Scattering and Gathering

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Hosea chapter 1. In the last few weeks, I’ve done some research on citizenship law. Exciting, right?

Because I, you know, come to find out, well, I don’t know that I really found out. It’s just common sense that if the Lord opens doors for a Christian and me to adopt internationally, which I’ve talked to you all about before, We would have to take steps to make sure that those kids could be citizens the moment they land on U. S.

soil. So I’ve been looking into that a little bit. But I found it interesting that in some countries, you know, they have different processes where you can get citizenship or where you can give it up.

In a lot of countries, you can give up your citizenship. I read the story of Lee Harvey Oswald, I guess, before he assassinated John F. Kennedy, either alone or working with others, depending on what you believe of the Warren report.

He had gone to Moscow at some point. He’d flown over there. He was a committed communist over here after he, I believe it was the Marine Corps he was in.

And he had left the Marine Corps and become a committed communist. and at one point he had flown to Moscow and gone into some, I don’t know, some embassy or some foreign ministry building over there and had tried to give up his American citizenship. I thought, well, that’s crazy, but I guess if you want to be a communist, you don’t really need American citizenship if you want to be a Soviet, I mean. So he went over there and tried to give up his citizenship, and the Soviets didn’t want him either.

he wasn’t able to defect over there. But I thought, you know, that was just, the giving up of his citizenship was just a formality. He had not been an American, at least in his heart and in his thinking and in his values.

He’d not been an American for quite some time. He’d not been a loyal American in quite some time. So the move to give up his citizenship was just a formality.

Now, I don’t know that there’s any way with American citizenship that they can actually take it away from you without your consent, at least at this point. I don’t think there’s anything that they can do. But I know in some countries, they have legal processes where if you break the law just in some horribly bad way or you’re just extremely disloyal to the country, whatever it is, some countries have a process where they can revoke your citizenship.

And I’ve read of countries, I can’t remember any off the top of my head, But I’ve read of countries where they’ve got groups of people who’ve been in rebellion against the country for however many years, and they’ve just gone through, and entire groups of people, they’ve stripped them of their citizenship. And really, all it was to say, I don’t think it’s Russia, but let’s just use Russia as an example, because I was already talking about being in Moscow. If Russia were to strip citizenship from the rebels in Chechnya, for example, and say, you’re no longer Russian citizens, well, really, they haven’t changed anything.

It’s just a mere formality. Those people haven’t been loyal Russians in years, if ever. And so all they’re doing is actualizing them in the choices that they’ve already made.

Tonight, that’s a little bit in line with what we’re going to talk about. Some of the choices that the people of Israel had already made, and God comes in and makes statements about his relationship to them. And to us, it sounds strange, and the idea God’s just going to write these people off.

But it’s not God’s, what we began talking about last week with his relationship with Israel at this point in the book of Hosea, it’s not that God just all of a sudden arbitrarily gets tired of them and says, I’m done with you people, you’re not my people anymore. They hadn’t been his people for quite some time. As we’ve been talking about with worship, the worship of God is an ongoing thing.

It’s a lifestyle, it’s a pattern, it’s something we do completely or not at all. And these people had been worshiping God, for the most part, many of them had been worshiping God, not at all for quite some time. And we’re going to read tonight about when God says they were not his people.

We began last week, some of you were not here, I know, we began last week with a study in Hosea. And I started with that because some of you have asked me about the minor prophets, the little books at the end of the Old Testament that nobody seems to talk about much, and so we’re going to talk about them. I don’t know that when we get done with Hosea, we’ll go immediately into the next minor prophet, but for right now we’re in Hosea and we’re going to take a look at it.

And seeing Israel’s unfaithfulness to God and needing some visible picture to make them understand their sin against him, their unfaithfulness to him, God takes one of his prophets, Hosea, and instructs him to go and marry an unfaithful woman. So that the people of Israel would look at this woman who is married to Hosea, but runs off, tries to throw away her marriage, runs away, cavorting with other men, and yet he goes to chase after her. God sends him to chase after her to get the people of Israel to understand what their relationship to God was like.

