We are continuing through the book of Hosea. Hosea chapter 3. It’s it. It’s the whole chapter.
That’s what we’re going to do. It’s a very short chapter. Again, the chapters are written by some guy in a carriage and every bump he hit he had a verse or something.
We don’t, there’s no rhyme or reason. Often it seems. So, but here they can more or less go together.
Verses 1 through 5. Hosea chapter 3 verses 1 through 5. Let us listen attentively to the word of God. Then the Lord said to me, go again, love a woman who is loved by a lover and is committing adultery, just like the love of the Lord for the children of Israel who look to other gods and love the raisin cakes of the pagans. So I bought her for myself for 15 shekels of silver and one and one half omers of barley.
And I said to her, you shall stay with me many days. You shall not play the harlot, nor shall you have a man. So too will you, will I be toward you.
For the children of Israel shall abide many days without a King or Prince, without sacrifice or sacred pillars, without ephod or teraphim. Afterward, the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God and David their King. They shall fear the Lord and his goodness in the latter days.
Let us pray. In the short order, God, we read particular of your love, of your forgiving love. And in contrast, it seems more or less a forgetful love of your people of old.
And even of today, Lord, to one degree or another, at times in the New Testament era, God, your people have strayed away in serious regards, especially publicly, Lord, for that’s what you’re especially after here. As we see, they love the raisin cakes of the pagans, which is the act of public worship that was mixed in with your worship, God. And so, Lord, as we read this passage, may it encourage us, in spite of how much judgment is there in chapter one and chapter two, of you upon your people, because you will judge them as a father judges his wayward son.
So, Lord, even as a father, you forgive them with an everlasting forgiveness, as we see, especially in verse five. And may this encourage us as well, Lord, that you are a forgiving and loving father and you have forgiven us through Christ Jesus, our Lord and Savior. Amen.
Chapter three takes us back to the metaphor of chapter one, right? Of the unfaithful spouse, taking the idea of covenant broadly, the covenant of grace, the Mosaic covenant, its particular application or manifestation of that covenant of grace in the Old Testament, and how they have broken it, like a spouse breaks the marriage vow. And although short, chapter three, it is full of hope and promise. We see in it the love of God, indeed, the covenantal faithfulness of our Lord, but we also see the forgiveness in that divine love.
It is not a sentimental or sappy emotion, but a cosmic declaration of forgiveness and redemption to sinners. And as we look into this text more carefully, forgiving love, verses one through three, that’s not what’s said there, but clearly that’s what’s being done. And then the Lord said to me, the covenant-keeping God said to Hosea, go again, love a woman who is loved by a lover and is committing adultery, just like the love of the Lord for the children of Israel.
Again, he’s making this parallel more explicit here, as it was in chapter one, and implied in chapter two. It’s like a marriage. And what’s going on in a marriage when the wife or the husband is going off on their own with another man or another woman? That’s very serious stuff God’s saying.
And he’s saying it again here, that he can get the lesson the first time. In chapter one, he grabs Gomer. He has three kids.
Each kid has a name. You can imagine doing that to your kids. So that whenever they saw them in the marketplace with the kids or at school, they probably hadn’t even schools back then.
And certainly if they went out to the playground, they would call the kids to them, lo ami, not my people, come here, not my people, come here. Why would you name your kid that? What’s going on here, Gomer? What’s going on here, Hosea? Well, let me explain it to you. So they’re living lessons.
They didn’t get the lesson, apparently. So he makes another lesson here in chapter three to go out and find her. Doesn’t get specific.
So the question sometimes people ask is, is this Gomer all over again? Was she unfaithful and ran off? It could be. The name isn’t here. But in one sense, it’s not really important, is it? The significance is what had been done and what God will do instead.
The gross, public, persistent unfaithfulness of God’s people that he will judge, as we saw in chapter two, he will punish them. And we see here as well in verse four, that they will be without a king, without a prince, without a priest, without a temple at all. They will not have those blessings on earth anymore.
But in spite of all that, to the whole world, it looks like they’re being beat up and cast out and God has forgotten them. He has not forgotten his people. That’s the point.
In spite of their wickedness towards him. That’s the glory of the good news. That’s why I covered that in Sunday School class.
Let’s talk about what regeneration is. Let’s talk about justification. It does not change.
