Let us turn to our Bibles to Hosea chapter 2. Hosea chapter 2. Hosea chapter 2 verse 23. 2 verse 23. Especially the latter part of verse 23.
Let us listen attentively to the Word of God. Then I will sow her for myself in the earth, and I will have mercy on her who had not obtained mercy. Then I will say to those who were not my people, you are my people, and they shall say, you are my God.
Let us pray. And here, God, we read this amazing language and truth that you have chosen people, that we are your chosen people, and that by grace and by mercy, for we were a people who had not obtained mercy, our God and Savior. We, the vast majority of us, certainly were Gentiles, and our history has been those not Jewish.
And so, God, we have no knowledge in our ancestors, often, of the Gospel. And here we see a future, a prophecy of the future in which you bring many who are not your people, who were not chosen like the Jews, but now they are chosen like the Jews. And now we are people.
That is to say, we are covenanted to you. You have brought us into your mercies, into the covenant of grace by the power of the Holy Spirit, as we heard this morning, granting us forgiveness, granting us regeneration and the gift of faith and repentance, so that we can also, in return, say, you are my God. Lord, may this ring sweetly into our hearts this evening, we pray, and encourage us as we read these words of the covenant promises.
Amen. You are my people is part of a longer sentence that has several variants in the Bible, and that’s what I’m going to go over this evening. There are almost 30 instances of this phrase and many more implicit references or partial references to this concept in the Bible.
In fact, it is attached to the main theme of redemption. And how is that so? The phrase first comes to our attention in God’s covenant with Abraham. And that’s the first point.
A Covenant Promise
A covenant promise, Genesis 17, 7 through 8. That’s the great passage in which Abraham is given the covenant promise. He’s called there in chapter 12 in Genesis to go out and follow the Lord into the land of Canaan. And here, several chapters later, a little later in his life, God makes clear the kind of covenant and grace that he will give and bestow upon Abraham.
We read in verse 7, And I, that is the Lord God, I will establish my covenant between me and you and your descendants after you and their generations for an everlasting covenant to be God to you and your descendants after you. Also, I give to you and your descendants after you the land in which you are a stranger, all the land of Canaan as an everlasting possession, and I will be their God. Right? It will be an everlasting covenant to be God to you and to your seed, or descendant here.
And he ends up, and he ends in verse 8, And I will be their God. He repeats that phrase again, which is half the phrase we’ll read elsewhere. You will be my people and I will be your God.
Or a different order sometimes, or only one half of that phrase or another half of that phrase, which is a covenant phrase that God has made a covenant with his people, his chosen elect, the creator judge of heaven and earth, could have left the human race in the deserved misery of sin and death. Or as our Confession states in chapter 7, the distance between God and the creature is so great that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience unto him as their creator, yet they could never have any fruition of him as their blessedness and reward. They could have no reward or blessing from him but by some voluntary condensation on God’s part.
Condensation on God’s part because Adam and Eve, without a covenant, still had to obey God. That’s the point. And God didn’t have to give them anything.
I gave you life. What more do you want? That was sufficient. And it’s doubly so after we’ve broken the covenant through Adam that God doesn’t have to give us anything.
But he went above and beyond that before the fall and of course, as we know, after the fall. So when the Lord God of heaven and earth made a covenant with Abraham, it was a double, maybe you could say a triple blessing. The forgiveness of of course, Abraham’s sin.
We read that that he believed in the promises and was imputed to him by faith. That’s picked up and argued by Paul in Romans 4 and unpacks that great marvelous doctrine of justification by faith alone. But more than just forgiven and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness upon him, but the blessings upon Abraham and not just the blessing upon him but upon his descendants, his seeds, and the nations that go in the rest of us.
It’s blessing piled upon blessing brothers and sisters. Way above and beyond what he deserved and the rest of us deserve. In the fallen religions of the ancient Near East, you wanted the God to look after you.
They took religion seriously. And in fact, the entirety of the world took religion seriously. It still does.
We forget the world is beyond the Western civilization. You got India, you got Africa, you got South America, although they’re probably a little wonky there. But still, most people, even today, believe something about religion.
They have a different religion, of course, but it’s not atheism. Atheism is a weird thing in the West. It only grows through false education.
You have to be really educated to beat out of you the native and natural understanding that there is a God and you’re his creature. But in the ancient Near East, because of this universal truth that they wanted a God, they believed in the God, they wanted the God to look after them because it was a scary, dangerous world. We, again, forget that in the West.
And we have blinders on. In one sense, it’s a good thing. I don’t want to see the miseries of the world.
