God’s Controversy with Idolatry

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Transcript:

Well, turn with me to Hosea chapter 4. Hosea chapter 4. How many of you have ever had to tell your children something more than once?

Anybody? Okay. Anybody not?

Ladies, any of you ever have to tell your husband something more than once? Yeah. Most of you.

We have to repeat ourselves a lot, even in little things. I had the privilege, along with Christian, last Friday night of going as Brother Daryl’s guest to the Gideon banquet over in Prairie Grove. It was quite an impressive spread, not only the meal, but the speakers they put together.

It was just a good evening, I thought. But Lanny Rice was one of the speakers, and he spoke here last year when we had somebody to come talk about the Gideons. He said that repetition is one of the ways we learn things.

and then as if to prove the point, the next person that got up to speak, I’m pretty sure said that repetition is the way we learn things. And I think I may have even heard a third person say it that night, and I thought, okay, I get the idea. Repetition is how we learn things.

It was good to hear that. It was something I was going to need as Friday night. Thursday I’d been working on this message.

Wednesday I was working on it. I’ve started trying to at least have my messages outlined, if I can, by Tuesday night. I don’t finish studying by Tuesday night and leave them alone until Sunday.

But I’ve been trying lately this thing called not procrastinating and getting them at least outlined by Tuesday night. That way I have. .

. What is it with loud noises when I. .

. The building was falling apart last week. Anyway, try to have things outlined by Tuesday night, and that way I can think more on the details over the next few days after that.

And toward the end of the week, I was thinking about this message I swear I have preached this message before. We’re going to talk about idolatry tonight, and I thought, I have talked about that before. I know I have.

I spent three weeks, a three-week miniseries on Wednesday nights, I’m fairly certain, about idolatry in the last six months sometime. I feel like I’m repeating myself. And during the children’s, what do you call it, pizza and painting party yesterday, I’d gone into my office, nobody knew, but I’d gone into my office with a slice of the big cookie.

so I wouldn’t have to share it. And I went in there and Brother Jack, when I came in, Brother Jack was sitting in my office and I thought, I wonder if he’s got some big cookie stashed somewhere too. But he was already sitting in my office so I had to pretend I didn’t have the big cookie.

And we sat there and talked and we were talking about today and I was sharing with him that I was feeling this way and he pointed out to me that, you know, the Israelites seem to have the same problem over and over and I thought, well, no wonder I’ve talked about this before. I mean, God didn’t just talk about idolatry once. I was thinking, did I preach on Hosea before and didn’t realize it?

And no, I remembered that it was Solomon when I preached on idolatry for all those Wednesday nights. It was talking about Solomon’s life and where Solomon went astray toward the end. I got to thinking, well, here I am repeating myself, but then again God repeated himself in talking about idolatry because the Israelites never did seem to get it, at least not until after their dealings with Assyria and Babylon.

I don’t know this for a fact, but I’ve heard preachers say that after the captivity, they came back and Jews today have even wandered away from God. They don’t accept Christ as the Messiah, and many of them will say we’re secular Jews or we’re Jews who don’t even believe in God. I don’t understand how that works when I read the Old Testament.

That’s like saying I’m a Christian and I don’t believe in God. But I’ve been told that they never went back into idolatry the way that they did up to that point. But even if you say they stopped with the idolatry, the worshiping of visible idols after the captivity, you’ve still got about a 4,000-year period of time when over and over God had to talk to them about idolatry.

And I realized yesterday, or last night, I realized that the reason for that is idolatry seems to be the biggest problem that humanity has. If you don’t believe me, think about all the other things that are rooted in idolatry. I mean, I pointed out to you a couple weeks ago that idolatry was such an important issue to God that the very first two commandments of the Ten Commandments had to do with idolatry.

The very first thing that mankind was tempted with was idolatry. You shall be like God. In other words, they were going to set themselves up as gods in their own eyes.

They’re going to worship themselves instead of one true God. I don’t know what you call it here, but where I come from, we call that idolatry. And ever since that first idolatrous temptation was given into, mankind has sinned in a myriad of ways.