They, of course, this is preached to a mixed audience. It is preached publicly. And as such, you’re going to have unbelievers in Israel, like you do today in the church, and believers as well.
And so it applies differently depending on the person who’s hearing it. Not in the sense of a subjective, but in the sense of, obviously, that when God says, I love them and I will never give up on them. I have a faithful covenantal love towards them and I will redeem them.
He’s not saying that of the non-elect, of the unrepentant who hate God, but rather of his people who are weak and who sin because we sin as well. That’s the glory of the gospel, which is this. God saves sinners.
And once you’re born again and you grow in sanctification and you will grow, what are you? You’re a sinner saved by grace. You’re a sinner saved by grace. And that’s what’s being highlighted here implicitly insofar as they’re saying, God’s like, here’s the example all over again.
Get this woman, she’s playing a harlot. That’s what you guys are doing with respect to the first table of the law, with respect to me, spiritually speaking. But I’m going to love you, what? Anyway.
I’m going to love you anyway. And God loves us in spite of our sins and shortcomings. Praise be to his name.
And it’s by the blood of Jesus Christ, of course. He’s faithful to the unfaithful. And so after describing what he’s called to do and how he finds her and brings her and says to her in verse three, you shall stay with me many days.
You shall not play the harlot, nor shall you have a man. So too will I be toward you. Hosea is representing God, of course, here.
And I will be faithful to you in spite of your unfaithfulness. But you ought to be faithful to me as well as the implication. You stay with me.
Don’t go elsewhere. Don’t flee this relationship. It’s a dedication, therefore.
It’s a picture of God’s love to us. So I will be towards you. I will be with you.
I will never leave you. It’s his faithful love towards his people. And that’s why I use the title faithful love here.
Faithful Love
But love is clearly here as well, that language, and his faithfulness as well. To highlight, it’s an objective fact that you will fail, for example, and sin. And you may feel like you’re this woman or this man, like King David, for example.
The men can think of King David, who has failed the Lord, has failed his church, an open public scandal. But God is greater than our sins. And he has sworn upon the life and death of his son to never leave us.
That’s the covenantal promise. That’s what we’re reading here in this short description in verses one, two, and three. This is it.
Doesn’t go back into it again here in these verses. This is called covenantal love or loving-kindness. And as I titled it here again to highlight faithful love.
Love, yes, we get. But I want to highlight the fact of faithfulness in spite of what one may feel. Of course, God doesn’t have feelings like a man.
But the idea of love in the human language gets mixed up. And I want to highlight the fact that he’s faithful, faithful, faithful, even when we aren’t. The Lord’s covenantal love here then, as I can take as a sub-point, another way of describing faithful love of God Almighty.
The marriage metaphor, of course, is a beautiful picture of this fact for us. The covenantal language of chapter two as well. Then I’ll say to those who are not my people, you are my people.
And you shall say, you are my God at the end of chapter two. Clearly, again, covenantal language. So from chapter one, chapter two, and now in chapter three, although the explicit language there of the covenant, you are my people, I’ll be your God, for example, or I am in covenant with you is not there, but the marriage is.
And by application, that’s the same idea here. God’s covenantal, his promise, love towards us. Another way of talking about covenant is his promise to us.
Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter seven, is the chapter on the covenant. The chapter on the covenant, WCF seven, three, paragraph three. Man, we read, by his fall, having made himself incapable of life by that covenant, right? The covenant of works or the covenant of nature.
The Lord was pleased to make a second, commonly called the covenant of grace, wherein he freely offers unto sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ, requiring of them faith in him that they may be saved and promising to give unto all those that are ordained into eternal life, his Holy spirit to make them willing and able to believe. We have this, brothers and sisters, in one form or another, in these verses. You have the idea of the covenant, of course, and the marriage picture here of God being faithfully bound by promise to the bride, to the spouse, that we are his spouse.
And on the flip side, we are like the harlot and unfaithful, one degree or another, of course. Degrees of sin are important in our sanctification and understanding our sanctification. And then here at the end of the chapter, it says, promising to give unto all those who are ordained into eternal life, making them willing and able to believe.
Verse five, afterwards, the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God, and they shall fear the Lord and his goodness in the latter days. That’s the fulfillment therein. Mankind has broken the covenant of works, Isaiah 24, 5. The earth is also defiled, under its inhabitants, because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant.
