My Goal is God Himself, Part 2

If you preach a 35-minute sermon while the pastor is out of town, you might just get two next week. No, thank you, Pastor Ron. That was really encouraging. Please open in your Bibles and turn to the book of Hosea. We’ll take a look at chapter 2. Hosea chapter 2, verse 8 through 13. We’ll read the text. We’ll ask for God’s blessing in our study. And then we will study it. Hosea 2, 8 through 13.

For she does not know that it was I who gave her the grain, the new wine, and the oil, and lavished on her silver and gold which they used for bale. Therefore, I will take back my grain at harvest time and my new wine in its season. I will also take away my wool and my flax, given to cover her nakedness. And then I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, and no one will rescue her out of my hand. I will also put an end to all her gaiety, her feasts, her new moons, her Sabbaths, and all her festal assemblies. I will destroy her vines and fig trees of which she said, these are my wages, which my lovers have given me. And I will make them a forest, and the beasts of the field will devour them. I will punish her for the days of the bales when she used to offer sacrifices to them, and adorn herself with her earrings and jewelry, and follow her lovers so that she forgot me, declares the Lord.

Let’s pray. Triune God, we come before you in recognition that salvation from beginning to end is an act of you. We think of you, Father, in choosing us in Christ before the foundation of the world. We think of your love in ordering all events to lead to our salvation, your glory, and our ultimate good. We think of you, Lord, and your love on full display, living a life in our stead that we could never live, absolutely perfect. Dying a death on the cross, satisfying God’s wrath on our behalf, and rising from the grave on the third day, demonstrating that you absolutely are God the Son. We think of you, Holy Spirit, for all the many ways that you have worked in our lives, as has even been read earlier before, causing us to be born again so that we see the glory of Christ. We think of your work in our lives and sanctification and constantly conforming us to his image.

And we also think about your work in illuminating God’s word, your word to us. So we come to you as the author of this text, begging and asking, pleading that you would give us the meaning Lord, that all of us would not leave here unchanged, but that instead, Lord, that you would save the lost and that you would edify the saved. It’s in your name we pray these things. Amen.

In our perceived sophisticated culture, idolatry almost seems like a non-issue. It can be easy to think that God’s condemnation of idolatry is irrelevant or outdated and not worth spending much time considering. We as 21st century Americans may see idolatry as just something that other people in the world struggle with, perhaps less educated or people in different cultures.

We look at Israel’s example here in the text in the past and are so perplexed at how silly they seem. forsaking God for idols. We think of the golden calf incident. How could they do that after God delivered them from Egyptian bondage? The sin of Peor during the wilderness wanderings, the worship of other Canaanite deities during the time of the judges that brought about God’s discipline on them as a nation, or Israel’s idolatrous disobedience as a nation from Solomon’s era to the exile. To say that we are no better than Israel almost seems tongue in cheek, knowing that we never struggle with worshiping gods such as Baal, Ashtoreth, or Dagon. Yet truly, unmistakably, we are no better inherently.

The pull of idolatry is just as bad today as it was back then. Idolatry is not just worshiping little statues or engaging in primitive cult worship. Idolatry is worshiping anything other than God. This world certainly worships other things than God. They may say they aren’t religious, but they are, because we as humans are inherently worshipers. The fancy term for this is man is homo religiosus, meaning that since we are created in God’s image, made to worship him as the crown of his creation, We are inherently worshipers. In other words, we can’t not be worshipers. We, as dependent beings, will never be truly independent. Only God is. As one professor of mine said, God be, and because he be, everything else be. This dependence illustrates how we were made to worship.

In fact, Paul argues the same point, that even those who try to suppress the idea of the sacred or of the true God still end up worshiping something. We read in Romans 1 that even though they, the unbelieving world, knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible men and of birds and of four-footed animals and crawling creatures. And unfortunately, this is not merely the world’s problem.

We as believers must continually repent of the idolatry of the old man that seeks to rear its ugly head in our lives. In our study of Hosea, we have already talked about how idolatry in our day can look like adopting some of the unbiblical worldviews that this culture has to offer.

