Calling out Spiritual Infidelity

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Well, tonight, if you’ll turn with me to the book of Hosea chapter 1, Hosea chapter 1, if you’re not familiar with Hosea, if you can find Daniel and then turn back a little further, it’s the book right after Daniel. Some of you told me this morning that I was meddling, and no, Ms. Wyman, it wasn’t just you, or told me that I was stepping on toes.

Well, good, because I was stepping on mine too. The recipe, if you want to call it that, for worship is something that is difficult to live up to, and yet it’s worth every effort to truly worship God, to be submitted to Him, to honor Him, to obey Him. Folks, it’s just worth it to live a life of worship to God.

Sometimes as believers, though, we can look outwardly as though, you know, that we’re worshiping God. We can look outwardly as though we’ve got all of this stuff down, and yet within our hearts can be far from Him. We can wander away.

Oftentimes throughout history, God’s people have wandered away. Now, I told you this morning, I don’t know if we’re going to, you know, go through these, what am I trying to say, all in order, you know, just one book after another, or if we might take a break in between them and talk about something else. But some of you have asked me, and some that are not here tonight, have asked me over time about these minor prophets, what many people call these small books at the end of the Old Testament that nobody ever seems to talk about and why don’t they ever talk about them.

And I thought it’d be a good thing for us to study, a good thing for us to look at and look at on purpose and take a good look at. And I decided to start tonight with Hosea because Hosea is the first of the minor prophets. And it ties in very well with what we talked about this morning and what I just mentioned, that oftentimes we can look on the outside like we’re truly worshiping.

We can look like people who are submitted to God when on the inside we know that’s not the case. As Sean mentioned a minute ago, the brochure. And I was sitting there thinking, I don’t want a brochure made.

Can I not have a brochure of my life made? Because I know that for every good thing in there, there’s probably bad to go along with it. And I know that at times it looks outwardly like, well, he’s the preacher.

He’s got it all together. And I know there’s nothing good in me except what the Lord’s done. And folks, God’s program, if you want to call it that, has always been to bring people back to him.

That we as a human race have wandered away from God. Like the old song, Come Thou Fount, says, prone to wander, Lord, I feel it, prone to leave the God I love. Here’s my heart, Lord, take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above.

We as a species are prone to wander away from God. And you know what? He changes us and he makes us new, but as long as we’re in these bodies, that sin nature is still there.

And so sometimes the tendency to wander is still there. And certainly among God’s people in the Old Testament, there was that tendency to wander away from him. It was nothing new in Hosea’s day, but it had reached a climax in Hosea’s day.

It had been going on since the early days of Genesis. We saw the wandering away from God raise its ugly head in the book of Judges time after time and under the kings. Folks, there’s a long history of God’s people wandering away from him.

And in Hosea’s day, God decided, I’m going to put a stop to it and I’m going to show the people exactly what they’ve been doing. Because when we look at our wanderings, and sometimes it can be just a little bit of wandering. God’s right here and I’ll just take a step this direction.

It’s just one step. It’s not a big deal. God decided to show them in vivid, uncertain terms what they were doing. And so he called a man named Hosea that we don’t know a whole lot about other than what’s taught in this book, and called Hosea and used Hosea to show the people of Israel just how dangerous it was when they wandered away from God.

And to proclaim his judgment and that there was punishment coming for their wandering, but also behind the judgment, Behind the punishment, there was restoration that God’s intent was not just to punish them. God could have ground them into a fine powder had He chosen to. And yet God said, one day I’m going to restore you.

See, His intent was not just to destroy them. His intent was to tear down all the wicked things that they had built up and rebuild them as His people as He intended them to be. So we look tonight at Hosea, and as we study through this book over the next few weeks, It may seem doom and gloom.

It may seem depressing at times. It may seem harsh at times, the way God speaks to the people of Israel. But we’ve got to remember, it’s a picture of God’s love.

Because if God hadn’t loved the people of Israel, he would have just destroyed them. He wouldn’t have cared if they wandered. He wouldn’t have given them a second chance.

