Bible Commentary

Expositor's Bible Commentary Hosea 4:1 Hear the word of the LORD, ye children of Israel: for the LORD hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land. THE THICK NIGHT OF ISRAEL Hosea 4:1-19 ; Hosea 5:1-15 ; Hosea 6:1-11 ; Hosea 7:1-16 ; Hosea 8:1-14 ; Hosea 9:1-17 ; Hosea 10:1-15 ; Hosea 11:1-12 ; Hosea 12:1-14 ; Hosea 13:1-16 ; Hosea 14:1-9 It was indeed a "thick night" into which this Arthur of Israel stepped from his shattered home. The mists drive across Hosea’s long agony with his people, and what we see, we see blurred and broken. There are stumbling and clashing; crowds in drift; confused rallies; gangs of assassins breaking across the highways; doors opening upon lurid interiors full of drunken riot. Voices, which other voices mock, cry for a dawn that never comes. God Himself is Laughter, Lightning, a Lion, a Gnawing Worm. Only one clear note breaks over the confusion-the trumpet summoning to war. Take courage, O great heart! Not thus shall it always be! There wait thee, before the end, of open Visions at least two-one of Memory and one of Hope, one of Childhood and one of Spring. Past this night, past the swamp and jungle of these fetid years, thou shalt see thy land in her beauty, and God shall look on the face of His Bride. Chapters 4-14 are almost indivisible. The two Visions just mentioned, chapters 11 and Hosea 14:3-9 , may be detached by virtue of contributing the only strains of gospel which rise victorious above the Lord’s controversy with His people and the troubled story of their sins. All the rest is the noise of a nation falling to pieces, the crumbling of a splendid past. And as decay has no climax and ruin no rhythm, so we may understand why it is impossible to divide with any certainty Hosea’s record of Israel’s fall. Some arrangement we must attempt, but it is more or less artificial, and to be undertaken for the sake of our own minds, that cannot grasp so great a collapse all at once. Chapter 4 has a certain unity, and is followed by a new exordium, but as it forms only the theme of which the subsequent chapters are variations, we may take it with them as far as Hosea 7:7 ; after which there is a slight transition from the moral signs of Israel’s dissolution to the political-although Hoses still combines the religious offences of idolatry with the anarchy of the land. These form the chief interest to the end of chapter 10. Then breaks the bright Vision of the Past, chapter 11, the temporary victory of the Gospel of the Prophet over his Curse. In chapters 12-14:2 we are plunged into the latter once more, and reach in Hosea 14:3 if. the second bright vision, the Vision of the Future. To each of these phases of Israel’s Thick Night-we can hardly call them Sections-we may devote a chapter of simple exposition, adding three chapters more of detailed examination of the main doctrines we shall have encountered on our way-the Knowledge of God, Repentance, and the Sin against Love. A PEOPLE IN DECAY: 1 MORALLY Hosea 4:1-19 - Hosea 7:7 PURSUING the plan laid down in the last chapter, we now take the section of Hosea’s discourse which lies between chapter 4 and Hosea 7:7 . Chapter 4 is the only really separable bit of it; but there are also slight breaks at Hosea 5:15 and Hosea 7:2 . So we may attempt a division into four periods: 1. Chapter 4, which states God’s general charge against the people; 2 Hosea 5:1-14 , which discusses the priests and princes; 3 Hosea 5:15 - Hosea 7:2 , which abjures the people’s attempts at repentance; and 4 Hosea 7:3-7 , which is a lurid spectacle of the drunken and profligate court. All these give symptoms of the moral decay of the people, -the family destroyed by impurity, and society by theft and murder; the corruption of the spiritual guides of the people; the debauchery of the nobles; the sympathy of the throne with evil, -with the despairing judgment that such a people are incapable even of repentance. The keynotes are these: "No truth, nor real love, nor knowledge of God in the land. Priest and Prophet stumble. Ephraim and Judah stumble. I am as the moth to Ephraim. What can I make of thee, Ephraim? When I would heal them, their guilt is only the more exposed." Morally, Israel is rotten. The prophet, of course, cannot help adding signs of their political incoherence. But these he deals with more especially in the part of his discourse which follows chapter 7:7. I. THE LORD’S QUARREL WITH ISRAEL Hosea 4:1-19 "Hear the word of Jehovah, sons of Israel! Jehovah hath a quarrel with the inhabitants of the land, for there is no truth nor real love nor knowledge of God in the land. Perjury and murder and theft and adultery! They break out, and blood strikes upon blood." That stable and well-furnished life, across which, while it was still noon, Amos hurled his alarms-how quickly it has broken up! If there be still "ease in Zion," there is no more "security in Samaria." { Amos 6:1 } The great Jeroboam is dead, and society, which in the East depends so much on the individual, is loose and falling to pieces. The sins which are exposed by Amos were those that lurked beneath a still strong government, but Hosea adds outbreaks which set all order at defiance. Later we shall find him describing housebreaking, highway robbery, and assassination. "Therefore doth the land wither, and every one of her denizens languisheth, even to the beast of the field and the fowl of the heaven; yea, even the fish of the sea are swept up" in the universal sickness of man and nature: for Hosea feels, like Amos, the liability of nature to the curse upon sin. Yet the guilt is not that of the whole people, but of their religious guides. "Let none find fault and none upbraid, for My people are but as their priestlings. O Priest, thou hast stumbled today: and stumble tonight shall the prophet with thee." One order of the nation’s ministers goes staggering after the other!"‘ And I will destroy thy Mother," presumably the nation herself. "Perished are My people for lack of knowledge." But how? By the sin of their teachers. "Because thou," O Priest, "hast rejected knowledge, I reject thee from being priest to Me; and as thou hast forgotten the Torah of thy God, I forget thy children- I on My side. As many as they be, so many have sinned against Me." Every jack-priest of them is culpable. "They have turned their glory into shame. They feed on the sin of My people, and to the guilt of these lift up their appetite!" The more the people sin, the more merrily thrive the priests by fines and sin-offerings. They live upon the vice of the day, and have a vested interest in its crimes. English Langland said the same thing of the friars of his time. The contention is obvious. The priests have given themselves wholly to the ritual; they have forgotten that their office is an intellectual and moral one. We shall return to this when treating of Hosea’s doctrine of knowledge and its responsibilities. Priesthood, let us only remember, priesthood is an intellectual trust. "Thus it comes to be-like people like priest: "they also have fallen under the ritual, doing from lust what the priests do from greed. "But I will visit upon them their ways, and their deeds will I requite to them. For they" (those) "shall eat and not be satisfied," (these) "shall play the harlot and have no increase, because they have left off heeding Jehovah." This absorption in ritual at the expense of the moral and intellectual elements of religion has insensibly led them over into idolatry, with all its unchaste and drunken services. "Harlotry, wine, and new wine take away the brains!" The result is seen in the stupidity with which they consult their stocks for guidance. "My people! of its bit of wood it asketh counsel, and its staff telleth to it" the oracle! "For a spirit of harlotry hath led them astray, and they have played the harlot from their God. Upon the headlands of the hills they sacrifice, and on the heights offer incense, under oak or poplar or terebinth, for the shade of them is pleasant." On "headlands," not summits, for here no trees grow; and the altar was generally built under a tree and near water on some promontory, from which the flight of birds or of clouds might be watched. "Wherefore"-because of this your frequenting of the heathen shrines-"your daughters play the harlot and your daughters-in-law commit adultery. I will not come with punishment upon your daughters because they play the harlot, nor upon your daughters-in-law because they commit adultery." Why? For "they themselves," the fathers of Israel-or does he still mean the priests?