And last week, we focused on how, like Israel, we as believers can end up worshiping the blessings that God gives in neglect. The one who gives the blessings, he himself. The Canaanite idolatry that Old Testament Israel struggled with and present day atheistic religion have a very transactional love. Israel was tempted to think that if they engaged in the immoral Canaanite fertility cult that somehow they would receive the ability to have children and that their agricultural efforts would be blessed. Present day atheism lives out a transactional love as well, where they seek to worship their gods in exchange for their desired blessings.

Worshipping health to hopefully receive health, worshipping wealth, power, fame, pleasure, worshipping even a perceived righteousness. As an example, we have mentioned before is the wokeness in our culture, propitiate God’s wrath or their own guilt, ease the guilt that they have being sinners as the antidote, once again being created in the image of God with a conscience.

They worship these gods as if the blessings that they have came from them. When they only come, we know, from the sovereign God of the universe, from whom comes every good and perfect gift. But we as believers, if not careful, can fall into the same idolatrous trap of loving the gifts and not the gift giver. Loving God only for what he does for us rather than for he himself. Our goal in line with this must be God himself. We grow in this love by beholding God in Christ, and God uses that to transform us into Christ’s image. And so if we were to summarize this text, what does this text mean? How does this apply? Specifically, its meaning is that Israel is condemned for their idolatry because their blessings are not from the nations, as they may think, or idols, but from God himself.

And we must recognize that every good gift comes from he himself, our sovereign God. And so in Hosea 2, 8 through 13, there are two attributes of God demonstrated. that should grow your love for he himself that we will see. First one, verse eight. God is perfectly sovereign. God is perfectly sovereign. And a quick note on this word perfectly, I use that for the points in last week’s sermon about God’s attributes that they are perfect. And this shows that God is perfect.

There’s no possibility to increase his attributes in degree or cause him to become more sovereign. He himself being perfect denotes that he is independent and self-sufficient, as mentioned earlier. There is no way we could make God more sovereign to us, more patient, more just, or more good, like the attributes we saw last week. These come from him, the fountain of all being. We sing in one of our hymns, holy, holy, holy, he’s perfect in power, love, and purity. There’s no adding to those attributes of his, he is perfect in those. Let’s take a look at the text, verse eight.

It reads, for she does not know that it was I who gave her the grain. Real quick, I is God, she Israel, Old Testament Israel. The new wine and the oil, and lavished on her silver and gold, which they used for Baal. It’s really interesting. that she does not know the one who gave her the grain, and yet she still remembers those blessings. This is in direct contrast with verse 5. She perceives these blessings as something that she has earned from alliances with the other nations, such as Assyria or Egypt, or from engaging in the Baal fertility cult. This is crazy because God is the one who recognizes. He is the one that gave her the grain, the new wine and the oil and lavished on her silver and gold.

She thought that they were earned, these blessings, but they most certainly were not. They were covenant blessings, as is seen in God’s blessings promised to Israel for obedience in the Mosaic Covenant and Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, and promises of curses for disobedience. And more than that, and more than forgetting the one who gave them the blessings, she turned around and used those blessings to worship Baal. In other words, she had taken God’s gifts, the blessings of the covenant, and gave no thanks, but also then used those to give worship to a false god. They blasphemed God with the very blessings he gave them.

And you see, the world does the same exact thing. This is no different, even though we live in 21st century America. The world seeks to take the gifts that God has given and use them against him. One example is human reason. Human reason. It’s impossible without God to reason at all. It’s given by God.

Knowledge itself is impossible without God. Cornelius Van Til, a famous Christian apologist, said that non-Christian investigators of human reason and science are as successful as they are because they work with stolen capital. If any atheist assumes we can know anything, they are stealing from our worldview. Knowledge itself is impossible without God making it possible because of our own finitude in the resulting limitations that it brings. Without God, everything would just be a subjective, abstract, bottomless, and dark chasm where everything is relative. It’s kind of like, I don’t know, I kind of get frustrated with postmodern art. Like, what is postmodern art?

Does anyone in here know what it is? I mean, and today it’s demonstrating. I mean, you could put a banana on the wall and put duct tape on it and make six million dollars off that. True story. And I mean, props to the artists for capitalizing on the foolishness of the postmodern worldview.