When our relationship with God is correct, when we’re in good standing with God, when we’ve got a proper understanding of where we are and where God is, and realize that we are not God, and realize that we are not God’s equal, you know, a lot of other things seem to follow naturally from that. A lot of things just seem to be in order from that. That’s why Jesus said that the whole of the law and the prophets hinged on, love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, your mind, and your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.

You get those right, and everything else just kind of flows naturally from it. Well, folks, if we are in a right standing with God, if our relationship with God is right, if our relationship to God is one of us worshiping Him and Him alone, most other things are going to take care of themselves. problems. We’re not going to have a lot of the same problems that we would have otherwise.

I’m not going to say that we’ll be sinless. I’m not going to say that we won’t be tempted. But if we are squarely fixed with our eyes and focus on God and worshiping Him, there’s going to be a lot of temptation, I think, that whizzes by that we don’t even see.

We don’t pay attention to. We don’t have time for. We don’t have time to indulge in.

And on the other side of that coin, when we are in idolatry, when our understanding of God is not right, when our relationship to God is not right, everything else seems to get out of whack, doesn’t it? How many people do we know? And maybe some of us have been these people in the past. How many people do we know who the first step was just getting a little distant from God?

Maybe we stopped studying His Word. Maybe we stopped going to church. Maybe we just took a little step away.

And folks, that first step was all it took to create a whole new direction. And we see the pitfalls and we see the slippery slope when we begin to take a step away from God. And idolatry begins with a step away from God.

What he deals with them about in the book of Hosea, even in this book I feel like I’m repeating myself. What he deals with them about here in chapter 4 is their idolatry. And like I said, I feel like I repeat myself even in this book because one chapter, one message, it’s hopeful and he’s talking about the restoration of Israel in the future.

He starts out by talking about judgment on Israel for their sin. Then he talks about restoration, and he goes back to talking about judgment. Oh, but then there’s restoration, and last week we talked about God’s kind of love from the book of Hosea, and now we’re back to talking about a judgment.

And I think that what goes on in Hosea is just a snapshot of what was going on throughout their history, the peaks and the valleys, of being close to God and then worshiping idols, being close to God and worshiping idols. And he says to them in Hosea chapter 4 verse 1, Hear the word of the Lord, ye children of Israel, for the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth nor mercy nor knowledge of God in the land. When it says he has a controversy, that doesn’t mean God is being controversial. That means God has a problem with them.

God has something against them. God has a bone to pick with the people of Israel. And the reason God has a bone to pick with Israel is because God cannot stand idolatry.

God cannot stand when man takes anything else, whether it’s what Romans calls the image of the creeping things, and whether we’re talking about a statue of a lizard. When the Bible talks about creeping things, I always picture lizards. I don’t know why.

But whether we’re talking about people bowing down to statues of lizards, or whether we’re talking about people acting as though they themselves are God. Whatever it is that draws away from the one true God, the worship that he and he alone deserves is idolatry, and God cannot stand it. God hates it.

And so he says to the people of Israel, I have a controversy with you. I have a contention or a strife with you. I have a bone to pick with the people of Israel because of this idolatry.

He says, with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth nor mercy nor knowledge of God in the land. Why was there no mercy or knowledge or, I’m sorry, no mercy or truth or knowledge of God in the land? It was because they had fallen into idolatry.

And by the way, as we go through Hosea, this is not over and over they’ve fallen into idolatry. God is speaking through Hosea in a relatively short period of time, but going through their history, they’d fallen once again in idolatry. And he says in verse 2, by swearing and lying and killing and stealing and committing adultery, they break out and blood toucheth blood.

Now, there are people who put the words swearing and lying together and say that they mean perjury. Well, that may very well be to swear something and to lie about it. God had been clear about not lying under oath when he said, thou shalt not bear false witness against your neighbor.

They were not to perjure themselves. They were not to tell lies in a more general way of saying it. It could also be that they were profaning holy things by using them to swear on.

