1. "Who you give your thanksgiving to shows whether or not you understand what Christianity is all about."

2. "He alone is uncreated. All else that is was created by Him and is dependent on Him."

3. "If we are God's people, it's not because of our greatness, but because of His love. He has made us His people. We are dependent on Him. We were made to know Him, to be in relationship with Him, to be faithful to Him."

4. "Israel is a luxuriant vine that yields its fruit. The more his fruit increased, the more altars he built. When Hosea came to address Israel, they were apparently not in turmoil. No, at this time it seems they were prosperous. The problem was not with their tables being empty. Their tables were full, but their hearts were empty to the Lord."

5. "They thought that good food was bad and the bad food was good. They thought their practices were religious medicine leading to spiritual health, when in fact they were idolatrous poisons leading only to death and destruction. Can you imagine being so blessed and so blind at the same time?"

6. "God's anger never goes astray. It never has the wrong object. It never has the wrong intensity. It never has the wrong power or the wrong effect. It works perfectly in concert with His love for Himself and all that is good."

7. "Which of our actions, looking back on this year, are more like sowing the wind than sowing good seeds? A fair bit of time and energy was put into it. And all seems to be more questionable than we would like to admit."

8. "A more faithful Christian response to God's blessings of this year at Thanksgiving may not be merely contented cooking and eating on Thursday, but sincere soul searching and prayer that God would show us the truth about ourselves."

9. "Mourning and grief may be appropriate, not simply in war-torn parts of Gaza or the Ukraine or Nigeria, but in prosperous homes in DC and Prince George's County and Northern Virginia."

10. "Accurate self-knowledge is one of the most valuable things in life, as necessary as air or water. That's where the Holy Spirit uses God's Word, the Bible, and God's people, the church, uniquely."

Observation Questions

1. In Hosea 8:1, what two charges does the Lord bring against Israel that explain why judgment is coming upon "the house of the Lord"?

2. According to Hosea 8:4-6, what did Israel do with their silver and gold, and what is God's response to the calf of Samaria?

3. In Hosea 9:1-2, what specific accusation does God make against Israel regarding their threshing floors, and what consequence does He announce for their food supply?

4. What does Hosea 9:10 reveal about how God originally viewed Israel when He first found them, and what happened when they came to Baal-peor?

5. According to Hosea 10:1, how did Israel respond as their fruit and prosperity increased?

6. In Hosea 10:12-13, what does the Lord command Israel to do, and what does He say they have actually done instead?

Interpretation Questions

1. Why is the image of Israel as an unfaithful spouse (playing the whore) particularly significant given the context of harvest festivals and fertility worship in the ancient Near East?

2. Hosea 8:7 says Israel "sows the wind" and will "reap the whirlwind." What does this agricultural metaphor teach us about the relationship between idolatry and its consequences?

3. In Hosea 8:12, God says that even if He wrote His laws "by the ten thousands, they would be regarded as a strange thing." What does this reveal about the spiritual condition of Israel and the danger of familiarity with religious practices without true devotion?

4. How does Hosea 10:1 explain the tragic irony of Israel's prosperity—that God's blessings actually became the occasion for greater unfaithfulness rather than greater gratitude?

5. What is the significance of God threatening that Israel will "return to Egypt" (Hosea 8:13; 9:3) when He had specifically promised in Deuteronomy that they would never return there?

Application Questions

1. Hosea 10:1 shows that as Israel's prosperity increased, so did their idolatry. As you reflect on this past year, in what specific ways might increased blessings (financial security, career success, family stability) have drawn your heart away from dependence on God rather than toward gratitude?

2. The Israelites continued religious rituals to Yahweh while also worshiping Baal. What are some "dual allegiances" in your own life where you maintain outward Christian practice while trusting in something else (career, relationships, financial planning, political solutions) for your security and satisfaction?

3. God says Israel regarded His laws as "a strange thing" (Hosea 8:12). How would you honestly evaluate your own familiarity with and response to Scripture? What practical step could you take this week to ensure God's Word does not become strange or foreign to you?

4. Hosea 10:12 calls Israel to "break up your fallow ground, for it is the time to seek the Lord." What area of your spiritual life has become hard, neglected, or unproductive, and what would it look like to "break up" that ground through repentance and renewed attention?

5. As you approach Thanksgiving this week, how might your celebration look different if you took seriously the question of "to whom do we give thanks"? What specific practice could you incorporate with your family or community to ensure your gratitude is directed to the Lord rather than remaining a general sense of thankfulness?

Additional Bible Reading

1. Deuteronomy 28:1-14, 47-68 — This passage contains the blessings and curses of the covenant that form the background for God's judgment in Hosea, including the threat of exile for unfaithfulness.

2. Deuteronomy 7:6-11 — This passage explains why God chose Israel, emphasizing that election was based solely on God's love rather than Israel's merit, a key point in understanding God as the faithful lover.

3. 1 Kings 12:25-33 — This passage describes Jeroboam's establishment of the golden calves at Bethel and Dan, providing the historical origin of the idolatry that Hosea condemns.

4. Romans 1:18-25 — Paul's description of humanity exchanging the glory of God for created things parallels Israel's sin of misattributing God's blessings to false gods.

5. Psalm 103:1-14 — This psalm models the proper response to God's blessings that Israel failed to give, calling the soul to bless the Lord and forget none of His benefits.