And yet God in this calls them to repentance because he loves them. And we can be assured that when we wander, if we’re truly his children, when we wander, he chastens whom he loves, the Bible said. And when we wander, there’s a loving God who doesn’t just walk away, who doesn’t just abandon us, but who corrects us, who disciplines us, and who calls us back to himself.

See, we’re not that much different from the people in Hosea’s day. Hosea chapter 1 verse 1 says, The word of the Lord that came unto Hosea, the son of Beri, in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam, the son of Joash, king of Israel. He starts out by telling when he lived, when he ministered.

Hosea is an interesting figure because we don’t know much about him. And I was telling somebody at Discipleway this afternoon, it’s not the things that, for the most part, it’s not the things about the Bible that I understand that are spelled out that most captivate my imagination. A lot of times, and I don’t know that this is the right way to be, but a lot of times it’s the things that the Bible doesn’t spell out.

It’s the little details that you wonder thinking, well, what happened next? Or where did that guy come from? Or, well, what day did that happen?

And God didn’t feel it was important to tell us, so it shouldn’t be so important to me. And yet Hosea is fascinating because we don’t know that much about him other than what’s told in here, what we’re going to see in the next few weeks. And in spite of the fact that we know, I should say we know very little about him, in spite of the fact that he ministered for so long.

Based on the kings that he says he prophesied under, or whose reigns he prophesied during, the low end estimate says he ministered, he prophesied for about 50 years. I read some sources that said it may have been as many as 90 years. I mean, that’s a good long ministry, isn’t it?

To be preaching God’s word for 50 to 90 years, and yet we know very little about him. It reminds me of a couple weeks ago when we had the missions rally, And I thought everything went really well. And a lady came up to me afterwards and almost kind of got on to me.

I have no idea who she is. And she shook my hand and she was smiling real big. And then she pulled me in closer, you know, kind of like when people grab you by the collar, only she did it with my hand and pulled me in and said, you know, next time you could tell us who you are, I still have no idea what your name is.

And so I just said, I’m Jared Byrns. Nice to meet you. My wife thought that was funny.

I said, all I did was tell her my name. That’s what she asked. That’s what she wanted to know.

And I feel bad when I make faux pas or in social situations. And so I was thinking about that the whole rest of the night. I was driving home thinking, I should have told them who I was.

Why didn’t I think, just didn’t occur to me. Tell them who I was. And I almost, I won’t say I audibly heard his voice, but I almost audibly heard the voice of the Holy Spirit say, it doesn’t matter who you are.

I thought, well, that’s true. And I thought, okay, I wish, instead of worrying about this, I wish what I had told her was, no, I didn’t tell you who I am, but I talked about Jesus, and as long as you know who he is, who cares who I am. That should be my attitude.

And if the opportunity ever presents itself again, I’d like to think I’ll be quick enough to remember that, since I can’t go back. If any of you come up with a time machine where I can go back and share my snappy comeback with her, let me know. But I can’t explain it other than it was almost audibly driving home.

I heard the Holy Spirit tell me it doesn’t matter who you are. That’s my only explanation for why we don’t know any more about Hosea than we do. Because he was a faithful man of God who spent somewhere between 50 and 90 years of his life preaching God’s word to people who oftentimes didn’t care to hear it.

And it didn’t matter who he was as long as he pointed them to God. And folks, I think that’s a good example to each and every one of us. not just preachers, but we will come and go through the lives of many, many people throughout our lifetimes.

I read somewhere this week that the average person will come in contact with or influence up to 10,000 people in their lifetime. Folks, if at the end of our lifetime we’ve influenced 10,000 people in some small way and they don’t know our name, but they know who God is, they know who Jesus Christ is as a result of it, then we can say we’ve had a successful ministry. Folks, he ministered under these four kings, not in the sense that he worked for them, but during his reign, everything was reckoned in terms of which king’s reign you worked during.

Uzziah, one of the great kings of Judah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah. Tumultuous times in the history of Judah. And he says also that he ministered during the days of Jeroboam, the son of Joash, king of Israel.

I don’t understand still why he lists all the names of these kings of Judah when he was from the northern kingdom. I’ve told you all before that after Solomon died, his son really messed up. The kingdom split in two.

