Hosea 9

Hosea 8 detailed Israel’s sins (5 were mentioned).  Hosea 9 details Israel’s judgment (5 are mentioned).  Israel should not rejoice, no matter how good things might seem at the moment, in in the reign of Jeroboam II there was prosperity.  But they should be aware of what is coming.

·        9:1-2: Israel will lose her joy because the harvest will fail.  It’s not that there will not be a harvest; it’s that the harvest will be insufficient to meet the needs as well as the lust for drunkenness.  In the Law of Moses the punishment God promised for disobedience began with loss of productivity in the land (Deut. 28 details the progress of punishment if Israel continues to sin).

·        9:3-4: Continued sin will result in removal from the land.  Israel will end up back in Egypt as well as in Samaria.  Her sin was that she trusted in these nations to cure her sickness; the resulting judgment is that she ends up in those nations as their slaves.

·        9:5-6: Once she is in those nations then she will not be able to engage in true worship of the LORD if she wants to.  She will not be able to keep the feasts that she enjoys so much.

·        9:7-10: Israel, who had rejected God’s law lost her spiritual discernment.  The prophet was to be the one who spoke for the LORD, who could give the people the truth that would lead them.  But the prophets in Israel had become fools and spiritual mad men.  Good prophets (the watchman) were with the LORD and what Israel was left with were deceitful prophets who were part of leading them into God’s trap.  What an amazing statement of the law of the harvest: Israel became like the very thing she abhorred!

·        9:11-16: In the end, Israel would lose her population.  Abraham was promised a land and a people; in judgment the land goes and then the people.  The way this happens is powerful.  First God will diminish the number of births.  Then children who are born will die.  The population of the kingdom is the glory of the king.  Israel’s glory will fly away like a bird.  It is sad to see today an interesting thing in formerly Christian Europe: a falling birth rate.  Both political and personal decisions have led to this; and yet our passage suggests that God is at work in this issue.  What can we say about the millions of babies killed in the United States, again as a result of political and personal decisions?  Does this not speak to of the displeasure of the Creator?  Like Israel, we have what we desire; but what we desire robs us of what we need.  

The conclusion for Israel (v17) is that God will cast away His people and they wander among the nations.  The world has witnessed the fulfillment of this judgment.  God is serious about the obedience of those He has created.  We are His and we owe Him fear and reverence.