needed to make. And it took ingenious GIs to be able to weld a few pieces of scrap steel onto the fronts of tanks and bust through these hedgerows so that the armies could progress. These things, they really were nothing but vegetation and dirt and stumps and thorns, and yet they stopped the American army in their tracks until they could be taken down.

So the idea when he says, I know Hosea did not have Normandy in mind when he wrote this because it was 2,500 years before Normandy happened. But the same principle applies when he says he’s going to hedge up her way with thorns. We’re talking about an all but impassable barrier, the kind of thing that would have stopped her dead in her tracks.

And what God, I believe, is saying here is that he was going to throw up a roadblock where she would have to stop going down the road she was going on. She shall not find her paths. Verse 7, And she shall follow after her lovers, these false gods, but she shall not overtake them.

In other words, when God scatters them and sends them running, the nation of Israel wasn’t just immediately going to say, I was wrong. She was going to run after these false gods. When God proved them false, she was going to run after them still, but yet she was never going to catch up with them.

And I don’t believe the idols got up and ran. That’s not what he’s talking about. But she was never going to catch up with the people she had committed spiritual adultery with.

She shall not overtake them, and she shall seek them, but she shall not find them. Then shall she say, I will go and return to my first husband. You know why she couldn’t catch the idols and why she couldn’t find the gods she was looking for?

It’s because they didn’t exist in the first place. Now, I should say the idols existed. But the gods that Israel was chasing after, the gods that Israel would be looking for, didn’t exist in the first place.

They were a figment of some person’s wild imagination. So when she realizes that these false gods are not there for her as she thought, the nation of Israel, it says, Then she shall say, I will go and return to my first husband, for then was it better with me than now. Huh, I guess he wasn’t so bad after all.

Maybe I’ll turn back to God now. For she did not know that I gave her corn and wine and oil and multiplied her silver and gold, which they prepared for Baal. So she didn’t realize, the nation of Israel didn’t realize that all these things that all this time she had attributed, all the needs that she had, all the desires that were fulfilled, she was attributing to false gods and their blessing of her, when all this time they had been gifts from the one true God. And then she in turn, the nation of Israel, had taken the gifts that God gave her and prepared them as offerings to Baal and other false gods.

Therefore will I return and take away my corn in the time thereof and my wine in the season thereof and will recover my wool and my flax given to cover her nakedness. And now I will discover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers and none shall deliver her out of mine hand. I will also cause her mirth to cease, her feast days, her new moons, and her sabbaths, and all her solemn feasts.

God basically says, yeah, the nation of Israel is going to come back to me for these things, and they’re not just going to immediately be there. Now, as God is here speaking in chapter 2 of the nation of Israel, there’s also the fact that He had told Hosea in chapter 1 to go and marry Gomer, who was a prostitute. Maybe not a prostitute at the time, but God knowing that she would be, and Hosea knowing that she would be, God tells Hosea, go and marry her anyway.

Apparently at this point she had gone wild as he knew she would. And so God makes the comparison again between Gomer and the nation of Israel, I believe, so that when Hosea went and told the nation of Israel about their sin before God, he knew whereof he spoke. He knew the way God felt, how it felt to be wronged, how it felt to be wronged by the person you trusted the most of anyone in the world, the person you loved the most of anyone in the world, to be wronged by them and yet to have enough love to forgive them.

So God’s not forgiving them. Well, he will in just a moment. There were consequences in the meantime.

And I will cause all of her mirth to cease her feast days. He says in verse 12, And I will destroy her vines and her fig trees, whereof she hath said, These are my rewards that my lovers have given me, and I will make them a forest, and the beasts of the field shall eat them. And I will visit upon her the days of Balaam, wherein she burned incense to them, and she decked herself with earrings and her jewels, and she went after her lovers and forgot me, said the Lord.