Sermon Main Topics

I. Introduction: Thanksgiving's Historical Roots and Connection to Hosea

II. The Lover: The Lord and His Character

III. The Beloved: Israel as God's Chosen People

IV. The Beloved's Response: Israel's Sin of Idolatry

V. God's Response: Judgment Upon Israel's Unfaithfulness

VI. Application: A Call to Self-Examination and Repentance

---

Detailed Sermon Outline

Of course, this week around American tables, families will face the perennial question parents always get this time of year from children: Mommy, Daddy, where did Thanksgiving come from?

In my unending attempt to help out parents, I present an historical answer. We celebrate Thanksgiving because each year the Congress requests the President to make a proclamation to call the people of the nation to acknowledge to God His blessings to us in the year. We do this because, as President Washington said in his first year in office, it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor.

Lest you think that this cultural goodness began with the executive branch, Washington was just doing what seven years before the Congress had done. Before we had a president, the Congress in 1782 issued this call. It is the indispensable duty of all nations not only to offer up their supplications to Almighty God, the giver of all good, for His gracious assistance in a time of distress, but also in a solemn and public manner to give Him praise for His goodness in general, and especially for great and signal interpositions of His providence in their behalf. Therefore, the United States in Congress assembled, do hereby recommend the observation of a day of solemn thanksgiving to God for all His mercies, and they do further recommend to all ranks and testify their gratitude of God for His goodness by a cheerful obedience to His laws, and by protecting each in His station and by His influence, the practice of true and undefiled religion, which is the great foundation of public prosperity and national happiness. Of course, behind even this was the simple common practice in American families and communities by that point for a century and a half of recognizing God's provision through the harvest.

Most famously, there is that first meal in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1621.

So how am I going to get us from this seasonal bit of American history to our subject this month, the Old Testament prophet, Hosea.

Now, if you've been reading Hosea carefully and sensitively, I suggest that there is an exceedingly obvious and direct route.

The whole problem of the people of Israel at the time of Hosea was based around their desire for good harvests and how they would get good harvests. And when they had a good harvest, who their thanksgiving was to, that's the whole thing. So what we see in Hosea is exactly the fact that the thanksgivings that they gave were aimed at the wrong gods. And the Lord calls them out on this. Many societies have some way of marking the ingathering of crops in the harvest as the winter approaches.

In England it's Harvest Sunday, usually a bit earlier than our Thanksgiving. Well in ancient Israel it was by festivals. The festivals in the spring for the ingathering of the grains, and then in the fall for the ingathering of the grapes. This latter fall festival was the bigger one because it included really all the harvest of the year. You can read about it back in Deuteronomy 16:13.

It was called the Feast of Booths. That's Deuteronomy 16:13. It was especially important in ancient Israel because it was always threatened by the popular worship of the pagan fertility gods Baal and Asherah. So exactly what we're doing this week as Americans Thinking about our prosperity, the blessings we've known, and who we ascribe them to were exactly at the point that ancient Israel was again and again led away into great unfaithfulness and idolatry through. That's why the Lord sent Hosea to them.

He was preaching from around 750 BC to right before the invasion in 722 when Assyria wiped the nation out. Jonah around the beginning of that time had gone from Israel to the capital of Assyria, to Nineveh, and preached repentance. And they, the capital of the threatening Assyrian empire, their capital, had responded with repentance. They had repented to the Lord. Isaiah, in the decade or so at the end of Hosea's long ministry, would be preaching to the southern kingdom, to the kingdom of Judah.

And during those middle decades, between the ministry of Jonah and the first in the last few years of Isaiah's ministry, Hosea was preaching to Ephraim and the other nine of the original 12 tribes, which had separated off from Judah and Jerusalem down in the south. And from the very beginning of that separation, there were problems. The rebellion's leader, Jeroboam, nationalized the religious practices. He didn't want his people heading down south. Into Jerusalem to worship, taking the wealth of the nation down there in their sacrifices and offerings.

So he set up two temples that God never authorized, one in the south of the nation at Bethel or Gilgal, and one in the north at Dan. And he set up his own priesthood, having no relationship to the tribe of Levi or the family of Aaron that God had selected. And as we noticed last week, it didn't take long for the families of the Israelites to move from worshiping the right God wrongly to simply worshiping the wrong gods altogether. And those gods especially were the gods of fertility, Baal and Asherah, and their public worship involved public religious prostitution, visually depicting the lie that prosperity came from what we do or with the assistance of other gods, when the truth was it all came from the Lord.

Who you give your thanksgiving 2 shows whether or not you understand what Christianity is all about. To cover this story of love today, we'll have four simple parts: the Lover, the Beloved, and then to complete the story, the Beloved's response, and finally how God received that response. Put most simply, we have God, Israel, sin, and judgment. God, Israel, sin and judgment. Those are what we must understand to begin to fashion some idea of love's requirement as we see it in these middle chapters of Hosea.

You remember back in chapters 1 to 3, we'd seen the Lord call Hosea to marry this unfaithful wife. We've spoken of understanding Hosea, the prophet, and the unfaithful wife, Gomer, on three levels. One, it's historical, the real people, this happened. Number two, it stood as an analogy throughout the book for God, the faithful husband's relationship with Israel, the unfaithful spouse. And third, there's always the level for us today as Christians reading this.

