Let us turn to our Bibles to Hosea chapter 2. Hosea chapter 2, 2 verses 2 through 13. It’s after the book of Daniel. Let us listen attentively to the word of God.
Hosea 2 verse 2 and following. Bring charges against your mother, bring charges, for she is not my wife, nor am I her husband. Let her put away her harlotries from her sight, 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 they are the children of harlotry. For their mother has played the harlot, she has conceived them, has behaved shamefully.
For she 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, that she cannot find her paths. She will chase her lovers, but not overtake them.
Yes, she will seek them, but not find them. Then she will say, I will go and return to my first husband, for then it was better for me than now. For she did not know that I gave her grain, new wine and oil, and multiplied her silver and gold, which they prepared for bail.
Therefore, I will return and take away my grain in his time, and my new wine in his 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 feast 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 my wages that my lovers have given 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 bails, to which she burned incense.
She decked herself with her earrings and jewelry, and went after her lovers. But me she forgot, says the Lord. Let us pray.
God Almighty, the creator of all things, we who owe you our existence, our body and our soul, we read here through the prophet Hosea of your exhortation and warnings of your charges against Israel of old, the church of the Old Testament, and the consequences therein, from verse 6 onward, of how you will punish them for their wretched sin. Our Lord, may we see especially how heinous in your sight is false worship and going after false gods with spiritual harlotry, Lord God Almighty. Preserve us, we pray, from the pride of thinking that we are better because we have a more simple worship.
At the same time, God, thankful that you have humbled our hearts that we would not go after other gods, Lord. May this continue to be the case that you preserve us from our own sins. By our Lord and Savior we pray.
Amen. The ongoing transgression of the first table of the law comes in many forms here in the book of Hosea. We see this in everyday life as well, ranging from worshiping different false gods altogether to worshiping the true God with false practices.
God’s messengers of the Old Testament warned, conjoined, and admonished the Jewish church to faithfulness over and over again. In this longer section we read of the Lord’s exposing the sins of the people with the words naked, exposed, or uncovered used about four times in the text. From that public exposure, God brings two specific consequences or collections of consequences for the wickedness, their powerlessness, and their poverty.
Our Lord cares about His name and His honor, especially when His people who are called out by Him publicly, as we saw this morning, we have to have a public confession because it’s a public gospel and a public institution of the church, which is the pillar and foundation thereof of the truth, is trampled underfoot and God is not pleased. Let’s see more carefully what the Lord of the covenant has to say of the violators of the first table of the law in particular. The charges on faithful worship, verses 1-5, was there, of course, at the beginning of Hosea, where He uses the metaphor, the picture of His own marriage to an unfaithful woman.
The marriage was to show the spiritual unfaithfulness. It’s not about the actual marriage bond of the seventh commandment, but rather the first table of the law, the second commandment in particular of the proper worship and honor of God. And even the first table, first commandment, which is God Himself.
Israel had left God their husband and embraced the strange wives of the strange worship of the surrounding pagan nations and pagan peoples in the midst of them. And so here, the word, bring charges against your mother is against Israel, against, in particular, the generation that begot more unfaithfulness. And that’s the metaphor here of your children, verse 4, I will not have mercy upon.
He’s not talking about five and six year olds. He means adults in the next generation. They have begotten spiritually speaking.
That’s the metaphor, right? The spiritual beginning of more false worship and more wickedness in the people of God collectively and even individually. The marriage metaphor is picked up and used elsewhere. In the Old Testament, it’s not just a Hosea phenomenon, although it has the most marked event of it, actually getting married with another woman in real life.
Exodus 34.15 and Deuteronomy 31.16 make allusions to spiritual idolatry as well. The Lord said to Moses, Behold, you will rest with your fathers, and this people will rise and play the harlot with the gods of the foreigners of the land. And that’s exactly what happened.
And not only back then, here again, and this is up until the time of the exile and the Babylonian captivity in the fall of Samaria in 722 B.C. They were warned ahead of time. And imagine this. Maybe some of you adults don’t have to.
