Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Do not rejoice, Israel;
    do not be jubilant like the other nations.
For you have been unfaithful to your God;
    you love the wages of a prostitute
    at every threshing floor.
Threshing floors and winepresses will not feed the people;
    the new wine will fail them.
They will not remain in the Lord’s land;
    Ephraim will return to Egypt
    and eat unclean food in Assyria.
They will not pour out wine offerings to the Lord,
    nor will their sacrifices please him.
Such sacrifices will be to them like the bread of mourners;
    all who eat them will be unclean.
This food will be for themselves;
    it will not come into the temple of the Lord.
What will you do on the day of your appointed festivals,
    on the feast days of the Lord?
Even if they escape from destruction,
    Egypt will gather them,
    and Memphis will bury them.
Their treasures of silver will be taken over by briers,
    and thorns will overrun their tents.
The days of punishment are coming,
    the days of reckoning are at hand.
    Let Israel know this.
Because your sins are so many
    and your hostility so great,
the prophet is considered a fool,
    the inspired person a maniac.
The prophet, along with my God,
    is the watchman over Ephraim,
yet snares await him on all his paths,
    and hostility in the house of his God.
They have sunk deep into corruption,
    as in the days of Gibeah.
God will remember their wickedness
    and punish them for their sins.
“When I found Israel,
    it was like finding grapes in the desert;
when I saw your ancestors,
    it was like seeing the early fruit on the fig tree.
But when they came to Baal Peor,
    they consecrated themselves to that shameful idol
    and became as vile as the thing they loved.
Ephraim’s glory will fly away like a bird—
    no birth, no pregnancy, no conception.
Even if they rear children,
    I will bereave them of every one.
Woe to them
    when I turn away from them!
I have seen Ephraim, like Tyre,
    planted in a pleasant place.
But Ephraim will bring out
    their children to the slayer.”
Give them, Lord—
    what will you give them?
Give them wombs that miscarry
    and breasts that are dry.
“Because of all their wickedness in Gilgal,
    I hated them there.
Because of their sinful deeds,
    I will drive them out of my house.
I will no longer love them;
    all their leaders are rebellious.
Ephraim is blighted,
    their root is withered,
    they yield no fruit.
Even if they bear children,
    I will slay their cherished offspring.”
My God will reject them
    because they have not obeyed him;
    they will be wanderers among the nations.

• Hosea 9:1-17

Noted Biblical Scholars, Teachers, and Preachers Comments

Hosea 9:1-2 ‘threshing floor … winepress’: “These were the very places where sacred prostitution took place in an attempt to cause Baal to bring prosperity.”

• John MacArthur, John MacArthur Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics)

Hosea 9:1 ‘complete rejection of God’: “Israel’s rejection of God was complete. The Israelites, through their devotion to cultic practices, had put their hopes in Baal to provide material blessing. That blessing was thought to be guaranteed in exchange for ritual prostitution practiced at the shrines, which here were connected to ‘threshing floors’…”

• Dorothy Kelley Patterson, General Editor, NIV Woman’s Study Bible (Karen H. Jobes, Minor Prophets contributor)

Hosea 9:4 ‘bread of mourners … defiled’: “Food eaten on the occasion of mourning was considered unclean, defiling anyone eating it (cf. Deut. 26:12–15).”

• John MacArthur, John MacArthur Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics)

Hosea 9:6 ‘briers and thorns’: “Any who attempted to find refuge in Egypt from the destruction brought on Israel by Assyria would not find it. Instead, they would be collected and buried in Memphis (a city in northern Egypt), where extensive burial grounds and ancient pyramids were located. All their cultic paraphernalia would have been abandoned when they fled; ‘briers’ and ‘thorns’ were all that would remain.”

• Dorothy Kelley Patterson, General Editor, NIV Woman’s Study Bible (Karen H. Jobes, Minor Prophets contributor)

Hosea 9:6 ‘Quote’: ”’Your marriage is the guidepost by which your children will establish their standards for their own marriage.’ – Catherine HIckem”

• Dorothy Kelley Patterson, General Editor, NIV Woman’s Study Bible (Karen H. Jobes, Minor Prophets contributor)

Hosea 9:7-8 ‘Finding & Following Truth’: “In an earlier lesson, I quoted my Old Testament Professor, Don Garner. Another statement I remember Dr. Garner saying is: ‘if God calls you to be a prophet, be a prophet. But remember what they did to the prophets! Hosea noted God’s prophets were considered fools and maniacs.
“Often, what we want to hear and what we need to hear are different things. When you hear a message you do not wish to hear, do you easily dismiss the message and/or the messenger? While our modern access to so much information has great benefits, it also means we can find (and follow) only messages saying what we personally want to hear. I recently read a phrase describing the challenge for someone genuinely looking for accurate and authentic truth in the midst of contemporary media: Filter out the nonsense. Find and follow the truth even when it is inconvenient.”

• Jay McCluskey, A Long Walk with the Minor Prophets

Hosea 9:7 ‘lost its way – into liberalism’: “Israel had lost its way spiritually. Why? Because of the leadership.
“When I started out to study for the ministry, the big debate in the church in this country was between what was then known as fundamentalism and modernism. Modernism espoused the social gospel. They were the dogooders, and they claimed they had a high ethical standard. Frankly, I was inclined to agree with them because I found that many fundamentalists didn’t operate on high ethics. It disturbed me a great deal to think that the liberals had one strike on us in that connection. But I watched them carefully and found that they didn’t really have a high ethical standard. Hosea said it, and you can blame it on him; he said, ‘The prophet is a fool.’
“For example, there was a young man who attended Yale and had there an outstanding liberal preacher who taught ethics. This preacher taught young men to burn their draft cards—and that’s against the law. In certain protest meetings he taught and espoused that there is a higher law than the law of the land. The young man heard these things and thought, Well, if that’s ethics, then I will follow that. He was led into very serious trouble because of such teaching.
“May I say to you, liberalism has lost even its moral standard today. I was in Portland, Oregon, at the time it was discovered through the testimony of a policewoman that the place where the young people were getting narcotics was run by the liberal churches. Hosea said, ‘The prophet is a fool’—he has led the nation astray.
“Liberalism is also responsible for the policy this nation followed after World War II, and the trouble we are in today is a trouble that has been produced by liberalism. I will say this, fundamentalism may act fanatically at times, but the fact of the matter is that fundamentalism did not lead this country into the trouble we are in today. Before I even entered seminary I listened to men like Dr. Harry Ironside, Dr. Harry Rimmer, and Dr. Arthur Brown, and I heard my liberal professors and preachers call them fanatics. But what those men said and preached is true today, and the things I was taught by those liberal professors are not true at all—it just didn’t work out the way they said.
“Israel had turned their backs on God, and judgment was coming because of it. They had no spiritual discernment. It is the ignorance of the Word of God that disturbs me about our nation today. We receive many letters from people who are coming out of various cults and ‘isms’—and we rejoice in that—but how did they get trapped in all of these groups? There is only one explanation: ignorance of the Word of God and lack of spiritual discernment. God said that He intended to judge Israel, and that should be an illustration to any nation which makes a pretense of being a Christian nation.”

• J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible, Vol III, Proverbs to Malachi

Hosea 9:8 ‘Watchman of Ephraim’: “’The watchman of Ephraim was with my God’—evidently there were a few fanatical fundamentalists around in that day warning the people of the coming judgment.
“’But the prophet is a snare of a fowler.’ That is harsh language, and I would never use that kind of language to speak of the liberal today. However, I do believe that liberalism is in control in my day, especially over the news media. They have sacred cows known freedom of the press and freedom of speech, but they allow the fundamentalists very little freedom, I can assure you of that. Liberalism—whether it is in politics, the news media, or in the pulpit—is a snare; it is like a trap, and it brainwashes people. As a result, this nation has been in trouble ever since World War II. It is time someone made the diagnosis and gave the prognosis of the case: the problem is that we have turned from God as a nation. God has become a big swear word in Washington, D.C. His name is often used in the form of blasphemy but seldom in the form of prayer or in worship of Him.”

• J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible, Vol III, Proverbs to Malachi

Hosea 9:9 ‘Gibeah’: “Cf. 10:9. Israel’s sin is likened to the gross evil of the men of Gibeah, a reference to their heinous rape of the concubine (Judg. 19:22–25), an infamous and unforgettable crime (cf. Judg. 19:30).”

• John MacArthur, John MacArthur Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics)

Hosea 9:10 ‘discoveries, good and bad’: “God’s joy over Israel when they first formed their covenant with him in the wilderness is likened to the joy of both a hungry traveler who finds grapes growing in the desert and a gardener who finds the first ripe fig of the season. But he also recalled the time when Israel corrupted herself by committing adultery with the Moabites and devoting herself to their idols (see Nu 25:1–9). The punishment for adultery was death.”

• Dorothy Kelley Patterson, General Editor, NIV Woman’s Study Bible (Karen H. Jobes, Minor Prophets contributor)

Hosea 9:11 ‘stripped of glory’: ”God’s judgment of Israel would be so severe that it would strip them of their ‘glory,’ which in this context refers to their offspring. The future generation would have assured their continuity in the land, but they would be cut off from that. To emphasize the barrenness that would affect the land, God mentioned all three stages of human development. God’s people would be painfully denied the children for whom they most longed.”

• Dorothy Kelley Patterson, General Editor, NIV Woman’s Study Bible (Karen H. Jobes, Minor Prophets contributor)

Hosea 9:12 ‘no one to stand for God’: “This is another judgment which God was going to bring upon them. God had promise Abraham not only to give him the land but also to multiply his seed. God had said that Abraham’s seed would be like the sand on the seashore and like the stars in the heavens. God made good that promise, but now the people have sinned and He says, ‘You’re going to have a real decline in your birthrate as part of My judgment upon you.’
“’Not be a man left’ is not a declaration that God would completely wipe out the population, but that there would be no man left who would stand for God.”

• J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible, Vol III, Proverbs to Malachi

Hosea 9:13 ‘Gilgal’: “As a center of idol worship (cf. 4:15), the place was representative of Israel’s spiritual adultery; therefore, He had rejected them from intimate fellowship.”