We understand how we as God's people today who have received God's blessings that we can be unfaithful in our response to God. Well, I pray that as we look at these chapters, we will be able to become more aware of who God is, of what we owe Him, of how we've responded to Him, and of what that means to each one of us. And I pray that you will also end up seeking the Lord today. So we'll look at the Lord, the lover, the beloved, the beloved's response, and how the Lord received this response.

First, the lover, the Lord. This word here is used for God, but it is not simply a generic word for the deity. This is instead a particular God. If you turn to this passage in Hosea beginning on page 767 in the Bibles provided or just in your own copy that you brought with you, Hosea chapter 8, you'll see the ESV follows the long established convention in English of taking the four consonant name of God revealed first to Moses in the burning bush, which literally seems to mean I am that I am. And rendering it in all caps, L-O-R-D.

It's a statement of ultimate self-determination. Sometimes the Hebrew is simply transliterated into English as Yahweh, a derivative of the Hebrew verb to be. The name itself tells us important things about the God of the Bible. First we see that the one true God is self-existent. He depends on no one or nothing else to be.

He never needs to have a Thanksgiving God, Thanksgiving Day to thank any other being for the blessings that he has known. His existence and his actions are determined by no other being than him. No one is greater than him. No one created him. No one was before him.

Between him and all else that is, is a great gulf fixed. He alone is uncreated. All else that is was created by Him and is dependent on Him.

Second, from His very name we can see that this one true God is unchanging. He is immutable. He is always the same. As it says in Hebrews, He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Or as the Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it, what is God?

God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being.

So understanding that this is who the Lord is, let's now listen to Hosea chapter eight and see what more we can learn about him, about this God. And so kids, if you're listening, a way to help you in what could be a bit of an academic or abstract point is listen for anything in this chapter you learn about God and write down in a word or two anything you learn about God. As I read through Hosea chapter 8. And you can take that list and go over it with a friend, see if you got the same things afterwards, or you can go over it with your parents at lunch. All right?

Hosea chapter 8, again you'll find that on 767 if you're using the Bibles provided. Hosea chapter 8.

Set the trumpet to your lips. One like a vulture is over the house of the Lord. Because they have transgressed My covenant and rebelled against My law. To Me they cry, 'My God, we Israel know youw.' Israel has spurned the good; the enemy shall pursue him. They made kings, but not through Me.

They set princes, but I knew it not. With their silver and gold they made idols for their own destruction. I have Have spurned your calf, O Samaria, My anger burns against them. How long will they be incapable of innocence? For it is from Israel.

A craftsman made it. It is not God. The calf of Samaria shall be broken to pieces. For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. The standing grain has no heads.

It shall yield no flour. If it were to yield, strangers would devour it. Israel has swallowed up Dracula already. They're among the nations as a useless vessel. For they have gone up to Assyria, a wild donkey wandering alone.

Ephraim has hired lovers. Though they hire allies among the nations, I will soon gather them up. And the king and princes shall soon writhe because of the tribute. Because Ephraim has multiplied altars for sinning, they have become to him altars for sinning. Were I to write for him, My laws by the ten thousands, they would be regarded as a strange thing.

As for My sacrificial offerings, they sacrifice meat and eat it, but the Lord does not accept them. Now He will remember their iniquity and punish their sins, and they shall return to Egypt. For Israel has forgotten His Maker and built palaces, and Judah has multiplied fortified cities, but so I will send a fire upon his cities, and it shall devour her strongholds. We learned so much. We're just going to have time to look at a little bit of it.

Look in verse one. We learned that the Lord has a house. Now here that means not a church building or a temple, but a people that he had specially chosen, the people of Israel. We'll learn more about that in our next point when we look at. What we learn in Hosea about the beloved, God's people.

But an important thing to realize about the Lord is that he has a people. Among other things, that implies that the Lord possesses, he owns, he is an authority over all that that he has authored. The people that he's made belong to him. Now in one sense, of course, everyone on the whole planet belongs to him. We're all made in his image, descended from the man and woman he first made immediately.

But in a special in a real sense, Israel belonged to the Lord, and that Israel had been chosen by God. He made His covenant with them. He set His love upon Israel specially and made promises to them. And you can read some of those in Genesis 12 to Abram, or in Deuteronomy 28 to the nation of Israel through Moses. All of this means that this God of the Bible chooses That is to say, he loves.

He sets his affections on and especially blesses some. All of this we're just deriving from that first phrase there, the house of the Lord. So God has a special people. In what sense does he have them? He is the object of his people's prayers.

We see that in verse 2. And we experience that in our own times together here on Sundays in the morning and in the evening. We talk to this God. We understand that he has a relationship with us. And that we do with him.

He knows us and we know him. The other thing we observe about God from this chapter is that he is good.

And it is this very goodness that causes him to respond in certain ways to certain actions that people do that are wrong. This God, in his very goodness, has anger. Look again at verse 5: I have spurned your calf, O Samaria, my anger burns against them. This God is not limited to this time or that. Thus He knows the future.

He can speak of the future with certainty what He will do or what will happen. He also has all power so He can speak of nations as simply tools of his. I can't help but notice what had happened around the beginning of Hosea's ministry. As I mentioned a moment ago, that was Jonah's ministry to Assyria's capital city of Nineveh. As God really through repentance was strengthening Nineveh, was strengthening Assyria so he could use Assyria to punish his own people.