You did it when you were a teenager or your kids did it themselves. You warned them years in advance. You knew exactly what was going to happen.
You saw it. You’re not God. You’re not infinite.
But it’s so obvious. And they did it anyways. Fell on their face.
Did something stupid. In this case, something wicked. Especially wicked.
And that makes it all the more wretched. Now, verses 2-3 is specifically a call not only of charges, but of repentance even. Bring charges against your mother.
Bring charges, for she is not my wife, nor I her husband. It’s an allusion to breaking the marriage vow, which would mean, by implication, divorce. This is a serious matter.
It’s a covenantal matter. Now, what’s interesting here, what’s informative here, not just intellectually interesting, but I hope spiritually edifying, is the Lord God Almighty does not abandon them, but rather calls them to repentance. Over and over again.
Generation after generation. Even here, as we see, in God’s strong language of chapter 1, for example, Lo ami. You will not be my people.
But in the future, I will have mercy, and you will be my people. Even the Gentiles. And so here, God is calling them, urging them through the prophet to repent.
To cry out for mercy. And of course, repentance is a change of heart that comes from the power of the Holy Spirit. And therefore, it leads to the fruit of repentance.
And so, God expresses some of this fruit. Let her put away her harlotries from her sight. Stop it.
Flee from wretched worship. And doing things your own way before God. That’s the evidence of the fruit that’s called for all of us in our own lives, whenever we have sin, that we are supposed to flee that sin and actually have a fruit of repentance.
Not just intellectual, of course, but in action. Or, in particular, as we know elsewhere in the prophets, it’s not very specific here, throw away the stones and the wood, idols. Cast it all away.
Even burn it up. We see in the New Testament, in the book of Acts, where they burned all the terrible books. And all the things that were false worship therein.
And tear down the false altars as well. They had them in the high places, you may recall, elsewhere in the prophets. They talked about much of that.
They wouldn’t go to Jerusalem, they would go elsewhere to worship their false gods. And the warning here in verse 3, you better repent, you better have actions of repentance, lest I strip her naked and expose her as the day she was born. So there we have the first encounter of this language of nakedness or exposure, exposing false worship.
That’s why I have the title there, because he says it again in the latter verses. It’s clearly a metaphor to expose them, the idea of moral exposure in the world publicly as well, in particular the nations around them. They themselves will see it.
It can’t be hidden anymore. This is obviously a wretched, miserable sin against God Almighty Himself, and the whole world is going to see it. Sinners don’t want to be exposed.
They don’t want people to know about their transgressions, as much as they may claim often otherwise. And it makes you wonder sometimes in America, of course, you see them apparently bragging often in the media, but what else are they doing behind closed doors? That’s what we forget sometimes. It’s even worse, unfortunately, it seems.
They need it. They need that exposure, we need that exposure, if we are hardened in our sins as believers, because the exposure brings one important element that’s forgotten sometimes in the Church of God, shame, embarrassment, humiliation even. How can we have that in the American scene? We’re Americans.
We have so much pride, as I mentioned before. We’re very much into our individualism. But shame has its purpose.
It ought to be there. This is a terrible way of acting. How dare you do these things? This is horrendous.
This is heinous. And God’s telling them, I’m going to expose you. I’m going to bring you into shame even, using public exposure, the humiliation to the people of God in the Old Testament.
And it does happen when they are eventually invaded by Babylon and even other nations like Assyria. The exposure is not just shame itself, but to the consequences of sin. And set her like a dry land, it continues there, and slay her with thirst.
And so the exposure is not just the exposure of the sin itself, but exposure to the consequences of sin and punishment therein. Verses 4 and 5. I will not have mercy on her children, for they are the children of harlotry, of spiritual unfaithfulness. Again, gross, public, persistent, wanton violations of the first table of the law of God.
And I will have my next sermon on the first four commandments, probably the first two commandments, and then another sermon on the other two commandments. Because that’s what we’re covering mostly in the book of Hosea. And as you know, a lot of the prophets talk so much about the first table of the law.
