Session 8 Hosea 6:1–7:2
HOSEA 6:1–7:2
MEMORY VERSE: HOSEA 5:15
We expect our friends to be loyal. We want friends who keep their word. We want them to be dependable, respectful, and gracious. Our friends should expect the same from us. Why would it be different when it comes to God? God remains loyal to His people and expects them to remain loyal to Him in return.
(In PSG, p. 73)
Like a prosecuting attorney in a court of law, Hosea laid out the Lord’s charges against the people of Israel (Hos. 4:1). To show that Israel had broken its covenant with God, the prophet pointed out that five of the Ten Commandments were being broken. He declared that the priests, who were supposed to be Israel’s spiritual leaders, were to blame. They failed to teach the people a proper knowledge of God. The priests themselves had rejected God’s law and abandoned their devotion to the Lord. Therefore, the Lord would reject them and their descendants as serving as His priests (4:4-10).
Next, Hosea charged the people with idol worship, accompanied by acts of sexual debauchery. The people thought these practices would bring them good fortune, but these things would lead to their doom (4:11-14). Israel’s leaders and the people’s stubbornness would cause them shame as they would be carried off into captivity (4:15-19).
After Hosea made his case, the Lord rendered His judgment to the priests, the nation, and its royal house. Both Israel and Judah would experience God’s punishment. Their promiscuity and arrogance were not hidden from the Lord. They would seek the Lord but be unable to find Him because He had withdrawn from them. Like a lion, the Lord would tear them to pieces and depart from them until they recognized their guilt and sought His face (5:1-15).
After delineating the charges, verdict, and punishment, Hosea called the people to repent that they might be restored to a right relationship with God. God would not delight in a prolonged discipline of His people. If only they would seek to know God, they would experience the joy of a right relationship with Him (6:1-3). With no apparent response from the people, God declared that their love was here a moment and gone the next. They failed to realize that the Lord knew what was in their unfaithful, deceitful hearts. He wanted authentic devotion, not insincere acts of worship. They broke their covenant and betrayed the Lord; therefore, they would experience God’s judgment (6:4–7:16).
EXPLORE THE TEXT
1 Come, let’s return to the LORD. For he has torn us, and he will heal us; he has wounded us, and he will bind up our wounds. 2 He will revive us after two days, and on the third day he will raise us up so we can live in his pres-ence.
Interpreters do not all agree on the meaning of verses 1-3. Were the people of Israel parroting the words they thought God wanted them to say to appease and manipulate Him? The psalmist wrote of this type of response to God: “When he killed some of them, the rest began to seek him . . . But they deceived him with their mouths, they lied to him with their tongues, their hearts were insincere toward him, and they were unfaithful to his covenant” (Ps. 78:34-37). Or are these verses a record of God’s using His prophet to call His people back to Himself one more time, given that the Lord delights in mercy and not judgment? Either way, it will become clear in the rest of the passage that whether they communicated a false repentance or had received a sincere call to repent and turn back to God, the people of Israel continued to reject the Lord. In the context of verses 4 and following, it makes more sense to understand verses 1-3 to be a sincere call to repent.
Returning to the Lord is a major theme in the book of Hosea (Hos. 3:5; 5:4,15; 6:1; 7:10; 11:5; 12:6; 14:1,2,7).
Contingent on Israel’s repentance, the Lord promised to reverse the punishments He had exacted on Israel. The first promise was that God would heal what He had torn, an allusion to God’s promise to tear them to pieces like a lion (5:14). Second, God promised to bind up the wounds of those whom He had wounded.
Verse 2 contains a third reversal of the punishment: the Lord would restore His people to life. This restoration to life is connected to the idea that they were to be torn and carried off like dead prey by a lion (5:14). As if the idea of being revived from death to life is not enough to cause believers to wonder if this verse is somehow anticipating our salvation in Christ, the fact that this declares there will be a resurrection on the third day to live in God’s presence makes it impossible not to wonder if there is a connection to Christ here. Some Bible interpreters, however, understand this to mean God would restore His people after a short time and leave it at that.
While the New Testament does not explicitly quote this verse in reference to Jesus’s resurrection, 1 Corinthians 15:4 indicates Jesus was raised on the third day “according to the Scriptures.” The only place in the Old Testament that speaks of the third day in this way is here. No doubt, Hosea 6:2 is speaking of the future restoration of Israel, but how would that restoration ultimately come about? The Old Testament prophets spoke of the Messiah and His restoration of Israel, and no one expressed it any clearer than Isaiah did as he recorded the Lord’s promise to His Servant: “It is not enough for you to be my servant raising up the tribes of Jacob and restoring the protected ones of Israel. I will also make you a light for the nations, to be my salvation to the ends of the earth” (Isa. 49:6). Several times Jesus told His disciples that He would be killed and raised up the third day (Matt. 16:21; 17:23; 20:19; Luke 9:22).
