Divided Hearts under Chastisement
Notes
Transcript
There is woven through the Scriptures the call for wholeheartedness for God and His service. God abhorred the double-minded and half-hearted, Psalm 119:113
I hate those who are double-minded, But I love Your law.
‘I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot; I wish that you were cold or hot.
‘So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of My mouth.
This call for wholeheartedness is pertinent today. We are very much like the psalmist, hating people who are double-minded; who go about life half-hearted in their work or devotion… but what can we say when we realize that one of those very people lives in our own skin?
We sing songs beyond what we ourselves are willing to live. We pray to God, declaring our loyalty while our hearts pursue our own plans and purposes. We develop the art of religious posturing and pretending while we carefully condition our commitment. And what about our beliefs and our morals, our ethics and our shifty follow through, our prayers and how we treat others.
Is this possible for the church of God to catch this spiritual disease? The Nation of Israel caught it. So did the church of Laodicea. So can we. We must take seriously these warnings, learning from what Israel did, so that we will not be caught by a divided heart toward the LORD. So let us turn to Hosea 10 and see first that Israel was...
I. A people divided in love and loyalty, 10:1-2.
I. A people divided in love and loyalty, 10:1-2.
1 — Hosea now uses an agricultural motif in describing Israel .
A luxuriant vine — Israel loved seeing themselves as the vine of God, yet the more God prospered them, the more they turned to other gods, refusing to acknowledge the blessings that were from the LORD alone. With the increase in fruit, they responded by making more altars to other gods; the better the land, the better the pillars of the gods they worshipped could be built.
2 — Hosea characterizes the hearts of the people as “faithless,” false, deceitful, divided. The syncretistic worship Israel engaged in and putting the LORD on the same level as the idols they worshipped demonstrates their divided heart attitude. They will bear their guilt, knowing what the LORD has commanded, yet rejecting Him. They presumed on the LORD’s blessing, but the LORD will violently remove their altars and pillars.
The people of Israel, in their prosperity, relied on it rather than on the LORD. For us today, the danger is when God has prospered us and we take His blessings for granted, using them to make us feel better about ourselves, further drifting from the very One who blesses us.
II. A people divided between their words and their actions, 10:3-10.
II. A people divided between their words and their actions, 10:3-10.
3 — This probably reflects the times of Hoshea, the self-appointed last king of Israel, in the years 731-722 B.C. The people recognize that the king has failed them and that they did not respect the LORD. they acknowledge that there is no human king who could help them. They had thrown themselves out of God’s protection and now must say, with despair, “What can the greatest of men do for us?”
4 — Their words have been unreliable. They have broken their words of covenant with the LORD and with each other. The inevitable consequences will come just as the poisonous weeds will pop up in the furrows of their fields, choking out the life of the crops. God’s judgments will replace His blessings, as He had warned before the children of Israel entered the land.
5 — The LORD’s destruction of Israel’s altars, led by the destruction of the golden calf at Beth-aven/Bethel, would cause the Israelites in Samaria, Israel’s capital, to fear. The destruction of the semi-pagan religious set-up would cause the people to mourn over this idol and the idolatrous priest who served there would wail over its demise. The glory of this golden calf idol will have departed from the land, because...
6 — Assyria would take the golden calf, carrying it to their land as a tribute to honor their “great king” [Jareb] or the “avenging king,” a designation of that Assyrian king who characterized the empire he ruled, who loved strife.
Israel, upon their loss of their ‘god’ felt great shame. They had decided to trust in a foreign alliance with the Assyrians for their security. For us today alliances, like NATO, are a commonplace part of life. In the Ancient Near East, because the secular state did not exist, it was impossible to distinguish between a state and its gods. A treat on equal terms with a neighboring country would have involved Israel’s recognition of the other country’s deities as having reality and Equality with the LORD. By turning to Assyria or Egypt for help, Israel implied that the LORD was not as effective as the gods of Assyria and Egypt.
7 — The visual picture of Samaria (Israel) being cutoff along with her king is a twig which is floating on the surface of a fast-moving stream or wadi; they would be totally at the mercy of the Assyrians.
8 — The LORD had commanded Israel to destroy the idolatrous shrines that existed in the land when they entered in. Num 33:52
then you shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their figured stones, and destroy all their molten images and demolish all their high places;
“You shall utterly destroy all the places where the nations whom you shall dispossess serve their gods, on the high mountains and on the hills and under every green tree.