You had the northern kingdom, ten tribes that were led by one reprobate after another, just wicked, wicked men, never one good king of Israel. And then you had Judah, on the other hand, the southern kingdom, tribes of Judah and Benjamin that had a lot of wicked kings, but occasionally a good one. He was a prophet to the northern kingdom.

He was from the northern kingdom, and yet he talks about these kings of Judah, probably because by the end of his ministry, it was mainly the people of Judah who were left. The people of Israel had been either killed or had been scattered. That’s my guess as to why he mentions the four kings of Judah, so that they would know as well.

But he ministered during the days of Jeroboam, son of Joash, king of Israel. Jeroboam was a wicked king, yet again, he, I believe, is the one that Amos was sent to prophesy to. Amos was sent out of the fields.

He was a nobody and he was sent to the royal court and was told to prophesy against King Jeroboam because he had been engaging in idolatry. And so during the reign of this wicked king, Hosea is called of God to go and preach his word. The beginning of the word of the Lord by Hosea, and the Lord said to Hosea, so he begins, he moves from explaining his time period, who he is in verse two, to saying the beginning of the word of the Lord by Hosea.

He points out, this is the beginning of the prophecy that I brought to the people of Israel. This is the beginning of what I’m writing down as far as what’s from God. And he wanted to make sure, make no mistake, that it was from God.

This isn’t just a story that Hosea made up later on. Hosea says, this is the word that was given to me by the Lord. And the Lord said to Hosea, go and take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms. And by the way, that word’s going to come up quite a lot in this passage, in the book of Hosea as a whole.

It’s a concept that’s in there. Apologize for saying it, but it’s in there. I’m not comfortable with it, but it’s in there, and quite honestly, there aren’t a whole lot of nicer words for it.

He tells them to go take a wife who was essentially a prostitute and who would give birth to the children of prostitutes, and for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from the Lord. So this was Hosea’s call. And I’ve got to say, the man had tremendous faith in God to answer God’s call here.

God called me to go preach. God called me to be a pastor. That was a relatively easy call to accept.

It cost some things, but it’s all right. It’s a fairly comfortable assignment. God called this man not just to go and prophesy in a tough place, but God called this man to a shambles of a family life.

And I’ve told you all before that I could not do my job as well as I do. And some of y’all may differ on how well I do it. But however well I do it, I could not do my job as well as I do without the support of my wife.

I mean, she’s a big part. Y’all don’t see her a lot. She does a lot behind the scenes.

but she’s a big part of the ministry that I do. And this man was called to marry someone who was not going to be a big part of his ministry, who was not only not going to help him in his ministry, but actually was going to be a hardship on him. I don’t know that I have enough faith in God that if I heard him say, go marry a prostitute, that I could say, okay, Lord, I’d say, what have they put in the water?

What did I have for dinner last night to have a dream like that? Folks, he heard God clearly when he said, go marry this wayward woman. Go marry this prostitute.

Have children who are the children of prostitution. And he says to do this because the people of Israel had committed great whoredom departing from the Lord. Now, there was surprisingly a lot of debate over some things in just these first five verses that we’re going to look at tonight.

And I told you all I spent a great deal of time Thursday on studying the meanings of the word worship. I spent a great deal of time Friday trying to make heads or tails of this, and I wouldn’t have thought it would have been that difficult. But see, there’s the problem here of what actually happened when God told Hosea to go marry, her name ended up being Gomer.

When God told Hosea to go marry Gomer, what actually happened? Because the issue has been raised that if he had gone and married someone who was actively engaged in prostitution at that point, that would have disqualified him as a prophet in the eyes of many of the people. I mean, just like if my wife was out dancing for money at clubs, that would cast shadows on my ministry here.

That would have disqualified him in the eyes of the people. Even though they were very wicked, they would have said, this guy can’t be a prophet, look at who he’s marrying. And so the question has been raised, and not just raised by Bible-doubting scholars, but by some godly men as well.

Did God tell him to go marry someone who was then a prostitute? Now, trying to come up with an answer, some other scholars have gone the other way and said, well, this must all be an allegory. It’s the favorite answer of people who don’t want to believe what the Bible says when anything’s hard.