That’s the first four commandments. It’s that serious to God Almighty, because it’s His name on the line. Punishment on the children here.
Extending the metaphor, of course, from the picture of the generation of unfaithfulness being adulterers, or spiritual adultery, or idolatry, with a capital I, we would say, to use one word. Now speaking of the children following in their footsteps. So we read there in the Ten Commandments this morning that God said He will bring curses upon them to the third and fourth generations of what? Those who hate Him and disobey Him and run off and do their own thing.
There’s the implication there. And then the other half is the blessing upon thousands to those who love Him and keep His commandments. He’s not saying you’re doing it of your own accord, but He’s describing the kind of people He is blessing, those He’s already blessed, of course, with spiritual life, so they do love Him.
And He’ll give them even more blessing on top of that. This is a generational, in that sense, kind of a curse. They’re following the footsteps of the parents when they should have fled and embraced God’s true worship.
And the problem here, of course, is instead of following the footsteps of God Almighty and the prophets, they follow the false footsteps of their forefathers. And in fact, she blesses her fake gods. For she said, I will go after my lovers who give me my bread and my water, my wool, my linen, my oil, and my drink.
Who are these lovers? Well, it’s the false gods, right? This is the metaphor. We’re so embedded into the metaphor now we might lose sight of what’s being spoken of. False gods going after false worships.
And thanking the Baals. It’s mentioned twice in these verses, right? Baal and Baal’s plural, a little later. She’s thanking them.
That is, this generation is thanking these false gods for the material blessings upon them. As you recall, I said at the beginning in the outline of the sermon of the book of Hosea and the major themes, one of the themes is there are hardened hearts in their sins where they assuage their consciences by saying, God has blessed me, so it’s okay. I am blessed, so I can continue to sin because I am God’s people.
And here we have more evidence of that. That they are taking the blessings that should have been used to draw them to God and thank Him all the more with proper worship according to the first four commandments, made up their own worship, their own imaginations. You see there in verse 11, her feast days, her new moons, and her Sabbaths, not God’s.
And give these false gods honor and glory for the prosperity they have. That’s terrible. You’re like, what kind of people of God is this? This is horrendous.
Exactly, that’s the point. Imagine doing that to your parents. My parents, they didn’t do much for me, but that guy down the street, he did everything.
That’s my parents now, that’s my real parent. You can imagine how hurtful that would be emotionally, but also how horrendous, how wicked that is to not honor your parents or your spouse. I’m not married to you.
I want to be married to someone else. What in the world? Why are we here together? But it’s triply, quadruply more, because it’s God Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. Not just the creator, but the creator who what? Redeemed them and brought them out of Egypt.
This is the context, brothers and sisters. She blesses her fake gods. That’s a violation of the third commandment, which is the words and the works of God.
And later, in verse 8, God says, She forgot I blessed her. This was me. I’m the one who did this, not these so-called gods.
And so what you have there in these 13 verses, in fact, and in the rest of the Hosea, is a lot of moving parts or sub-themes that are overlapping one another, because they’re all interrelated when it comes to what? God’s law, in this case, violating God’s law. First commandment, worshiping Baal. The second commandment, they are doing their own kind of worship.
The third commandment, they’re honoring false gods and their word and works. The fourth commandment, they have their own Sabbaths and their own appointed feast days. Hers, not God’s.
Consequences of unfaithful worship. In verse 6 through 13, you see this here. Hopefully you have the similar translation.
This is one of the drawbacks to having so many different translations. Verse 6 and verse 9, you have what? Therefore, and therefore. I’m bringing charges, I’m calling to repentance, because of your spiritual adultery or idolatry.
Therefore, I’m going to make you powerless. Therefore, verse 9 and following, I’m going to make you poor. Take away your prosperity.
The powerlessness or loss of support, verses 6 through 8, where we read, Therefore, I will hedge up your way with thorns and wall her in, that she cannot find her path. Like she’s groping in the dark, wondering, where am I going? She will chase her lovers, but not overtake them. She’s impotent.