So what he’s saying is that when she sees that the corn and the oil and all these things are gone, when she sees that the vineyards and the fig trees and all the things that God had blessed her with were gone, her mind would be reminded of her days cavorting with Balaam and the false gods, and all the times she burned incense to the false gods and decked herself with earrings and jewels, so she could go off to their worship. And when she went after her lovers or her false gods, and she forgot me, said the Lord. God’s intent here was not simply to punish or destroy Israel.

Folks, if God had wanted to, he could have wiped Israel off the map at that point. He did it to Sodom and Gomorrah. He wiped them off the map.

He wiped almost the entire population of the earth off of the map in Noah’s day. God was capable of just destroying Israel if that was his intent. But God’s intent was to bring them to a point where they would recognize their need for him, where they would finally recognize their need for him.

That was his intent, so that he could then win Israel back. And it sounds, folks, it sounds harsh. It does sound harsh.

If my wife did something I didn’t like, and so I took away everything that she loved, you know, people would probably call me a bad husband. But then again, I have never been so wronged by my wife as God was by the nation of Israel. And sometimes, in order to make something better, you have to take off a few layers.

Sometimes when you’re refinishing a wood surface, you have to sand off the layers of the old varnish that are there. Sometimes doing car repairs. You know, I could slap a new gasket on there, but it’s not going to work if I don’t scrape the, what do you call it, the red stuff, the silicon that holds it on there.

If I don’t scrape the old stuff off. If I don’t do a little scraping and a little cleaning. And so what he was doing was basically cleaning away the refuse, cleaning away the residue of this idol worship, making Israel realize its complete and total dependence on the Lord God, so that when she realized how far she had fallen, she would remember God.

Now, if you’re sufficiently depressed by this message, we can move on to verse 14. Therefore, behold, I will allure her and bring her into the wilderness. Okay, at this point, it sounds like he’s setting a trap for her.

I’m going to allure her and draw her into the wilderness and speak comfortably unto her. That word also means tenderly. It’s not a trap he set.

When Israel’s ready to seek him again, he’s ready to be found. He’s ready to allure her. When it says to take her into the wilderness, folks, I would imagine that would be a reminder to them of God’s care for them over 40 years through the wilderness after they left Egypt.

I will bring her into the wilderness and speak comfortably unto her. And in her most trying and devastating time, God would be there with words of kindness and with words of tenderness, ready to forgive when they sought him again. And I will give her vineyards from thence and the valley of Achor for a door of hope.

And she shall sing there as in the days of her youth and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt. So from the very wilderness, he would give her vineyards. That means that which was dry and desolate, God would make alive and bountiful.

It’s a sign of God’s blessing that he would give her vineyards in the wilderness. The valley of Achor is a door of hope, as she shall sing there. There are different explanations of what this means.

Some people have tried to tie it to Achan and his rebellion under Joshua. That word Achor means trouble, though. The valley of trouble would be a door to hope for her.

Even the darkest places would be hope to her because God would be with her, would be with the nation of Israel. And she will sing there. Even in the valley of trouble, she will sing there as in the days of her youth and as in the day when she came up out of the land of Egypt.

Imagine the joy when after hundreds of years in slavery, hundreds of years of crying out to God, the people of Israel were finally delivered from the land of Egypt, a day that had been promised that many of them probably thought they would never live to see, And it happened. They were delivered from Egypt. They were brought.

God cleared the Red Sea. God held Pharaoh’s army back with a pillar of fire. Folks, imagine the joy that they would have when they first came out of Egypt.

Now, they quickly began to devolve into complaining and rebellion. But that day when they were delivered out of Egypt would be a glorious and joyful day. And he says that even in the valley of trouble, she will sing as in the day of her youth when she came out of the land of Egypt.

And it shall be at that day, saith the Lord, that thou shalt call me Ishi, and shalt call me no more Bailey. Now if these words mean nothing to you, it’s because we’re English speakers. But what these words mean, they both have a connotation of being a husband.