Well, it’s just an allegory. It’s a picture. It didn’t really happen.

Some have gone so far. I read somewhere, and if I’m being unfair to him, well, I’d say he could tell me, but he’s been dead for 400 years. I’ve been told that I’ve read that John Calvin said, well, this was all just a dream that Hosea had.

And I thought, what? There are people who believe that if Hosea was dreaming, surely God would have told him to say, Hosea, this is the dream from the Lord. And it would have said something about him dreaming that he went and married a prostitute.

I can’t, absent any evidence from the scripture, I can’t go along with the explanation that he just dreamed it all up, that it never happened, that it was just a picture or a symbol. What the most likely thing is, is that God told him to go and marry a woman knowing, she may have not been a prostitute at that time, but knowing that she was going to go astray. And that means Hosea would have married someone who looked good outwardly.

And I don’t mean physically good, but as far as their character, they looked respectable outwardly. But Hosea even went into the marriage knowing that she was a wayward woman. That seems the most likely answer, to me anyway.

that he told Hosea to go and marry this woman, God knowing and Hosea knowing how she was going to turn out. Now, if I get to heaven and the Lord tells me, no, I told him to go marry someone off the street corner, then I’ll say, okay, Lord, I was wrong. But whether he married her when she was engaged in that profession or whether he married her knowing that she was going to get involved in that, one thing is very clear that he knew where this was headed and it’s because God sent him there And it was through faith in God that he went and did this thing that made no sense at all.

I mean, there are numerous Proverbs that talk about instability and strife at home and wanting to have a happy home life and a good home life. And numerous Proverbs that talk about, say things to the effect of, you know, it’s better to have nothing and peace at home than have plenty and live with a quarrelsome woman is the phrase that some of the Proverbs use. And I could understand that.

Folks, I’ve dated some girls that I thought, okay, it would be better to spend the rest of my life alone than to not be lonely but be with you. Thank you. It’s better to not have everything you want and have peace at home, peace in your family, than to have everything and everything be in chaos.

And yet God was asking him to step in the chaos. And he did it. Folks, that took incredible faith in God.

So he steps into the chaos, and the reason for God asking him to do this is because he says the land, and he doesn’t mean the dirt, he means the people of Israel had committed spiritual infidelity. They had, if you want to use it in these terms, they had committed adultery against God by marrying themselves to the false gods and the idols of the countries around them. And that’s why God chose this picture.

And just because I say it’s a picture doesn’t mean I don’t believe it really happened. It says it in the Bible, I believe it happened. But the reason God asked him to do this, told him to do this, was to make the picture clear of the righteous being wedded to the wayward, to the unfaithful.

And the nation of Israel was supposed to be in this covenant relationship where they were his people and he was their God and they would have no other God. And yet they had worshipped Molech and they had worshipped Baal and they had worshipped Asherah and they had worshipped trees. They had worshipped the sun god.

They had worshipped the moon god. They had worshipped everything except the one true God. Yeah, they might worship him as well.

They might include him as one of the ones that they worshipped. But to worship God and something else is not to worship God at all because he demands all of it. As we saw in the passage this morning, he’s a jealous God.

He wants all of our attention. He wants all of our devotion. And so he said essentially that they had been unfaithful to him.

And what better way to make that point to them than to draw the parallel. And when people said, well, Hosea, he’s a messenger of God and his wife is unfaithful, Hosea could say that’s exactly the point. You criticize it when you see it here, and yet that’s exactly what you’ve done to God Almighty.

And so God tells him to go and marry Gomer. Verse 3, so he went and took Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim, which conceived and bare him a son. So he has a child with Gomer.

And the Lord said unto him, call his name Jezreel. For yet a little while, and I will avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu, and will cause to cease the kingdom of the house of Israel. And it shall come to pass at that day that I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel.

And apparently in Hebrew there’s a play on words between Israel and Jezreel. Apparently they sound even more similar in Hebrew than they do in English. The word Jezreel, or the word Israel, meant something I believe along the lines of a prince.