And, of course, on the flip side, God Almighty has redeemed us with a better covenant than Adam, the covenant of grace. Romans 5.12 in the New Testament expresses this idea of the covenant of works. Therefore, just as through one man sent into the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men because of all sin.
That’s Adam, of course, and we in Adam. The covenant of grace in the Old Testament and the New Testament that God has given us, and here expressed in this language of the marriage, chapter one and chapter three here, is a wonderful covenant indeed, in which God has promised, in spite of us being rebels to him, being born rebels, living rebels, a thought we’re indeed rebels, says, I’m going to save you anyways, because I’ve set my love upon you, and I’ve set my son for you, and the power of the Holy Spirit, and all the other gifts of redemption. But the covenant of grace in the Bible here, as we’ll see in Hosea, where he calls them to repentance, and it seems like often they’re not repenting, what’s going on here? And some people think, well, this must be something along the lines of something weird going on with the covenant of Moses, for example.
The covenant of Moses is something a lot of people stumble on, and they think there’s something especially weird or unique about it, and so far it is not, in their mind, part of the covenant of grace. There’s something so different about it that they have to take another approach to the Old Testament passages, and this is simply not the case. The covenant of grace is there in the Old Testament.
It was given to Adam and Eve in Genesis 3.15, 3.16, the following, in which the promise of the seed was given to them, and then after them, it was given to their kids, and to Abraham, and to David, and to Moses. All these were expressions and unpacking and outworkings of the covenant of grace, or perhaps we could say those were each a sub-covenant emphasizing different teachings, right, each building upon and assuming the prior covenants. So you have the Abrahamic covenant, which is what a lot of people like to emphasize, and it’s there in the New Testament, but that’s not the only expression of the covenant of grace.
There was the Mosaic, and after the Mosaic was David. The Davidic covenant isn’t contrary to the Mosaic covenant, certainly isn’t contrary to the Abrahamic covenant, but builds up and adds more detail that wasn’t there before, in particular the kingship of the Messiah sitting on the throne of David. The same is true in the New Testament as well, that we are part of the covenant of grace.
There’s progression from the Old Testament era to the New Testament era, or the new covenant era. New covenant in this case means a new manifestation of the covenant of grace. What we know as Christ to the first coming, the Christ the second coming, is obviously different in a lot of ways, but similar in a very substantial ways.
We’re saved by grace in both the Old Testament and New Testament, sanctified by grace, preserved by grace in the power of the Holy Spirit and the like. And so here in Hosea as well, that grace is understood in violations of the law and lack of repentance, being punished therein does not undermine the fact that they are in the covenant of grace. Whether they are in their heart or not, as I said, is a different story.
It’s a mixed multitude like it is today in the church. We read in Isaiah 42.6, I the Lord have called you in righteousness and I will hold your hand, I will keep you and give you as a covenant to the people and as a light to the Gentiles. In the Old Testament, there’s a number of passages highlighting the covenant of grace, especially in its future manifestation of Jesus Christ, who is called here a covenant of his people.
I will keep you and give you as a covenant to the people, that is my people. Of course, he isn’t a covenant per se, but he personifies the covenant so far as without him, there is no covenant of grace. You can’t have redemption without our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Hosea doesn’t contradict Isaiah. They’re all, yes, under the Mosaic economy, but not under the covenant of works as such, but rather an administration that especially emphasizes the law to teach them, because as we see here, they’re slow learners, especially in the first table of the law. It’s very fascinating to see this just over and over again.
So you go through the prophets. We saw some of that in Zechariah and elsewhere. It’s like, why do you guys keep running around mixing worship with God? This is terrible.
Because there, as God works in his providence, that we’re slow there, and we have our own slowness today, of course. There’s other prophecies of the Old Testament implied here by Hosea. He’s not ignorant of these things.
Ezekiel 36 is another well-known passage there about a new heart. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you, and I’ll take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh, and I’ll put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes, and you will keep my judgment and do them. He’s talking about the promise of the New Testament era, a relative promise, not an absolute promise.
Does anybody believe in the Reformed tradition that David did not have a new heart? Of course not. If he didn’t have a new heart, he couldn’t be saved. He wouldn’t be born again.
It’s saying, again, collectively, we see collectively they’re really messed up, but even individually, you have more of the Spirit of God, more obedience, more or less. Frankly, that’s what I said again, the easiest example is we don’t put up with multiple wives in our leadership. They did.