What’s more, Paul wrote of a day when all of those in Christ, the true Israel, would be raised up at His coming (1 Thess. 4:13-17). Here in verse 2, Hosea provided a partial glimpse of how God would restore Israel and bring about salvation to the ends of the earth through the Lord Jesus Christ.
3 Let’s strive to know the LORD. His appearance is as sure as the dawn. He will come to us like the rain, like the spring showers that water the land.
In verse 1, Hosea exhorted Israel to “return to the LORD.” Here he exhorted Israel to strive to know the LORD. These are the two essential imperatives of this passage. If the people of Israel would return to the Lord and strive to know Him, then they could depend on Him to return and save them just as sure as the dawn of a new day. It would be a new day for Israel. The Lord’s return would be as refreshing and invigorating as rain on barren land. Israel’s fertility gods could not do what God would do for His people if they would return to Him and strive to know Him. God was not the one who brought about this rift. If they wanted to experience intimacy with God, it was up to them.
(In PSG, p. 76)
4 What am I going to do with you, Ephraim? What am I going to do with you, Judah? Your love is like the morning mist and like the early dew that vanishes. 5 This is why I have used the prophets to cut them down; I have killed them with the words from my mouth. My judgment strikes like lightning. 6 For I desire faithful love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.
Like a frustrated father who must discipline his children but rather not do so, God expressed His frustration with both Ephraim and Judah. No matter what He did to give them opportunities to turn back to Him, they refused. He had blessed them with fruitfulness, but they continued in their unfaithfulness (4:10). He gave them words of hope and also threatened them, but they turned a deaf ear to both. Because of His love for them, God would rather not have to punish them.
God’s love for His people had been unwavering, but their devotion to Him was fickle. The only thing reliable about Ephraim and Judah was their unreliableness. The word love in verse 4 points to Israel’s covenant obligations to the Lord. Israel’s commitment to keep the covenant with the Lord had dissipated like a cloud. Their loyalty to God was as fleeting as a morning mist or dew that quickly vanished. How could the Lord deal with them as His covenant people when their loyalty to Him so easily disappeared? Thus the rhetorical question, What am I going to do with you?
Because of the fickleness of their devotion to the Lord, God sent His prophets to continually confront the people with their guilt. The phrase to cut them down might be likened to the modern expression, “they didn't have a leg to stand on.” In other words, there was nothing the people could say or do to refute the accusations the prophets brought against them.
In Hebrew, the last phrase in verse 5 literally reads, “and with regard to your judgments, light will go forth.” The prophetic utterances shed light on the darkness of the people’s promiscuity and unfaithfulness to the Lord. The light of God’s justice exposed the depravity of their sin. The fact that God sent numerous prophets to shine light on the peoples’ guilt was another expression of His mercy and love for them. These prophets gave Israel and Judah multiple opportunities to repent and turn back to God before His judgments came to fruition. If only they had listened to God’s prophets. Then He would have restored their relationship with Him and put an end to their punishment (6:1-3).
At best, the people of Israel and Judah misunderstood the sacrificial system. Or at worst, they used it as a way to try to manipulate God. The sacrifices were to be outward expressions of an inward reality, expressions of devotion to God. God desires faithful love and a desire for the knowledge of God. In contrast, the people used their religious activities as a substitute for loving and knowing Him.
This does not mean that expressions of worship outlined in the Old Testament law were wrong. Rather, the people were using them in the wrong way. For example, going to church, singing worship songs, and giving an offering are good things when done as expressions of love and devotion to the Lord. But doing these things is an affront to God when they are done for selfish, deceitful reasons, when it’s about what we can get from God rather than our expressions of love for Him. (
In PSG, p. 77)
7 But they, like Adam, have violated the covenant; there they have betrayed me. 8 Gilead is a city of evildoers, tracked with bloody footprints. 9 Like raiders who wait in ambush for someone, a band of priests murders on the road to Shechem. They commit atrocities. 10 I have seen something horrible in the house of Israel: Ephraim’s promiscuity is there; Israel is defiled. 11a A harvest is also appointed for you, Judah.
Beginning with the conjunctive but, verse 7 is connected to the preceding verse that states what the Lord desires from His people. In contrast to verse 6, the people, like Adam, had violated the covenant and betrayed the Lord. Bible interpreters are divided on how to understand the word Adam in this verse. Some suggest it means the people treated the covenant like dirt. If that were the case, this would require the word to have an unusual form in Hebrew. Others suggest Adam was a town where Israel must have committed some egregious sin against God’s covenant (see Josh. 3:16). This argument stems from the word there in verse 7 and the proximity of the place names of Gilead and Shechem in the following verses. However, two place names hardly establish a pattern, and the town of Adam does not seem to have been prominent at that time. Still others propose this verse references the first man, Adam.