“You shall tear down their altars and smash their sacred pillars and burn their Asherim with fire, and you shall cut down the engraved images of their gods and obliterate their name from that place.
They had failed to do so, so the LORD uses the Assyrians to fulfill His command. These places would become desolate, overgrown. It would also force the cessation of idolatry.
Israel would respond in terror, calling on the mountains and hills to cover them, preferring death to life. Cf. Jer 8:3
“And death will be chosen rather than life by all the remnant that remains of this evil family, that remains in all the places to which I have driven them,” declares the Lord of hosts.
9 — Israel had sinned consistently since the days of the evil at Gibeah, and the resulting response ending in the almost decimation of the tribe of Benjamin. Depicted by Hosea as warriors standing at Gibeah, he then asks a rhetorical question to which the answer was that the LORD would surely defeat them for their long association with depravity and injustice. But ...
10 — The LORD would choose the time of their chastisement (discipline/punishment) and when it is that time He will bind them as prisoners, being twice guilty (probably because of their original guilt because of their sin at Gibeah, and their present guilt because of their sin at Bethel).
We can set up our own false gods. Our words of love and loyalty to God are not enough. How we put our words into actions in living our faith will demonstrate our wholeheartedness toward God.
III. A people divided in their "sowing and reaping,” 10:11-15.
III. A people divided in their "sowing and reaping,” 10:11-15.
11 — Hosea had compared Ephraim to a heifer that enjoyed threshing, a comparatively light task where the animal was unmuzzled and free to eat from some of the threshed grain as it pulled the threshing sled over the gathered grain. The LORD had placed them in this comparatively light service to Him. They were to be a fruitful people for Him. However, they abandoned His service in preference to being yoked to sin. The punishment that they would bear would be the yoking of both the Northern and Southern Kingdoms to an enemy who would greatly restrict their movements and force them to perform hard work. Ephraim refers to the Northern Kingdom, Judah the Southern Kingdom, and Jacob the two kingdoms combined, this name stressing the rebelliousness of the patriarch now seen in the current descendents of Israel.
12 — What the Israelites should do is to repent, demonstrating this by sowing that which is righteousness so that they may reap the LORD’s kindness (Heb. hesed). The “uncultivated land” must be broken up so that it can provide a harvest. The figure here is for confessing sins , exposing them to God, removing from under the surface of life that which has remained unconfessed for a long time. It was time for Israel to “seek” the LORD now, whom they had not sought in repentance for a long time. Their confession and repentance of sin was to continue until the LORD sent His blessing of “righteousness” on them like “rain.”
13 — Instead, what Israel chose to do was to plow wickedness and reap injustice. They chose to eat the fruit of lies, trusting in themselves and in their own military might.
14 — the results would not be tranquility but turmoil, marking their life. Fortress meant for protection would instead suffer destruction, just as in Israel’s past. Which past event that is being referred to is uncertain.
(1) “Shalman” may be a reference King Shalmaneser III, an Assyrian who conducted campaigns in the West in the ninth century B.C.
(2) “Shalman” may refer to King Shalmanu, a Moabite ruler and contemporary of King Hoshea of Israel, his name appearing in a list of kings who paid tribute to the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III.
(3) “Shalman” may refer to the Assyrian king Shalmaneser V, who prepared the way for Israel’s captivity by invading the land.
Shalmaneser king of Assyria came up against him, and Hoshea became his servant and paid him tribute.
But the king of Assyria found conspiracy in Hoshea, who had sent messengers to So king of Egypt and had offered no tribute to the king of Assyria, as he had done year by year; so the king of Assyria shut him up and bound him in prison.
Then the king of Assyria invaded the whole land and went up to Samaria and besieged it three years.
In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria and carried Israel away into exile to Assyria, and settled them in Halah and Habor, on the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.
“Beth-Arbel” possibly refers to a town 18 miles SE of the Sea of Galilee. the battle being referred to had been a bloody one that was remembered vividly by the Israelites of Hoshea’s day, especially notable for the wanton slaughter of both mothers and their children without mercy.
15 — What Israel can expect is a similar slaughter at Bethel because of the great wickedness of the people of Israel. In that day even the king of Israel will be “completely cut off.” “At dawn” refers to the very beginning of the day of battle.
In history, Israel’s final king, Hoshea, was taken captive by the Assyrian conqueror Shalmaneser V before the actual siege of Samaria began.
Israel possessed a divided loyalty and love toward God. They could say all the right things, but their actions displayed their true heart. And they lived for themselves, not remembering for every decision they make, there will be consequences.