“Spiritual Desertion and What to Expect”
Hosea 2:2-13
Steve Hanchett, pastor
Berry Road Baptist Church
January 28, 2001
Bring charges against your mother, bring charges; for she is not my wife and I am not her Husband! Let her put away her harlotries from her sight and her adulteries from between her breasts; lest I strip her naked and expose her, as in the day she was born, and make her like a wilderness, and set her like a dry land, and slay her with thirst. I will not have mercy on her children, for the are the children of harlotry. For their mother has played the harlot. She who conceived them has behaved shamefully. For she has said, “I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my linen, my oil and my drink.” Therefore, behold I will hedge up your way with thorns, and wall her in, so that she cannot find her paths. She will chase her lovers, but not overtake them; yes she will say, “I will go and return to my first husband, for then it was better for me than now.” She did not know that I gave her grain, new wine and oil, and multiplied her silver and gold - which they prepared for Baal. Therefore, I will return and take away my grain in its time and my new wine in its season, and will take back my wool and my linen, given to cover her nakedness. Now I will uncover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers, and no one shall deliver her from my hand. I will also cause all her mirth to cease, her fast days, her New Moons, her Sabbaths - all her appointed feasts. And I will destroy her vines and her fig trees. Of which she has said, “these are the wages that my lovers have given to me.” So I will make them a forest, and the beasts of the field shall eat them. I will punish her for the days of the Baals to which she burned incense. She decked herself with her earrings and jewlery, and went after her lovers; but Me she forgot, says the Lord.
According to a January 15, 1989 article in the Lexington Herald-Leader, the family in a home in West Palm-Beach, Florida, told a film crew is was fine for them to use the front lawn of their home as a set for an episode of the “B.L. Stryker” television show.
While the show was being filmed, which included cars crashing violently in front of the house and the front lawn being blown up, a call came in from New York. It was the owner of the house demanding to know what was going on with his property. I seems the people living there didn’t own the house. They had no right to give permission for the property to be torn apart for a television show.
So often we live with the mistaken impression that our lives belong exclusively to ourselves. The truth is we belong to God. We have been bought by the precious blood of Christ. We need to know that the One who owns us is going to call upon us to give an account of what we did with the life that He has entrusted us with.
God will not allow us to simply go our own way and live apart from Him without acting to discipline us and bring us back into a right relationship with Him. This morning we are going to explore the first half of Hosea chapter two and what we will find is that the path that leads us away from God is a mighty poor stretch of road.
Hosea is filled with the passion, hope, love, of God but also with the judgment and terror of God upon sin. Chapter two lays out God’s case against Israel. In doing so we find The Common Pattern of Spiritual Defectors, The Consistent Problems of Spiritual Defectors, and The Certain Promise to Spiritual Defectors.
First consider with me the fact that there is a consistent pattern with spiritual defectors. The circumstance, the culture, the age may be different, but there are certain things that usually happen in a person’s life when they drift away from God.
If we can pinpoint the common elements of spiritual defection it can help us to keep ourselves on track. Once we know where people begin to drift away from Christ, we will be able to have warning flags in our own life. We will also learn some important keys to keeping ourselves from even beginning to drift spiritually.
It might be helpful to start at where the road of spiritual defection ends up. In verse 13 God says, “But Me she forgot.” That is where spiritual defection always ends up. But what does it mean to forget God? It means a person lives as if God doesn’t matter. In the case of Israel it specifically referred to their worship of Baal. They treated Jehovah God as if He was irrelevant to life. People do the same thing today. They chase after all kinds of things and people who they are convinced will bring a happiness to their lives and leave God completely out of the picture. So forgetting God is a kind of spiritual amnesia. The God that was once so important to a person’s life is treated as insignificant and irrelevant.
But the question we need to ask is how did these people get to that point? How did they go from being a people who were ardently committed to a relationship of love and worship of Jehovah, to a people who considered Him irrelevant?
There were a few steps they took to get to that point. They are the same steps people take today. The keys to understand this process of spiritual defection are verses 5, 8, and 12. Each of these verses points out the fact that the people of Israel came to believe that these idols that they were worshipping were the source of the material blessing and prosperity they were experiencing. They attributed three areas of life as having come from some other source than God.