But in the other sense, we forget the miseries of the world are still there with us and have been there for thousands of years since the fall. Everywhere. It’s a universal fact of life.
Once civilization is pulled out from under our feet, like war, pestilence, or earthquakes, or COVID or something, that you’re not very far from living off the face, living off the ground of the earth, and even starving and dying. They wanted God. They wanted help.
And so the religions, of course, have false gods that was ultimately derived from the true religion of the Bible, from Adam, from Noah. And they took these oral traditions and twisted them, of course, into their own imagination. But in that mindset, in that context, this makes sense.
In Genesis 17 and elsewhere here, we read this refrain over and over again, You are my people and I am your God. They like that. That’s a good thing.
That’s a wonderful thing. That’s the point. In other words, Abraham was blessed by the electing love of God in Christ in particular.
Every nation, as you recall, had their gods typically. One major god, maybe some smaller god, regional gods. When they went to war, they won.
Their God won. Our God’s better than yours. We saw some of this, right, in Samuel with the Philistines and Dagon and whatnot.
We’re better than your God. Our God’s better than your God. All this is going on.
This is the backdrop. And even today, implicitly, you have that. I won’t go down that path.
But in particular here, what that shows is what? Every nation believed that they were chosen by their God. They’re unique. They’re special.
That’s true. That’s an echo of the greater truth of election, that God has chosen some and not others. And in this case, he chose his people with an electing love of God in Christ.
The father from eternity past chose Abraham and his seed, the elect seed, of course, which was part of the visible seed of the visible church. The Son, the Messiah to come, lived and died for Abraham and for his elect seed. And the Spirit applied that redemption, of course, first through regeneration and the like.
And that electing love is emphasized, of course, in the covenant language. I will be their God. Think about it.
Their God. By implication, not their God. I’m not the God of the Egyptians.
I’m not the God of the Syrians. He, of course, is their God. And so far as we read over and over again in the Bible, especially in the Psalms, what? Our God is over the heavens and the earth.
Everything’s underneath our God. He’s the head God. He’s in charge of all the earth.
But he never says, I am your God and you are my people, to anybody else but his chosen body, the church, to us. That’s an electing love already by definition. Baptism is an external sign of that electing love, of course, because it separates us publicly from all those who are not loved by God.
A pastor you may ask, well, what if there’s an elect person out there who hasn’t been baptized yet? Well, sure, they’re loved by God. We don’t see it yet because, again, we only deal with what’s visible. That’s why we talk about the visible covenant.
And so you have those two overlapping themes, of course, through here. But in particular, even the outward form emphasizes the uniqueness, the chosenness, the electing love of our Lord and Savior. That it’s not just upon any person in the world, whoever feels like they’re called by God, but only those who are truly called by God, both especially internally but also externally.
I will be their God and you shall be my people is not said of anyone else, in other words. And so the covenant is special and unique only for those within the covenant of grace. And it shows, therefore, what? His care and concern about you.
One of the downsides of those who attack the atonement of Christ, the electing atonement of Christ, the efficacious electing atonement of Christ, by insisting and urging God loves everyone equally, is that you wonder, really, if God loves everyone equally, then I’m no more special than anyone else. But you are more special. Not special in yourself, of course, not as though God looked at you and said, you know, Bob Harvey here, he’s a great guy, I think I’ll make him a Christian.
Of course not. But rather he chose out of his mere love and mercy and compassion to save Bob, in spite of his hatred and anger towards him, of being born in original sin and in wickedness. And because of that, God giving him the sign of the covenant, giving all of us the sign of the covenant, the sign of the covenant that’s unique, that other people don’t have, to show that he cares for us and watches over us and gives us special signs of his pleasure upon us.
The Abrahamic covenant in the Old Testament, I want to explain a little bit about this here, because that’s not where it starts, necessarily, insofar as we know Adam and Eve were in the covenant, they were saved as well, and their children, that is, some of their children were elect and saved, and any of those who called upon the name of the seed to come, that was the revelation they were given in Genesis 3, right? The promised seed shall come and destroy the serpent, the work of the serpent, you must rely and trust upon him. But it’s especially in the Abrahamic covenant that the substance and the nub of the gospel is highlighted in such a way that becomes more clear and now is cemented into a group of people known as the Jews, which are also known as the Church of God, or the called out ones. Gathered what you need, called out into the covenant.
They are his people and he is their God. So that language already tells you some of the dynamics and the parameters of this relationship. Now some Christians are confused about, in particular, the Abrahamic to Mosaic covenants and how the two are related.