-"go aside with the harlots and sacrifice with the common women of the shrines! "It is vain for the men of a nation to practice impurity and fancy that nevertheless they can keep their womankind chaste. "So the stupid people fall to ruin!" ("Though thou play the harlot, Israel, let not Judah bring guilt on herself. And come not to Gilgal, and go not up to Beth-Aven, and take not your oath at the Well-of-the-Oath, BeerSheba, "By the life of Jehovah!" This obvious parenthesis may be either by Hosea or a later writer; the latter is more probable.") "Yea, like a wild heifer Israel has gone wild. How now can Jehovah feed them like a lamb in a broad meadow?" To treat this clause interrogatively is the only way to get sense out of it. "Wedded to idols is Ephraim: leave him alone." The participle means "mated" or "leagued." The corresponding noun is used of a wife as the "mate" of her husband { Malachi 2:4 } and of an idolater as the "mate" of his idols. { Isaiah 44:11 } The expression is doubly appropriate here, since Hosea used marriage as the figure of the relation of a deity to his worshippers. "Leave him alone"-he must go from bad to worse. "Their drunkenness over, they take to harlotry: her rulers have fallen in love with shame," or "they love shame more than their pride." But in spite of all their servile worship the Assyrian tempest shall sweep them away in its trail. "A wind hath wrapt them up in her skirts; and they shall be put to shame by their sacrifices." This brings the passage to such a climax as Amos loved to crown his periods. And the opening of the next chapter offers a new exordium. Hosea 4:11 Whoredom and wine and new wine take away the heart. 11; Hosea 2:1-23 ; Hosea 3:1-5 THE SIN AGAINST LOVE Hosea 1:1-11 ; Hosea 2:1-23 ; Hosea 3:1-5 ; Hosea 4:11 ff.; Hosea 9:10 ff.; Hosea 11:8 f. The Love of God is a terrible thing-that is the last lesson of the Book of Hosea. "My God will cast them away." { Hosea 10:1-15 } "My God"-let us remember the right which Hosea had to use these words. Of all the prophets he was the first to break into the full aspect of the Divine Mercy to learn and to proclaim that God is Love. But he was worthy to do so, by the patient love of his own heart towards another who for years had outraged all his trust and tenderness. He had loved, believed and been betrayed; pardoned and waited and yearned, and sorrowed and pardoned again. It is in this long-suffering that his breast beats upon the breast of God with the cry "My God." As He had loved Gomer, so had God loved Israel, past hope, against hate, through ages of ingratitude and apostasy. Quivering with his own pain, Hosea has exhausted all human care and affection for figures to express the Divine tenderness, and he declares God’s love to be deeper than all the passion of men, and broader than all their patience: "How can I give thee up, Ephraim? How can I let thee go, Israel? I will not execute the fierceness of Mine anger. For I am God, and not man." And yet, like poor human affection, this Love of God, too, confesses its failure-"My God shall cast them away." It is God’s sentence of relinquishment upon those who sin against His Love, but the poor human lips which deliver it quiver with an agony of their own, and here, as more explicitly in twenty other passages of the book, declare it to be equally, the doom of those who outrage the love of their fellow men and women. We have heard it said: "The lives of men are never the same after they have loved; if they are not better, they must be worse." "Be afraid of the love that loves you: it is either your heaven or your hell." "All the discipline of men springs from their love-if they take it not so, then all their sorrow must spring from the same source." "There is a depth of sorrow, which can only be known to a soul that has loved the most perfect thing and beholds itself fallen." These things are true of the Love, both of our brother and of our God. And the eternal interest of the life of Hosea is that he learned how, for strength and weakness, for better or for worse, our human and our Divine loves are inseparably joined. I. Most men learn that love is inseparable from pain where Hosea learned it-at home. There it is that we are all reminded that when love is strongest she feels her weakness most. For the anguish which love must bear, as it were from the foundation of the world, is the contradiction at her heart between the largeness of her wishes and the littleness of her power to realize them. A mother feels it, bending over the bed of her child, when its body is racked with pain or its breath spent with coughing. So great is the feeling of her love that it ought to do something, that she will actually feel herself cruel because nothing can be done. Let the sick-bed become the beach of death, and she must feel the helplessness and the anguish still more as the dear life is now plucked from her and now tossed back by the mocking waves, and then drawn slowly out to sea upon the ebb from which there is no returning. But the pain which disease and death thus cause to love is nothing to the agony that sin inflicts when he takes the game into his unclean hands. We know what pain love brings, if our love be a fair face and a fresh body in which Death brands his sores while we stand by, as if with arms bound. But what if our love be a childlike heart, and a frank expression and honest eyes, and a clean and clever mind. Our powerlessness is just as great and infinitely more tormented when sin comes by and casts his shadow over these. Ah, that is Love’s greatest torment when her children, who have run from her to the bosom of sin, look back and their eyes are changed! That is the greatest torment of Love-to pour herself without avail into one of those careless natures which seem capacious and receptive, yet never fill with love, for there is a crack and a leak at the bottom of them. The fields where Love suffers her sorest defeats are not the sick-bed and not death’s margin, not the cold lips and sealed eyes kissed without response; but the changed eyes of children, and the breaking of the "full-orbed face," and the darkening look of growing sons and daughters, and the home the first time the unclean laugh breaks across it. To watch, though unable to soothe, a dear body racked with pain, is peace beside the awful vigil of watching a soul shrink and blacken with vice, and your love unable to redeem it. Such a clinical study Hosea endured for years. The prophet of God, we are told, brought a dead child to life by taking him in his arms and kissing him. But Hosea with all his love could not make Gomer a true, whole wife again. Love had no power on this woman-no power even at the merciful call to make all things new. Hosea, who had once placed all hope in tenderness, had to admit that Love’s moral power is not absolute. Love may retire defeated from the highest issues of life. Sin may conquer Love. Yet it is in this his triumph that Sin must feel the ultimate revenge. When a man has conquered this weak thing, and beaten her down beneath his feet, God speaks the sentence of abandonment. There is enough of the whipped dog in all of us to make us dread penalty when we come into conflict with the strong things of life. But it takes us all our days to learn that there is far more condemnation to them who offend the weak things of life, and particularly the weakest of all, its love. It was on sins against the weak that Christ passed His sternest judgments: "Woe unto him that offends one of these little ones; it were better for him that he had never been born." God’s little ones are not only little children, but all things which, like little children, have only love for their strength. They are pure and loving men and women-men with no weapon but their love, women with no shield but their trust. They are the innocent affections of our own hearts-the memories of our childhood, the ideals of our youth, the prayers of our parents, the faith in us of our friends. These are the little ones of whom Christ spake, that he who sins against them had better never have been born. Often may the dear solicitudes of home, a father’s