But apart from God, there is no objective truth. Everything’s abstract. We are lost when it comes to human reason. And yet those who seek to pursue knowledge of the universe with reason so often try to do so against God, the very one who gave them the ability to reason. Another example is science. It is only possible with God and was created as general revelation to glorify him as creator. Yet it seems that secular science has made itself the enemy of the biblical worldview today. Though not omniscient, the world still uses what it has, all the limited information, to rebel against God as if they knew everything, right?

How much of the ocean do we understand? Some of the more liberal estimates I found this week was that we have explored less than 5%. How much of space have we explored? Within the last couple decades, we have discovered that in the Milky Way alone, there are at least 100 billion planets.

And so far, we as humans have only visited one other celestial body, which is the moon, even though plans are being made for travel to Mars. Secular science also doesn’t understand everything, such as particle wave theory. that sometimes electrons and photons function in some ways as particles, in other ways as waves. They can’t explain this, and yet they have the audacity to say that God doesn’t exist based off of their scientific reasoning. Science only works with a creator. And yet many are willing to overlook the why and the how to make conclusions about the what.

In fact, I overheard, is James Tillotson here today? Is he here? Yes, hey. I overheard him teaching his physics class at Olive Tree, the school we teach at. I heard from the hallway, he was telling his students, you know, everyone believes in the virgin birth. You either believe in the virgin birth of Christ or of the universe. And it’s so true.

Archaeology is another example. The world tries to use this against God, even though we have very little of the archaeological record. If we were to think of countries that have spent the most time examining artifacts and spending time studying archaeology, we think of Egypt. And even in 2017, a famous Muslim archaeologist gave his personal estimate that at max, 30% of Egypt’s artifacts have been found, let alone the whole world. People try to use this still against God.

In 1888, an Irish missionary by the name of William Wright wrote that some were denying the existence of the biblical Hittites, Israel’s enemies, because of the lack of archaeological record. This missionary said to those critics that the absence of evidence is not evidence. And then, in 1906, a couple of archaeologists were stumbling around in Turkey and saw a hill in the distance. And they decided to dig there, and they discovered Hattusis, the capital of the Hittite Empire.

In all of these examples, the world seeks to operate independently of God, but cannot do so consistently. Neither do they give God thanks for his gifts, demonstrating a love for the gifts, but not the gift giver. And maybe here today, if you are an unbeliever here, you might deny this.

You might deny that you are using God’s gifts against him. You think you have the authority to claim that God is not a sovereign power or is not sovereign over your life. Even though you may deny it on the surface, know this, that it does not excuse the fact that you are suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. I heard one man say one time that the atheist may claim to not believe in God, but God doesn’t believe in the atheist. It also does not excuse the fact that you are affected by that very sovereignty of God, which you deny is His. I heard another illustration one time that, you know, two people could jump off a skyscraper and one could deny the reality of gravity and one might not, but they’re both going to meet the same fate, right?

And in a similar way, God’s sovereignty affects us all regardless of whether you seek or seek to acknowledge it or not. But unfortunately, As the Church, we can adopt this same mindset, desiring God’s gifts with neglecting Him. We must not compromise, mistaking His sovereignly distributed gifts as something that we must earn from another source. Reformation and revival historically, from Biblical history to the present, has always been a sovereign work of God and not the result of human effort.

If God is not sovereign over all things, including salvation, then pragmatism is okay and perhaps is the more moral approach. If God is not sovereign, eloquence and appearance might look more like seeker sensitivity, making the church seem more like the world.

If God is not sovereign, the use of logic and apologetic strategies will assume that people are saved by their wits or comprehension of the logic of apologetic arguments. This wrong view makes all the weight and glory of the unbeliever’s salvation fall upon us as human beings when salvation is of the Lord, at least practically speaking, by one’s ability to produce a logical argument.

Not to even mention, it assumes that neutrality exists, which it does not. We also could see the adoption of psychological manipulation. Yes, even psychological manipulation is the right approach for the church, morally speaking. if God is not sovereign over all things. This is sort of the opposite of the approach of making logic the source of salvation. This can be seen as emotionalism, unnecessary tugging on the heartstrings, not using the Bible but telling emotional stories, or understanding human psychology and seeking to coerce people into the response we want rather than faithfully proclaiming the gospel and seeing what God does.