So sovereign is our God. So much more we could say, but that's it now. For what we want to know is about the lover, God. This is what we begin to see about this God. Look on page 768 in your Bible's provided for our next point.

With this love story, we have to consider second now, the beloved, the object of the Lord's love. What do we learn about Israel in our passage? Well let's look at Hosea chapter 9 and see what we find.

Rejoice not, O Israel, exult not like the peoples, for you have played the whore, forsaking your God. You have loved a prostitute's wages on all threshing floors. Threshing floor and wine vat shall not feed them. And the new wine shall fail them. They shall not remain in the land of the Lord, but Ephraim shall return to Egypt, and they shall eat unclean food in Assyria.

They shall not pour drink offerings of wine to the Lord, and their sacrifices shall not please Him. It shall be like mourners' bread to them, all who eat of it shall be defiled, for their bread shall be for their hunger only. It shall not come to the house of the Lord. What will you do on the day of the appointed festival, on the day of the feast of the Lord? For behold, they are going away from destruction, but Egypt shall gather them.

Memphis shall bury them. Nettles shall possess their precious things of silver. Thorns shall be in their tents. The days of punishment have come. The days of recompense have come.

Israel shall know it. The prophet is a fool. The man of the Spirit is mad. Because of your great iniquity and great hatred. The prophet is the watchman of Ephraim with my God.

Yet a fowler snares on all his ways, and hatred in the house of his God. They have deeply corrupted themselves, as in the days of Gibeah. He will remember their iniquity. He will punish their sins. Like grapes in the wilderness, I found Israel, like the first fruit on the fig tree in its first season.

I saw your fathers, but they came to Baal-peor, and consecrated themselves to the thing of shame, and became detestable, like the thing they loved. Ephraim's glory shall fly away like a bird, no birth, no pregnancy, no conception. Even if they bring up children, I will bereave them till none is left. Woe to them when I depart from them. Ephraim, as I have seen, was like a young palm planted in a meadow.

But Ephraim must lead his children out to slaughter. Give them, O Lord, what will you give? Give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts. Every evil of theirs is in Gilgal. There I began to hate them, because of the wickedness of their deeds.

I will drive them out of my house. I will love them no more. All their princes are rebels. Ephraim is stricken, their root is dried up, they shall bear no fruit.

Even though they give birth, I will put their beloved children to death. My God will reject them because they have not listened to Him. They shall be wanderers among the nations. There's so much in this passage. What do we see about God's people, the recipients of His love here?

Well, they're called Israel. Because they are descended from Israel, also known as Jacob. It was his descendants whom the Lord brought up out of slavery in Egypt through Moses centuries before Joshua. You remember it led them into the land of Canaan. He established its greatness through King David.

In the time of King David's grandson, Rehoboam, the northern ten tribes out of the 12 had taken the northern half of the land and rebelled against Rehoboam's rule and set up a rival kingdom. The southern kingdom had remained with Jerusalem and was called thereafter Judah and was ruled by David's descendants. The northern tribes began under the leadership of the rebellious Jeroboam who had himself crowned their king. Then he established places to worship the Lord in the north that God had never authorized, started a priesthood that was not of the family of Aaron or the tribe of Levi as God had established through Moses. Jeroboam wanted a religious apparatus that would be loyal to him.

So as we've noted already, he created his own. And as we noted, it's a short step from building your own ways to worship God to beginning to worship your own gods. And that's what they had done. We'll turn to that more in the next point. Now I simply want us to understand more of who these people were that Hosea was preaching to.

They were people who had been specially chosen by God. They were people to whom God had specially given his laws. And who were specially receiving his prophets, like Hosea. They could with reason refer to the one true God as their Lord, their God. They were privileged people.

They were largely an agricultural, rural hill people, like people from the Ozarks or the Appalachians. They were not the urbane people who lived down in Phoenicia and were sea traders. They were not the mighty urban people of Assyria with their military powers. No, they were people who were farmers, farming grains and fruits with livestock, especially sheep on the hillsides. They were rural people.

In earlier centuries they had known a zenith of greatness under David and Solomon, but they had only receded from that falling, as I say, into division in the decades after Solomon's death. In the north, their largest and most numerous tribe was called Ephraim, which is why that name is used here interchangeably with Israel. It became the name which Israel is often called by, the whole northern ten tribes, just like the two remaining tribes are called by the name of the largest of those two tribes, Judah. They clearly continued to offer worship and sacrifices to the Lord. They did not stop worshiping the one true God.

They simply added other worship to it.

We'll think more about that in just a moment when we look at what it really meant, what its context was. But it seems, if you look in chapter 9, verse 4, I think their sacrifices were continuing to be made to Yahweh. They were made in his name, very much like in the period with Aaron when they built the golden calf in the wilderness coming out of Egypt. They said they were worshiping Yahweh. But it was this golden calf that they had made.

They were clearly still a special concern of the Lord's because He sent prophets to them like Hosea, like Jonah, like Amos, like Isaiah to the southern kingdom. You see there in chapter 9 verse 10, the Lord recounted something of his history with them using the image of grapes in the wilderness or the first fruit on the fig tree. It was God who found them. He made them His own specially. It's no credit to them that they were God's people.

The Lord had spoken very clearly about that to their forefathers. If you look over in Deuteronomy chapter 7 in verse 6 we read, 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. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set His love on you and chose you. For you are the fewest of all people.