Either one would probably be an acceptable title for a husband. But Ishi is far more intimate from what I understand of my study. That to call your husband Ishi is to call him your man.

to call him a friend, to call him a husband whom you love. To call him Baile, the name Baile means Lord. It’s one of the words for Lord.

It means a master. It’s not the same as the Lord when you see the word, when you see the Lord, especially in lowercase capitals or small capitals. Not the same word.

Baile meant a master or a Lord. Both of these words could mean husband. Ishi indicates an intimate relationship, a love, and a friendship.

Bale means I’m a little bit afraid of him. It means I’m with him out of fear and not out of love. And so when it says that Israel would call him in that day Ishi and not Bale, what it means is Israel would walk with God and would obey him out of love and not simply out of fear.

Not simply out of obligation, but out of love toward God. And I will take away the names of Balaam out of her mouth, and they shall be no more remembered by their name. These false gods that she’s worshipped, Israel would be so in love with God that she wouldn’t even remember the names of her false gods anymore.

And in that day, I will make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field and with the fowls of the heaven and with the creeping things of the ground, and I will break the bow and the sword and the battle out of the earth and will make them to lie down safely. And I will betroth thee unto me forever. Yea, I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness and in judgment and in loving kindness and in mercy.

So he talks about taking war away from the earth and Israel and the Lord being together forever. Now, again, I believe this is something that’s prophesied in the future even for us, when Israel together submits to the Messiah. And I will even betroth thee unto me in faithfulness, and thou shalt know the Lord.

And it shall come to pass, and that day I will hear, saith the Lord, I will hear the heavens, and they shall hear the earth, and the earth shall hear the corn and the wine and the oil, and they shall hear Jezreel, and I will sow her unto me in the earth, and I will have mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy, and I will say to them which were not my people, thou art my people, and they shall say, thou art my God. And ladies and gentlemen, that’s what God wanted with Israel all along. That’s what Israel had promised to do all along.

This was nothing new. This was the loving relationship that God had proposed between himself and Israel all along, that Israel professed, said, we will go along with this, we will do it, and yet they had done everything but. And so in this, yes, we’ve gone through the harshness of God tearing down the nation of Israel, God bringing it to its lowest point, sanding away the old layers so that he could paint something more beautiful, so that he could build something more beautiful, what should have been in the first place.

What we see here at the end of this chapter is not just a message of judgment, but it’s a message of disciplining Israel so that they could be restored, so that they could be reconciled unto God. And he says, they will be my people. And we can learn a few things about God’s relationship to his people by looking at what God had in mind, what God has in mind for this perfect relationship between himself and Israel.

The first of these is that God deals directly with the hearts of his people. God deals directly with the hearts of his people. You know, it can be useful to know arguments and to know facts and to know all these proofs about God and the Bible when it comes to talking to somebody about God and their need for Him.

But what I’ve told and what I believe is the case is that oftentimes it’s more effective to deal with the heart and deal with conviction. Because in our minds, we oftentimes think we’re smarter than we really are. And yet God, through His Word, has a direct line to our hearts.

and the Holy Spirit speaks to us in ways sometimes I don’t understand. Most of the time I don’t understand how He works. And yet God can convict men of sin.

God can convict men of their need for Him where, in the intellect, all there is is pride. And God can bring men to knowledge of Himself. He says that when He brings her into the wilderness, when He brings Israel into the wilderness, He will speak tenderly to her.

When God restores His people, when God takes a sinner who has wandered away from Him and restores Him, reconciles them to Himself, God’s words are not harsh. As the Bible says for us as Christians, once we as sinners have trusted Him and become His people, the Bible says there is now therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. When we become His people, we no longer have to worry about the same kind of judgment, about the same kind of wrath on sin.

Yes, we will have to answer for the things that we’ve done, but the wrath for sin, the demands of God’s justice were paid for by Jesus Christ. And God speaks directly to the hearts of His people. God speaks tenderly to His people. And God is always ready to be reconciled to His people.