And Jezreel on the other hand meant to scatter, like you’re sowing seeds. And what it sounds like, God is using a play on words here to change what he says about Israel, that they’re going to be scattered like sowing seeds in a field. And what he tells them, what he tells Hosea is, Name your child Jezreel.

Name my child scatter? Yes, name your child scatter. So that when the people ask you why you would do such a thing, and folks, names meant so much in their culture.

Names meant even more than they do today. We were so careful in naming our kids, trying to come up with something that meant something good and that was, you know, we made sure it didn’t rhyme with bad things and was not going to get them made fun of as children and tried to pick names that were meaningful and significant. Even more so.

Even more so with them. As a matter of fact, they would change names at a point in time if the old name no longer suited them. And so for God to tell him, name your child this, so when they ask, why in the world would you name your child scattered, You can say because God is going to scatter Israel.

God is going to avenge the blood of Jezreel. And there is a place called the Jezreel Valley. God is going to avenge the blood of Jezreel on the house of Jehu.

And he’s going to break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel. What that means. And you may be familiar more so than you think with the valley of Jezreel.

How many of you have heard the word Armageddon? Most of you. Armageddon is mentioned in the Bible.

It’s mentioned in the book of Revelation. The word in Hebrew, I guess that’s Greek, Armageddon. The word in Hebrew is Tel Megiddo, which means Mount Megiddo, and it’s on the edge of this Jezreel Valley.

And people have looked at this Jezreel Valley. I can’t remember if it was Napoleon or some famous, several big battles have been fought there, and one famous commander looked at it and said it was the perfect place to wage a war. And I’ve seen pictures of it.

It’s a pretty impressive area of land surrounded by mountains. It’s like something you’d see in Hollywood. This valley of Jezreel is a real place.

And what he’s talking about when he says, avenge the blood of Jezreel on the house of Jehu. King Jeroboam, who he prophesied under, the king of Israel. King Jeroboam was a descendant of King Jehu.

King Jehu had been a military commander in Israel some generations before. And the king of Israel at that point, I believe his name was Jehoram, was a wicked man, as all the kings of Israel were. And he was involved in idolatry.

He was involved in all kinds of wicked practices, and he led the people. He caused them to be involved in wicked practices as well. And so God raised up Jehu and said, Jehu, I’m going to use you to wipe out the house.

It was Ahab’s son, I believe Jehoram was. King Ahab, you remember him from Ahab and Jezebel. He said, I’m going to use you to wipe out the house of Ahab and their idolatry.

And Jehu, being the bloodthirsty, power-hungry man He was, jumped at the chance. And he killed King Jehoram after he was wounded, killed him in the valley of Jezreel. He went to a city where they had the sons and grandsons of the royal house, went to this city and said, now that the king is dead, why don’t you all pick one who you want to be king and put him on the throne?

The idea being, okay, we need to figure out who the most likely person is to be a threat to my power now so we can get rid of him. And the people who were in charge of the young men, in charge of the city, said, Oh, no, we’ll do whatever you want. And he said, Oh, good.

How about you count, the Bible says count their heads. And next thing we know, we see about 70 heads piled up outside. And Jehu has them piled up so the people will see them and fear.

And then people come from the royal family of Judah to visit their relatives in the royal family of Israel. And they come and say, We’re going to visit Ahab’s kids and Jezebel’s kids. And he has them slaughtered as well.

Now the problem for Bible scholars has been how in the world, why would God avenge the blood of Jezreel against Jehu when God told him to go and wipe out the royal house, the family of Ahab in the first place? The reason is that God told him to go and wipe out this other royal family because they were polluting the land with their idols. The intent was for Jehu to be the one to get rid of the idolatry, and yet Jehu didn’t go into this with the idea of serving God and restoring his law and getting rid of the idols.

What God sent him in there to do for God’s glory, Jehu went in and saw as an excuse to seize power. And Jehu got rid of a few of the idols, he got rid of the Baal idols, but he brought in golden calves. Now, anybody remember golden calves?

Did God tell them that was an okay thing to have? Anybody? Yes or no?