But it was because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath he swore to your fathers, though the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keeps his commandments to a thousand generations, and repays to their face those who hate him, by destroying them. He will not be slack with one who hates him; he will repay him to his face. You shall therefore be careful to do the commandment and the statutes and the rules that I command you today. When the prophet Samuel gave his final address to Israel, he said, the Lord will not forsake his people for his great name's sake, because it has pleased the Lord to make you a people for himself.

So if nothing else, we understand that this people, specially loved by God, have no room for pride.

If we are God's people, it's not because of our greatness, but because of His love. He has made us His people. We are dependent on Him. We were made to know Him, to be in relationship with Him, to be faithful to Him. So much for who the beloved are.

Page 769 in your Pew Bible. Third now, having set up the players, as it were, we come to the actions. So what have we done? What had Israel done in the time of Hosea? What was Israel's response to the Lord's love?

Well, let's look at chapter 10 of Hosea. We'll find more here of what we've seen really in the nine chapters before it. Israel is a luxuriant vine that yields its fruit. The more his fruit increased, the more altars he built.

As his country improved, he improved his pillars. Their heart is false; now they must bear their guilt. The Lord will break down their altars and destroy their pillars. For now they will say, 'We have no king, for we do not fear the Lord and a king, what could he do for us?' They utter mere words with empty oaths; they make covenants. So judgment springs up like poisonous weeds in the furrows of the field.

The inhabitants of Samaria tremble.

For the calf of Bethaven. Its people mourn for it, and so do its idolatrous priests, those who rejoiced over it and over its glory, for it has departed from them. The thing itself shall be carried to Assyria as tribute to the great king. Ephraim shall be put to shame, and Israel shall be ashamed of his idol. Samaria's king shall perish like a twig on the face of the waters.

The high places of Aven, the sin of Israel, shall be destroyed. Thorn and thistle shall grow up on their altars, and they shall say to the mountain, Cover us, and to the hills, Fall on us! From the days of Gibeah you have sinned, O Israel; there they have continued. Shall not the war against the unjust overtake them in Gibeah? When I please I will discipline them, and nations shall be gathered against them when they are bound up for their double iniquity.

Ephraim was a trained calf that loved to thresh, and I spared her fair neck; but I will put Ephraim to the yoke, Judah must plow, Jacob must harrow for himself. Sow for yourselves righteousness, reap steadfast love, break up your fallow ground, for it is time to seek the Lord, that he may come and rain righteousness upon you. You have plowed iniquity, you have reaped injustice, you have eaten the fruit of lies, because you have trusted in your own way and in the multitude of your warriors. Therefore the tumult of war shall arise among your people. And all your fortresses shall be destroyed.

As Shalman destroyed Beth Arbel on the day of battle, mothers were dashed in pieces with their children. Thus it shall be done to you, O Bethel, because of your great evil at dawn the king of Israel shall be utterly cut off.

Friends, Israel is often presented in the Old Testament as a vine. And beginning in chapter 10 verse 1 we see it's clear that this vine has been fruitful. Yet here is the problem.

And it comes crashing right into our Thanksgiving celebrations this morning. Look at chapter 10, verse 1. And if you want to notice one verse from all three chapters, this is the verse you want to notice and understand. Chapter 10, verse 1. Israel is a luxuriant that is spreading, that is lush vine that yields its fruit.

The more his fruit increased, the more altars he built. These are not altars to Yahweh. As his country improved, he improved his pillars. Those are idols to Baal. If you want one verse to understand the situation the Lord had sent Hosea to address, it's right here, Hosea 10:1.

When Hosea came to address Israel, they were apparently not in turmoil. That would come later.

That come nearer to the time when they fall apart. No, at this time it seems they were prosperous. The image could be used of a vine lush, may it have grown and prospered, filled with grapes productive. No, the problem was not with their tables being empty. Their tables were full, but their hearts were empty to the Lord.

This is where Hosea begins to challenge us as the Thanksgiving prophet.

How heavily will your own table be groaning with God's blessings as your family gathers this week?

And what is your heart like in response to these blessings? What did these people do with the prosperity that God had given them? They misattributed it. In response to their prosperity, what do they do? They build more altars.

They take more action and they're building those altars even to the wrong God. These were not altars to Yahweh, these were altars to the false gods, Baal and Asherah. The pillars he mentions here in 10:1 that Israel gave its money to improve were upright stones piled high to represent fertility throughout the land.

This is why it's so telling that Hosea was called to marry Gomer. You have to wonder, had Gomer been a sex worker for one of these false religious temples? Is that what she was? Some goddess of fertility, plying her name, her trade, making the harvest more plentiful thereby? Looking back, Over Hosea's prophecies, we see this theme clearly.

If you look back in Hosea 4:10, they shall eat but not be satisfied. They shall play the whore but not multiply. Friends, again and again there's this image, these terrible images of miscarriage and and of even children being killed. And again, I'm sorry to every young family here. These are hard images to read, but we have to understand this is how serious this topic is.

It's not saying anything about miscarriages that are suffered among us as a congregation today. The Lord is sovereign in all the ways that are mysterious to us. But friends, as this part of God's revelation about these people at this time, What that stood for in the deepest and sharpest way is that all the actions they could take to be fruitful would yield them nothing. He's saying that in the deepest way he can. 4:10, They shall eat but not be satisfied.