That’s a clear big difference there. We’ve got to remember this, and so it’s a relative difference insofar as the effects of sanctification in our life, and of course, collectively, it’s almost like night and day, but at the end of the day, it’s still not that much different with respect to us compared to heaven. It’s like you’re going to feel like perhaps we’re not even saved in this era compared to heaven, because there’s nothing, no more sin, no more temptation, no more weakness, and that’s the difference in my mind between the Old Testament and New Testament is like us compared to heaven.
We’re all saved, the whole spectrum, brothers and sisters, so don’t misread this. I remember struggling with Ezekiel, you know, from the non-Presbyterian background and the like. Well, the New Testament church has to have only the elect as members of the body of Christ.
One thing, you can’t guarantee that. I mean, there’s no way around that, okay, and the other thing is this verse isn’t really going in that direction. They’re really, they saved people in the New Testament.
In the Old Testament, they weren’t really saved. They didn’t really quite have this stuff. Of course not.
That’s ridiculous, so these prophecies of the movement of grace, more spirits, more power of sanctification collectively and individually, and the body of Christ is there in the Old Testament pointing to the New Testament era, but all within what? The covenant of grace, one covenant. That’s the point, and Hosea understands this, and that’s the background of these verses in this book. Forgetful love, verse 4, it sounds kind of weird.
Forgetful Love
My wife’s like going over it as she’s proofreading the bulletin for any typos because you will get typos from me, and I was like, what I had in mind in using the word forgetful love is the phrase that we use, forgetting your first love. Okay, not as though you literally forgot, but you wandered off the path of sanctification, and you got distracted by worldly pleasures and distractions. That’s the idea.
That’s the picture here, and that’s applied, of course, in verses 1 and 2, where he says, go out there and grab this woman who clearly is unfaithful, who forgot her love, right, but here in 4, it’s there as well if you see the fact that there is punishment here. For the children of Israel shall abide many days without a king, without a sacrifice, without an ephod, which is a vest of the priest. Well, what is that? Is that just an interesting description of, well, in the future you don’t have these things, oh well, or is a picture of punishment? Clearly a punishment.
In the first case of the lack of a king and the lack of a prince, it’s a punishment of chaos, of being invaded is the implication here. They’re going to lose their kingdom. They’re going to lose their political protection and peace, and of course the second part is they’re going to be without public worship.
They’re not going to have the priest, or the ministers, we would call them back then. Minister just means servant, so yeah, I’m not a priest. And the sacrifices, and the temple, and all that represents and helps them in their weakness.
Like, public worship is supposed to help us. It’s a means of growth in the Christian walk. Praising God, being with his saints, hearing his word, missing all that.
It’s gone. No more Lord’s Supper, for example. That’s a punishment.
And why is that punishment there? The implication, of course, is because they’ve been unfaithful. We read in chapter one and chapter two, they’ve forgotten their first love, right, out of Revelation. So that’s why I described it that way and so this discipline here is a little more specific.
Without a prince or a king, as I said, that is, that’s the implication because they’re being invaded. They’re going to be in a captivity and they’re not going to have their own leaders. They’re going to have someone else lead them, foreigners, and that’s not good.
Without a sacrifice or an effort, no more temple, no more access to the priest’s sacrifices, taking away these natural, on the one hand, of a nation state, which is a good proper thing ordinarily, and then supernatural, as it were, that is, the instituted worship in particular, but not uniquely that, and everything related to that in the land itself, the land of promise, all gone. They were there in both cases to comfort the people of God, both externally and externally, and the Lord says, I’m going to take away the comfort. Remember chapter one? Why? And chapter two was brought up again because they’re like, look at us.
We’re prospering. God must love us. We’re doing okay.
God’s like, okay, that’s what you think? I’m going to take away the prosperity because you’re misinterpreting the prosperity. To your advantage to sin. That’s one of the sub-themes in this whole book, and so here again with this punishment, that fits that background.
I’m taking away all these good things, and you’re going to suffer accordingly. Punishment today, not having a home country, would be punishment indeed. The pilgrims struggled with that.
Not as bad, though, because they could have stayed in England. It’s just been not to their advantage. It was worse for the Huguenots.