They see sometimes an absolute instead of a relative contrast between Abraham and Moses and the Mosaic economy and the law and all the requirements therein, and they will talk about, as you heard this morning in Sunday’s class, grace versus law. And in that context, they’re going to say the Mosaic covenant had only law, law, law. We don’t want law because law doesn’t save us.
We want grace. We want the Abrahamic covenant. And yet the evidence, of course, points the other way.
In fact, what kind of evidence? The covenantal language evidence, as we read here in Hosea 2.23 and there in Genesis 17, is used in the midst of the Mosaic covenant. In the covenant of covenants, as it were, in the Levitic passages, where we have a description of the most legalistic part, as it were, of the Old Testament, the Mosaic, that is the priesthood and the temple and all the restrictions and requirements they had in that context. Leviticus 26, verse 12.
I will walk among you and be your God and you shall be my people. Saying the same thing again as he said to Abraham, and as we’ll see he said to David, and he says to the prophets, and he says even in the New Testament, because it’s one covenant of substance. The covenant of grace was given to Adam and Eve, as I said, and the fullness is given to Abraham, and is still there in the Mosaic covenant.
It’s reiterated again in David in 2 Samuel 7.24, in 2 Samuel 7.24, and you establish for yourself your people, Israel, to be your people forever. And you, O Lord, became their God. Isn’t that beautiful language? I am your God, I’m taking special care of you, and special consideration, and guarding and hedging you, and providing for you.
And we saw that, of course, in Hosea 2, where he says, you know, I’m gonna give you a bill of divorce, but I’m gonna take it back, and I’m gonna bring you into the desert, and I’m gonna give you vineyards, verse 15, and in the valley of Echar, which was a valley of destruction, as a door of hope instead, you shall sing there as in days of your youth. I’m gonna give you prosperity, and preserve you, as only he who is wedded to you by covenant. That’s why the uniqueness is so important in Christianity.
It’s a source of praise in the Old Testament, reiterated again in Psalm, Psalm 100, for example. Oh, look at that, we’re gonna sing that tonight. Psalm 100, verse 2. Serve the Lord with gladness, come before his presence with singing, knowing that the Lord, he is God, it is he who has made us, and not we ourselves, we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.
So there you have half the description, we are his people, and by application is what? He is our God. The two go hand-in-hand, and that is covenantal language. A description of this special relationship that no one else has.
Clearly the same idea, God loves and cares for them, we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. He is our shepherd, and a shepherd takes special care of his sheep. He doesn’t kick them when they’re down, he pulls them out of the pit.
You’ll see some videos like that on YouTube, when the lamb jumps out, he’s all happy, and he goes right back into the pit. And God, what, takes him and pulls him out yet again. It’s a beautiful image.
The Abrahamic Covenant is not just the Abrahamic Covenant. Adam and Eve were in it. It’s the covenant of grace, but with the Abrahamic flavor, as it were, in the language used to highlight.
There’s progression of revelation of the goodness of the gospel, how God saves us, and all the different dimensions and dynamics of what that looks like. That’s why sanctification is a long class. It covers all kinds of ways of talking about we’re saved, and how it affects us.
In a sense, it’s the context of sanctification and justification. And it’s there in the New Testament, because it’s the same way. They’re saved the same way in the Old Testament as we are in the New Testament, brothers and sisters.
We read that in the Psalm. We sang this a little earlier, that we trust in God. In the Psalms, the Psalmist talks about trusting in Him, not obeying the law enough to get to heaven, but relying upon God and His mercy to have compassion upon us.
Well, here we have, in 2 Corinthians 6.16, this phrase again from the Old Testament. 2 Corinthians 6.16 and 17. What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God.
So here we have another metaphor from the Old Testament temple. And God said, I will make my dwelling among them, and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore, go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing, and then I will welcome you.
Quoting the Old Testament, that covenantal language again, that special language of Abraham picked up again, and David, and elsewhere. A clear connection for substance between the Testaments, although the outward forms, as we know, have changed. That whether Jew or Gentile, we can be God’s people, and He can be our God, if we would repent and flee from sin and trust in a living Savior, Jesus Christ.
First Peter, as we know, quotes Hosea, as well as Romans 9. First Peter 2.9 and 10 we read, but you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people, and you have not obtained mercy, but now you have received mercy. That, is that not a picture of us, brothers and sisters, as you reflect upon your own history, when you were not a Christian, when you were not a believer? This is true for some of us, others that were blessed by being raised in the covenant community, of course, but even then they can say the same thing, because they could have been cast out and not been born therein.