• John MacArthur, John MacArthur Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics)

Hosea 9:14 ‘Marriage & Family’: “Societies in ancient Israel considered it extremely important for people to have families. Barrenness was a universally understood cause of personal misery. When Hosea invoked an evil fate on Ephraim, he chose ‘a miscarrying womb’ (Hos. 9:14) and the death of any newborn that escaped miscarriage. The last of the plagues on Egypt involved the death of the firstborn (Ex. 4:23).”

• Timothy B. Cargal, et al., The Chronological Study Bible

Hosea 9:15 ‘Gilgal’: “In other words, God says to them, ‘Their sin in Gilgal brought My judgment upon them, although I loved them. This should be a warning to you. I will judge you again, and you will come to the conclusion that I do not love you anymore.’”

• J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible, Vol III, Proverbs to Malachi

Hosea 9:16 ‘the fruit’: “God’s judgment was to come not only upon the fruit of the ground, but also on the birth of children.”

• J. Vernon McGee, Thru the Bible, Vol III, Proverbs to Malachi

Hosea 9:17 ‘wanderers’: “God promised global dispersion for disobedience (cf. Lev. 26:33; Deut. 28:64, 65).”

• John MacArthur, John MacArthur Commentary (quoted Scripture without bold/italics)

My Thoughts

When the guys are partying hard, I have heard people say, “Get it out of your system.  Tomorrow you will be paying for this.”  Maybe that’s a military thing.  Maybe it is a youth thing.

But God does not say this.  Hosea proclaims, “Do not celebrate like the other nations do.”

Then Hosea speaks of the payment to a prostitute on the threshing floor.  Rev. MacArthur makes it clear that sexual misconduct with a prostitute on the threshing floor is what these Baal worshippers did in order to have a bountiful harvest.  If we look at many false god ceremonial acts, they flaunt their debauchery toward God.  It is not different.  It is in many cases opposite.  And these acts are deliberate, not to show an alternative, but to thumb their noses at God Himself.

I see the concept of pride month, pride marches, and the rainbow – now associated with a certain group of people in the same vein.  It is not arbitrary or accidental.  They take one of the worst sins of pride and they misappropriate a symbol of God’s mercy to laugh at God, daring God to send down a lightning bolt.  There time will come just as Israel’s time came soon after Hosea proclaimed their doom.  But Hosea was offering one last chance to repent.  And that can happen today also.

You may think that exile to a foreign land can be reversed by celebrating God’s appointed festivals there, but the land where they are sent will not abide by that.  And the treasures of Ephraim will go to the ones who send the people into exile.  They will have nothing but briers and thorns in which to trade for favor.

Then, Hosea reminds them of Gibeah.  It was there that the Levites concubine was raped and killed.  At the time, it was part of Benjamin, but now that portion of Benjamin was part of the northern tribes.  Only a portion of Benjamin was part of Judah.

Then Hosea declares a curse on the progeny.  They will find difficulty in childbirth.  Their descendants will become fewer and fewer, and their lands will be divided by strangers.  To make things worse, their women will have wombs that are barren and breasts that dry.  No children, no sustenance for the children already born.

Then the focus shifts to Gilgal.  Gilgal had great spiritual significance.  Joshua first camped at Gilgal after crossing the Jordan.  The pillar of twelve stones was erected at Gilgal to remind the people of what God had done for them – a reminder to obey God in order to maintain that favor.  It was the site of the first Passover celebration after coming to the Promised Land.  All of this at Gilgal, but where did King Saul attack against God’s orders, making Israel odious in the sight of the Philistines?  At Gilgal.  And Gilgal became a center for false god worship.

God will reject them.  They will become wanderers on the earth.

Some Serendipitous Reflections

Hosea 9 1. During this period, Israel made a show of worshiping God while observing the fertility cults to ensure a healthy harvest. What are some time-honored practices for ensuring success today: (a) Cheating on a test? (b) ‘Cutting corners’? (c) ‘Greasing a client’s palm’? (d) Taking a ‘cut’? (e) Undercutting the competition? Searching for ‘loopholes’? How is your allegiance to God ‘supplemented’ by keeping today’s cultural ‘fertility cults’? (g) Other:    ?
“2. What do these practices say about who we really think is responsible for our prosperity? What kind of ‘bondage’ can these things lead us into? How is it people become ‘as vile as the thing they love’ (v.10)?
“3. In what ways is the person who upholds God’s standard in your culture considered a ‘fool’ or a ‘maniac’ (v.7)? Have you ever felt this way about pro-lifers? TV evangelists? Nuclear freezeniks? Conscientious objectors? Social prophets? Creationists?
“4. Have you ever been treated badly, like Hosea, because of some radical expression of your Christian faith? What happened?”

• Lyman Coleman, et al, The NIV Serendipity Bible for Study Groups

Hosea 9 has one set of questions.

Substitute whatever group for any reference to a small group or ask who could come to your aid.

If you like these Thursday morning Bible studies, but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Thursday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.