Losing France to the Roman Catholic powers that be that persecuted them at the St. Bartholomew’s Massacre in the 1570s, for example, is a terrible thing. Losing social leaders and therefore losing peace, protection, prosperity, and it is indeed a punishment from God. And then of course in their case, it wasn’t a particular punishment for the Huguenots’ particular sins.
God may be bringing that punishment to the nation of France itself because they had lots of struggles going on in France, for example, but it’s certainly not a good thing, whatever the case may be. And so today we too in America or in the West may have troubles in our nation, may have bad leaders, may lose access to good churches. Again in Europe, my wife and I were there 15 years ago, had a hard time finding good faithful local churches, reformed churches.
We ended up going to a generic kind of reform-ish church of some sort with all kinds of Americans there. They’re like, ah, there’s nowhere to go. That’s hard.
And maybe it wasn’t a particular sin of theirs, but it’s still a general, I use the word general punishment, broadly speaking. You may not have anything particular to repent about, but it’s not good. And it drives them all the more to come to God and say, we need help, Lord.
Give us more of your mercy and dependence upon you. So loss of churches is especially hard in comparison to a loss of peace in society when we realize that this is what God has given us for our soul. Forever love, verse 5, after where the children of Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God and David their king.
Forever Love
So after a short description of the kind of punishment that will come upon them, he continues to give good news, a good response of the future. This is what’s going to happen, Hosea tells his audience. We have a forever love in the Lord God of the covenants, as we see in the repentance of God’s people here.
They shall return and seek the Lord their God. We already know that that comes from the power of the Holy Spirit upon them. It is God working in them.
The fact that they repent and come to him and want nothing more to do with the false worship and loving of the raisin cakes of the pagans, because their hearts have changed. They have been pricked. The punishment has come to full fruition.
To get to verse 5, you had to go through verse 4, which is conviction, hardship, and difficulties external and internal in our Christian walk. Here again, collectively of course, the entire church slash nation of Israel. Afterward, the children shall return and seek the Lord and David their king.
That is, the Israel or the church of the Old Testament shall seek out the Lord, which is another way of saying repenting, obviously, because repentance is not seeking foreign gods, but seeking the true God, which meant they were not seeking him before, and they were lost in their ways of false worship. It’s not enough, of course, to hate or flee from sin. The best of unbelievers may hate and even reform themselves, and they do.
I’ve seen it. Nikki, he had even better self-control than you do. But of course, they’re fleeing from sin.
Their self-control has nothing to do with because they love Jesus. They just love something else. So it’s sin in another direction.
You just don’t know it. But we must flee sin, false worship, violations of the first table law, wherever it may be found, and seek our Lord God Almighty for his sake, seeking him wherever he may be, which of course is in his word, preached, read, and the like, seeking him as a thirsty man and a desert, as you read in the psalm last week. And David, their king, will seek the Lord that is the covenant-keeping God, their God.
And David, their king, isn’t that interesting? I think we all know that isn’t literally David. David, the king, in his office in particular, is a picture of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, and seeking him is to seek him as their Lord and Savior, that he is their master. Remember, redemption in the Bible and in our catechism, Jesus Christ, our Redeemer, has three offices, prophet, priest, and king.
And kingship has something to do with you being saved. It’s his power and dominion over you and subduing you. That’s the language we use, that’s a good language.
God subdues you to himself. And the Christians are called in our sanctification to say, yes, I want God, King Jesus, as my Lord, as my King, and I want to submit to him. That’s part of the calling that we have to tell people of the gospel.
Repentance means fleeing from sin, but also means not just simply accepting Jesus as Savior in the sense of, he takes away my sins, that’s great, I’ve got no more responsibilities. And churches do that, again, whether intentionally or not. I’ve seen it, it keeps going on, unfortunately.
And so they never have Jesus as their Lord, as their King, who has a royal law for them. You must submit and obey, and of course that ties into here, they shall fear the Lord and his goodness in the latter days. The fear of God, as we read this morning in sanctification, is tied to obedience there in Jeremiah, to follow him all the days of the life.
It is a blessed thing to rest and follow Jesus as our King to protect us, not only from the world, but from ourselves. Fear of God is also a telltale sign of true repentance, so the latter part of verse 5, not just the natural fear that a finite being would have before the awesome might of the infinite space and a supernova. You can imagine how terrifying that is, even to Adam before the fall.
I mean, it’s just an awe-inspiring thing. So there’s different ways of describing and understanding the word fear. We only have one word, fear, although we do have the word terror, they’re related.