counsels, a mother’s prayers, seem foolish things against the challenges of a world calling us to play the man and do as it does; often may the vows and enthusiasms of boyhood seem impertinent against the temptations which are so necessary to manhood: yet let us be true to the weak, for if we betray them, we betray our own souls. We may sin against law and maim or mutilate ourselves, but to sin against love is to be cast out of life altogether. He who violates the purity of the love with which God has filled his heart, he who abuses the love God has sent to meet him in his opening manhood, he who slights any of the affections, whether they be of man or woman, of young or of old, which God lays upon us as the most powerful redemptive forces of our life, next to that of His dear Son-he sinneth against his own soul, and it is of such that Hosea spake: "My God will cast them away." We talk of breaking law: we can only break ourselves against it. But if we sin against Love, we do destroy her: we take from her the power to redeem and sanctify us. Though in their youth men think Love a quick and careless thing-a servant always at their side, a winged messenger easy of dispatch-let them know that every time they send her on an evil errand she returns with heavier feet and broken wings. When they make her a pander they kill her outright. When she is no more they waken to that which Gomer came to know, that love abused is love lost, and love lost means Hell. II This, however, is only the margin from which Hosea beholds an abandonment still deeper. All that has been said of human love and the penalty of outraging it is equally true of the Divine love and the sin against that. The love of God has the same weakness which we have seen in the love of man. It, too, may fail to redeem; it, too, has stood defeated on some of the highest moral battle-fields of life. God Himself has suffered anguish and rejection from sinful men. "Herein," says a theologian, "is the mystery of this love that God can never by His Almighty Power compel that which is the very highest gift in the life of His creatures-love to Himself, but that He receives it as the free gift of His creatures, and that He is only able to allow men to give it to Him in a free act of their own will." So Hosea also has told us how God does not compel, but allure or "woo," the sinful back to Himself. And it is the deepest anguish of the prophet’s heart, that this free grace of God may fail through man’s apathy or insincerity. The anguish appears in those frequent antitheses in which his torn heart reflects herself in the style of his discourse. "I have redeemed them-yet they have spoken lies against Me. { Hosea 7:13 } I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness-they went to Ba’al-Peor. { Hosea 9:10 } When Israel was a child, then I loved him but they sacrificed to Ba’alim. { Hosea 11:1-2 } I taught Ephraim to walk, but they knew not that I healed them. { Hosea 9:4 } How can I give thee up, Ephraim? how can I let thee go, O Israel? Ephraim compasseth Me with lies, and the house of Israel with deceit." { Hosea 11:8 ; Hosea 12:1 } We fear to apply all that we know of the weakness of human love to the love of God. Yet though He be God and not man, it was as man He commended His love to us. He came nearest us, not in the thunders of Sinai, but in Him Who presented Himself to the world with the caresses of a little child; who met men with no angelic majesty or heavenly aureole, but whom when we saw we found nothing that we should desire Him, His visage was so marred more than any man, and his form than the sons of men; Who came to His own and His own received Him not; Who, having loved His own that were in the world, loved them up to the end, and yet at the end was by them deserted and betrayed, -it is of Him that Hosea prophetically says: "I drew them with cords of a man and with bands of love." We are not bound to God by any unbreakable chain. The strands which draw us upwards to God, to holiness and everlasting life, have the weakness of those which bind us to the earthly souls we love. It is possible for us to break them. We love Christ, not because He has compelled us by any magic, irresistible influence to do so; but, as John in his great simplicity says, "We love Him because He first loved us." Now this is surely the terror of God’s love-that it can be resisted; that even as it is manifest in Jesus Christ we men have the power, not only to remain as so many do, outside its scope, feeling it to be far-off and vague, but having tasted it to fall away from it, having realized it to refuse it, having allowed it to begin its moral purposes in our lives to baffle and nullify these; to make the glory of Heaven absolutely ineffectual in our own characters; and to give our Savior the anguish of rejection. Give Him the anguish, yet pass upon ourselves the doom! For, as I read the New Testament, the one unpardonable sin is the sin against our Blessed Redeemer’s Love as it is brought home to the heart by the power of the Holy Spirit. Every other sin is forgiven to men but to crucify afresh Him who loved us and gave Himself for us. The most terrible of His judgments is "the wail of a heart wounded because its love has been despised": "Jerusalem, Jerusalem! how often would I have gathered thy children as a hen gathereth her chickens, and ye would not. Behold your house is left unto you desolate!" Men say they cannot believe in hell, because they cannot conceive how God may sentence men to misery for the breaking of laws they were born without power to keep. And one would agree with the inference if God had done any such thing. But for them which are under the law and the sentence of death, Christ died once for all that He might redeem them. Yet this does not make a hell less believable. When we see how Almighty was that Love of God in Christ Jesus, lifting our whole race and sending them forward with a freedom and a power of growth nothing else in history has won for them; when we prove again how weak it is, so that it is possible for millions of characters that have felt it to refuse its eternal influence for the sake of some base and transient passion; nay, when I myself know this power and this weakness of Christ’s love, so that one day being loyal I am raised beyond the reach of fear and of doubt, beyond the desire of sin and the habit of evil, and the next day finds me capable of putting it aside in preference for some slight enjoyment or ambition-then I know the peril and the terror of this love, that it may be to a man either Heaven or Hell. Believe then in hell, because you believe in the Love of God-not in a hell to which God condemns men of His will and pleasure, but a hell into which men cast themselves from the very face of His love in Jesus Christ. The place has been painted as a place of fires. But when we contemplate that men come to it with the holiest flames in their nature quenched, we shall justly feel that it is rather a dreary waste of ash and cinder, strewn with snow-some ribbed and frosty Arctic zone, silent in death, for there is no life there, and there is no life there because there is no Love, and no Love because men, in rejecting or abusing her, have slain their own power ever again to feel her presence. 