And Jesus would say later on, you know, you’re not to swear by the earth or heaven or the throne of God. Did he say? Again, I may be getting two passages mixed up.

I hate when that happens. But he said we’re not to swear by anything. He said let your yes be yes, your no be no. It may be very possible that they were saying things like, I swear to God.

Or they were swearing on the temple. I’m never real comfortable with the idea of swearing on the Bible. I’m not saying we should stop it.

It’s just a little uncomfortable to me to take God’s word and treat it like it’s, well, I can’t think of the word. But to treat it, does anybody know the word I’m looking for here? I think it demeans it to say it’s just something you put your hand on and that’s all it’s good for.

It’s almost like a superstition. So I’m not saying it’s a bad practice or we need to stop it. It just makes me a little uncomfortable.

But it could be very well here that they were profaning holy things. They’re saying, I swear to God, or I swear by the temple, and knowing full well that they were not going to follow through with what they swore. And so you’ve got people swearing, you’ve got people lying.

They were telling things that they knew to be false. Folks, God hates that. And killing, well, we know where he stands on that.

He said, thou shalt not kill. And people at various times when they get far away from God give no thought really to the taking of innocent life. And they were killing and they would kill one another and they would steal. We know how God feels about that.

The Eighth Commandment, thou shalt not steal. And people were taking things that didn’t belong to them. Not just as thieves in the night breaking in and stealing things, but they would defraud one another. They would cheat one another.

Try to see what all they could get by with. And honestly, ladies and gentlemen, as I read through this passage, I see a lot of similarities between 7th century Israel and 21st century America. I mean, I hate to say that, because I love this country.

Hearing about some of the places where the Gideons were passing out Bibles and reading some of the things that I’ve read on the Voice of the Martyrs website, folks, I just, I didn’t deserve to be born here. I thank God that I was born here and that we live in a free country where we can worship Him. But at the same time, my goodness, how this country has spit in God’s face.

over and over after the blessings he’s given us. And we’re no different than they are. And committing adultery, again, we know how God feels about that, the seventh commandment, thou shalt not commit adultery.

And they break out, they were running wild, and blood toucheth blood. Now there are a couple of interpretations of the phrase blood toucheth blood. I’m not sure which one, well, I’m not sure absolutely which one is correct.

I know which one I lean to. There are some people who would say that it’s talking about mixed marriages between the Israelites and the pagan countries around them, and the blood was mingled between the Israelites and the Canaanites and the Moabites and all these. That’s very possible that he’s talking about that.

There’s also the sense in which there was so much violence that the blood ran together in the streets. I could see where either one of those could fit what he’s talking about here. Either one of those could be the explanation of what he’s talking about here.

I tend toward the latter, but again, I wouldn’t be surprised if I got to heaven and God said, no, it was that intermarriage thing. Either way, what’s clear is they were doing things that God had told them not to do. God had told them not to marry the pagan countries around them.

It wasn’t a racial thing. It wasn’t that God said these people are worse than you, you’re better than them. It was that God said you need to be separate because their idolatry will corrupt you.

If it’s the explanation that there was so much violence that the blood ran in the streets and my blood mixed with your blood as we both lay there as a result of the violence. Folks, either way, these are things that God would not be happy with. And so he tells them, you’ve got these problems in your country.

Therefore shall the land mourn, and everyone that dwelleth therein shall languish with the beasts of the field, with the fowls of heaven. Yea, the fishes of the sea also shall be taken away. Folks, if they weren’t going to mourn over their sins, somebody was going to.

And he says here that the very land would mourn. The Bible says, I believe in Proverbs, that righteousness exalteth a nation while sin is a reproach to any people. Folks, the nation is blessed and prosperous by and large when we fear God.

And I believe there’s some precedent in Scripture that when a nation turns its back on the righteousness of God, when a nation decides it no longer wants to fear God, that there are consequences and even the land will mourn. Now that’s not to say that every natural disaster, every terrorist attack is God’s hand of judgment. I believe that when God finally gives this country or any other country what it deserves, it will be clear and his people will know it.

Now, in what sense that comes about, I’m not sure. I know we don’t see a lot of instances in the Old Testament where God brought judgment on a country and didn’t tell them what was going on. I’m not one of these people like Pat Robertson who’s going to tell you every hurricane is God’s judgment.

Now, I did say at one point years ago that I thought God was going to judge New Orleans Certainly thereafter, Hurricane Katrina hit. But quite frankly, New Orleans isn’t doing anything that any other city in America is doing. Did I say that right?

They’re not doing anything different than what the rest of the cities are doing. So I’m not going to stand here like Pat Robertson and tell you, well, this hurricane was God’s judgment for New Orleans and their sin. That mine disaster was a result of that city taking God out of the public schools.

Folks, I don’t know. If God ever does tell me that, well, I’ll double check in his word and then I’ll let you know. But there is precedent for believing God does judge nations when they forget him.

And he says here that even the land will mourn. And there are consequences when a nation forgets God. He says the land will mourn, and everyone that dwelleth therein shall languish.

Doesn’t say necessarily he’s going to kill everybody that lived in the land of Israel, but they will languish. I know what languishing is. You see plants sometimes that need to be watered.

Any one of you could have come and looked at my garden last July and seen what the word languish looked like. Probably any of the rest of you that had gardens could have showed us. They’re still there, but they’re not in good shape.

They’re just kind of clinging to life. With the beasts of the field and the fowls of heaven, yea, the fishes of the sea shall also be taken away. Their livestock would languish.

They wouldn’t have fish to go after. Yet let no man strive nor reprove another, for thy people are as they that strive with the priest. He says, and so don’t let the people go around and accuse one another, because they’re all like people who would strive with the priest. And what that means, I believe he’s talking about, there is a certain level of pridefulness and a certain level of comfort with our sin that somebody would go to a man of God and argue about it and try to justify themselves. And for somebody to go to the priest and say, you’re wrong in what you say God’s Word is, I’m happy with this, I’m doing what I want to do, and argue with the priest, that would be pretty arrogant.

It would be arrogant for somebody, not just me as the pastor, but any one of us as a man or a woman of God, to stand and clearly say, this is what God’s Word says, and have other people say, I don’t care what God says, I don’t care what God’s Word says, I know what it says in there, and I’m going to do what I want. When somebody gets to that point, there’s really not a whole lot of rationality. There’s not a lot of ability to reason with them.

He says, don’t deal with them. I believe he’s talking to Hosea here and saying, they’re all like people who strive with the priests. There’s no reasoning here.

There’s just arrogance. Folks, if God could have gotten through to these people any other way, I’m sure he would have done so. But we’d come to the point after thousands of years that the only thing that was going to get their attention was the Assyrians and the sword, because there was no reasoning with them anymore.

Therefore shalt thou fall in the day, and the prophet also shall fall with thee in the night, and I will destroy thy mother. He’s talking about the nation of Israel. He was going to destroy the nation of Israel.

The people would fall in the day, and it says the prophets shall also fall with thee in the night. He’s not talking about Hosea here, but the priests, the religious leaders, the people who professed to be prophets and said, no, Hosea, you’re wrong. They were just as corrupt as the people.

We see that throughout the Old Testament. The religious leaders would become corrupt. the political leaders would become corrupt, and it would lead the people in the road of corruption.

You see that when Jeremiah would prophesy, there would be false prophets who would come and say, no, when God’s given him a message that God was going to judge Judah, these other people would say, no, he’s wrong. God said Judah’s going to prosper. And God would strike those men down as false prophets.

He says the people here were going to fall in the daytime, and their prophets were going to fall with them in the nighttime, and he would destroy the nation. We’re going to try to move through the rest of this quickly. My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.

They’re destroyed for lack of knowledge. It’s not that they didn’t know a lot of things. We’re not destroyed for lack of mathematical knowledge.

We’re not destroyed for lack of scientific knowledge. We’re not destroyed for lack of geography knowledge or any other number of academic subjects. We are destroyed.

The people are destroyed for lack or knowledge of God and His righteousness. And when he says here, my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge, He’s not talking about the people who truly feared him and trusted in him. He’s talking about the nation of Israel as a whole because they profess to be his people while not actually possessing a relationship with him.

I’m not sure, but I kind of imagine the phrase my people here being used in a tongue-in-cheek way. Those people who profess to be mine are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Ladies and gentlemen, if you’re really born again and you have a growing relationship with God, you know something about him.

But the fact is, in America in the 21st century, in a nation filled with adultery and stealing and killing and all other sorts of evil that God is against, there are people who sit even in the pews of evangelical churches and go week after week who have no knowledge of Him, have no relationship with Him, have no real faith in Him, have never been born again, and yet profess to be His people, and they are destroyed for lack of knowledge because they don’t know the true God or His salvation or His righteousness. My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge because thou hast rejected knowledge. It wasn’t that they didn’t have it available to them.

God had revealed himself to the people of Israel, and they had rejected what they knew. Romans chapter 1 talks about man choosing not to retain God in their knowledge, that mankind has the opportunity to know that there is a God. They have the opportunity through the light of conscience to know his law, and yet mankind routinely rejects what we do know of God, choosing to serve ourselves or other things instead.

So they rejected knowledge of God. Because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me. And here he’s talking again to the false priests.

Seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children. As they were increased, so they sinned against me. As God blessed them, they just used that as opportunity to sin against God more.

And I’m sad to say in our country, the more he blesses us, it seems we use that wealth and we use that prestige and we use that freedom as an opportunity to sin against him even more. Therefore will I change their glory into shame. As far up as they are, they’ll be that far down.

They eat up the sin of my people. I had to read that a couple times because that sounds like a good thing, to eat up the sin, to devour the sin, get rid of the sin. But now he’s talking, I believe, about the sin offering, that it would be offered to God by the priests, and the priests would be allowed to eat some of it, and they set their heart on iniquity.

See, the problem was the priests, the religious leaders, were going through the motions of leading Israel in the worship of God, and yet their hearts were set on iniquity. The religious leaders were just in it for the material benefits, and in their hearts they could not care less about the righteousness of God, and the people followed suit. And there shall be, verse 9, like people, like priests, and there shall be like people, like priests.

Like father, like son, is the phrase that comes to mind. What I do, Benjamin tries to do. What I say, Benjamin tries to say.

Many of you have heard that. He will repeat invariably the last word of any sentence you say. It’s like a parrot.

He wants to be like the big people. Well, folks, in their day, the priests were the leaders. They were the big people of the nation.

It says the people would be just like the priests. And as the priests had their hearts on iniquity, had their hearts on sin, so the people would follow suit. And I will punish them for their ways and reward them for their doings.

Quite honestly, I don’t want to be rewarded for my doings, do you? I’d much rather get what I don’t deserve than what I do deserve. For they shall eat and not have enough.

They shall commit whoredom and shall not increase, because they have left off to take heed of the Lord. So whatever they do, it will not be enough. They will never get ahead.

They will never prosper the way that they try to, because as diligent as they are about all these other things, the thing that they have forgotten is the most important. The thing they have not been diligent about is service to God and obedience to God. And he says, Whartom and wine and new wine take away the heart.

And all of their sin, all of their idolatry will draw their heart farther and farther away. And we’re going to stop in verse 11 tonight. We’ll pick up in verse 12 next week.

But I wanted to share with you really the three reasons I see in this passage that God has a controversy with idolatry other than the fact that it takes glory away from Him. But there are practical concerns about our spiritual condition that idolatry is not something to mess around with. The very idea that we can worship something other than God, even if it’s in addition to the one true God, is dangerous.

And God says, I have a controversy with the inhabitants of the land. And then he begins to describe all these things. Folks, it began centuries before this even with a little bit of idolatry that led them into some bad practices.