And if we just leave off at certain points, it can sound like this is only a message of doom and gloom, that God was just done with the people of Israel. That God has Hosea have the three children, we’re going to talk about their names tonight, and gives them these names to tell Israel what’s going on between him and them, And then Gomer, Hosea’s wife, runs off, and it just sounds like God is washing his hands of Israel. But at the same time, as I said, God sends Hosea to run after Gomer.

And the last verse of this chapter, the last verse of this chapter, as we’re going to read tonight, tells us there’s more to God’s plan than just writing off Israel. He does write them off in the short term. But folks, where we plan short term, And as human beings, even our long-term plans are short-term.

God looks at the long view of history. And God always has a plan in mind. We’re going to start tonight in verse 4.

I know we already talked about this a little bit last week, verse 4. And so I won’t go into a great deal of detail explaining it as far as all the history of it. But the Lord said unto Hosea, 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 and house of Israel.

So Gomer and Hosea have had a child. God tells Hosea, name him Jezreel, which in Hebrew meant to scatter. It was a word similar to the name Israel, and so it was a play on words.

The word Israel, I believe, meant prince or something similar to that. And so going from being part of God’s family, he changes their name and uses this and says, now you’re going to be scattered. It’s a word that they would use for sowing seed.

Jezreel was also a valley in northern Israel where the northern kingdom of Israel was located. If you know about Armageddon, that’s where Mount Megiddo is located. It’s all right there together.

And he tells them, he tells Hosea, call his name Jezreel, because there I’m going to avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu. God had sent Jehu to get rid of the royal family of Ahab and their idolatry, And Jehu had done what God told him to do, but hadn’t done it in the way God told him to do it. God appointed him to cleanse the land of idolatry, and yet he gets rid of a little bit of the idolatry, seizes power, and somehow his favorite idols are missed in the sweep.

And so God at that point says, what you’ve done, you’ve done unrighteously, and the blood of Jezreel is going to be avenged on you. The house of Jehu was the royal family, kind of like they have the house of Windsor in England today, in the United Kingdom. the royal house of Jehu was the family that the kings came from.

And Hosea is there to tell King Jeroboam that your days are numbered. The days of your royal family here are numbered. The days of this kingdom are numbered because in Jezreel, God is going to break the back of the Israelite army as he would later do under King Sennacherib of Assyria.

They would send them in. The Israelite army would be defeated and there would be nothing between the Assyrian army and the capital city of Israel but the valley of Jezreel. and he says at Jezreel the bow of Israel will be broken and I will take away the kingdom and house of Israel and he did as I said King Sennacherib marched in once Jezreel was clear he marched into Samaria he conquered the entire northern kingdom of Israel and suddenly there was no house of Jehu on the throne because there was no kingdom anymore Assyria annexed Israel they took the ten tribes We talked about this a little bit in Sunday School this morning.

They’re not the ten lost tribes of Israel. They’re still around. Even James wrote to the twelve tribes who were scattered.

It’s hard to view them as lost if he still identifies them. They were just assimilated into the Assyrian Empire. A lot of these empires that conquered multiple nations, they would go and they would just big melting pot and mix everybody together.

And they’d uproot entire villages and say, here, you live here in northern Israel, we’re going to take you to southern Iran and put you there. In this village from southern Iran, we’re going to put you in Turkey. And everybody’s going to be moved around so that you don’t have all the Israelites together where they can forge a resistance.

We don’t have all the Turks together where they can forge a resistance and that sort of thing. And so Israel, the northern kingdom, the ten northern tribes were scattered just like God through Hosea said they would be. And it shall come to pass at that day, verse 5, I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel.

Verse 6 says, and she conceived again and bare a daughter. And God said unto him, call her Lo-Ruhamah, for I will no more have mercy upon the house of Israel, but will utterly take them away. So he’s called them Jezreel, indicating they were to be scattered, but just in case they didn’t get the picture there, he says, I will utterly take them away.

I will utterly disperse them. This name, Lo-Ruhamah, means no mercy. It says, tell the people of Israel that I will not have mercy on them any longer.

Again, just as a reminder, God did not just suddenly decide, hey, I know I’ve been a God who keeps my promises up to this point, but I am through with that. I’m bored with that whole way of business. I’m just not going to have mercy on you anymore.