Peter combines a number of Old Testament imageries, obviously, and each imagery here highlights what? The unique relationship, I am your God, and not other people’s God, in this special way of salvation, in the covenant of grace. I am their Creator God, yes, but I’m also their judge, but to you I am a father, I am a shepherd, I’m one wedded to you as a husband, and therefore care and love you. A chosen race, a royal priesthood, that’s special, that’s a combination, of course, the kingship and the priesthood.
A holy nation, unlike the unholy nation, so separated from the rest of the world. A people for his own possession, that’s an allusion to Deuteronomy, which I’ll cover in a bit. Why? To the end, or that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
This is why you are special and chosen from the world, that you can manifest the glories of God in your life, and you are a person who has not had mercy, but now have mercy, because now you are God’s people. The promises of the covenant. So we looked at the progression and how the covenant language is used in a couple of key passages, there’s a couple dozen more of the passages I could have gone over in Jeremiah and whatnot, but I want to go over some of the promises of the covenant, in particular here.
To deliver us, Exodus 3.7. So I’m going over other passages with the same refrain. And the Lord said, I have surely seen the oppression of my people who are in Egypt, right? Here he is talking to Moses. I know what’s going on.
My people have been here for a few generations, and they are being oppressed and beaten, and I’ve heard their cry because of their taskmasters, for I know their sorrows. And I will take you as my people, this is chapter 6 verse 7, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God who brought you out from the burdens of the Egyptians. He knows what they’ve gone through in chapter 6. He explains, because of this, I will take you as my people, and I will be your God.
And so there, of course, that was already the case, right? Didn’t he tell that to Abraham? He told that to Abraham. I’ll be your God and to your descendants as well. These are the descendants.
And what he’s saying, in other words, is I’m picking up where you thought I left off but I really didn’t leave off, as we know. And the language here isn’t anew in the sense of, well, I never had thoughts of saving you at all, but rather he’s reiterating that things have changed in their life, of course, and that he is picking up the covenant, I speak as a man, and will fulfill it for them so that they will know that I am the Lord God who brings them out of Egypt. I, of course, brought this upon them to show them all the more, much more grace than they could ever realize.
So it’s not only for delivering us but also for purifying us. Jeremiah 31.33, there’s a Jeremiah passage. In Jeremiah 31.33 we read, Again, Ezekiel 36.
You can go to that passage as well. Where the Old Testament prophecy is, there’s coming a day in which this covenant will be strengthened, and doubly so. And I will have my people again, in this case, magnified and expanded to, as we know, the Gentiles.
The promise here is quoted partly in Hebrews 10. The law and the covenant, of course, go hand in hand. That the purification and the call for deliverance is not just from the consequences of sin but unto righteousness, right? Sanctification.
I will write it on their hearts. The law of God, we read in Jeremiah 31. And I will be their God and they shall be my people.
I will be their God and they shall be my people. It’s not just a promise of justification or adoption and the specialness therein and the righteousness imputed upon us but also sanctification. God writing the law upon our heart and we working it out in our lives.
And that’s part of the promises. God purifies us with His Word and His law. Hosea 2.23, of course, that they are my people and you are my God.
We were declared before Him as we do in our songs and our vows. To be God’s people, of course, is to be separate from evil. So Hosea 2.23 is in the broader context, as we know, of them being unfaithful.
And that unfaithfulness is the context of prosperity. Look what we have. God must love us so what we’re doing is okay.
That’s basically more or less the argument. We kind of follow that argument sometimes in our own lives. Well, I’ve gotten away with it.
I must not be too bad. God’s like, no, I’m your God. You’re my people.
You’re supposed to be special. You’re supposed to be holy. And you’re supposed to be godly and obedient.
So the language, in other words, also implies the life of holiness that we’re called to. And the promise as well is that He will stay with us, not just purify us and deliver us, but He will stay with us. Zechariah 8.8, there we have another prophet.
Zechariah 8.8, and I will bring them to dwell in the midst of Jerusalem. Right? It’s a future prophecy. And they shall be my people and I will be their God in faithfulness and in righteousness.
When he says, when we talk about God being faithful to the covenant, that means He won’t break it. He will sustain it. He will be with you and He will never leave you.
That’s the idea here. They will be my people. I’m telling you, they will always be my people because I am their God, and as God, I will never break my word.
It is in faithfulness and in righteousness, not in unjustness, is the implication. And so that’s the glories of the covenant, the covenantal language and how the covenantal language is tied to a number of themes in the Bible, but always tied primarily to the covenant of grace itself, the unique relationship that we have with Him by faith and faith alone in Christ Jesus, our Lord and Savior. And so that leads us to the second point.
A Covenant Calling
I finally got to the second point. A covenant calling, treasured possession. The world tells us to be special and what they mean by you got to be special and unique other than buy my products and drive my car is often really for self gratification and sin.