4. "THE CORRUPTION THAT IS THROUGH LUST" Hosea 9:10-17 CF. Hosea 4:11-14 Those who at the present time are enforcing among us the revival of a paganism-without the pagan conscience-and exalting licentiousness to the level of an art, forget how frequently the human race has attempted their experiment, with far more sincerity than they themselves can put into it, and how invariably the result has been recorded by history to be weariness, decay, and death. On this occasion we have the story told to us by one who to the experience of the statesman adds the vision of the poet. The generation to which Hosea belonged practiced a periodical unchastity under the alleged sanctions of nature and religion. And, although their prophet told them that-like our own apostates from Christianity-they could never do so with the abandon of the pagans, for they carried within them the conscience and the memory of a higher faith, it appears that even the fathers of Israel resorted openly and without shame to the licentious rites of the sanctuaries. In an earlier passage of his book Hosea insists that all this must impair the people’s intellect. "Harlotry takes away the brains." { Hosea 4:12 } He has shown also how it confuses the family, and has exposed the old delusion that men may be impure and keep their womankind chaste. { Hosea 4:13-14 } But now he diagnoses another of the inevitable results of this sin. After tracing the sin and the theory of life which permitted it, to their historical beginnings at the entry of the people into Canaan, he describes how the long practice of it, no matter how pretentious its sanctions, inevitably leads not only to exterminating strifes, but to the decay of the vigor of the nation, to barrenness and a diminishing population. "Like grapes in the wilderness I found Israel, like the first fruit on a fig-tree in her first season I saw your fathers." So had the lusty nation appeared to God in its youth; in that dry wilderness all the sap and promise of spring were in its eyes, because it was still pure. But "they-they came to Ba’al-Peor"-the first of the shrines of Canaan which they touched-"and dedicated themselves to the shame, and became as abominable as the object of their love. "Ephraim"-the "Fruitful" name is emphasized-"their glory is flown away like a bird. No more birth, no more motherhood, no more conception! Blasted is Ephraim, withered the root of them, fruit they produce not: yea, even when they beget children I slay the darlings of their womb. Yea, though they bring up their sons I bereave them," till they are "poor in men. Yea, woe upon themselves" also, when I look away from them! Ephraim"-again the "Fruitful" name is dragged to the front-"for prey, as I have seen, are his sons destined. Ephraim" - he "must lead his sons to the slaughter." And the prophet interrupts with his chorus: "Give them, O Lord-what wilt Thou give them? Give them a miscarrying womb and breasts that are dry!" "All their mischief is in Gilgal"-again the Divine voice strikes the connection between the national worship and the national sin-"yea, there do I hate them: for the evil of their doings from My house I will drive them. I will love them no more: all their nobles are rebels." And again the prophet responds: "My God will cast them away, for they have not hearkened to Him, and they shall be vagabonds among the nations." Some of the warnings which Hosea enforces with regard to this sin have been instinctively felt by mankind since the beginnings of civilization, and are found expressed among the proverbs of nearly all the languages. But I am unaware of any earlier moralist in any literature who traced the effects of national licentiousness in a diminishing population, or who exposed the persistent delusion of libertine men that they themselves may resort to vice, yet keep their womankind chaste. Hosea, so far as we know, was the first to do this. History in many periods has confirmed the justice of his observations, and by one strong voice after another enforced his terrible warnings. The experience of ancient Persia and Egypt; the languor of the Greek cities; the "deep weariness and sated lust" which in Imperial Rome "made human life a hell"; the decay which overtook Italy after the renascence of Paganism without the Pagan virtues; the strife and anarchy that have rent every court where, as in the case of Henri Quatre, the king set the example of libertinage; the incompetence, the poltroonery, the treachery, that have corrupted every camp where, as in French Metz in 1870, soldiers and officers gave way so openly to vice; the checks suffered by modern civilization in face of barbarism because its pioneers mingled in vice with the savage races they were subduing; the number of great statesmen falling by their passions, and in their fall frustrating the hopes of nations; the great families worn out by indulgence; the homes broken up by infidelities; the tainting of the blood of a new generation by the poisonous practices of the old, -have not all these things been in every age, and do they not still happen near enough to ourselves to give us a great fear of the sin which causes them all? Alas! how stow men are to listen and to lay to heart! Is it possible that we can gild by the names of frivolity and piquancy habits the wages of which are death? Is it possible that we can enjoy comedies which make such things their jest? We have among us many who find their business in the theatre, or in some of the periodical literature of our time, in writing and speaking and exhibiting as closely as they dare to limits of public decency. When will they learn that it is not upon the easy edge of mere conventions that they are capering, but upon the brink of those eternal laws whose further side is death and hell-that it is not the tolerance of their fellow men they are testing, but the patience of God Himself? As for those loud few who claim license in the name of art and literature, let us not shrink from them as if they were strong or their high words true. They are not strong, they are only reckless; their claims are lies. All history, the poets and the prophets, whether Christian or Pagan, are against them. They are traitors alike to art, to love, and to every other high interest of mankind. It may be said that a large part of the art of the day, which takes great license in dealing with these subjects, is exercised only by the ambition to expose that ruin and decay which Hosea himself affirms. This is true. Some of the ablest and most popular writers of our time have pictured the facts, which Hosea describes, with so vivid a realism that we cannot but judge them to be inspired to confirm his ancient warnings, and to excite a disgust of vice in a generation which otherwise treats vice so lightly. But if so, their ministry is exceeding narrow, and it is by their side that we best estimate the greatness of the ancient prophet. Their transcript of human life may be true to the facts it selects, but we find in it no trace of facts which are greater and more essential to humanity. They have nothing to tell us of forgiveness and repentance, and yet these are as real as the things they describe. Their pessimism is unrelieved. They see the "corruption that is in the world through lust"; they forget that there is an escape from it. { 2 Peter 1:1-21 } It is Hosea’s greatness that, while he felt the vices of his day with all needed thoroughness and realism, he yet never allowed them to be inevitable or ultimate, but preached repentance and pardon, with the possibility of holiness even for his depraved generation. It is the littleness of the art of our day that these great facts are forgotten by her, though once she was their interpreter to men. When she remembers them the greatness of her past will return. The Expositor's Bible Text Courtesy of BibleSupport.com . Used by Permission.

Hear the Word of the Lord, ye children of Israel: for the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land. Hosea 4:1 A corrupt people and an expostulating God Homilist. In the previous chapters the prophet's language had been highly and somewhat perplexingly symbolical. In this chapter he begins to speak more plainly and in sententious utterances. I. A CORRUPT PEOPLE. The depravity of Israel is represented — 1. Negatively. "There is no truth," etc. These are the great fontal virtues in the universe; and where they are not, there is a moral abjectness of the most terrible description. A people without reality, their very life a lie. No acts of beneficence performed, and the very spirit of kindliness extinct. The greatest, the holiest Being in the universe utterly ignored. 2. Positively. The absence of these great virtues gives rise to tremendous crimes. (1) Profanity. Reverence is gone. (2) Falsehood. (3) Killing. (4) Dishonesty. (5) Incontinence. (6) Murder. II. AN EXPOSTULATING GOD. "The Lord hath controversy." Of all controversies this is the most awful. 1. It is a just controversy. Has not the great Ruler of the universe a right to contend against such evils? 2. It is a continuous controversy. 3. It is an unequal controversy. What are all human intellects to His? Sparks to the sun. The sinner has no argument to put before Him. He cannot deny his sins. He cannot plead accidents. He cannot plead compulsion. He cannot plead some merit as a set-off, for he has none. This controversy is still going on. It is held in the court of conscience, and you must know of its existence and character. ( Homilist. ) Jehovah's controversy with Israel George Hutcheson. In this chapter Israel is cited to appear at God's tribunal. There the Lord makes the following accusations — 1. Gross violation of both Tables of the Law, both by omission and by commission. God threatens, because of this, to send extreme desolation. 2. Desperate incorrigibleness. He threatens to destroy such, and the false prophets, and the body of the people and Church. 3. God accuseth the priests in Israel, that, through their fault, the people were kept in ignorance. He threatens to cast them and their posterity off. He further accuses the priests of ingratitude towards Elm, for which He threatens to turn their glory into ignominy. And tie even accuses them of sensuality and covetousness, rendering them unfaithful to their calling. 4. He accuses the whole people of gross idolatry, and threatens not to restrain their sin by corrections. 5. He accuses them of the idolatry of the calves, from which He dissuades Judah, as being an evidence of Israel's wantonness, and the cause of their ensuing exile. 6. He accuses Ephraim, the kingly tribe, of their incorrigibleness in idolatry, their intemperance, filthiness, and corruption of justice through covetousness. For this He threatens sudden and violent destruction and captivity, where they should be ashamed of their corrupt worship. ( George Hutcheson. ) The Divine suit with Israel Jeremiah Burroughs. I. THE SUIT COMMENCED. 1. The knowledge that any truth is the Word of the Lord is a special means to prepare the heart to receive it with reverence and all due respect, even though it be hard and grievous to flesh and blood. 2. The nearness of a people to God does not exempt them from God's contending with them for sin. 3. The nearer the relationship the more grievous the controversy. II. THE PLEADING OF GOD. A suit first is entered against a man; when the court day comes, there is calling for a declaration. 1. God contends not with a people without a cause. 2. God contends not against a people for little things. These are not little things "No truth, no mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land." 3. It is in vain for any man to talk of his religion, if he make no conscience of the second table as well as the first. III. JUDGMENT PRONOUNCED (ver. 3, etc.). "Therefore shall the land mourn." 1. All the glory and pomp of the men of the world is but as a flower. 2. Times of affliction take down the jollity and bravery of men's spirits, and make them fade, wither, and pine away. 3. The good or evil of the creature depends on man. 4. God, when in a way of wrath, can cause His wrath to reach to those things that seem to be most remote. 5. No creature can help man in the time of God's wrath, for every creature suffers as well as man. IV. EXHORTATION TO JUDAH TO BEWARE THAT SHE COME NOT INTO THE SAME CONDITION (ver. 15). The prophet Hosea was sent especially to Israel, to the Ten Tribes, but here we see he turns his speech to Judah. 1. Ministers should especially look to those whom they are bound unto by office, but yet so as to labour to benefit others when occasion offers. 2. When we see our labour lost on those we most desire to benefit, we should try what we can do with others. There were many arguments why Judah should not do as Israel did. V. EXECUTION, GOD IN HIS WRATH GIVING UP EPHRAIM TO HIMSELF (ver. 17). 1. Ephraim engaging himself in false worship is now so inwrapped in that sin and guilt that he cannot tell how to extricate himself. 2. The Lord has given him up to his idols.(1) It is a heavy judgment upon a people when the saints withdraw from them.(2) The Lord here virtually says to Hosea, "You can do no good to them, it is in vain for you to meddle with Ephraim." God has a time to give men over to themselves, to say that His Spirit shall no longer strive with them. It is the most woeful judgment of God upon any people, or person, when He saith in His wrath, "Let him alone." It is a testimony of very great disregard in God for His creatures. Those thus let alone are going apace to misery. God intends by this to make way for some fearful wrath that is to come upon them. It is a dreadful sign of reprobation. ( Jeremiah Burroughs. ) The Lord's controversy The court is set, and both attendance and attention are demanded. Whom may God expect to give Him a fair hearing, and take from Him a fair warning, but the children of Israel, His own professing people? Sin is the great mischief-maker; it sows discord between God and Israel. God sees sin in His own people, and a good action He has against them for it. He has a controversy with them for breaking covenant with Him, for bringing a reproach upon Him, and for an ungrateful return to Him for His favours. God's controversies will be pleaded, pleaded by the judgments of His mouth before they are pleaded by the judgments of His hand, that He may be justified in all He does, and may make it appear that He desires not the death of sinners; and God's pleadings ought to be attended to, for, sooner or later, they shall have a hearing. ( Matthew Henry . ) There is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land Things that go with the knowledge of God E. B. Pusey, D. D. Truth and mercy are often spoken of as to Almighty God. Truth takes in all which is right, and to which God has bound Himself; mercy all beyond which God does out of His boundless love. When God says of Israel there is no truth nor mercy, He says that there is absolutely none of those two great qualities under which He comprises all His own goodness. "There is no truth," none whatever, "no regard for known truth; no conscience, no sincerity, no uprightness; no truth of words; no truth of promises; no truth in witnessing; no making good in deeds what they said in words." "Nor mercy." This word has a wide meaning; it includes all love to one another, a love issuing in acts. It includes lovingkindness, piety to parents, natural affection, forgiveness, tenderness, beneficence, mercy, goodness. The prophet, in declaring the absence of this grace, declares the absence of all included under it. Whatever could be comprised under love, whatever feelings are influenced by love, of that there was nothing. "Nor knowledge of God." The union of right knowledge and wrong practice is hideous in itself; and it must be especially offensive to Almighty God that His creatures should know whom they offend, how they offend Him, and yet, amid and against their knowledge, choose that which displeases Him. And on that ground, perhaps, He has so created us, that when our acts are wrong, our knowledge becomes darkened. The knowledge of God is not merely to know some things of God, as that He is the Creator and Preserver of the world and of ourselves. To know things of God is not to know God Himself. We cannot know God in any respect unless we are so far made like unto Him. Knowledge of God being tim gift of the Holy Ghost, he who hath not grace, cannot have that knowledge. A certain degree of speculative knowledge of God a bad man may have. But even this knowledge is not retained without love. Those who "held the truth in unrighteousness" ended (St. Paul says) by corrupting it. Certainly, the speculative and practical, knowledge are bound up together through the oneness of the relation of the soul to God, whether in its thoughts of Him, or its acts towards Him. Wrong practice corrupts belief, as misbelief corrupts practice. The prophet then probably denies that there was any true knowledge of God, of any sort, whether of life or faith, or understanding or love. Ignorance of God, then, is a great evil, a source of all other sins. ( E. B. Pusey, D. D. ) A national duty J. Garbett. No one can fail to acknowledge in this terrible picture a representation of every people which habitually breaks the laws of God; and who, having set themselves free from the restraints of religion, or, through ignorance, being unconscious of their obligation, are delivered up to the working of their own heart's lusts, and to follow their own imaginations. This consummation of depravity is even found in the chosen people of God. There was no truth where the great Source of all truth had announced the laws of moral perfection: there was no mercy where the prodigies of Divine compassion had been manifested from one generation to another: there was no knowledge of God where alone God could be known, and in the only place in which the principles of His government, and the attributes of His person, had been revealed to man. What rendered the case of Israel desperate, and remedy impossible, was this, that those who had been set apart as the depositaries of Divine knowledge, and who, by their life and doctrine, had been intended by the Almighty to act constantly, as a conservative power, against the corruptions of the mass, had yielded themselves to the popular torrent, and turned rank and station, the dignity of a holy vocation, and the talents of knowledge and intellect to the promotion of those vices which God had given them a solemn commission to withstand. They were weary of resisting the tendencies of the age and the godless spirit which found too complete an echo in their own hearts. So the princes and priests of Israel deserted their post, sealed up the records of God's Word, and by ceasing to inculcate the awful sanctions of His law, and concealing from the people those oracles in which alone knowledge and wisdom are to be found, filled up to the brim the measure of their iniquity. That measure was filled up because they who had knowledge and had the guardianship of God's heritage had turned traitors and withheld the Bread of Life from the famishing people. To whatever privileges a people may have been elected, no outward marks of distinction, apart from a corresponding holiness, will avail in the sight of Him who is no respecter of persons, and who trieth the very reins and hearts. The history of Israel is nothing but the annals of those judgments with which tie has visited their abuse of mercies, and their never-ending neglect or perversion of that most awful of all deposits, spiritual knowledge. If men in all times have been made accountable to God for the fate of their fellowcreatures, and most assuredly they have, it behoves us to look well to our own case, and beware how we involve ourselves in the participation of such guilt. Let us not deceive ourselves by supposing that the sins and the sanctions, the moral actions and the moral dealings of the eider covenant are inapplicable to ourselves. Considerable differences there may be, but they are all against us, and an increase of our responsibility. It is known to few of us how vast are the masses of ignorance and vice which undermine the surface of this favoured land. ( J. Garbett. ) Therefore shall the land mourn, and every one that dwelleth therein shall languish. Hosea 4:3 The social causes of human misery J. Robinson. It is a principle illustrated by the holy records, that when immorality has thoroughly infected a state, in defiance of all warning and ordinary discipline, it is given up to destruction, as was Sodom, and also many of the most renowned empires of ancient times. Nothing is more certain and calculable in action and result than are social evils and social virtues. To inquire into their nature and operation is the way to discover a remedy for a most serious evil, and to furnish the most powerful motives for its rigorous and incessant application. There is much misery in the world. A primary cause of it is to be found in man himself. We are not to blame society, or social relations in any of their forms, for all the evils that exist in, and seem to be developed by them. Man, by his very constitution, is a social creature. The depravity of man, both as the judicial result of his sin, and as aggravated by his habits both of thought and sensual indulgence, insinuates itself into all that he does, and corrupts every relation into which he enters. Each relation, therefore, however fitted to produce and increase his happiness, is found to contribute something to his misery, and presents to the observer some new form and modification of human suffering. Consider the common relations of human society. I. THE POLITICAL. If justice were enthroned in every heart there would be no necessity for any political economy. The authority of God in every man's conscience would render all human government totally unnecessary. Government as a human institution can be traced no higher than to the necessities that spring from the fall. So long as government is the administration of justice- the agency by which wrong and outrage are repressed and punished — it must contribute in a most effectual manner to the good of a community. It is not because of this relation between the governor and governed that political evils exist. When the governor ceases to be the administrator of justice at all, and when the abettors of wrong obtain power and influence, then righteousness is hurled from her throne, and law trampled in the mire under the feet of a lawless and licentious mob. The ruin of a state has generally commenced with the corruption of its government. The amount of calamity and woe inflicted on our species by corrupt and despotic governments forms too serious an item to be passed over in silence. II. THE CAUSES OF HUMAN MISERY OPERATING THROUGH THE MEDIUM OF THE RELATIONS OF COMMERCE. These we take in their most extensive sense, including the intercourse and the arrangements, agreed upon generally, for conducting the manufacturing and mercantile depart ments of trade. The morals of trade, it is to be feared, are but indefinite at the best. Gain is the object pursued; but the means of acquiring it are as various as the dispositions and amount of principle felt by the candidates will admit. There are certainly parts of the economy of trade that require attention and no slight measure of reform. There is much of suffering and unhappiness observable in the commercial relations of life; and these may be clearly traced either to causes originating in something defective in the moral principles on which the economy of trade is based, or in the dispositions of those who take a part in conducting its several departments. Illustrate from the relation of master and servant, of the employer and the employed. Late hours; time for payment of wages; speculation; getting out of temporary difficulties by giving accommodation bills, etc. III. THE CAUSES OF HUMAN MISERY IN THE RELATIONS OF FRIENDSHIP AND PRIVATE SOCIETY. 1. Society has its temptations, and these, if not carefully watched, may lead us into much evil. One of the first consequences of a fondness for society is the diminished fervour of the domestic affections. Another temptation is a love of display. A certain indolence too is generally induced by the kind of social intercourse to which we are now referring. 2. Society has its actual vices. What so pernicious as envy? Consider the conventional estimate formed of the character of vices, such as gambling. There never was a day in which the debauching indulgence of the appetites was so inexcusable as the present. The cure of all the evil and misery is the adoption of the principle and rule, — "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." ( J. Robinson. ) A terrible deprivation Homilist. — A deprivation that comes upon the people in consequence of their heinous iniquities. I. A DEPRIVATION OF BOTH MATERIAL AND SPIRITUAL GOOD. 1. Of material good.(1) Health. Sin is inimical to the bodily health and vigour of men and nations; it insidiously saps the constitution.(2) Means of subsistence. Reference is to one of those droughts that occasionally occur in the East, and is ever one of the greatest calamities. How soon the Eternal can destroy our means of subsistence l 2. Of spiritual good. Their presumptuous guilt was as great as that of one who refused to obey the priest when giving judgment in the name of Jehovah ( Deuteronomy 17:12 ). One of the greatest spiritual blessings of mankind is the strife and reproof of godly men. What a derivation for these to be taken away! II. A DEPRIVATION LEADING TO A TERRIBLE DOOM. 1. The destruction of both priests and people. The meaning is that no time, night or day, shall be free from the slaughter both of the priests and of the people. This was literally true of the Ten Tribes at this time. 2. The destruction of the social state. "And I will destroy thy mother." Who was the mother? The Israelitish state. And it was destroyed. ( Homilist. ) With the beasts of the field, and with the fowls of heaven The sharers in Divine judgment George Hutcheson. The Lord's sentence or threatening for these sins is that extreme desolation shall come, not only on the people, but on the land, and on all the creatures for their sakes, even on the fishes which were in lakes and ponds in the land. Doctrine — 1. The judgments of God upon the visible Church will be very sad and grievous, when they are inflicted, and as universal as sin hath been. 2. Albeit the Lord's judgments on sinful and impenitent people do at first utterly consume them, yet that will be only that they may live awhile to feel their own miseries, and then be consumed by them, if they repent not. 3. Sinful man is a great enemy to all the creatures, as well as to himself; he makes both himself and them to mourn and pine away, because he will not mourn indeed. 