God had made a covenant with them that they would walk with him and he would be their God and they would be his people and they would obey him, they hadn’t done it. Not only had they just broken the law, but they had actually engaged in every kind of idolatry and every kind of pagan worship that you can imagine. And if they thought about the Lord God at all, they thought of him as just one of their many gods.

He’s the God that our ancestors worshipped and yet we’ve got all these others that are here alongside him. He’s just one of many. And because of that, God said, I’ve tried time and time and time again to get your attention, to get you to repent of this, to realize the danger of it, and you haven’t done it.

I’ve been protecting you all this time. It’s about time that somebody speaks to you in a way you can understand. And that would be the Assyrians.

God used the Assyrians to make them understand. No more mercy, he says. And folks, I can’t imagine the fear that I would feel today if God came to me and said, there’s no more mercy for you.

Folks, if we think about it, we are completely and totally dependent upon the mercy of God. And I’m not just talking salvation. In salvation especially, we are completely and utterly dependent upon the mercy of God.

God did not have to save any one of us. God, out of his goodness, sent his son. God, out of his own goodness, paid the penalty.

God, out of his own goodness made a plan and offer salvation by faith, but he didn’t have to. Nobody held God at gunpoint and said, you need to make a way for them to get to heaven. He would have been completely within his rights to just write us off.

For salvation, we’re completely and utterly dependent on God’s mercy, giving us, not giving us what we do deserve, and his grace giving us what we don’t deserve. And yet for more practical things, I mean, not that salvation’s not practical, but more day-to-day things, I should say. We’re dependent on God’s mercy.

It’s God’s mercy that my heart’s beating right now. I think it’s still beating, yeah. For the breath that I just took, that was God’s mercy.

Folks, I didn’t deserve that breath. Truth be told, we are all sinners against a holy God. We don’t deserve the next breath we take.

We’re completely dependent on God’s mercy. And what I’m not saying here to you is that I’m sure there were individuals within the kingdom of Israel who had kept the We know there were because there were prophets. There were men that God called to go and call out the nation.

There were men like Hosea. And I’m not saying that those men, in spite of the fact that they were faithful and they had faith in God, I’m not saying they lost God’s mercy and salvation. I believe we’ll see men like Hosea in heaven.

But at the same time, the nation lost its mercy of God in day-to-day things. It was by God’s mercy that Israel was not destroyed by its bigger, stronger neighbors. Ladies and gentlemen, it is by God’s mercy today that Israel is not overrun by its bigger, stronger neighbors.

Folks, we’re completely dependent on God’s mercy, as were they. And I can’t imagine a more chilling thought than for God to say, Lo, Ruhamah, no mercy. There’s no more mercy for you.

But I will utterly take them away. But I will have mercy upon the house of Judah, and will save them by the Lord their God, and will not save them by bow, nor by sword, nor by battle, by horses, nor by horsemen. He said, and this would have added insult to injury, if you will, because the kingdom of Judah in the south was not perfect either.

The kingdom of Judah, the people sinned just as much probably. The difference was you had people in Judah, you had leaders and you had prophets who were calling them back to repentance and the people would respond periodically. And there were still more people in Judah that had faith in God.

And I can’t tell you for sure that’s the reason why he let them go on a little longer. But I do know that there’s a precedent in Scripture for believing that God will stave off the judgment of a nation because of his people within it. Look at Sodom and Gomorrah.

When Abraham pleaded with God, would you spare the city if I could find X number of righteous men? And God said, sure. And he couldn’t even find ten.

And so there were some in Judah more so than in Israel who feared God. for whatever reason, God said, I will have mercy on Judah. Now that had to sting because they were sister kingdoms. In a sense, they’d come from the same kingdom of Israel.

They’d split apart. And a lot of times they would be friends with each other when there was an outside threat, but then they were always squabbling and rivals with each other like siblings. You know, my sister and I, we can, even now, we can have some pretty nice fights between us, but yet somebody says something to her on her job, or, you know, and I’m ready to drive four hours over there, and I don’t know what I would do.