They can’t do what they want to do to perpetuate their sins and their wretchedness before God. More metaphors, not physically, of course, hedged up, but spiritually hedged up and held back from doing what they want. They cannot find the path of their lusts.
Verse 6. Echoes Proverbs 22, 5, where we read, Thorns and snares are in the way of the perverse. He who guards his soul will be far from them. They walked right into that proverb.
Psalm 18, 26, With the pure you will show yourself pure, and with the devious you will show yourself shrewd. We read this elsewhere as well in Deuteronomy, where God says, You will trample my name underfoot. You will, here as we read, be devious and sinful.
I’m going to turn around and turn the tables on you and bring about more punishment towards you. Specifically, it seems from the rest of Hosea as well, it’s not very specific here, as I said, there are multiple themes interwoven in the text here, that part of this, her seeking out and not finding her lovers, the lovers aren’t just the false gods of worship, but also the nations that supported and promoted those false gods, like the Assyrians and the Egyptians. God told them, you may recall, Don’t go to foreign alliances.
You must trust and depend upon me. You know what they do. They go to foreign alliances because they’re scared of a big nation coming.
They want to go to Egypt to protect them from Assyria, or go to Assyria to protect them from Babylon, or whatever the case is. God’s like, No, no, no, I told you no. Don’t do that.
And when they do that, they get tempted. You get those kind of alliances, especially with the kind of gross paganism they’ve had for centuries and thousands of years. And they start playing around with false gods and false worship.
Now, of course, they already had in the line of Canaan, they had driven out all the Canaanites, right? And it’s always been a thorn in their side, both internally as a nation, and, of course, here externally. So, verse 7, She will chase her lovers, but not overtake them. Yes, she will seek them, but not find them.
And she will say, I will go and return to my first husband, for there it was better for me than now. So the idols and false gods, foreign alliances, all intertwined, intertangled, and messed up together at the time, and for many, many places and centuries, to be sure. And they will seek these things out and will not come to fruition.
It won’t come to their advantage. They’re not going to get what they want. And it’s going to hurt them.
All this time, when they should be repenting, they waste instead of seeking out dead ends. The punishment is not always something bad happening to the sinner. Sometimes it’s not getting what they want as punishment.
Because their own lusts are so strong in that direction that they struggle. And you hold it back. We’ve seen this.
We do this to little kids sometimes. He’s got a hissy fit. I didn’t get what I wanted.
And it’s like the end of the world for the kid. And the same thing spiritually with wicked sinners and even Christians at times. You become very immature.
God doesn’t always have, as it were, an overt, direct punishment upon them. Hey, you’re going to have your house burned down or something. But He just simply doesn’t give you what you want.
That is, your sinful wants. And that itself can be a punishment. And that’s what we’re reading here.
You’re not going to get there. You can’t get there. You’re walled in.
You can’t find anything you want. Returning to God, verses 7 and 8. I will go and return to my first husband, for it was better then than it is now. That’s what she’s saying.
That is, the generation is realizing it’s not turning out very well. I’m losing my power. I can’t make good connections.
I can’t get what I want. Maybe I should return back to God. Is this sincere? Is this perhaps a prophecy of what will happen in the future? It’s not clear.
But it’s certainly better than pursuing false gods either way, whatever the case is. Verse 8. For she did not know that I gave her grain, new wine, oil, and multiplied her silver and gold. It is God Almighty who gave them the prosperity that they are abusing.
As we see in America, generation after generation of prosperity, even in the church, is wasted. And instead of being used to honor God and glorify Him on His day and throughout the year, they just abuse it and run off and do their own thing. Very much the same thing here with Israel of old is what’s going on here.
The source of blessing in this connection here of prosperity and unfaithfulness being hand in hand, unfortunately, although from a different direction, prosperity distracting us from God these days. Back then, prosperity was rationalizing their sin. It could be overlapping to be sure.
But it’s a little different today because we don’t have this special covenant that they had for the land, for example. We are so far into generations that don’t know God compared to, it seems, Israel at the time. You can’t quite make a comparison, I think.