They shall play the whore but not multiply. Because they have forsaken the Lord to cherish whoredom and wine and new wine, which take away the understanding. There's a comment that might slow you up on drinking. Do you have so much understanding you can have some despair, have some taken away? Well then have some more wine.

My people inquire of a piece of wood, and their walking staff gives them oracles, for a spirit of whoredom has led them astray and they have left their God to play the whore. They sacrifice on the tops of the mountains and burn offerings on the hills under oak, poplar, and terebinth, because their shade is good. Therefore your daughters play the whore, and your brides commit adultery. I will not punish your daughters when they play the whore, nor your brides when they commit adultery. For the men themselves go aside with prostitutes and sacrifice with cult prostitutes, and a people without understanding shall come to ruin.

Though you play the whore, O Israel, let not Judah become guilty. Enter not into Gilgal, nor go up to Bethaven, and swear not as the Lord lives, like a stubborn heifer, Israel is stubborn. Can the Lord now feed them like a lamb in a broad pasture? Ephraim is joined to idols. Leave him alone.

Stand back.

When their drink is gone, they give themselves to whoring, and their rulers dearly love shame. And then look down in chapter 5, a few verses later, verse 3: I know Ephraim, and Israel is not hidden from me. For now, O Ephraim, you have played the whore; Israel is defiled. Their deeds do not permit them to return to their God. For the spirit of whoredom is within them, and they know not God.

This kind of summary statement over in chapter 6, verse 10: In the house of Israel I have seen a horrible thing: Ephraim's whoredom is there, Israel is defiled.

So with all this as background to our passage, our first verse in chapter 9 makes Even more sins. 9-1, rejoice not, O Israel, exult not like the peoples, for you have played the whore, forsaking your God. You have loved the prostitutes wages on all threshing floors. Threshing floors, places of bringing in the harvest, using the harvest, places of plenty. The irony that God's blessings would be attributed to one who has really been the enemy of God and his people.

It's terrible and it's tragic. How blind do people have to be to think that, as Hosea put it in chapter 9, verse 7, the prophet is a fool. The man of the Spirit is mad. I mean, is that how they were thinking about Hosea when he was giving this prophecy? Is that how they were dismissing him?

They thought that good food was bad and the bad food was good. They thought their practices were religious medicine leading to spiritual health. When in fact they were idolatrous poisons leading only to death and destruction. Can you imagine being so blessed and so blind at the same time? That's the people of Israel that Hosea is called to speak to.

Not knowing a lack of blessing, knowing great blessing. A full thanksgiving, but so blind to understand from whence the blessing came. So blind as to its source. Oh, beloved, look at many of those that share our thanksgiving table this week.

I remember one sermon I've shared with you before when a pastor in London named Edmund Calamy was being pitied during his sermon by his congregation. Because of his last sermon, he was one of those who in what's called the Great Ejection would lose their job. The parliament had come up with new requirements and he couldn't agree to them and his whole congregation knew it. They'd been given a year to think about it and he wasn't gonna do it. So he was now preaching his last sermon to them.

And he knew that as doing that, that the congregation knew he was giving up his source of livelihood. And so he knew they would be pitying him. So he decided to preach to them from 2 Samuel chapter 24, where David sinfully numbers the people in his pride. He does the census, which when you, the more you study it, the more you see how just horrendously wrong that was for David to do. And David should have known better.

But he did it anyway. And he points out to them a detail in the text that though God had told David that he would be punished for it, the punishment didn't come immediately. And Calvary meditates on that apparent tension. And he says in his sermon, maybe some will say, I have committed many sins, but I'm not brought into any trouble.

Remember it was nine months after David had numbered the people before he was in trouble. But as sure as God is in heaven, sin will bring trouble sooner or later. Though one sin a hundred years, yet shall he be accursed. Maybe thy prosperity He makes way for Thy damnation. And this is Thy greatest distress, that Thou goest on in sin and prosperity.

Beloved, Israel responded to God's blessings by rejecting God and by choosing their sins instead.

We have to get to the fourth part to complete our story. We have the lover and the beloved. We have the actions of the beloved. How the beloved Israel, the people, the house of the Lord has responded to the Lord. So now what will the lover do?

Number four, what is God's response to Israel's sin?

The Lord had warned His people centuries earlier through Moses as they had prepared to go into the Promised Land in Deuteronomy chapter 28 and 29.

We find one part of that warning, Deuteronomy 29, beginning in verse 16.

Deuteronomy 29. Beginning in verse 16.

You know how we lived in the land of Egypt, how we came through the midst of the nations through which you passed. And you've seen their detestable things, their idols of wood and stone, of silver and gold which were among them. Beware lest there be among you a man or a woman or clan or tribe whose heart is turning away today from the Lord our God to go and serve the gods of those nations. Beware Lest there be among you a root bearing poisonous and bitter fruit, one who, when he hears the words of this sworn covenant, blesses himself in his heart, saying, 'I shall be safe, though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart.' this will lead to the sweeping away of moist and dry alike. The Lord will not be willing to forgive him, but rather the anger of the Lord and His jealousy will smoke against that man and the curses written in this book will settle upon him, and the Lord will blot out his name from under heaven, and the Lord will single him out from all the tribe of Israel for calamity, in accordance with all the curses of the covenant written in the book of the law.