Be special and different by not being like those Christians and being holy and whatnot. But we are called to be treasured possession of God, and we are called to be different. I said that is implied, of course, in Hosea, and it’s more explicit in Deuteronomy 7.6. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God.
The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for His treasured possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth, brothers and sisters. Recently, I saw a little video, I didn’t read the whole thing, I just saw the snippet there, because it’s our ambassador to Israel. Remember who our ambassador to Israel is, Huckabee.
And he’s, I’m sorry, babbling about how the Jews are special. Jew qua Jew. I mean, these people are ethnic Jews, they’re racial Jews, they’re in Israel, they’re special, we’re supposed to treat them special.
And brothers and sisters, you’re not. You’re not supposed to treat them like dirt, of course. But they’re no special than any other nation, than Russians, or Africans, or Hindus.
No, that’s not a race. Indians. Nothing.
This language here in Deuteronomy 7.6 was not given to Jews as Jews, but Jews in the covenant of God. And they have rejected the covenant today. And many back then rejected it as well, as we know.
The treasured possession of God is those to whom He has put His name upon them. And we know in the prophecies, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, what I just read, Jeremiah 31, of the future of the Gentiles coming in. And God, we read that in 2 Corinthians.
And again, in 1 Peter, who is that language given to? Not the Jews anymore, but only the Jews, so far as they are believers in Jesus, just as much as the Gentiles are believers in Jesus. All of us together are His people, and He is our God, and we are what? A treasured possession. You are a treasured possession, brothers and sisters.
Don’t forget that. He’s put His mark on you, and that’s His baptism. And so how should you act? How should you feel? Instead of being stuck up with privilege, as those did in Hosea, again, in our context here, look at us.
We’re special Jews. We can get away with whatever we want. Oh, no.
You should be thankful and continue to do your calling. And so, by implication then, a covenant calling of being special is a covenant calling of a holy life. Again, I already read 2 Corinthians 6.16 is a proof text that there is a connection between this language of the Old Testament and the New Testament, because it’s the same covenant.
But here, in 2 Corinthians 6, it’s tied to the call of godliness and obedience. What agreement has the temple of God with idols? I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them. This walking among them, this fellowship with them that was broken in the Garden of Eden, where He came in the cool of the evening to walk with them, the implication, of course, He can’t because they are in sin, and they fled from Him.
But He has redeemed that, and He picks up that language again, because we know God doesn’t walk. He doesn’t have legs like a man. But it’s the idea of being alongside with Him, and He can and will be because He purifies us.
And that’s the covenant promise. Therefore, go out from their midst and be separate from them. I will dwell and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
Paul quotes in the New Testament because it’s about us, not just Jews as Jews, but Jews and Gentiles who are in the body of Christ. So there’s moral constancy between the Testaments, short of, of course, the ceremonial distinctions which are done away with. All the other moral applications are there and for us.
We, brothers and sisters, are indeed a chosen generation from God Almighty as He preserves us. Now, we are, of course, justified, adopted, and sanctified all in the context of the covenant. The covenant is tied to these and more, the covenant of life.
A Covenant Life
The covenant is for us, for life is the point of the third point. I have a covenant of life to keep the parallelism here, but it’s a covenant of life not in the sense that we get life, that’s true, but for life, forever and ever, in other words. The call of holiness and godliness is not just a one-time thing.
We are called to be like Jesus all the days of our life. And of course, that sometimes means standing out in the crowd. And that’s why the idea of discipleship that Peter highlights there, but you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, that you are to proclaim the excellencies of God, and you who are not a people are now become a people.
And so the New Testament writers, in using the Abrahamic language of the covenant, show that we are in the covenant and we are called to holiness and sanctification all the days of our life, every day and into eternity. And that’s where we find the connection from Genesis to Revelation, the covenant of grace, and even the language of the covenant. You are my people and I’m your God, or I will be your God and you will be my people.
And some variant therein is fulfilled there in the book of Revelation itself. We’ve read it in Genesis 12, and I will end the sermon with Revelation 21.3. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will be with them as their God.
Amen and amen. Let us pray. Glorious Lord and Savior, gracious Father, Redeemer, you are a covenant-keeping God.
You have given us and brought us into the covenant. You’ve given us a promise, the heart of the covenants. And that promise is echoed in this language that we are your people and you are our God.
In fact, here in this variance in Hosea, we can say, you are my God. I pray, Lord, and I implore your spirit that everyone here would be able to say that, if not with their mouth, certainly with their hearts. You are my God and we are your people.
May this be so by the blood of Christ, our Lord and Savior, the everlasting covenant. Amen.