Army and Arena
Text: Hosea 9:1-9
In The 24-Hour Christian, Pastor Earl Palmer warns that people, in general, flock to any proof of power. “Political tyrants always use the army and the arena, the power of the sword and the circus.” (p. 47) This is as true in the church as it is in the political domain. Religious tyrants use the compulsion of uniformity and the confusion of popularity to demand allegiance. Many believers experience the disastrous results of being more concerned about being in line with their denomination or church than in obedience to God while others doubt the legitimacy of their experience with God because they cannot point to large numbers of people with the same experience. Neither is valid in itself.
In today’s text, the northern kingdom (Ephraim = Israel) has bowed to the economic and social sword of Baal worship, as well as the easy success and inveterate sensuality of Baal’s fertility cult. Instead of looking to God for guidance and submitting to God’s will, the Israelites had bought into the false religion of the unbelievers. As a result, the very people who should have known better were caught in the same trap as those who never knew God. They had lost both their joy and their future. Let’s see how the text puts it (again, imposing my translation on you, but encouraging you to read from your favorite translation, as well):
1) Do not rejoice (making a lot of noise), Israel.
Don’t dance seductively (same root as twirling, but usually translated “exult”) like the peoples
Because you have committed adultery against your God;
You have loved for a harlot’s fee upon every threshing floor.
2) A threshing floor and a (wine) press will not feed them
And new wine shall fail them.
3) They shall not dwell in the land of Yahweh.
Ephraim shall return to Egypt
And in Assyria, they shall eat trafe.
4) They shall not pour out wine to Yahweh
And their sacrifices shall not come near to Him.
Like bread for mourners for them, all they eat shall contaminate them
Because their bread is for their sustenance (literally, their “being”).
They do not come to the house of Yahweh.
5) What will you do for the festival day and for the feast of Yahweh?
6) Because, behold, they go from destruction.
Egypt gathers them, Memphis buries them.
The most cherished of their silver (usually associated with idols in Hosea) are dispossessed
by nettles and thorns are in their tents.
7) The days of the visitation (with punishment) have come.
The days of punishment have come. Israel knows it.
The prophet is stupefied.
The man of the spirit is driven crazy
because your iniquity is so great
and your hostility is so prevalent (also highly multiplied).
8) The prophet is a watchman over Ephraim with God.
A trap is set along all his paths,
hostility in the house of his God.
9) They make deep their apostasy
as in the days of Gibeah.
He remembers their iniquity.
He visits judgment upon their sins.
So, I look at this text and what do I see? I see lots of words about worship: rejoicing, dancing (exulting), eating unholy food (trafe), pouring out wine (libation offering), offering sacrifices, abstaining from bread in morning, not going to the House of God, and celebrating feast days. But as I read it, I see a problem. I see accusations of spiritual adultery, a revocation of the privilege of living in the land of promise, predictions of eating non-kosher food (because they will be in captivity), they aren’t following proper mourning ritual, they aren’t worshipping regularly, and they aren’t prepared for holy days.
In fact, it looks to me like Hosea preached this sermon right in the middle of one of Israel’s traditional feasts. It looks to me like he’s saying that there isn’t any sense in worshipping because they’ve already violated God’s commandments in so many other areas. It looks like he’s saying that God has left them to the false gods that they chose instead of God Almighty.
As I prepared to share from this passage, I saw something interesting by a professor of Old Testament in Australia, Frances Anderson. He does a lot of syllable counting in his study and he broke down the first seven verses of this chapter as follows:
Hosea 9:1-3 = 69 syllables
Hosea 9:4-5 = 56 syllables
Hosea 9: 6-7a = 55 syllables
Hosea 9:7b-9 = 69 syllables
This was so regular that it caught my attention. I wondered if each one of these sections had a purpose. As I read the text again, it jumped out at me. The first three verses are God’s judgment against Israel. Verses 4-5 explain why Israel is being judged. Verse 6 and the first part of verse 7 show the results of Israel’s invalid worship. Then, the last part of verse 7 and verses 8-9 emphasize God’s verdict in even stronger language. Whenever I see a Bible passage begin with an idea and close with a stronger statement of the same idea, I’ve noticed that the key message tends to be in the middle. We like to call it a “theological sandwich” because the meat is in the middle. So, let’s look at the sandwich.
Hosea 9:1-3 = 69 syllables [A - Basic Judgment]
Hosea 9:4-5 = 56 syllables [B - Invalid Worship]
Hosea 9: 6-7a = 55 syllables [B’ – Result]
Hosea 9:7b-9 = 69 syllables [A’ – Verdict]
The first part of this chapter is a warning to God’s people that God won’t put up with spiritual adultery, God doesn’t want us to be trapped in the slavery of false gods. But the meat of this chapter is that even God’s people can get tangled up with and enslaved by false gods if they don’t worship God properly. There is no sense in shouting and dancing before God because the relationship is broken. And, since the relationship is broken, they cannot expect the blessings God promised.