4. As the glory of all the creatures is but a flower, which God will soon make to wither and languish when He pursueth for sin, so the creatures will not help man when God is angry at him; but as these draw him from God, so God is provoked to cut him short in them, as here they are consumed with him. ( George Hutcheson. ) All creatures share the calamities of sin As beasts, birds, and fishes, and in a word, all other things, have been created for the use of men, it is no wonder that God should extend the tokens of His curse to all creatures, above and below, when His purpose is to punish men. When God curses innocent animals for our sake, we then dread the more, except, indeed, we be under the influence of extreme stupor. ( John Calvin . ) Yet let no man strive, nor reprove another. Hosea 4:4 Restraint of converting agencies Here is given an order of court that no pains should be taken with the condemned criminal to bring him to repentance, and the reason for that order. I. THE ORDER ITSELF. "Let no man strive, nor reprove another." Let.no means be used to reduce or reclaim them; let their physicians give them up as desperate and past cure. It intimates that as long as there is any hope we ought to reprove sinners for their sins. It is a duty we owe to one another to give and take reproof. Sometimes there is need to rebuke sharply, not only to reprove but to strive, so loth are men to part with their sins. But it is a sign that persons and people are abandoned to ruin when God says, "Let them not be reproved." They are so hardened in sin, and so ripened for ruin, that it will be to little purpose either to deal with them, or to deal with God for them. It bodes ill to a people when reprovers are silenced. II. THE REASONS OF THIS ORDER. 1. They are determined to go on in sin, and no reproofs will cure them of that. "Thy people are as those that strive with the priests"; they have grown so very impudent in sin that they will fly in the face even of a priest himself if he should but give them the least check. Those sinners have their hearts wickedly hardened who quarrel with their ministers for dealing faithfully with them. 2. God also is determined to proceed in their ruin. "Therefore shalt thou fall." The ruin of those who have helped to ruin ethers will, in a special manner, be intolerable. When all are involved in guilt nothing less can be expected than that all should be involved in ruin. ( Matthew Henry . ) Therefore shalt thou fall in the day, and the prophet also shall fall with thee in the night, and I will destroy thy mother. Hosea 4:5 Common destruction George Hutcheson. The threatening is that destruction should come upon such sinners and on the false prophets who flattered and soothed them up in this course. Learn — 1. Men's opposing of the Word, their rejecting of reproof, and blessing themselves when they are rid of it, will not avail them, nor hold off wrath, but rather hasten it. 2. How high soever men exalt themselves in their opposition to God and His truth, yet that guilt will bring them down, and when God begins to reckon, He will teach every sinner particularly. 3. Vengeance can reach sinners in the height of their prosperity, and can ruin them suddenly and unavoidably. 4. It is a plague upon sinners that when they go farthest wrong, and oppose the faithful servants of God, yet they will never want corrupt men pretending to come in God's name to bolster them up in their evil way, and God hath a sad controversy against such seducers. 5. However sinners shelter themselves under the privileges of a visible Church or state, yet the Lord may let them find that their sin doth not only undo themselves, but bring utter desolation also on the Church and nation whereof they are. Therefore it is subjoined, "And I will destroy thy mother." ( George Hutcheson. ) My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Hosea 4:6 The perils of ignorance T. Rennell, D. D. If there is a knowledge on which not only the improvements and the refinements but the very being of society depends, the state of this must be in its nature most deeply awful and interesting. It was the language of pagan philosophy that such a knowledge did exist. The heathen wisdom was enabled to discern that all science, as exercised in its inferior provinces, required some principle of a sublimer nature, which might afford cement, consistence, and basis to every subordinate effort and exertion of the human intellect. In exploring this principle they however failed — and instead of substantial truth, were lost in the delusive twilight of a magnificent though ineffectual and perpetually baffled metaphysical speculation. Those on whom the daystar of revelation arose, found in the distinct discovery of a moral Governor of the universe, and the full and unequivocal display of His attributes, that knowledge which marks the origin, the limits, and the destination of every faculty, talent, and acquisition. When God tells us there is a knowledge "for the lack of which a people is destroyed," we must infer that it is the "knowledge of Himself, His nature, His providence, and His power. If it be true that "knowledge and wisdom are the stability of prosperous times," the converse will equally claim our attention. Inquire into the moral causes of both these propositions. It is not my intention to institute a regular comparison between the various acquisitions and exertions of ourselves and our predecessors. I mark those intellectual habits which interfere with the cultivation of that knowledge which directs, superintends, and sanctifies every portion of wisdom we can acquire. Whatever was the region of science which our predecessors explored, they steadily kept in view the great Source of every good and perfect gift. And this not only in theology proper, but also in history, moral science, and natural philosophy. Every work was in some measure a school of Divine knowledge. Now it is rarely indeed that, except in works directly treating of theology, any pious reference, even when the subject most points to it, is made to the dispensation and moral government of Almighty God. To a variety of causes this may be traced; to none more than to pride, or to its abortion, vanity. This engenders a fondness for paradox, than which nothing can be a greater obstruction to all knowledge, and particularly to the knowledge of God and His dispensations. All paradox, even in its most ingenious forms, is mere debility, and in no instance a mark of energy or strength of mind. It is observable that, in proportion to the love for this, the intellectual appetite is palled and vitiated for the perception and investigation of genuine truth. Hence those mischievous abstractions, which when introduced into religion, morals, and politics have, from causes comparatively mean, produced the most extended and tremendous effects. In a short time there will (we have reason to fear) remain but two kinds of persons among us, either those who think not at all, or those whose imaginations are active indeed, but continually evil. Of these latter it may be said, "Their foolish heart was darkened." Of the principles, I do not say of the detail, of political science, a sound theology is the only sure and steady basis. Now we trace the operations by which a destruction so extended in its consequences has been effected. The master-spring of every principle which can permanently secure the stability of a people is the fear and knowledge of Almighty God. The first operation of a principle of atheism, and perhaps one of the most formidable in its consequences, is that which leads political men to conceive of Christianity as a