This is the making people decide in the moment, making them anxious like altar calls, which is not wrong to, it’s in fact, it’s very much good to call people to repent and believe, but manipulating people in the moment is very worldly. All of this is moral though, if salvation is ultimately up to us. But instead, God calls the church to faithfully proclaim the gospel and trust the outcomes to him because his word will not return void. He will have mercy on whom he will have mercy, and he will save who he saves. In the Reformation, and even today, people wondered how Martin Luther started the Reformation. And Luther is quoted in a sermon saying, I simply taught, preached, wrote God’s word.

Otherwise, I did nothing. And then while I slept or drank Wittenberg beer with my Philip and with Amsdorf, the word so greatly weakened the papacy that never a prince or emperor inflicted such damage upon it. I did nothing. The word did it all. Had I desired to foment trouble, I could have brought great bloodshed upon Germany. Yea, I could have started such a little game at Vorms that even the Emperor would not have been safe. But what of that? What would have that been? A fool’s play. I did nothing. I left it to the Word. What do you suppose is Satan’s thought when an effort is made to do things by violence or to take things in one’s own hands rather than trusting in God’s sovereignty? He sits back in hell and thinks, how fine a game these fools will make for me. But it brings him distress when we spread the word only and let it alone do the work.

In times of revival, how different do you think the preaching is? Is it more eloquent than other times? Is it more logically compelling and consistent? Is it more manipulative than other times? Historically speaking, when it comes to authentic revival, the answer is a resounding no. Ian Murray, a very well-written church historian, in his book Revival and Revivalism, notes the same pattern in the Second Great Awakening, the not bad parts, the good parts, not Charles Finney, but the good parts. He says this, the facts are indisputable.

A considerable body of men for a long period before the Second Great Awakening preached the same message as they did during the revival, but with vastly different consequences. The same men, the same actions, performed with the same abilities, yet the results were so amazingly different. Thus what characterizes a revival is not the employment of unusual or special means, but rather the extraordinary degree of blessing attending the normal means of grace. That’s not to say that God even redeems in his sovereignty, poor pragmatic methods to point people to the truth of the gospel, but that’s not because of the error. It’s in spite of it. We can think of the Jesus revolution and the cavalry chapel movement where many people did come to an authentic faith, but it wasn’t because of the bad theology.

It was because God is so sovereign. He worked to save his own even through it. As Calvin said, God works with means, without means, and against means. Or if we think of the common expression that God can draw a straight line with a crooked stick, God draws a straight line with a straight stick. God draws a straight line with no stick, and God can draw a straight line with a crooked stick, or no stick at all, as mentioned before. We as the church must remember the sovereignty of God and not go seeking out his gifts while neglecting he himself.

And you see, even as what was read before with John 3, it’s amazing because the world can’t explain revival because it is a sovereign work of God. The wind blows where it wishes. The atheistic Darwinian or Freudian might try to explain the miracle of regeneration away as some sort of transactional function of pursuing animal-like desires. The atheistic neo-Marxist worldview says that everything is a clash of classes, everyone being either motivated by money or the pursuit of hegemony, being in power, or leaving oppression by the oppressive power. But you see, in either of these worldviews, there’s no room at all for the supernatural work of God and no explanation when someone comes to faith against their circumstances. The wind blows wherever it wishes, and so is the work of the Holy Spirit. We need to be a people of the word and prayer, going to the one who is sovereign over revival, rather than seeking to bring it about by our own human means. God is perfectly sovereign. So the second attribute that we see, and we see this with the rest of our text, is that God is perfectly omnipotent. God is perfectly omnipotent. God is perfectly sovereign. God is perfectly omnipotent. Let’s take a look at verse nine. Therefore, I will take back my grain at harvest time and my new wine in its season. I will also take away my wool and my flax, given to cover her nakedness. Just for the record, too, so that we’re on the same page.