Instead of turning to God who had miraculously provided food in the wilderness and given them the land that was representative of their success, they had turned to Baal to guarantee good harvests and fine wine. As a result, the land of promise, the land of Yahweh, would be taken away from them in the same way the “garden” was taken away from Adam and Eve when they tried to become “as gods” in the garden.
But do we in the church, do we as modern believers, engage in spiritual adultery. Do modern believers have their own false gods of reputation, success, power, wealth, intellectual arrogance, or carnal sensuality? When I realized what verse 3 said about eating trafe (Trafe means "torn" or "damaged" and refers to that which is non-kosher (and “kosher” = “proper”), I was reminded about a Jewish friend’s grandfather and grandmother. It seems that the grandmother kept a very kosher household, but the grandfather would go astray whenever he would go out on the town. Contaminated flatware would be buried in the backyard. She once threatened to rip an entire stove out and bury it because my friend boiled a lobster on it. When the grandpa would “defile” himself with non-kosher food, the grandmother would complain, “Do you have two stomachs? Do you have one stomach that’s kosher and one stomach for trafe?” She was horrified that her husband’s faith and practice were not consistent.
In Hosea 9, we are told that the good harvests and the new wine of celebration are going to give out and that Israel/Ephraim will be taken away from the land of promise to a place where they will eat just like anyone else. And it makes me wonder if God’s people of today don’t have “two stomachs,” two ways of living—one for when we’re in church and one for when we’re in a society full of trafe. Yet, the truth is that the trafe in our society isn’t eating the wrong foods or drinking the wrong drinks. The trafe in our society is ignoring God’s will and refusing to obey God’s direction in our lives such that we cannot have a close and comfortable relationship with God—the relationship God wants to have with us and that we should want to have with God.
Our problem is that it is too easy for human beings to be idolatrous. Almost 500 years ago, John Calvin described this capacity as a “factory of idols.” Today, the factory is churning out ideas of humanism and empiricism without the leavening quality of God’s Word. Today, the factory is confusing tolerance and relativity with a substitute for Truth that fools us into being satisfied with less than God intended for us. Today, the factory is churning out impatience and irresponsible consumerism that cause us to confuse things with blessing rather than following our Lord’s admonition to love actively and sacrificially.
Now, some of you will protest that you don’t believe in false gods, you’re certain that there aren’t any idols in your life. You say that you know you put too much emphasis on things that aren’t important, but you excuse it by saying that you know it isn’t important. The problem, as the great German theologian, Helmut Thielicke, wrote in the first volume of his systematic theology is that once I concern myself with emptiness, it gains power over me. Suddenly, something IS that really is NOT. (p. 97, The Evangelical Faith: Volume One: Prologomena: The Relation of Theology to Modern Thought Forms) We can say that we know superstition isn’t true, but if we’re spending time on it, we are losing time to it. We can say that we know that worry isn’t faith, but if we’re worrying about something, we’re not trusting God with it (and whatever isn’t of faith is sin). We can say that we’ve forgiven people, but if we keep going over the wrongs again and again in our minds, we’ll never be rid of the pain and anguish the original wrong did to us. We compound the wrong. We can say that something is a “little” sin, but I don’t see any evidence in the Bible that God “grades on the curve.” It looks to me like any sin is enough to bring damnation without the salvation available by means of our Lord Jesus Christ.
In this passage, Hosea reverses the usual story of salvation. Not only is the northern kingdom going to lose its freedom to return to the figurative Egypt of slavery (in this case, Assyria as conqueror), but as we have seen, will lose the land of promise. Instead of celebrating the feast where God freed Israel from Egyptian slavery to give life to the nation, verse 6 has Egypt gathering them back and Israel being buried by the cult of the dead in Memphis. Get it? With God there is freedom and LIFE, but with Egypt, there is slavery and DEATH.
The strange reference to silver being dispossessed by nettles and thorns in verse 6 becomes simple when we remember that Hosea usually refers to “silver” with regard to making idols. In short, not only has Israel chosen slavery and death over freedom and life, but Israel has chosen weeds and thorns over that which has real value. Is that so different from those of us in modern life? Don’t we see people espouse freedom from sexual morality, only to become enslaved by unwanted pregnancies, “necessary” abortions, venereal disease, and emotional heartbreak? Don’t we see people espouse freedom from the worship of God, only to become enslaved by the worship of possessions, obsessed by the urge to amass wealth beyond any usefulness, and tortured by the fear of losing said possessions or wealth? Don’t we see people working so many hours FOR their families that they end up LOSING their families?