Almost like in English, we only have one word for love. Okay, why don’t we have four or five like the Greeks do, because they’re very helpful to have those different. The same with fear, there’s different types of fear.
Now I’m talking about here, this text is not about the natural fear the finite would have in response to seeing the infinite. It’s awe-inspiring and humbling, just wow, this is something else. That’s what they had with God.
But the moral fear of a child to a parent they love. They don’t wish to displease them. Their highest respect is the Lord God and his will, and they are fearful of displeasing him.
Not a servile fear, that’s the description there in the New Testament, in fact, but the fear of a child, the proper godly fear. Philippians 2.12, Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, I’ll tell you right now, think about how encouraging that is. The apostle’s saying you’ve always obeyed.
Well, my sanctification’s incomplete. I know, but it’s sufficient enough to say you’ve always obeyed. Not my presence only, but now much more in my absence.
I’m not here watching you. Work out your salvation with what? Fear and trembling. For as God who works in you, both to will and do his good pleasure.
The implication being, of course, that they will be obedient. They’ll throw out what? The false worship, the raisin cakes. I don’t care how good they are.
It’s like being on a diet. You know the diet’s the right thing to do. You gotta take those raisin cakes and throw them out the window.
Sometimes you gotta what? Cut off your right hand, Jesus said, if you’re serious about the call of discipleship. Not literally, of course, but take away things that are precious to you, because your right hand, I’m sure, is pretty precious to you. And so are these raisin cakes to them.
And submit to God, our King, with godly fear, because he first loved us. The text highlights the church’s response to God’s covenant covenantal grace and love and faithful love to them, but assumes it was the Holy Spirit, of course, that moved them, as I said before, and therefore they embrace to love him, to fear him, and his goodness in the latter days. And it’s interesting here that he says the latter days.
Right, latter days, that remind you of anything? Prophecy, right? Eschatology, bastards, great stuff. We just finished Professor Venema’s book, The Promise of the Future, which covered all the four major eschatological positions or positions of the end times for us, so I’m not going to go through that for you, but you can actually find that online if you want to check out the book, and you can, as it were, check it out and read it, like at a library. But here, this is a promise of the return of the Lord God Almighty, and therefore it ties this text to the coming of Christ.
Like all the other texts I talk about in the latter days or the end days that were picked up in the New Testament, Peter quotes them, like Joel, for example, and says, we’re in those latter days, we’re in the end days. I’m quoting from Joel, and Joel and Hosea, you can quote here in Hosea, and not just the other well-known passages in Isaiah and Jeremiah, but here in this as well, pointing to the time of Jesus Christ. So there will be a future, and it does happen, they become under captivity, right? They lose access to the priests, they lose access to the temple, that is formal public worship, that’s a punishment upon them.
They lose access to their own king and their own nation, another form of punishment upon them, and then they’re brought back into the land, and Jesus comes in the latter day, and this is fulfilled in that great prophecy of Ezekiel 36 and elsewhere in the New Testament era. This is what this is a parallel to, same idea, different language. It’s pointing to the time that we find ourselves in today.
And so, in the latter days in which we find ourselves, we too should pray this prophecy will continue to be fulfilled. It isn’t just one time. We’re in this prophecy right now.
In the latter days, more and more of God’s people are called by Him, they fear Him, they seek Him out in His goodness. Pray the Lord of the harvest to bring more of His people into His church, even within the body of Christ, for many have forgotten their first love. We pray that they would have a full repentance, as indeed the rest of us, and that we would come back to Him with a proper fear of a love, of a love that submits to a greater love, of the love of a forgiving Father who has given us an everlasting covenant.
Amen. Let us pray. Indeed, God Almighty, may our hearts rejoice in seeing that You have fulfilled this by bringing Your Son, Jesus, as the King who sits on the throne of David, and that You have therefore, from that position, subdued our wills.
We pray You continue to subdue more of those who are unbelievers, but particularly in this context of this passage, it is more directly applicable to other Christians who profess the name of Christ but are living in gross public violation of Your law, specifically the first table, that they would too come back to fear of the Lord their God and mourn their sin. Our God and Savior, continue to keep us humble, we pray, and we can help others. And pray to this end, God, that more of Your people would be drawn to You and to Your faithful love.
By our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen.