Apply Within

Bob Davis: What's happening, what God is showing us and what Christians I think can learn from this and get a lesson from this is that the great sin is unfaithfulness. He has saved us, and what are we doing with it? He has saved our lives, purchased us with his blood, and how are we treating that? I would say that we've got a long way to grow, and that's what God is saying as well.

Guest (Male): Welcome to Apply Within, a verse-by-verse study of the word of God with Pastor Bob Davis of North Country Chapel. We invite you to join with us as we, by the power of God's Holy Spirit, apply His word within our own hearts as we study line upon line, precept upon precept, verse-by-verse through the Bible. Continuing in Hosea chapter 1 verse 10, God declares His promise to restore His people and reveals His steadfast love despite their unfaithfulness. Here's Pastor Bob.

Bob Davis: Look at verse 10. "Yet the number of the children of Israel," speaking of the north, speaking of them total, "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 it shall be said unto them, 'Ye are the sons of the living God.'"

Now, is God cool or what? You've hurt me, departed from me, and so I turn away from you. But I promised Abraham something. And a promise is a promise. When I promise, I keep my word. And so notice what he says: mercy, grace. Yeah, you will be destroyed, but not completely. There will come a time when you will again be as the sands of the sea because God will always keep His promise.

God even said, talking about Israel, He would cut the tree down to the ground. Well, when you cut a tree down to the ground, have you killed it? No, because the roots are down under the ground, aren't they? There's still going to be life. And God is going to allow them to suffer. Many of them, listen, millions will die during this raid and years upon years upon years will go by and they will be mistreated and kept as slaves, and etcetera.

But the promise still remains. You'll still be as the sands of the sea. That's what He promised Abraham. And you'll be called, the place right here where I told you you will not be My people, He says there's going to come a time when you will be called the sons of the living God. And guys, you and I have read the end of the book. Someday Israel as a nation's going to turn back as an entire nation back to the Lord, and He will take them back.

People, when people study the book of Hosea, many Bible teachers, because of the message in Hosea, teach that God is finished with Israel. But verse 10 clearly says He is not finished. I'll still take care of you in the long run. They will be called the sons of the living God. They will turn back. Look at verse 11. "Then shall the children of Judah and the children of Israel be gathered together." You won't be a divided nation anymore. You'll be one nation again.

"And appoint themselves one head." By the way, I know who that's going to be. Messiah the King will sit on the throne of David and rule and reign, and they will accept Him, one head. "And they shall come up out of the land: for great shall be the day of Jezreel." You know something? Those are promises that Israel still hasn't understood yet.

Right now today, Israel doesn't have one head. So it hasn't been realized yet, but it's going to be. They will come together. They will stop being divided. They will come together and be one nation under God, and that will be when Messiah the King takes it all over. So it's good news. Now we go to chapter 2. "Say ye unto your brethren," this is what I want the kids to say. Now Hosea's wife has wandered off. She's hanging out, earning some money in prostitution.

"Say ye unto your brethren, Ammi; and to your sisters, Ruhamah." Notice the "Lo" is missing in both of them. Remember how the children were named? Now the "Lo" is missing in both of those words. "Plead with your mother, plead: 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." Say to your brothers not "Lo" but "My people."

And say to your sisters not ones that are not pitied, not "No pity," but "Pitied ones" or "Ones that are pitied." "Plead" carries the idea of great contention or conflict. Stand against your mother and plead that she return. Gomer was unfaithful. So God says to the kids, "You go plead to your mother to come home. Go beg your mother, contend with her, stand against her, and contend with her that she come home."

You know, even after they had been married for years and they had three children, this woman takes off and goes off into prostitution. Now again, notice God applies this physical sin into the spiritual and says that's what the nation of Israel has done. That's what they've done. Israel has been unfaithful. Those two golden calves set up in the high places. "Go to your mother and contend with her. Tell her to come back to me. Tell her to turn away from her idolatries."

An application I think to our own lives when you read verses 1 and 2, we as Christians, the great sin that we sin, whether we like to admit it or not, is the sin of unfaithfulness to the Lord our God. A sin of unfaithfulness to the Lord our God, to Jesus Christ, who I read in the New Testament purchased us with His blood. You and I have been purchased by the blood of Jesus Christ. That means God the Father so loved us, the world—the cosmos not meaning the universe and all the trees and sticks and things but humankind.