Hosea was a prophet in 8th century B.C., Israel, who served as a metaphor for God being faithful and Israel being unfaithful by going and being commanded to marry an unfaithful wife. And so much of this language comes from this marriage metaphor, which is God speaking to Israel before their exile, that they had been unfaithful, and because of that, God was going to bring about judgment. In these first five verses, though, or these five verses, excuse me, the following five that we have in this point, God is perfectly omnipotent. God uses the phrase, I will, seven different times. He doesn’t say, I might, or I really hope to. Or I’ll try. He says, I will.

This demonstrates God’s omnipotence, meaning he is all powerful. And as we mentioned before, perfect in power. The certainty of God’s judgment demonstrates this very omnipotence. Though God’s omnipotence and sovereignty are related, they are not the same thing. God’s omnipotence is that he can do whatever he wants. God’s sovereignty is that he will do whatever he wants.

God promises to remove the blessings from Israel, fulfilling his word with the nation corporately for their idolatrous disobedience. That he would bring curses to the nation as a whole corporately for their disobedience to him. Notice too the first-person pronouns, my grain, my new wine, my wool, my flax. God is correcting unfaithful Israel by showing whose resources the grain, wine, wool, and flax really were. Rather than being Israel’s by right through transactional relationship, Through worshiping idols and trusting in foreign alliances, they were gods. This shows that God not only sovereignly distributes resources, but they also are his. We are mere stewards. The earth is the Lord’s and all it contains, right? The world and all who dwell in it. Psalm 24,

1. If Israel had this in mind, How could they possibly be transactional knowing that they could not bring anything to the table to try and earn God’s favor because he already owned everything? We also see here that God is going to strip these things to reveal Israel’s nakedness. And this in this context has less to do once again with indecency, more to do with shame. Think Genesis 3 again. Before the fall, they were naked and unashamed. After the fall, they were naked. They realized they were naked and were ashamed. God promises that Israel’s shame and spiritual bankruptcy will no longer be hidden after he removes Israel’s blessings. And this will reveal what has been there all along. This won’t change anything. It will just show Israel’s hearts.

And we can see this today, that many people in our day believe that they are victims. That evil people exist in the world because of a traumatic past only, or excuse their own shortcomings by believing that they are only a product of their circumstances. Or that some people become evil because they’re given many blessings or such as riches or fame. But the Bible teaches no such thing. The Bible does not deny that circumstances can amplify. the evil of the naturally evil human heart, but it does not create evil in the heart.

Circumstances only draw out what was in the heart. And you see what God is doing with Israel here is very similar. He’s showing them what’s in their hearts, removing the blessings to show them the truth. It’s a very loving act, showing Israel their terrible spiritual condition of their hearts so that she might repent. Verse 10, God says, and then I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, and no one will rescue her out of my hand. Here, God is essentially saying, you want lewdness? Well, guess what? Lewdness is what you’re gonna get. The punishment here directly corresponds to the offense. In Revelation 2, the church of Thyatira had tolerated a loose woman in their midst, and God’s punishment for her, for her deception of others, was that she would be in a bed of sickness. We will see today in Sunday school that Israel’s punishment for wanting a king like the rest of the nations is that they got a king like the rest of the nations in Saul.

In Romans 1, those who do not see fit to acknowledge God are given an unfit mind as an act of God’s judgment. And this shows that God’s justice is perfect. God not only does not allow for sin to be swept under the rug, but he also demonstrates his glory, punishing the sin for the exact offense. And you see, if you were an unbeliever here today, seeking to be apart from God’s grace and mercy during your life here on earth, Know too that unless you repent and believe in Christ, that will be your fate for eternity. The judgment will be exact for the offense in line with your rebellion against him.

You will suffer away from his mercy and grace, as Paul says, the penalty of eternal destruction away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might. Second Thessalonians 1 9. God’s judgment here will be absolute just as it is for Israel in this text. We see no one will rescue her out of my hand. Today in the headlines, we hear much about El Salvador’s prison. But here in our state, in Colorado, we have the most secure prison in the world.