“Bread and water,” is a reference to the necessities of life. “Wool and flax,” indicates the clothing that the people wore. Then, “oil and drink,” is term used to describe the extras or the luxuries that they people had. These were things that they didn’t necessarily need for survival, but brought a degree of added pleasure to their lives. And the view and attitude of the people was that these things came from somewhere other than God.
So the first step in their spiritual defection was a failure to acknowledge God as the giver of all good gifts. The first step toward forgetting God and living as if He does not matter is ingratitude toward Him. Thanksgiving toward God is more than just spiritual good manners. The root of unthankfulness is believing that what we have comes from someone or something other than God Himself.
Last week we looked briefly at Romans 1, take a moment and read the pattern of spiritual defection that Paul expounds upon there. The first step in man’s rejection of God is not glorifying him or being thankful {1:21}. Ingratitude is a sign of a serious spiritual flaw in our soul. If it is not dealt with and kept in check than it is can become the first step down the road of spiritual defection.
The next step logically proceeds from ingratitude. If we don’t really believe that “every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father of Lights,” then we begin to develop a belief system about where these things do come from. Do we have what we have by our own personal accomplishments only? Are they the result of blind chance or dumb luck? Do we have what we have because of some other person? Certainly we have to acknowledge that hard work, sometimes what seems like luck, and the help of other people come in to play. And while we need to be grateful for others, we better make sure we understand that God is ultimately the source of all good and blessing in our lives.
Failure to acknowledge the gifts of God and then to attribute the blessings of life to other sources causes us to take the next step down the road of spiritual defection. Looking to other things, people or even ourselves as the source of our security, and assurance in life.
One of the characteristics of spiritual defection is when we take the gifts of God and spend them on things that are in opposition to God’s will for our lives or against the character, nature and knowledge of God. People are doing this sort of thing all of the time. People take the hands that God has given them and use them to harm others. They take the voice God gave them to speak hateful things to and about others and even to curse God. People use the talents God has gifted them with and develop them for evil in this world. God becomes the One who sponsors their wickedness. The prodigal son is a good example of this. He took what his father gave him and spent it for his own evil purposes.
We know we are doing this when we give all of our devotion, energy, love, and commitment to something or someone other than God Himself. When our worship of God and service to God and our love for God lags behind our love of other things and other people we can be sure that we have begun the process of spiritual defection and it won’t be long before we have “forgotten God.”
I believe that one of the ways we can fight against the danger of spiritual defection in our own lives is to live with a constant heart of gratitude. We need to follow the admonition of Paul to give thanks in everything as more than just good spiritual manners. It is critical to the health of our spiritual life that we live as a thankful people.
I want you to notice also that it doesn’t just stop there. The road of spiritual defection has serious potholes. Spiritual defection that begins with ingratitude will lead to immorality.
That is the common pattern of spiritual defection.
Now I want you to see the consistent problems that come to spiritual defectors. You can not go down the road of spiritual defection without experiencing serious consequences. Let me spell some of them out for you.
First, personal humiliation {v.3}. I don’t know if you have caught this or thought about it, but have you noticed that God is not in to cover-ups. God has a way of exposing people’s sins. That is especially and most importantly true for those who profess to be His children. Go all the way back to Cain and you will find God bringing men’s sins into the light of the day. Public shame is a powerful force to that makes people face themselves and see their sin for what it really is. If we refuse to deal with it privately God will take it public. We don’t have to look any further than the front pages of the newspaper than to see that this is so.
The second problem spiritual defectors will have to contend with is not only humiliation but starvation {v.3b}. Life without God is going to be a hard life. There is going to be an emptiness of soul, and a dryness of spirit that will seem at times quite overwhelming.
Not only will you have to deal with humiliation and starvation, but frustration as well {v.6,7a}. One of the interesting things about these verses are that the indicate that the first response to the emptiness of soul a spiritual defector has is to pursue their false gods with even more zeal. In verse seven it says they “chase their lovers.” God will act to frustrate you at this point. It will seem like the things you so desperately want are just within reach but always beyond your grasp.
Finally, we see that not only will God bring humiliation, starvation, and frustration to the life of the spiritual defector, He will also bring about depravation {9-11}. The God who has been so good and poured out His gifts upon the spiritual defector, even when that person’s heart was not right, will begin to withdraw His favor and His goodness and His gifts from the person’s life.
I need to give a note of caution at this point. We should not assume that everyone who is lacking materially is under God’s judgment, nor should we assume that everyone who is prospering is living right and being rewarded. We are not just talking about material possessions. Actually, one of the things that God specifically mentions that he will remove is joy from the person’s life. So a person may continue to have lots of things materially but the depravation comes in that they have no joy. And that in itself is probably much more severe trouble than the removal of things material.
I would point out to you the Psalmist prayed for revival and when he did he said, “revive us again that our hearts may rejoice in you.” David, likewise, when he confessed his sin and sought restoration to God asked God to “restore the joy of his salvation.” So when we talk about deprivation, we are not talking just or even primarily about material things. Certainly God may do that. Primarily though we are thinking about the spiritual things that God will remove from your life. And that is a far more serious problem.
So the common pattern of spiritual defectors is ingratitude, displacement, defection, and immorality. The consistent problems for spiritual defectors are humiliation, starvation, frustration, and deprivation. Now I want you to see that there is also a certain promise given to spiritual defectors. The passage we have dealt with today only hints at the promise. We will see more about the hope that is here as we get in to the rest of chapter two next week. But I do want you to see that the light of hope is breaking through the dark clouds of judgment. The promise of hope is there amidst the warnings of judgment. Where?
First, you see it at the very beginning of this long passage expounding the judgment of God. For it begins with a plea to repent. In verse two Israel is called upon to put away her spiritual adultery. And the first word in verse three is “lest.” In other words what was threatened was conditional. It would not happen if the people repented. So the first glimmer of hope and promise we see is that God is hinting at the fact that He is a God who stands ready to receive and restore the repentant sinner. God holds out a promise of amnesty. All He asks is that you put away your spiritual defection and restore your relationship with Him.
The second glimmer of hope and promise that shines through this passage is the progressive nature of God’s dealings with the spiritual defector. God does not do what He justly could do. He does not immediately sentence the spiritual defector to physical and spiritual death. Instead God progressively turns the heat up with the intention of getting the attention of the person who is straying from Him.
The illustration of the principle is seen in Hosea’s relationship with Gomer. He could have had her stoned under the law. He had every right to do so. But he didn’t.. Not only did he not have her stoned he chose instead to seek a restoration of their relationship.
God would be perfectly justified in condemning every sinner for ever and each sin without giving them any hope. But that is not what He does. Instead God gives a day of grace, an opportunity for repentance. And even when God brings humiliation, starvation, frustration, and deprivation into our lives, He does so to turn us back to Himself. He gets our attention to turn our lives back to Him.
I want you also to see in verse seven that the prodigal wife, when she has been awakened to her need, at first only thinks of what her husband can do for her. She decides to go back to him, not so much out of love, but out of need. Oh, certainly it would be best if every person who came to Christ came to Him only because they loved him with a pure love unmixed with other motives. I do believe this is what God wants to develop in our lives.
But most of us don’t come to Christ like that. And most who have drifted don’t come back like that. But don’t let that keep you away. Jesus Himself told the story of the prodigal son He said the prodigal’s motive for going home was his hunger. He remembered how much better life was in his Father’s house. And when he came home the Father welcomed him and loved him and received him.
You that are wanting to come home to God need to know that God is ready to receive you. It may be that your desire stems from the humiliation that sin has brought to your life, or the starvation of soul you are experiencing, or the frustration that you are going through, or the depravation you feel in your spirit. Believe it or not, all of those things come from the strong hand of God’s love. His only design is to get you to come to your senses and come home to Him.
And old hymn that I dearly love says it very well:
Come ye sinner, poor and needy, weak and wounded, sick and sore;
Jesus ready stands to save you, full of pity, love and power.
Come ye weary, heavy laden, lost and ruined by the fall;
If you tarry till you’re better, you will never come at all.
Let not conscience make you linger, nor of fitness fondly dream;
All the fitness He requireth is to feel your need of Him.