This seems to be a good fit for Hosea’s analogy. Fundamental to ancient covenants were the concepts of relationship and obligation. These concepts were present between God and Adam in the garden of Eden, even if the word covenant is absent (Gen. 2:17). Just as Adam betrayed God by violating the obligations imposed on him, the Israelites in Hosea’s day betrayed the Lord by breaking the covenant obligations God had imposed on them at Mount Sinai.
The city of Gilead was located in a rugged region east of the Jordan River in the north-central highlands, also called Gilead. Gilead had a number of connections to Jacob. It was in Gilead that Laban caught up to Jacob and accused him of deception by sneaking away with Laban’s daughters (Gen. 31:25-26). Also, God changed Jacob’s name to Israel in the region of Gilead (Gen. 32). Jacob’s connection to Gilead is noteworthy given Hosea said it was tracked with bloody footprints. The root for the Hebrew word footprints is the same root for the name Jacob. What’s more, the word evildoers is the same root word as “Beth-aven,” the term Hosea used as a description of Bethel (Hos. 4:15; 5:8; 10:5). Bethel was the place Jacob met God when he was fleeing from Esau. Hosea would bring Jacob into his prophecy again in 12:2-4. At this point, it appears the nation of Israel was acting as selfish and devious as did their father Jacob. They were more like what Jacob had been than what he later came to be when God changed his
name to Israel.
Next, the Lord turned His attention to the road to Shechem. Shechem was an ancient city located in the hill country of Ephraim on the slope of Mount Ebal and was the location of the first capital of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Shechem is best known in the Scriptures as the place where Jacob’s daughter, Dinah, was raped, and in retaliation, her brothers, Simeon and Levi, slaughtered all of the men of the city. After that, the rest of Jacob’s sons plundered it (Gen. 34).
In verse 9, the Lord described the priests, the descendants of Levi, as calculating and bloodthirsty men waiting in ambush to commit murder just like Levi had done at Shechem years back. This declaration against the priests at Shechem demonstrates that Israel’s spiritual leaders were as wicked as everyone else. It is a picture of the complete spiritual collapse of the nation of Israel.
After zooming in on specific examples of Israel’s apostasy by alluding to some of the worst characteristics of the nation’s forefathers, Hosea's message once again focused on the nation as a whole. What the Lord saw in the house of Israel was horrible. This word is connected to the idea of a virgin giving herself to wanton behavior (Jer. 18:13). It is in line with the parallel statements in verse 10 of Ephraim’s promiscuity and Israel’s defilement. These are descriptions of Israel’s covenant unfaithfulness to the Lord, Israel was morally impure and ritually unclean. It was a declaration of the utter social depravity and religious degradation that characterized Israel.
Before launching a three-fold accusation against Israel (6:11b–7:2), the Lord declared that He also would bring about judgment, a harvest, on Judah as well. Even though Judah had not yet reached the level of wickedness Israel had, they were headed down that path. It would be nearly another hundred and twenty years before the first deportation of exiles from Judah into Babylonian captivity. Nevertheless, God once again was giving them ample warning and an opportunity to repent and to keep it from happening.
11b When I restore the fortunes of my people, 7:1 when I heal Israel, the iniquity of Ephraim and the crimes of Samaria will be exposed. For they practice fraud; a thief breaks in; a raiding party pillages outside. 2 But they never consider that I remember all their evil. Now their actions are all around them; they are right in front of my face.
The Lord brought forth three accusations against Israel. He used the three main proper names of the nation, Israel, Ephraim, and Samaria. Before delivering His accusations, the Lord promised that He would one day return His people from captivity and restore them. This restoration of God’s people would involve both His exposing their sins and healing their sins. The three accusations were that they cheated one another, thieves broke into people’s homes, and thugs mugged people outside their homes (7:1). No place was safe.
In their folly, the people of Israel failed to consider that God was watching them and witnessed how their entire society was consumed with sin. The emphasis here is that their sin was not hidden from God. It was happening right in front of His face. By failing to recognize this truth, Israel failed to consider what a holy and just God would do in response to such wickedness.
(In PSG, p. 80)
Salvation
Repentance is a genuine turning from sin toward God. (See Joel 2:13; Acts 3:19.)
Use a Bible atlas and Bible dictionary to locate and learn about places mentioned in Scripture.
Find the locations of Gilead and Shechem in a Bible atlas. Then use a Bible dictionary to learn more about the events that happened at Gilead and Shechem in the Old Testament. What are some significant occurrences at these two locations that connect to Hosea’s message of judgment against Israel? What was the point in mentioning Gilead and Shechem in this passage?
God directed Hosea to marry an unreputable woman, which he did. Through Hosea’s marriage, God detailed the ruin and disaster that would occur to Israel because of its sin.