I’ve never been in a fight in my life, but, and I’m not the kind of just run in and yell at somebody, but I guess stand next to her chair there at the salon and just glare at the person. I don’t know, but, you know, don’t, I can mess with my sister, she can mess with me, but you don’t get to do that. And so there’s this rivalry between Israel and Judah, and to hear, you’re done here, but yet I’m going to give Judah a little more time.

That would have stung a little bit. But I will have mercy upon the house of Judah, and will save them by the Lord their God. Later on, when Sennacherib and his successors lay siege to Jerusalem, they will lay siege to Jerusalem, they’ll bring an army of about 185,000 men.

And God doesn’t even use the army of Judah to rescue Jerusalem. God doesn’t send bows. He doesn’t send archers.

He doesn’t send swordsmen. There’s no big battle. He doesn’t send horses or horsemen.

What happens is the Bible says an angel of the Lord went out and 185,000 Assyrian soldiers died that night in their beds. There’s no logical explanation for that other than the hand of God. And so he did exactly what he said he’d do.

After the Assyrians conquered Israel, they marched south and said, we’re going to take Judah at the same time, and yet God said, no, no, you’re not going to. And when she had weaned Lo-Ruhamah, she conceived and bear a son, and God said, call his name Lo-Ami, for you are not my people, and I will not be your God. Now that sounds funny.

That sounds out of place in the Bible. God said, we’d walk with him, and he’d be our God and we’d be his people. Yes, exactly.

And you have not been his people for a long time. That’s why I said, that’s why I talked about citizenship and people having it revoked by some countries because they’ve been disloyal. Okay, God here was not arbitrarily saying, you’re not my people anymore and I don’t want to have mercy on you. Folks, they had not been his people for quite some time.

And it wasn’t that God said, you’re not my people anymore and so everything’s different. This had already been going on and God just actualized them in their choices. God just said, what has been going on, what has been reality all this time, now we’re going to apply the terminology to it and we’re going to call it what it’s been all along.

You are not my people. You’re not the people I intended you to be. I would say you’re not who I thought you were, but God knows everything that’s on our hearts.

Sometimes I’ll tease Christians. and she’ll say something that surprises me, and I’ll repeat the line from The Sound of Music. You know, sometimes I don’t believe I know you.

When his friend is talking about collaborating with the Nazis, sometimes I don’t believe I know you. You’re not the person I thought you were. You’re not the person, and I’m just teasing her when I say it, but you’re not the person that you presented yourself to be.

All along, they’ve been saying, but we’re God’s people. We’re God’s people. And it was a title, but there was no reality behind it as far as they were concerned.

They were not serving as they had said they would. So God said, call his name Lo-Ami, for you are not my people and I will not be your God. And folks, this sounds bad and it sounds doom and gloom.

And for them, in this time, it was. It was bad. God had already called them out as unfaithful.

And he tells them three things here that the unfaithful cannot claim. First, that the unfaithful cannot complain. The unfaithful can complain.

The faithful can complain too. The unfaithful cannot claim the security of being God’s people. And folks, I’m not talking about you sin and you lose your salvation.

Hopefully you’ve heard me preach enough and preach on this subject that you know I don’t believe that you can lose your salvation. If you are truly his, if you’ve been born again, then you’re his forever. But the problem is there are people sitting in churches all over this country, all over the world, who’ve had some kind of false conversion experience where they thought they were saved because they repeated some words, they said a prayer, they did what the preacher told them to, and then they’ve been fed a steady diet of eternal security, and they’re claiming the security of being God’s people, and yet they’re not His people.

And their lives and their fruits show that. Folks, the unfaithful cannot claim the security of being God’s people. Sitting in the church, being part of this community, not necessarily the membership, but being part of this community does not make anybody safe somehow.

Being one of God’s faithful people brings us security, but the Israelites could not claim the security of being God’s people because they weren’t God’s people. And so he told them, I’m taking away the kingdom and the house of Israel. Without a kingdom, without a government of their own, they were at the mercy of the Assyrians.

There was no real security for them anymore. And the idea that we can say, well, yeah, I’m a Christian. I was born in America, and I’ve heard people say that.