The ADX floor in Supermax was built in 1994 and is in Fremont County. It hosts some of the most dangerous criminals in the world, such as Joaquin El Chapo Guzman, the Boston Marathon bomber. In fact, it’s so secure that El Chapo was denied access to receiving a Bible for fear there would be codes inside of it. Each cell roughly costed $250,000 to make.

Prisoners stay in those seven by 12 foot cells that are soundproof in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. The floors have pressure sensors to track the movement of the inmates. They have motion detectors, guard towers with snipers and dogs. It is surrounded by a 12 foot fence with razor wire, super secure. Each door is opened with a fingerprint and a retinal scan. The guards outnumber the inmates two to one. Each room has sound and temperature detectors, listening to the inmates and also watching their body temperature. And most importantly with this illustration, no inmate has ever escaped this prison. And yet, though practically speaking, it seems impossible that anyone could escape. It technically is not impossible.

Since it is run by humans and humans are finite, they cannot ensure anything absolute according to their own efforts. But you see, God’s judgment is not this way. There is absolutely no escaping his judgment, even if there was hope of escaping the supermax. That is why the kings of the earth and the great men and the commanders and the rich and the strong and every free man will hide themselves in caves. and call out to the mountains to fall on them in the judgment of tribulation, because God’s judgment is absolute. There’s no escape. It will be inescapable.

Verse 11, we read, I will also put an end to all her gaiety, her feasts, her new moons, her Sabbaths, and all her festal assemblies. It seems here that Israel was engaged in some sort of syncretistic, superficial, and hypocritical worship at best. Being syncretistic, that just means that she was mixing the worship of the true God with the false gods of the nations. And this is condemned directly by God here. We saw in verse 7 that she was coming back to God because the circumstances seemed better just to go back to him rather than loving him for he himself. but we see here it’s even more superficial. Their relationship with the true God would have been mixed at best. And as we will see in Sunday school again in 1 Samuel today, God uses the heart posture of obedience, or prefers the heart posture of obedience rather than the externals of sacrifice. Hypocritical religion, in other words, is a blasphemy to God.

It doesn’t matter how good Israel looked in the sight of others, how religiously devoted they were in their feasts, their new moons, their Sabbath’s festival assemblies, God knew their hearts. Verse 12, I will destroy your vines and fig trees, of which she said, these are my wages, which my lovers have given me, and I will make them a forest, and the beasts of the field will devour them. You see, God is using his promised discipline, the curses for disobedience, part of the stipulations of the Mosaic covenant, for his glory, but also Israel’s ultimate good. He’s getting to the heart of the issue, literally. He’s confronting their transactional view of blessings.

Israel did not need to make foreign alliances for national security purposes or for trade. These demonstrated their unbelief in protection from God, making alliances with his enemies of Assyria and Egypt. We also see that Israel did not need to worship the false gods of the nations surrounding them to try and earn their favor and receive fertility and agricultural success as their wages for debasing themselves. These were promised to Israel as a nation for obedience to the Mosaic Covenant. But even in their disobedience, God’s patience and goodness were seen in his continual bestowal of those blessings, even when they used those blessings to sin against him. Israel compromised because they did not trust God’s omnipotence.

And very practically speaking, we can do the same exact thing. If we ever feel backed into a corner in our circumstances and decide to compromise and pursue sin, we demonstrate unbelief in God’s power. Even anxiety demonstrates our lack of trust in God’s power and the shortcomings of trusting in our own. Whenever we worry, we are taking the burden of responsibility for outcomes that we were never intended to hold. When we do so, we are taking on a load that we most certainly cannot bear.

And we all know this from personal experience. That’s why we shouldn’t worry. We should let tomorrow worry about itself, right? As our Lord says, knowing that God is sovereign and omnipotent, everyone in this room, we should be able to rest knowing this.

Verse 13, final verse. God says, I will punish her for the days of the bales when she used to offer sacrifices to them and adorn herself with earrings and jewelry and follow her lovers so that she forgot me, declares the Lord. It’s interesting here how the language of earrings and jewelry stands out because God has already shown that he is the one who provided Israel with their gold and silver. Once again, Israel’s using those things that God gave them to blaspheme him. This demonstrates the foolishness of Israel trusting in false gods.

It doesn’t make any sense. God has already given them everything. This isn’t just an issue of the mind, it’s an issue of the heart. Polytheism makes absolutely no logical sense whatsoever. Like, when would one God’s domain end and another’s begin? What if there’s overlap? Like, whose allegiance would you worship? You can’t have two or more sovereigns, and you can’t have two or more omnipotence. You can’t have two that are all-powerful, right? Because that would mean one wouldn’t be, or they both wouldn’t be. There can only be one.

And God has demonstrated He is that one. Idolatry has divided Israel’s loyalty, and they are certainly not thinking consistently, because this is an issue not merely of the mind, but of the heart. So there’s been one thing, admittedly a little bit personally, that has been troubling me about this metaphor, this marriage metaphor between Hosea and Gomer, as well as God and Israel. According to the law, an adulterous wife was to be punished by death.

Leviticus 20.10 is where that was commanded. And even if a couple received divorce and the wife’s second husband died, she could not come back and remarry the first husband.

And my question that’s been coming up in my mind again and again is how can God use this metaphor for Israel? How can he use this metaphor according to the law without being unjust, contrary to his own character? Or is this just where the metaphor breaks down? This is what my thinking has been, what I’ve been thinking about for a while, but then this week it clicked. Light bulb moment came on.

It’s all about Christ’s atonement on the cross. where he propitiated, that is, satisfied God’s wrath on behalf of all those who would come to know him, and not just for the God-fearers of the Old Testament and the New Testament church of both Jews and Gentiles, but also new covenant Israel, both individually and corporately. It works with the metaphor.

At the cross, Christ died for new covenant Israel too, corporately, because all Israel in the New Testament will be believers in Christ and his atonement. And it’s still actual and accomplish something and is not compromised for a potential atonement because they will all come to know him.

We see in Jeremiah 31, the promise of the new covenant. God says, and they will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother saying, know the Lord, for they will all know me. From the least of them to the greatest of them declares the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity and their sin I will remember no more. So when God within this marriage metaphor of Hosea and Gomer promises to woo her back, he’s not doing so against his character.

He’s not doing so with justice, but he’s also not doing so with injustice. He’s doing so with non-justice or his mercy, not giving them what they do deserve because of the cross, this is possible. He may do so as being both just and justifier for Old Testament God-fearers, the New Testament church corporately, as well as the new covenant Israel one day corporately as well. God’s faithfulness to Israel here is not sweeping sin underneath the rug, it is his mercy.

And it is made only possible through Christ’s accomplishment of redemption at the cross. And you see the same is for sinners like you and like me. Christ came because we could never give God a right transactional love to be right with Him. We would all fall short. We all do fall short. And all being sinners, we are undeserving of God’s mercy, and we are unable to save ourselves.

But that’s exactly why Christ came. Christ came into the world to save sinners. If you have not trusted in Christ, trust in Him today. Once again, He promises that He will never cast out anyone who comes to Him. You will but trust and believe in Him.

And we as believers, can take great hope seeing the glory of God’s sovereignty and omnipotence demonstrated in his plans for Israel’s eventual salvation in the new covenant and our forgiveness of sins as believers because it was all vividly portrayed and accomplished at the cross.

Let’s pray. Lord, we thank you for your word. “‘Lord, your word is like fire,’ you said in Jeremiah, “‘like a hammer that smashes the rock into pieces. “‘All the competing worldviews fall before you. “‘Lord, you alone receive the glory, “‘and that is demonstrated as well in your plan of salvation, “‘not only for the Old Testament God-fearers, “‘not only for the New Testament church, “‘but also, Lord, for the new covenant in Israel one day.'” We thank you that you are faithful to your promises, Lord, and that we can trust in your character, that when we make you yourself our goal, we can rest and rely upon your sovereignty and omnipotence. We pray, Lord, that in a world that is constantly competing for our affection, that we would constantly remind ourselves of these truths, that, Lord, you reign over everything, all is part of your plan, all things for your glory and our ultimate good, and also, Lord, that you have no limit to your power, that you are perfect in power. We thank you for Christ, and we pray that you would bless the rest of our day, that we would glorify you with it. And it’s in your name we pray these things. Amen.