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. And what's happening, what God is showing us and what Christians I think can learn from this and get a lesson from this is that the great sin is unfaithfulness. He has saved us, and what are we doing with it? He has saved our lives, purchased us with His blood, and how are we treating that? I would say that we've got a long way to grow, and that's what God is saying as well.

He says plead, contend, or else "I will strip her naked, and set her as in the day that she was born." You know when you're born, you don't come in with any clothes. Kind of embarrassing. "And make her as a wilderness, and set her like a dry land, and slay her with thirst. And I will not have mercy upon her children; for they be the children of whoredoms." If she does not repent, God will severely judge her. If Israel will not turn back and immediately, God will severely judge.

That's what He's saying. And He says, "And I will not have mercy on her children." Israel's children are who? All those that are Jewish, true? Israel's children, I will not have mercy. That means on the individuals that make up the nation, the northern part. And it looks like from this language that the entire northern nation has turned away. Imagine that. The millions that live there have turned away. And God says they need to turn back right now or I will judge.

Verse 5: "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 my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, mine oil and my drink.'" The harlot says this. She shows us why she's doing this. She's doing this for money. She's doing this to get things that she couldn't get otherwise. She was tired of not having things.

Israel, under the call of the Lord God, under the command of God the King, they were saying, "But we want more. The other nations have this. The other nations have that. We want that too." And so they started going after false gods. He said just as a prostitute goes out there to get more money so that she can have things, he said that's what they're doing. They're doing it for money. They're doing it for material things.

It looks like Hosea was not a well-to-do man. He was a prophet of the living God and he probably, it looks like he wasn't rich like some of the other guys. Full-time ministry, you didn't make a lot of money. Didn't have a lot of stuff. Remember full-time ministers are taken care of by God's people. And Hosea was a full-time prophet, and what were God's people doing? They weren't bringing their tithes and offerings into the church so Hosea could live. They were worshipping false gods.

So Hosea's income was pretty low. He was having some troubles, hard to make ends meet. And his wife it looks like decided, "I'm going to get out there and I'm going to get to work. I'll get stuff for me." God says you take that physical and turn it to the spiritual. That's what Israel's doing also. "I'm going to get out there out from under God." I mean He always holds us back with these rules and these regulations, these stupid laws. "I'm going to get out there and live and get some life. We're going to make it."

Israel's sin was the same. See, Hosea's wife got tired of being poor. She got tired of not having what she wanted, what other people had, so she went out to get it, make a better life for herself. Israel's sin is the same. Israel turned to false gods to make it easier on themselves. They could eat what they wanted, they could live what they wanted, they could do their own thing. They could be free and whatever and be like everyone else.

She says, "I'll go after my lovers. They give me food, my water, my wool, my flax, my oil, my drink." All the time forgetting it was God that had been providing that for Israel. It was God. I think we forget that today. You know, it's not because you've always been healthier than everybody else. And I hear that so often. "Well, I've just really got a healthy constitution and that's just me. I don't bruise easy. I eat right."

You know what? You're nuts. You know why you're healthy? God. That's why. And you can't fool anybody. We all know it. You start eating healthy and then a report comes out all that stuff you've been eating that's been not healthy and doctors were wrong all along. And the things they told you not to eat, very things your body needed. "Oh, I quit that years ago. I don't touch that." And now they find out, oops, you really need some of that in your diet.

You can't win it and you can try to be smart and you can try to do it right, but do you notice how God is still God? And He's been providing your income, my health, my income, your health. He's been providing your clothes. He's been providing our food, our shelter. He's been providing it all and we're acting like He didn't do it.

And as soon as He doesn't give us a little bit more of what we think we want, we become prostitutes and we go out and find a way to get it ourselves. And that's what Israel's doing. And God says, "It's not blessing me, it's hurting me and you're treating me this way and there will be no mercy." You know my Spirit will not always strive, He says. It's because the Lord your God has blessed you. The Lord our God has blessed us that we're still alive today and that we have incomes, that we even have jobs.

Some of you say, "Well, I don't have a job, I've been laid off." But has He given you enough health to go look for a job, enough health? Has He given you the ability and allowed you to be able to read so that you could even write and fill out an application and read the questions? What has He given you? What has He done? We so quickly become like Israel and turn from Him.

And that's what I think Jesus was saying to the Ephesians: "Come back, you've left your first love." He didn't say they lost their first love, He didn't say you're going to hell, He just said you need to come back. You need to remember from whence you have fallen. You need to come back into a brand new honeymoon relationship with God is what He says. And that's what God's calling them to do.

Ephesians 4 verse 30, I mentioned it to you earlier: "And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption." It's not a threat but it's a strong reminder. Don't grieve God's Holy Spirit. God's Holy Spirit's the one that has sealed you. Don't play with fire. You will get burned is what He says.

"Therefore," verse 6, "behold, I will hedge up thy way with thorns, and make a wall, that she shall not find her paths. And she shall follow after her lovers, but she shall not overtake them; and she shall seek them, but shall not find them: then shall she say, 'I will go and return to my first husband; for then was it better with me than now.'" God said, "I'll make sure that you get what you're after. You'll get out there and you'll find out it's really a desert and I'll make sure that you can't get to the things you want to get to until you suffer so much that you'll begin to think, 'You know what? I should go back to my God.'"

I don't remember, it's better to be with the Lord. Remember the prodigal son who had everything at home but he decided, "I want to take my stuff and I want to go and I want to live." What did he do? He took his stuff and it was all gone and he found himself ready to eat with the pigs. And what did he say? "In my father's house, it's better than this. I'm crazy. Even the servants eat better. I'm going to go home and I'm going to ask him to take me back as a servant."

What is Jesus or the Lord saying here? "I'm going to make your way so difficult, so difficult that no matter what you try, you'll fail. And then there'll come a time when you're no longer attractive. You start losing your looks. You start losing that body of yours and then as a prostitute, nobody'd be interested in it no more. You'll be a mess, maybe taking away your health even so that physically you're dying." God says you'll be left desolate and then maybe you'll be smart enough to come home.

So what's He going to let happen to Israel in the north? They're desolate. They were raped, they were murdered, millions of them were killed, taken into years and years of slavery, crying out that they could go home. Verse 8 says, "For she did not know that I gave her corn, and wine, and oil." She tried to go get those for herself, she didn't know I was doing it. "And multiplied her silver and gold, which they prepared for Baal."

In other words, they even took gold and made false gods out of them, the gold that I gave them. "Therefore will I return, and take away my corn in the time thereof, and my wine in the season thereof, and I will recover my wool and my flax given to cover her nakedness." God says He's going to judge because they refused to acknowledge Him as their provider, as their Lord God.

Baal was the god who was worshipped, they worshipped Baal. He was the god of the weather. And they worshipped in that way. And so therefore if he's the god of the weather, then he would be responsible for agricultural blessings, wouldn't he? If he's the god of the weather, you got to get rain or stuff won't grow. So they're worshipping Baal hoping things will grow. God says they've forgotten that I'm the one that does that.

I gave them the gold and they turn around took that gold and made idols with it. They also worshipped Baal not only as the god of the weather, but as the god that was responsible for human fertility. So they had a lot of sexual garbage and worship going on with Baal. God says, "I'm going to take it all away. I'll take it all away so that they won't even have material that they can make clothes. They'll be naked. That'll be embarrassing. It'll be cold. It'll be a bummer when the sun's too hot, you get burned." God says that's what I'm going to do.

"And now will I discover," that means uncover or show, verse 10, "her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, and none shall deliver her out of my hand. I will also cause all her mirth to cease, her feast days, her new moons, and her sabbaths, and all her solemn feasts. 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."

Now God is hurt because they have left Him and He is angry. Now remember when God does things, these aren't emotions that are out of control like yours and mine. These are right when God's angry. It is righteous indignation and He's got a right and it is good when He's angry. When God is hurt, it is righteous hurt, not a jealousy or a whining like us. God is hurt and angry that Israel has so completely forgotten Him, and He will judge them because of it.

And by the way, you and I have the privilege of looking back at all these years, even back in the history because it's written here for us in scripture, and have they had it rough or what? They still have it rough today. Do you know why? Because they do not acknowledge Him as their Lord and their Savior as I am. Many of the Jews today are atheists; they do not even believe in any God at all.

And so I promise you, according to scripture, it's not going to get better for them this afternoon or tomorrow. What do you think's going to happen? It will get worse and worse until finally in the great tribulation period, they will cry out and come together as a nation and turn back to God as a nation. It's going to happen. He said so. So God's going to judge them accordingly, He says.

We look at verse 14. "Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably to her." God's going to call her out into the wilderness, out and away. There's a point there. "Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her. And I will give her her vineyards from thence," out in the wilderness, "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."

The valley of Achor, everybody, that word means trouble. Allure her out into the wilderness, out into the deserts, out into the valley of trouble. And she'll be completely separated from her lovers and all those things she's so interested in now. Don't overlook God's mercy here. I'll get her to a position where she will want to listen to Me. And when she listens to Me, I'll bless her. Isn't that cool?

God does that to you and I even today. If you and I as His children rebel and decide we're going to run, kind of like Jonah did, God will get us to a position where we'll want to listen to Him. Verse 16 says this: "And it shall be at that day, saith the Lord, that thou shalt call me Ishi; and shalt call me no more Baali. For I will take away the names of Baalim out of her mouth, and they shall be no more remembered by her."

In that day you'll call me Ishi. That word in our language means "my husband." And you'll no longer call me Baali. Oh, that word means "my lord," but it refers to the false god Baal. They were saying "my lord," but it was the wrong lord. Is Jesus Christ your Lord? God says you'll no longer call me that fake "my lord." When you say it, it will be real. It will be something from your heart. And He says they, His children, Israel, will completely forget those other gods, those other foolish idols. They will turn from them and completely forget them.

So that's a prophecy. It hasn't happened yet, but it's going to. Verse 18 says, "And in that day will I make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of 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." Meaning, I'll give them their land back. Israel returned to their own land. That return will be accompanied with peace. The animals will no longer be hostile. They won't be dangerous. You won't have to hide from poisonous snakes. You won't have to run from the lions and tigers and bears. You won't have to.

When's that going to take place? When the Lord Jesus Christ returns and sets up His kingdom and sits on the throne. Then will the wolf lie down with the lamb. Then the children can play with the poisonous snakes and it'll be all right. Then, that's what verse 18's talking about. God will cause war to cease. Notice He says that in verse 18? That would be the bow and the sword and the battle. God will cause wars to cease. You're going to see there'll be a thousand years of peace with Jesus Christ on the throne.

Verse 19: "And I will betroth thee unto me forever; yea, I will betroth thee unto me in righteousness, and in judgment, and in lovingkindness, and in mercies. I will even betroth thee unto me in faithfulness: and thou shalt know the Lord." God's going to restore Israel once again. And He likens it to a marriage relationship. A new beginning with the love being brand new, being fresh again.

"And it shall come to pass in that day," verse 21, "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." That means heaven and earth are going to finally tune in to each other. God has scattered, but He says I'm going to regather and it'll be in harmony finally. They'll tune up. That's all He's saying.

The last verse says this: "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.'" God will have mercy. I'll call them my people again and I will be their God again. But it's not going to be for a while because now they're going to go into suffering and torture and punishment by their own choosing. Now remember who's saying this. God's saying that, but who's preaching it? Hosea. Who has a wife who won't stay home. And it's hurting him. We'll stop here, but it's kind of cool. You're going to see God tell Hosea to break the law in the next chapter.

Guest (Male): Thank you for listening to Apply Within with Pastor Bob Davis. Apply Within is a radio outreach ministry of North Country Chapel. Our Sunday morning Bible studies are at 9:00 and 11:00 AM. We also have a Friday evening Bible study at 7:00 PM and a Monday evening Bible study at 7:00 PM. You can download today's message in its entirety at northcountrychapel.com/studies. That's northcountrychapel.com/studies.

If you would like a copy of today's message, write to us and ask for the message with today's date. The address is Apply Within, 2281 West Seltice, Post Falls, Idaho, 83854. Or call us at 1-800-572-8851. That number again, 1-800-572-8851. Our mobile app is available for iPhone and Android. Download it to listen to full-length studies, watch the live stream of our services, or to find out more about church events. If you have been blessed by the teaching or have prayer requests that you would like to share with us, write, email, or call us as well. Please join with us every Monday through Friday as we study together verse-by-verse on Apply Within, sponsored by North Country Chapel. God bless you.