Israel had made a fundamental mistake, but it is a mistake that is made over and over again in human history. As a great British theologian once observed, “Even if we started psychologically free, the result of the choice of evil is to impair freedom; and an impaired freedom goes on to a destroyed freedom.” He went on to say: “It is not immaterial to our freedom what we choose so long as we are choosers. If we choose evil, our very choice enslaves us.” (P. T. Forsyth, Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind, p. 64). Yet, how many times do we hear people say that it doesn’t matter what we choose as long as we’re free to do so. That’s a problem, a problem that has dogged humankind from the beginning. Hosea doesn’t let his listeners get away with it and we can’t allow that, either.
Actually, it seems that Hosea is so upset by Israel’s disobedience that he describes an ecstatic prophet going into virtual apoplexy as God gives the word of judgment against Israel. We know that the prophets of the 10th century (King Saul’s and King David’s eras) would go into trances and speak in strange utterances. It’s almost like the stronger the manifestation or trauma the prophet experienced, the stronger and more authoritative the word from God (or in the case of the false prophets, the word from the gods) was supposed to be. If that’s so, verse 7 indicates that God’s Word of judgment against Israel is extremely powerful. God’s judgment is so powerful, in fact, that the prophet has to watch over God’s people as a watchman would watch out for an enemy. So powerful is God’s judgment, that the House of God has become a hostile place for Israelites to go, a “minefield” as we might put it where rebellion is exposed and a penalty exacted.
Finally, Israel’s guilt is attached to a harsh racial memory, an atrocity so horrible and unforgettable that Hosea only needs to mention the location—much as we would invoke Auschwitz or Buchenwald to remember Nazi atrocities. [Ironically, on the day I prepared this message, my wife and I had to detour from our usual route because a Holocaust Museum was opened in Skokie, IL near our residence. I told her the detour was necessary because of Neo-Nazi demonstrations that had taken place in the area over the years, dating back to the earliest immigration of Jews into this area. After more than 60 years, isn’t it strange that just remembering the atrocity can create controversy? Sure enough, the Neo-Nazi demonstrations occurred.]
Gibeah was the site of a horrible crime. You can read about it in Judges 19-20. A Levite from the hill country of Ephraim was so dismayed when his concubine ran home to her father that he followed her all the way to Bethlehem to get her back. On the way home, they accepted hospitality in Gibeah. Unfortunately, there were some homosexuals in Gibeah (apparently, considering how the story ends, they were bisexuals) who wanted to have sex with the Levite. In almost a repeat of Lot’s story where he hosted the angels in Sodom, the host offered his virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine to the lustful men. The men refused and kept clamoring for the Levite until the Levite, in desperation, threw his concubine out into the crowd.
By this time, the men were so aroused that they raped the woman and damaged her so badly that she returned to the host’s residence and collapsed on the threshold. When the Levite discovered her body the next morning, he placed her on his donkey and carried her back to Ephraim. There, he cut her corpse into twelve pieces and sent one to each of the tribes of Israel as a summons to war.
Now, many is the time that I’ve asked myself why such a horrible incident is recorded in the Bible. The Levite was a coward because he pushed her out into the crowd of sex fiends in the first place, but he is the one who summons Israel into a war of vengeance after the concubine is dead. The Levite is supposed to be a man of God, yet he was complicit in the sin of the sex fiends of Gibeah. Now, also consider that homosexuality is usually associated with the worship of pagan gods in the Ancient Near East. Why do you think Hosea was remembering this incident?
I believe Hosea invokes this horrible historical incident to make the point that Israel/Ephraim, God’s own people, have endangered themselves, their loved ones, and their heritage by giving in, by being complicity in the worship of pagan gods. Just as war and destruction was the result of this horrible incident in the period of the Judges, so Hosea says that war and destruction would be the result of Israel’s spiritual adultery with Baal worship (and all of its sexual and success-based overtones that still exist in our society today).
Now, this sermon from Hosea is as ugly as any of those we’ve considered so far in this series. It essentially says that if we try to find substitutes for God—substitutes that are socially more acceptable and potentially more practical in the short term—it will not only cut us off from a positive relationship with God, but it will cut off God’s intent to transform us, to bless us, and to empower us, just as Israel was cut off from the House of God, the land of promise, and the purpose of celebrating the feast Hosea seems to be interrupting (my guess would be Passover since it has all the references to Egypt). The sermon essentially tells us that we need not bother with worship if we’re not willing to engage God in willing obedience and total loyalty.
Of course, with such harsh words, it is also good for us to remember the flip-side of idolatry, faithfulness. Faithfulness means that we admit our sin whenever we are tempted to depend upon something other than God. In this admission, the first step toward authentic repentance, something marvelous takes place. As Swiss psychologist Paul Tournier once shared, “The sense of guilt is not erased, it is shifted from its false infantile object to the real problem: dependence on God and God alone.” (Paul Tournier, Guilt & Grace, p. 123.) The good news is that there is a fast way out of idolatry, focusing on God and depending upon God alone! I’m sure I’m not alone in needing to rid my personal altar, my personal temple, of accumulated idols—anything standing between me and God. Won’t you turn back to God, now?