They still had a lot of the worship. You see they had the feast days and new moons. They have the priest.
They have these things. They had it. It was just twisted and demented.
We don’t have that anymore. The vast majority of Americans simply just don’t go to church. They all went to church at least.
We forget that. So there are some differences. That’s why I said today prosperity is distracting us from God.
Why do I want to go to church? I’ve got everything I want and need. Back then it was, I’m going to go to church, but I’m going to rationalize my sins. Nevertheless, I’m going to worship God the way I feel like worshiping Him and have fun and even having harlotry attached to their worship.
I don’t mean spiritual harlotry either, adults. And that leads us here to who is or what is Baal, verse 8. Which they prepared, that is, they took the grain, the wine, and the oil. They did their tithes.
They did a part of their grain harvest and the oil harvest and the like and offered it up to Baal instead of God Almighty. Who is this Baal? Well, it turns out there was lots of Baals back then in different places up north and south of Canaan, there in Assyria and the like. The pagan god of fertility, in particular in Canaan, is what we’re used to, but it’s not an uncommon name, as I said.
It’s often a formal title as it is here, The Baal. Baal in Hebrew simply means master and is used elsewhere in the Bible to mean master and not another false god. You won’t always see that because you’ll just see the translation master, for example.
But it’s the same Hebrew word, Baal. Right, so it’s being used in a more formal fashion often in this case, like we talk about the Lord. The Lord of heaven and earth.
This is the Baal. Baal here in archaeology, in the Northern Kingdom in particular, was used especially for a major Phoenician-type Baal deity. So you have the Phoenicians there, not just the Canaanites using Baal, but it was a different Baal for them, a different god.
Maybe even the same Baal as under Queen Jezebel. Remember her? This is what they dug up. So we have, I have a very nice handy book God blessed me with.
I found at Zondervan. If you remember prayer time, probably won’t buy Zondervan anymore. This was a number of years ago.
A huge five-set encyclopedia. Color pictures are nice. I got it like 50 bucks.
Each one’s this thick. Beautiful pictures of archaeology in there. And you can see they have dug this stuff up for 150 years now.
It’s there, brothers and sisters. You just can’t get away from the Old Testament and the New Testament being embedded in real life and history. And so you have Baal, Shemim.
That’s one Baal. Hyphen. We do the same thing, right? We talk about the Lord God Almighty.
We miss some of it in English. But you have Jehovah, Jireh, for example, and the like. All these hyphen words of God Almighty was a pretty common thing back then.
Baal, hyphen, Shemim, which is the god or master of sun and rain, and by extension wisdom and the like. There’s Baal, Malkart. Baal, Malkart, of prosperity and fertility.
So that sounds more like the Canaanite god. And also of child sacrifices and veneration of the dead. And then you have Baal, Hadad, the storm god.
You’ve probably heard that as well. Thus, again, of what? Rain and fertility. You see one of the major themes there, of fertility.
Because this is a farming community, and the nations have been full of farmers for thousands of years. You forget that. The vast majority of the civilizations had their members being farmers, and they were dependent very much upon the land.
I don’t get that rain, I don’t get that harvest. So these gods were often tied to these things of the land. Verse 13, we have Baal, plural.
It would be Baalim in Hebrew, or Baals here with a simple S. Verse 13, O punisher for the days of the Baals. Now it’s plural. What’s going on here? They probably worshipped all of them, depending where they were.
Northern Israel, southern Israel, on the border with another nation. They just mixed and matched their religions. It’s called syncretism.
And I’ll talk about that in the second commandment. Poverty, loss of prosperity. Here’s the other, therefore, verse 9-13.
Therefore, I’ll return and take them away. My grain in its time and my new wine in its season. You can’t get what you want.
You can’t get the alliances. You can’t go back to your gods. You’re stumbling in the dark.
You’re powerless. And now I’m going to take away the power of prosperity. It can become now poverty.
And that, of course, will be ultimately fulfilled when they’re invaded. Being invaded is not a good thing. Because invasions back then weren’t kind little things.
