Hosea 10:4-8

Israel's sin, sorrow, shame, and suffering.

These verses exhibit them with marvelous conciseness and great impressiveness.

I. ISRAEL 'S SIN OF UNFAITHFULNESS . Israel's unfaithfulness at the period of which the prophet speaks was of the most reckless kind. It took the form

By their idolatry they renounced the covenant of their God, which had the seal of circumcision; their promises of reformation, when they made such, were falsified; the vows wrung from them in distress or otherwise they failed to pay. The most sacred bonds did not bind them; subjects violated their oath of allegiance, and sovereigns their coronation oath; alike in treaties with foreign powers as in contracts with their fellow-men, they made no conscience of keeping faith. Add to all this the perversion of justice and the misuse of judgment, and the picture is complete; perfidy, perjury, and the perversion of judgment being in the foreground, and untruthfulness the dark background of all. Such was the growth, prolific and pestiferous as hemlock, which at this period overspread the land of Israel as if in furrows specially prepared for it.

II. ISRAEL 'S SORROW IN CONSEQUENCE OF SIN . Men may be sure that their sin shall find them out, by detection, or punishment, or both; while sorrow follows in the wake of sin. The inhabitants of the northern capital, like the people of Bethel or Beth-area, being calf-worshippers, and therefore, called the people of the calf, would naturally be overwhelmed with consternation and alarm, when the news of an invading host approaching the provincial town, which was the chief seat of the calf-worship, reached them; still more so when that hostile host had actually entered it and carried off their idol. Their fear before the event would be succeeded by sorrow after it. Not only would the Samaritans sympathize with their coreligionists of Bethel in their calamity and loss, but tremble because of their own proximity to peril, not knowing how soon the tide of conquest should sweep over themselves. Both peoples, Samaritans and Beth-avenites, united in a common cause, and, involved in a common calamity or soon to be so, would mourn for the loss of their idol. This Scripture may well impress its lesson, and a most salutary one, on all idolaters, whether those who bow down to those idol vanities of wood, or stone, or metal, made by their own hands, or those spiritual idolaters whose hearts are swayed by some lust or passion, or any other object than God. Any earthly object that engrosses our affections, or usurps that place in our heart which belongs to God alone, is our god for the time being—our idol, and that which commands our homage or adoration. And surely, as we set up any such object of spiritual idolatry in our heart and elevate it to the throne of our affections, we shall come to grief; we shall be disappointed in it while we possess it, or disappointed of it when we lose it. Bitterly shall we be made to feel and to mourn its loss; nor is this to be wondered at or complained of, for God is a jealous God, and will not give his glory to another. Matthew Henry has well observed that "whatever men make a god of, they will mourn for the loss of; and inordinate sorrow for the loss of any worldly good is a sign we made an idol of it." The idol-priests who derived their emolument and livelihood from idolatry were plunged in still greater mourning than the people for whom they ministered. The wages of sin do not last long, and do not satisfy the short time they do last. Thus it was with the priests when the source of their gain and the object of their glow departed.

III. ISRAEL 'S SHAME WAS ANOTHER CONCOMITANT , OR RATHER CONSEQUENCE , OF ISRAEL 'S SIN . The shame was twofold; shame to see their idol thrown down and defaced, and yet more to see it, or at least the gold that adorned it, carried away in triumph as a present or peace offering to King Jareb. There was yet deeper cause of shame. It was not only that they gloried in their god of gold, and confided in it for protection, but that their policy was completely frustrated. The political sagacity on which, no doubt, they piqued themselves, as certain to keep Israel separate from Judah by detaching the former from the latter in worshipping at the national sanctuary in Jerusalem, resulted in Israel's ruin. No wonder that Ephraim, the tribe with which this separation originated, received shame; while the remaining tribes of Israel, that with such facile compliance acquiesced in their counsel and followed their example, were put to shame. Thus the wise are often caught in their own craftiness.

"The sinners' hands do make the snares

Wherewith themselves are caught."

IV. SUFFERING IS ANOTHER RESULT OF SIN . Creature-confidences fail to succor; without Divine help and blessing, sovereign and subject are alike powerless and resource-less. The king, on the appointment of whom the people had so set their heart at first, and on whose power all along they continued to place such confidence, was too weak to help; and in utter impotence was himself cut off—cut off ignominiously as foam on the face of the water, or chip carried headlong by the current. The scenes of their sin were so desolated, and left without a single worshipper, that thorns and thistles came up upon those altars where multitudes once had worshipped. So true it is that "if the grace of God prevail not to destroy the love of sin in us, it is just that the providence of God should destroy the food and fuel of sin about us." Sinners in general suffer sooner or later shame and contempt, disgrace and disappointment, poignant sorrow and mental anguish. To such an extent was this the case with the hapless idolaters, that their distress was so intolerable that, feeling life not worth living, they preferred death to life. Times there are so sad, and suffering, both bodily and mental, so acute, that death is more than welcome. To be swallowed in the yawning earth, or covered by the falling hill, or whelmed in the surging sea, was welcome to such sufferers. So with impenitent sinners in the day of judgment ( Revelation 6:16 ). So with the Jews in their distressful circumstances at the siege of Jerusalem by the Romans ( Luke 23:30 ). This cry for death passed into a proverb; it was the offspring of despair.

V. SUMMARY OF THIS SECTION . Such a summary is contained in verses 7 and 8. Israel's two chief sources of confidence were their king and their idolatry—one civil or secular, the other ecclesiastical or sacred, both to the rejection and neglect of the true Source of hope and help. Neither of these is any longer available or any longer reliable. The king or head of their civil polity is cut off like foam on the surface of a stream—a moment there, then gone forever. The high places of Avon, that is, Beth-aven, "house of vanity," the name given in contemptuous reproof of idolatry to Beth-el, once the "house of God"—these high places consecrated to idolatry, at once the occasions of sin to Israel, and places polluted by that people's sin, are doomed to destruction, total destruction. The altars erected thereon are destined to be heaps of ruins, so forsaken and desolate, that where the whole burnt offering went up in smoke ( עֹלָה , whole burnt offering, from עלה , to go up), the thorn and the thistle now go up ( יעלו ), and bear undisputed sway. The sin-laden people who had forsaken their own mercies and pursued their idolatrous practices on those hills and at those altars, are in the end so overwhelmed with calamity and so thoroughly miserable, that, as we have seen, they prefer death to life, reckoning a life so wretched not worth living. Hence arose their cry of desperation—a cry that may have had its origin in the local situation of the people who uttered it. Situated on a hill as Samaria was, and surrounded by an amphitheatre of hills still higher, the intervening valley and narrow outlets being occupied by the enemy, those hills to which they once looked for safety, instead of helping, now hemmed them in, and the only help they could now afford was to fall on their devoted heads, to screen them from wrath and deliver them from misery.