And the next generation, your children who rise up after you, and the foreigners who come from a far land will say, 'When they see the afflictions of that land and the sickness with which the Lord has made it sick, the whole land burned out with brimstone and salt, nothing sown, nothing grown, where no plant can sprout, an overthrow like that of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the Lord overthrew in his anger and wrath. All the nations will say, why has the Lord done thus to the land? What caused the heat of this great anger? And then the people will say, It is because they abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them up out of the land of Egypt, and went and served other gods and worshiped them. Gods whom they had not known and whom he had not allowed to them.

Therefore the anger of the Lord was kindled against this land, bringing upon it all the curses written in this book. And the Lord uprooted them from their land in anger and fury and great wrath, and cast them into another land as they are this day.

So when we turn to Hosea, what have we seen? Well, friends, look again at those first three verses of chapter 8.

Said the trumpet to your lips, One like a vulture is over the house of the Lord, because they have transgressed my covenant and rebelled against my law. To me they cry, My God, we Israel know you. Israel has spurned the good; the enemy shall pursue him. God would sovereignly use Israel's political and military enemies to pursue Israel, to battle and defeat and rout and scatter Israel. And this is exactly what was going to happen a few months or a few years after Hosea's 30 year long preaching ministry to this nation stopped.

Can you imagine Hosea giving out this message for 30 years from the 750s into the 720s. That is a long time for a faithful preaching ministry. And a long time for a faithful preaching ministry to be spurned. The question is, with what is true, what would be done? The people of Assyria's capital, Nineveh, they responded with repentance when Jonah came.

Recently. Well, what now of Israel? What now of God's own people? What do church people do when they hear the truth? We know people we think of as unrighteous, but we know what they do.

What do we do who know ourselves, think of ourselves, call ourselves to be the people of God? What do we do with the truth? The Lord makes it clear here that all the money and effort they put into these idols, their silver and gold, they mentioned there in chapter 8 verse 4, would lead to no good, but only to their own destruction.

Friend, whether you are a member of a church or not, of this church or another one, what have you done with God's words?

His warnings to you. How have you directed your time, your efforts, your money over this year? Your hopes? Have they been toward good ends or bad?

Have they been toward godly relationships, the kind of relationships God's Word would encourage you to have? Or have you sought out ungodly relationships?

Have you put your energies and efforts into extending God's sovereign reign over every aspect of your own being? Or have you sought to limit it, or even escape and evade as if we could ever hide from the Lord? God's response to the Israelites' false worship here is instructive to us. We see it in chapter 8, verse 5. We see two big takeaways.

One, their idolatry didn't work. It didn't serve them. They weren't getting any credit with the one true God for their worship of the false gods. You look there again in verses 5 and 6 of chapter 8, I have spurned your calf, O Samaria. My anger burns against them.

How long will they be incapable of innocence? For it is from Israel's, a craftsman made it, it is not God. The calf of Samaria shall be broken to pieces. So their idolatry didn't work, number one. Number two, instead of helping them, their idolatry actually hurt them.

Their idolatry had an effect. It actually hurt them. You see in there, verse 5, the Lord says, My anger burns against them. Friends, what a thing to consider. We thought about that phrase last week, God having a controversy with his people.

We thought, if there's anybody we do not want to have a controversy with, it's God. We might survive controversies with other people. We might do okay in some contests, but not in a controversy with God. He is literally the last being in the universe. Or we want to be in a controversy with, that we would want to have his anger.

Anger among us is such a varied thing, isn't it? It's wrong as often as it's right. But God's anger never goes astray. Isn't that interesting? It never has the wrong object.

It never has the wrong intensity. It never has the wrong power or the wrong effect. It works perfectly in concert with His love for Himself and all that is good. It takes into account all the accompanying circumstances and qualifications. Hosea 8:7 has this famous image of sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind.

The image is one of ultimate vanity.

Futility, uselessness. Sowing is understood as very laborious work. And usually, of course, it's essential work. It's seed that's sown, which then grows and produces the food that our bodies need and is sustained by. But here, Hosea has this gross picture, like a mime sowing the wind, the air, Nothing, empty.

And the result is a powerfully destructive result of a whirlwind, a tornado.

So, friend, which of our actions, looking back on this year, are more like sowing the wind than sowing good seeds? A fair bit of time and energy was put into it. And all seems to be more questionable than we would like to admit, which have proven fruitful. God warns His people against giving ourselves to labor that in the end yields nothing.

Here in chapter 8 verses 8 to 13 really summarize the Lord's response to His people giving themselves to spiritual unfaithfulness. There in chapter 8 again, verse 8, Israel is swallowed up already. They're among the nations as a useless vessel. For they have gone up to Assyria, a wild donkey wandering alone. Ephraim has hired lovers, though they hire allies among the nations, I will soon gather them up.

And the king and princes shall soon writhe because of the tribute, because Ephraim has multiplied altars for sinning. They have become to him altars for sinning. Were I to write for him my laws by the ten thousands, they would be regarded as a strange thing. As for my sacrificial offerings, they sacrifice meat and eat it, but the Lord does not accept them. Now he will remember their iniquity and punish their sins.

They shall return to Egypt. Egypt is what the Lord is calling here in history. Ended up being Assyria. Egypt is referencing back to that final threat to God's disobedient people in Deuteronomy 28 at the end of the long series of curses. The very last thing he says in Deuteronomy 28 is about the unfaithful people.