God restores to His people, second of all, God restores to His people the joy that sin has ravaged. He says in here that he will give her vineyards, he will give her hope, that she’ll sing as in the day that she left Egypt. Folks, the nation of Israel had wandered in sin for many, many years.

They’d wandered away from God for many years. And I submit to you it was their sin. It was not God who brought them to their lowest point.

It was their sin. God didn’t just dump these things on them arbitrarily. They were the consequences of their sin.

And sin had nearly destroyed the nation of Israel, and yet God gave them back what they had lost. God restored the joy to them. And sometimes we as human beings, we can wander in sin for years. Many people who come to Christ for the first time have wandered in sin and wickedness for decades to the point where they think that they have completely destroyed their life, there will be no joy, that God can’t even forgive them.

And yet they trust in Christ. And I won’t say that all the consequences go away. But God has a way of restoring things that have been ravaged by sin. God has a way of restoring joy, bringing true joy.

into the hearts of His people that we could not know otherwise. And God promised to restore the joy that sin had ravaged among His people. Third of all, God enters into a loving relationship with His people.

He doesn’t just speak to their hearts, but He speaks tenderly to them for the purpose of having a relationship with them. That’s expressed when He says, You will no longer call me Bailey, but you will call me Ishi. You won’t merely fear me.

You won’t merely walk with me out of obligation, but you’ll walk with me out of love. That’s what God desired all along. That’s why God created us.

He desired to have that relationship with us where we would walk with him, we would love him, and we would worship him forever because he’s worthy of it. And God enters into a loving relationship with his people. Fourth of all tonight, God provides peace and security to his people.

Now, that’s not to say that everything in our lives is nice and sweet and lovely. Sometimes we have struggles. But, ladies and gentlemen, as God’s people, and I realize that the church and Israel are not the same thing, But as God’s people, we have, this is illustrative of our relationship with Him, we have peace and safety in Him that we would not otherwise have.

We have the peace of knowing that no matter what happens to us on this earth, if somebody kills us, if the worst happens, we know where we’re going. We know that no matter how bad things get, there’s something better waiting for us on the other side. I’ve started reading in the last two weeks the book Tortured for Christ, written by the guy who started Voice of the Martyrs.

And he talks about the love that they had toward the communists who tortured them in the prisons in Romania. And it’s incredible to read about the things that were done to them and the way they responded in love and out of a desire to see these people saved. And he said that we could sing praises to God in prison and they couldn’t stop us.

They could beat us, they could kill us, but they couldn’t stop us. And I thought that’s incredible to be so sure of your salvation, to be so sure of your place in heaven, that you think it doesn’t matter if you torture us or if you kill us, we get to go be with Jesus. Folks, there’s a peace and there’s a security that comes from being God’s people.

And it’s a peace and a security that the world can never know apart from Him. And He says He’ll break the bow and the sword and the battle out of the earth and make them lie down safely. And finally tonight, God shows mercy and forgiveness to His people.

I will show her unto me in the earth, and I will have mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy, and will say to them which were not my people, Thou art my people, and they shall say, Thou art my God. He shows mercy to those who have not obtained, who have not earned mercy. As a matter of fact, if we could earn mercy, we wouldn’t need it.

If we need it, we can’t earn it. That’s the paradox there. Yet He shows mercy to those who are not deserving.

Simply by their turning to Him, simply by their love for Him, simply by their trust in Him, He shows them mercy. And God shows mercy to His people even today. We can look at books like Hosea and conclude nothing else than sin is serious business to God.

And there will come a day of wrath and judgment on sin, and yet God has made a way out of it. And God intends to show to His people mercy and forgiveness as well as all these other things. How do I become one of God’s people?

I’m not an Israelite. This doesn’t apply to me. Folks, to become one of God’s people, to become one of God’s children, all it takes is trusting in Christ. These people would be restored, it says, when they gathered together and appointed one head, that being Jesus Christ, their Messiah.

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