And to see the progression of this, we go backwards through the passage we’ve just looked at. I’m not going to explain the whole text to you again from back to front. But folks, starting in verse 8, where he talks about eating up the sin of his people.

The priests eating up the sin and their hearts being full of iniquity or being on iniquity. And he talks about they commit whoredom. And he talks about their adultery and wine shall take their heart, take away their heart, carry their hearts farther and farther away from God.

Folks, one of the reasons God hates idolatry, in addition to it robbing him of his glory, is that idolatry leads to immorality. Idolatry leads to immorality. We cannot think that it’s okay to worship something other than God, even just a little bit, and not expect that it’s going to carry us into some practices that we never thought we would participate in.

It all begins with just a step away from God. Solomon, in all his wisdom, I talked about Solomon a few moments ago. Solomon in all his wisdom, God had given him wisdom to make him the wisest man on earth.

And yet the commandments God had given, one of them was not to multiply to themselves wives and not to take foreign wives. So in other words, it was a bad idea to marry a bunch of women. And having less wisdom, considerably less wisdom than Solomon, even I can tell you that’s a bad idea.

Men, I don’t know about you, but I have my hands full with one. And I love her, but I couldn’t handle ten more like her. Because she couldn’t handle ten more like me either.

But it was a bad idea, and God had told them not to multiply wives to themselves. And Solomon, I believe, worshipped his wisdom a little more than he worshipped God, and thought, I can handle it. I’m smart enough to handle it.

And he married a bunch of women. He married a bunch of foreign women. And it all began with idolatry, a little bit of worshipping self, and self’s desires and self’s wisdom more than God.

And if I remember the count correctly, he had at least 800 women. Folks, that’s going way outside of the bounds of what God wants you to do. And it led to idolatry.

It led from that little bit of idolatry to now he’s allowing them to build temples to their false gods. He’s participating in the worship in these temples. And the nation began to run amok.

The people began to reject God and involve themselves in all sorts of idolatry. Folks, if we do not fear and worship God the way we are supposed to consistently, we will find ourselves involved in things that we never thought we would do. People all the time in this country, professing Christians, find themselves caught in the snare of adultery, find themselves caught in the snare of pornography, find themselves caught in the snare of stealing, of drunkenness, of all sorts of things, and it begins with getting a step away from the proper fear and worship of God.

That’s where it begins. And he tells them that as they’ve worshipped idols, they’ve gone on to hoard them in the wine. Second of all, idolatry leads to ignorance.

He says that they’re destroyed for lack of knowledge, and I told you that was not lack of knowledge of academic subjects, that was lack of knowledge of God. Folks, it stands to reason that when we don’t worship God, when we worship a false God, and a lot of people think they are worshiping God. The very first message I preached here was on all the false gods that people worship, these ideas they get of who God is that are not rooted in the Bible, that God is just a Santa Claus, that God is just all love all the time, and there’s never any wrath or judgment.

All these false ideas that people have of God, and these are the things that they worship, it stands to reason that they wouldn’t understand who the true God is. When you’re worshiping some false God of your own design, you’re miles away from the God of the Bible. There’s no way to know Him, you’re not worshiping Him.

Idolatry leads to ignorance of God. Idolatry leads to ignorance of God’s righteousness, all these things. Idolatry leads to ignorance, and God’s people, or the people who profess to be gods, are destroyed for their ignorance.

Third of all tonight, finally, idolatry leads to lawlessness. We progress here from a few sinful acts, this immorality, to ignorance of God and his righteousness, to acting in ways that not only are destructive to us, but destructive to others around us. And as our society, you can look, some of you who have been alive longer than I have can trace the decay of our society, and as people began to forget the fear of God, society has progressively gone downhill, hasn’t it?

We see a murder rate in this country that they didn’t have 100 years ago in most places. We see divorce rates and teen pregnancy rates and abortion rates and folks, all sorts of things. They didn’t have 100 years ago in the same numbers that they have today as our socie