The Lord will bring you back in ships to Egypt, a journey that I promised you should never make again. And there you shall offer yourselves for sale to your enemies as male and female slaves. But there will be no buyer. Friend, do you realize what's happening? These children of Abraham, having shown themselves no different than the world, in their lives and worship will be redistributed among the people of the world.

They will be going back into the world. It would be like that call to Abram out of Ur, the Chaldees, a thousand years before. So, this part of that experiment is now done. And having received a millennium of God's treasure, His blessing, His love, the people continued to reject it. And so tellingly, I think, it's not really literally Egypt, it's Assyria.

It's the people of the east where Ur was, the Chaldeans, where Abram had come from. Empire that comes and takes Israel into which they are scattered back into the nations that they would live like and worship like.

Friends, there is another way. That wasn't the end of all of God's people. In the final verses of chapter 9 and chapter 10, There is a warning about the grave penalty of being cut off from God. You look at their last verse in chapter 9, verse 17, Hosea warned the people that God would reject those who wouldn't listen to him. And then in chapter 10 at the end, verse 15, there's the warning that the final king of Israel will be cut off.

Both of those things happened historically, not many years after Hosea finished his prophetic ministry among them.

But in the whole Bible, we know that there's more to the story. We learn in the New Testament that there is another one who was cut off for us.

The one who we confessed earlier as the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, is only begotten. This one came for us and for our salvation. The Father's love is expressed by sending His only Son to save and rescue us, to sustain us. This is the good news that brings us together as we begin every week here rejoicing in God's provision for His sinful but earnestly repentant people who truly love Him and trust Him. Though we sin, we trust in Christ.

We pray He changes and forgives us. We want to continue to follow him. Friends, this is the plea of every true child of God. We rely not on our own goodness, on our own righteousness, on how well we have done. We rely on what God has done in Christ, the one who obeyed perfectly for us.

We have no other hope. How wonderful the Father's love to undeserving sinners like us.

But do we really know ourselves to be that? Interesting, isn't it, that a more faithful Christian response to God's blessings of this year at Thanksgiving may not be merely contented cooking and eating on Thursday, but sincere soul searching and prayer that God would show us the truth about ourselves.

Hosea's ministry was no doubt to recount the truth about God to his people and to remind them of their duties and to convict them of their sins and to pronounce his judgment upon them.

And for some of us here today, the right way to thank God this year is to begin with lament.

Mourning and grief may be appropriate, not simply in war-torn parts of Gaza or the Ukraine or Nigeria, but in prosperous homes in DC and Prince George's County and Northern Virginia.

What has our year been marked by?

Giving ourselves in sinning, regarding God's law as a strange thing, unfamiliar to us, His Word unread, His instructions ignored.

Young people, if the Bible seems odd to you, is that a more significant statement about the Bible or about you?

We're looking at our lives. Could we be said to have forgotten our God or to have forsaken him? We need God's help to be able to answer such questions. Because of the one thing we see here in Hosea 9:9, In their sins, we read of these Israelites, they have deeply corrupted themselves. Accurate self-knowledge is one of the most valuable things in life, as necessary as air or water.

That's where the Holy Spirit uses God's Word, the Bible, and God's people, the church, uniquely. When we are told in 2 Corinthians 13:5, Examine yourselves to see whether you're in the faith. Test yourselves. Friends, we are literally here to help each other do that.

The reason we joined this local church is not in order to sort of nitpick at fruit and sin and say, oh, I see six sins in you, you're probably not a Christian. No, it's to look at God's grace in our lives to give us honest feedback about ourselves, to let people get to know us well enough to do that and to call on spiritually mature people to lead the way in doing that. And yet if you find in yourself this morning, Too much like the Israelites here, too much characterized by great evil, as he puts it in 10:15, of unfaithfulness or ingratitude, trusting in our own strength, committing injustice, showing iniquity of this kind or that.

Make a choice beyond recognizing the fact and beyond merely lamenting it.

Choose to not continue in your sin.

Choose, as he says here in chapter 10 verse 12, sow for yourselves righteousness, reap steadfast love. Break up your fallow ground, for it is the time to seek the Lord that He may come and reign righteousness upon you.

Let's pray.

Friends, let me just ask you to take a few moments in quietness Having heard God's Word, examine your own heart.

Acts 4 says, There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.

Romans 3 says, But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the Law through the Law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith.

In Jesus Christ for all who believe.

Lord God, we pray that our sins would not have corrupted ourselves so fully, that we're beyond the reach of youf Holy Spirit.

We pray, Lord, that yout would teach us the truth about ourselves. Lord, if we are like these children of Israel, with all the blessings yous've given us lost, teach us the truth, Lord. Sow righteousness in us. Help us to turn from our sins and to trust in Christ truly and fully. Give us the grace to do that, we pray.

Lord, if we are those who do know and love your word, who do not regard your law as something strange, who do not give thanks to other gods, who sincerely want to see your rule extended over every part of our own lives. From our own hearts in truth to our thoughts and speech, to our actions. Then Lord we pray you'd give us for all the sins that we do commit and that we do think of an assurance of the salvation you've given us in Christ. Lord, help us to rejoice in the confidence of his righteousness given to us as a gift of grace through faith in him. We pray all this in Jesus' name.

Amen.