Oh, you don’t have a border? We’ll just walk across it. Rather, they took their arms and attacked you. And so you lost your prosperity.
The shriveling up of the source of their pride, their prosperity. Taking away the grain, the wine, the wool, and the linen. And again, verse 10, nakedness.
And I will uncover their lewdness in the sight of the lovers, and no one shall deliver from my hand. Given to cover their nakedness, verse 9, right? I will take back my wool and my linen. What about the wool and linen? Given to cover their nakedness.
My prosperity is excusing my sin. That’s what’s being said there. And then we come to verse 10.
And I will uncover their lewdness in the sight of the lovers. I’ll take away their prosperity, expose them publicly to show how shallow they are before me as a spiritual people of God. And shutting down all their fun as well.
I will cause all her mirth to cease. All her joy that, of course, we know ultimately is a superficial carnal joy. A shallow joy that will fade away.
We forget people can have lots of fun and excitement. Commercials show this all the time. You’ve probably experienced this certainly when you went to public school.
Many of you older ones did. And the younger generation need to realize people can smile and laugh and have hearts that are miserable. Don’t judge on the outside.
But realize there’s more going on on the inside. They were probably turning the outward forms of worship, so here we are in verse 11, into times of pagan revelry. And I already mentioned this before, of harlotry.
Not spiritual, but actual. Being tied to pagan worship. In other words, they desecrated God’s worship forms.
And God doesn’t have these. These are not his days. I will cause her mirth to cease.
She’s going to be most miserable indeed. Her feast days, her new moons, her Sabbath, and all her appointed feasts. God didn’t appoint them.
They’re not his, is what he’s saying. Now, he may mean they made completely new days. Probably not.
There’s strong evidence. We forget this sometimes. Maybe you hadn’t fully realized this.
But again, it’s syncretism. You can hear the word from sin to put together the mix. They would mix their religion with the pagan religions and say, I’m worshiping the true God.
This happened in the Pentateuch where Aaron created the golden calf. And you hear it sounds like the sound of war in the camp. And he comes down and it turns out they’re worshiping Jehovah, it says.
Through the golden calf. They were mixing the thing. This is the real God.
It’s the golden calf that brought us out of Egypt, they said. And they call him Jehovah. It’s there in the text.
He’s using the right name. But the wrong form of worship. That’s the point.
And probably the same thing here. Maybe not. Maybe in these cases when it’s Baal, they literally meant Baal as opposed to it’s our God kind of mixed with another God.
Which is still bad enough, brothers and sisters. Still very bad indeed. The violation of the first commandment.
Verse 12, more cutting off of the prosperity. And I will destroy her vines, her fig trees, of which she has said, these are my wages that my lovers have given me. Right? Again, she’s honoring others.
These nations and their gods. Because if you honor a nation, you honor their God back then. It’s just simply how it was.
If you want a war, that means your God’s better than their God. The two went hand in hand. We forget this because we’re so secularized in the last 80 to 100 years in America.
And so God’s going to take it all away. Because they were deceived therein. To bring them to full repentance.
That’s the point. God’s not doing this just because he’s a petty God. Any more than your parents who discipline you do it because they’re petty parents.
But because they love you. They know you’re hurting yourselves. God loves them.
He knows they’re hurting themselves. So he warns them. He calls them to repentance.
And he’s giving them these consequences to bring them to the end and bring them towards repentance. The reason explained again. I will punish her, verse 13, for the days of the bales to which she burned incense.
Right? The days. Other, presumably, holy days. So they probably added holy days on top of the ordinary days.
Remember they have the Sabbaths. They have the feast days. Those are given by God.
And they probably added on top of those as well. The offering of worship to a made-up God is described as forgetting in the Old Testament often. And we’ll kind of come across in Hosea where God says the lack of knowledge is a problem amongst my people.
And that knowledge here you’ll see hinted at in verse 8. For she did not know. Right? She had a lack of knowledge that I gave her grain and new wine, that I’m the one who blessed her. So it’s theological knowledge is what he’s driving at.