mere auxiliary to the State. Religion was not instituted (in the Divine council I mean) for the purpose of society and government, but society and government for the purposes of religion. As atheism presumptuously attempts to discard a moral government, in order to open a fearless unrestrained indulgence for the impetuosity of passion, so superstition administers, upon a principle of commutation, to those same indulgences. It is utterly subversive of the two grand pillars of the Divine administration, His justice and His mercy. Thus both atheism and superstition are instruments of the general adversary of mankind. Their origin is in the wilful ignorance of God, and their operation in the merciless destruction of His creatures. The present disastrous state of human affairs can only be ascribed to one source, a corruption of morals, produced by a previous depravation of the opinions of mankind. If the events we deplore and deprecate arise from ignorance, error, and false opinion; and this ignorance is specifically the ignorance of Almighty God and His dispensations, to revive and disseminate with activity the principles of a sound, Christian, and orthodox theology will be our best interest, as it is our bounden duty. ( T. Rennell, D. D. ) The sin of public teachers George Hutcheson. Here made responsible for the ignorance of the people. 1. As ignorance is a very rife and destroying sin in the visible Church, so the guilt thereof doth ofttimes lie in great part at preachers' doors. 2. Such as would be able to teach others, ought to take much pains that they may be instructed themselves from God in His Word. 3. The more familiar occasion of converse men have with holy things, wanting holiness, their contempt and dislike of them will be the greater, and their opposition to light have the more perversity and the less infirmity in it. 4. Such as do for a time reject and resist means of knowledge, may at last come to lose the light they had. 5. The more relation any pretend to God, by virtue of their general or particular calling, the Lord will make use thereof to aggravate their sin and unanswerable walking. 6. Unfaithfulness in offices will cast men out of the Church, as unsavoury salt is cast out, which is a sad judgment. 7. It is a righteous judgment on unfaithful ministers that God suffers their posterity to be neglected. ( George Hutcheson. ) Lack of knowledge Jeremiah Burroughs. As if he had said, If they had the knowledge of God, they might have prevented all this, but they were ignorant and sottish people, and this was the forerunner of misery and destruction. The heathens were wont to say that if their god Jupiter would destroy one, he would first besot him; so these people were first besotted and then destroyed. Ignorance is not the mother of devotion, but rather the father and mother too of destruction. In the beginning of this chapter we have the sin of ignorance set forth, here we have its danger. There we had the charge, that they had "no knowledge in the land"; here we have the judgment, that they "are destroyed for want of knowledge." Ignorance is not only the deformity of the soul as blindness is the deformity of the face; though a man or woman have never such a comely face otherwise, yet if they be blind, or have but one eye, it mars their beauty; so ignorance takes away the beauty of the soul; and not only so, but is dangerous and destructive, and that in these respects — 1. The rational creature is very active of itself, and will always be in motion, always working. Then, wanting knowledge, and surrounded by pits and snares, how dangerous is his situation! 2. Man's way is for eternity, and there is but one way that leads to an eternity of happiness, and that lies in the midst of a hundred crossways and bypaths. If he have not light, if he want knowledge, what is to become of him? 3. Man is not only going onward through dangers and byways, but he must go on with his own light. The soul that is ignorant no angel in heaven can help, except as an instrument of God to bring sight into his eyes. 4. The work we are to do about our souls and eternal estates is the most curious and most difficult piece of work, and we must do it by our own light. 5. Blindness in this world makes men objects of pity and compassion, but this ignorance and blindness make men to be the objects of the hatred and curse of God. God gave us light at first, we have brought ignorance upon ourselves. ( Jeremiah Burroughs. ) Lack of knowledge the destruction of a people W. Nicholson, M. A. The tide of human affairs is ever throwing up upon the surface of society some one particular subject of special and engrossing interest. One of the prominent subjects of our time is education. It has been forced on the minds of thoughtful men by the lamentable results of allowing an exuberant population to outgrow the means of their moral and religious training, bequeathed by the wisdom and piety of their forefathers. Hosea the prophet was commissioned to denounce God's just displeasure, and His determination to inflict punishment upon a people that refused to be reformed. God had a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there was no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land. It is a serious question how far such language may befit ourselves. It is certain that there is a fearful lack of "knowledge of God" in our times. I. WHAT IS THE KNOWLEDGE, THE LACK OF WHICH DESTROYS A PEOPLE? The question is analogous to another, What is education? Are we agreed among ourselves as to what is to be understood by this expression? There is a class of men whose ideas of knowledge and education are almost confined to the acquisition and communication of the facts and principles of physical and general science. Education, in their estimation, is training up the young to be in mature life well-informed and philosophical men: men who can keep pace with and help on the forward movements of an inquiring and intellec

4:1-5 Hosea reproves for immorality, as well as idolatry. There was no truth, mercy, or knowledge of God in the land: it was full of murders, 2Ki 21:16. Therefore calamities were near, which would desolate the country. Our sins, as separate persons, as a family, as a neighbourhood, as a nation, cause the Lord to have a controversy with us; let us submit and humble ourselves before Him, that he may not go on to destroy. 4:6-11 Both priests and people rejected knowledge; God will justly reject them. They forgot the law of God, neither desired nor endeavoured to retain it in mind, and to transmit the remembrance to their posterity; therefore God will justly forget them and their children. If we dishonour God with that which is our honour, it will, sooner or later, be turned into shame to us. Instead of warning the people against sin, from the consideration of the sacrifices, which showed what an offence sin was to God, since it needed an atonement, the priests encouraged the people to sin, since atonement might be made at so small an expense. It is very wicked to be pleased with the sins of others, because they may turn to our advantage. What is unlawfully gained, cannot be comfortably used. The people and the priests hardened one another in sin; therefore justly shall they share in the punishment. Sharers in sin must expect to share in ruin. Any lust harboured in the heart, in time will eat out all its strength and vigour. That is the reason why many professors grow so heavy, so dull, so dead in the way of religion. They have a liking for some secret lust, which takes away their hearts. 4:12-19 The people consulted images, and not the Divine word. This would lead to disorder and sin. Thus men prepare scourges for themselves, and vice is spread through a people. Let not Judah come near the idolatrous worship of Israel. For Israel was devoted to idols, and must now be let alone. When sinners cast off the easy yoke of Christ, they go on in sin till the Lord saith, Let them alone. Then they receive no more warnings, feel no more convictions: Satan takes full possession of them, and they ripen for destruction. It is a sad and sore judgment for any man to be let alone in sin. Those who are not disturbed in their sin, will be destroyed for their sin. May we be kept from this awful state; for the wrath of God, like a strong tempest, will soon hurry impenitent sinners into ruin.