God said that was not a good thing. And so what God had sent Jehu to do in order to cleanse the land had become an excuse for Jehu to seize power. And people see this as a contradiction.

There’s a skeptic website that had this listed as a contradiction I saw yesterday and said, well, on one hand you have God telling him to go and cleanse the land and then you have God punishing his descendants for it. Yes, he did what God told him to do, but he didn’t do it in just the right way, the way God told him to do it, or for the reason God told him to do it, and that was sin too. And just because God allows somebody to do something to punish one group of people, doesn’t mean that they themselves are righteous.

Hello, Babylonians. When the Babylonians came in to carry the people of Judah later on into exile, to punish them, to call them back to God, they thought, God, why have you forsaken us? Why have you rejected us?

Why are you letting the Babylonians get away with this? And God’s answer, this is not a direct quote, was who says I’m letting the Babylonians get away with anything? Their time is going to come.

That’s what the book of Habakkuk is about. The Babylonians’ time is going to come too. They’re not innocent here either.

And God sent in the Persians to take care of the Babylonians. Ladies and gentlemen, he used a wicked man like Jehu to cleanse the land of the wicked family of Ahab, but that didn’t mean Jehu was special. That didn’t mean that Jehu didn’t have to answer for his sins. And so here Hosea prophesies, hey, the royal family of Israel is going to pay for the sins that they’ve committed.

So having figured that out, I don’t see that as a contradiction at all. When you realize it’s not just about who did what, it’s about the sin that was behind it. He tells them, I will avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu and will cause to cease the kingdom and house of Israel.

And it will come to pass that that day I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel. One of the great battles in a few years from this, when the Assyrians came through and took over the northern kingdom of Israel, one of the great battles, one of the last great battles is believed to have been fought in the Jezreel valley as the Assyrian army marched south to the city of Samaria to lay siege to it and take the entire kingdom into captivity. And if they had not broken the back of the Israelite army in the Valley of Jezreel, there would have been an army to stand between them and the city of Samaria.

But you know what? God broke the bow of the house of Israel in the Valley of Jezreel, and nothing stood between Israel and the Assyrian armies except the open plain. And so God’s prophecy through Hosea was brought to pass.

He told him all of this was going to happen. And Israel, because of its idolatry, because it has gone, as he says, it’s committed whoredom and departing from the Lord and going after these other gods, Israel is going to have to pay for what it’s done. Next week, we’ll start with looking in verse 6 and talk about the other two children of Hosea and Gomer.

But I want to share with you real quick in the last couple minutes that we have together tonight a few things that we can learn from this. Because this can’t be just a history lesson, folks. There’s more to the Bible than just history.

We need to apply things. And we can apply things to our lives, even that we find in these prophecies from 800 years before Christ. The first thing is that neglecting the proper worship of God is spiritual infidelity. Neglecting the proper worship of God is spiritual infidelity.

We talked about worship this morning and what it means. This does not mean, when we talk about spiritual infidelity, it doesn’t mean we have to go find some other God to worship. The moment we step away from the worship of God, we’ve been unfaithful to him.

He doesn’t say, the land hath committed great whoredom following after the golden calf. He says, they’ve committed it, departing from the Lord. When they stepped away from God, they committed spiritual infidelity.

We cannot neglect the worship of the one true God. It’s spiritual infidelity if we do. Second of all, spiritual infidelity is readily passed from person to person.

Now, some people have speculated that because he says, marry a wife of whoredoms and bear children of whoredoms, that that meant that when she later on would go astray, that those children would be conceived out of those unions. But we see here that she bore Hosea these children. So it has to mean something else.

And what it means is what they saw their mother do, they followed suit. And I’m not just talking about her profession. I’m talking about the idolatry that she was obviously engaged in.

If she left her husband to go engage in prostitution, she certainly wasn’t worshiping God and following him. And what she did, her children followed in. And ladies and gentlemen, sin and idolatry, these things are infectious.

They are contagious. Do you remember back to me talking about Solomon and God telling him not to multiply wives to himself and take wives from the foreign kingdoms? And he thought, oh, what’s one or two going to hurt or 400?

And all of a sudden, they had convinced him to let them