So this is another one of those sub-themes here interwoven in this text and the rest of Hosea as well. And so here we have, lastly, unfaithful worship today. The sum of the matter is the first table of the law matters and it matters to God.
It’s not just an Old Testament matter and concern. It’s picked up in the New Testament. It’s implied there, and Paul mentions it in the apology that he gave, that is, the apologetic sermon he gave on Mars Hill, which says even the pagan nations know there’s a real God out there.
And Him we live and move and have our being. So he’s tying the first table to natural revelation, that is, the unbeliever knows there is a God and there should be, therefore, a proper worship. The first commandment is about God, who He is, and therefore our response to Him.
The second commandment is about His worship, that is, how we honor Him. What does that look like? Both internally, always internally, and externally, what’s changed, right? In the Old Testament they have sacrifices, how you honor God externally. In the New Testament we don’t have sacrifices anymore, thankfully.
I don’t have to kill an animal. I don’t like killing animals. We have the Lord’s Supper and Baptism.
The third commandment is about His word and His works. They are to be respected and honored. And the fourth commandment is about His day and the days that He has appointed.
He did appoint multiple days in the Old Testament and now it’s simply one day. The first table as to substance, not the outward form necessarily, right? The temple is gone, that’s an outward form. Sacrifices are gone, that’s an outward form.
But always the substance, the heart of the matter, is the greatest. You can be sick in a mist, worship in the Old Testament, can’t get to the sacrifice, but you can still what? Worship God with your heart. That’s the heart of the matter.
And same with the New Testament. How do we know this? Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength, Jesus says. The Jews knew this, right? In that conversation He had.
He says, I know what this is. I want to know if Jesus knows what it is. And the second is like it.
You shall love your neighbor as yourself. That’s the first table of the law and the second table of the law. And it matters today because these examples of the Old Testament are used in the New Testament to remind us of wretchedness and sin.
We saw that in 1 Corinthians. I finished that book. And he references the Old Testament and their false worship in chapter 10, for example, and shows the seriousness of that sin.
And the judgment is not just spiritual. Providential punishment as well today happens. Loss of prosperity and even death to remind us as the fire should remind all those there who see it of God’s coming judgment if we do not repent.
And God brings these judgments even today although not in this special manner and not always with that kind of intensity and certainly not with the miracles anymore. These miraculous things that happen as we saw with the prophets to wake them up because that special relationship they had as a nation and a church. But we still have a relation as a nation as all nations do.
We are supposed to submit to God. Even if we don’t have a special covenant like Israel with this land or something like they had of Canaan, the moral law of God is still binding upon all. They have broken the covenant of works individually and collectively as leaders and as followers.
And we pray that they will be exposed to their own sin. And we brought the shame that they would repent and our leaders would repent as well. Protect your hearts, brothers and sisters.
The obvious lesson for us is don’t follow in the footsteps of prior generations just because they are older than you or seem wiser than you. If they are desecrating God’s worship, don’t follow them. Don’t have a flippant use of the sacraments or preaching or honoring of his name throughout the week.
But especially watch your hearts, brothers and sisters. Read and meditate upon the word to better know and follow God in Christ. And therefore to what? Expose, not your heart to sin, but to righteousness in the word of God and God’s grace and gospel and Holy Spirit.
Keeping him, we pray, in your heart by his power and his spirit upon you. Let us pray. Lord God Almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, may we continue to learn to honor who you are, God, and not just on Sunday but throughout the week.
It’s not simply we shouldn’t desecrate the Lord’s Day and desecrate his public worship but we shouldn’t desecrate your name throughout the week. We shouldn’t make images of you throughout the week. It doesn’t matter what day or time it is.
We should always have a proper respect and reverence for the first four commandments and in particular, Lord, the substance therein that our hearts would always love you, follow you, fear you, and adore you. We pray and ask for more of your spirit therein, God, that we would have humble hearts and that we would persevere in our Christian walk to always honor you or right. By the blood of Christ, we pray, and his glorious redemption to come in full fruition when he comes back in the second coming, Lord Jesus.
Maranatha. Amen.