Because I’m not a Muslim, because I’m not a Hindu, because I was born in this country, I’m a Christian. Folks, when people around us say, yeah, I’m a Christian, I’m one of God’s people, and yet by their fruits we know they’re not, and they claim the security of God’s people. The unfaithful cannot claim the security that comes from being God’s people.

Second of all, the unfaithful could not claim the blessings of being God’s people. This blessing, this mercy that he talks about is a blessing, something they didn’t deserve or something they didn’t earn. And God had not only protected them, but he had prospered their nation.

Every bit of wealth they had, every bit of prestige they had, every bit of comfort they had was the mercy of God. It was a blessing from God. And, you know, with obedience to God comes blessings.

That’s not a hard and fast rule. It’s not a mathematical formula that if you do X plus Y, you get Z. where I’m telling you that if you’ll just be good enough, that God will bless you, that’s not how it works.

But in general, as a general principle, not necessarily a promise or a rule, but as a general principle, obedience to God brings blessings. And they had been disobedient for all this time, and they were expecting to continue to coast from here on out because of the obedience of their forefathers and the blessings that was purchased by their forefathers. And they could not claim the blessings of being God’s people when they were not God’s people.

Third of all, the unfaithful could not claim to be God’s people. They couldn’t claim the security or the blessings of being God’s people because they were not God’s people. He tells us in verses 8 and 9, You are not my people, and I will not be your God.

See, by their continued disobedience and idolatry, they had shown who they really were. They could talk about being the Israelites. As we talked about this morning with the Pharisees, they could talk about being the descendants of Abraham, but they had shown themselves by their actions that they were not God’s people.

And not necessarily the nation, but the individuals in it had not been for quite some time. They were not God’s people. And as I said, this sounds very much doom and gloom, and it sounds bad.

And it is bad for the people of Israel at this point. But God, as I said, takes a longer view of history. And we’re just about finished.

Yet the number of the children, verse 10, Yet the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured nor numbered. And it shall come to pass that in the place where it was said unto them, ye are not my people, there shall it be said unto them, ye are the sons of the living God. Then shall the children of Judah and the children of Israel be gathered together and appoint themselves one head, and they shall come up out of the land, for great shall be the day of Jezreel.

And most Bible scholars believe that that’s talking about a future day of redemption, when those who respond to Christ as the Messiah from Judah and from Israel recognize him as one to be the king, the one that God promised, and God restores them, and God restores the nation of Israel through their faith in Jesus Christ. Many Christian scholars of the book of Hosea believe that when they appoint themselves one head, it will be recognizing Jesus Christ as king. And I look forward to that day, and God could have easily and with every right said of the people of Israel and of the people of Judah and of us, you’ve sinned against me, I’m done with you. And he says to these individuals, you are no longer going to benefit from these things to which you’re not entitled that you’ve been claiming all along.

And yet my goal in this is not to completely destroy you. My goal in this, God’s ultimate goal, God’s ultimate plan was to draw the unfaithful to himself. Even as he’s calling them out for their unfaithfulness, even as he’s judging them for their unfaithfulness, God’s plan was to restore them and to draw the unfaithful to himself.

And throughout the Bible, we see places, even in the New Testament, where God pronounces judgment sin, but always behind the bad news, there’s the good news that God has provided for the reconciliation and restoration of sinners to himself. Folks, as we continue to study the book of Hosea over the next few weeks, we need to keep these themes in mind of his judgment and of his reconciliation, because they go hand in hand with what it is that we are supposed to be all about as we talk to our friends and neighbors, that yes, sin is real and God will judge sin. And we cannot continue to disobey him and expect him to just bless us in return.

But yet God’s plan, God’s long-term plan, is to draw sinners to himself. If I could use the word, I would say, to woo us to him. That’s an okay word, isn’t it?

All right. It’s not one we use much anymore. I was making sure it didn’t mean something wrong.

The way I’ve heard it used, I thought it was all right. But to win us to himself is his goal. And he told them, because he needed them to understand the way you’ve been going. You’re not my people, and you can’t claim all the blessings of being my people, but yet it’s my will that eventually you will be my people.