Isaiah chapter four says, hear the word of the Lord, O children of Israel, for the Lord has a controversy with the inhabitants of the land. There is no faithfulness or steadfast love and no knowledge of God in the land. There is swearing, lying, murder, stealing, and committing adultery. They break all bounds and bloodshed follows bloodshed. Therefore the land mourns and all who dwell in it languish. and also the beasts of the field and the birds of the heavens, and even the fish of the sea are taken away. Yet let no one contend and let no one accuse, for with you is my contention, O priest. You shall stumble by day, the prophet also shall stumble with you by night, and I will destroy your mother. My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge, because you have rejected knowledge. I reject you from being a priest to me, and since you have forgotten the law of your God, I will also forget your children. The more they increased, the more they sinned against me. I will change their glory into shame. They feed on the sin of my people. They are greedy for their iniquity, and it shall be like people, like priests. I will punish them for their ways and repay them for their deeds. They shall eat, but not be satisfied. They shall play the whore, but not multiply, because they have forsaken the Lord, to cherish whoredom, wine, and new wine, which take away the understanding. 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 sacrificed 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 be come to ruin. Though you play the whore, O Israel, let not Judah become guilty. Enter not into Gilgal, nor go up to Bethhaven, and swear not as the Lord lives. Like a stubborn hyfer, Israel is stubborn. Can the Lord now feed them like a lamb in a broad pasture? Ephraim is joined to idols. Leave him alone. Where their drink is gone, they give themselves to whoring. Their rulers dearly love shame. A wind has wrapped them in its wings, and they shall be ashamed because of their sacrifices. Thanks. You can probably tell just from listening to that passage tonight, and I somewhat joked with some of you this week, wear a hard hat tonight. This is an intense passage. This is one of the few places in Hosea that we don't see much hope. It seems all is lost, all is squandered. And so there's a little bit of a, burden on my heart tonight to teach this passage because of its just straightforward way that it deals with us. I wanted to make a few remarks before we really got into studying the passage tonight, just about some resources for you in studying Hosea. Some of you have been part of our Catalyst groups. That's our weekly home small groups that meet all over the city. We have five different Catalyst groups. And people have a meal together, they discuss what we've heard on Sunday nights from Hosea, and just share life and pray for one another, serve one another. That's a great way to connect. If you haven't connected with one of those after the service tonight, there's just a table out here in the foyer that I would encourage you to stop by. There'll be some people out there that'll be smiling. and they'd love to just help you figure out a time and a place where that might be effective for you. But I also wanted to mention a couple books for you that'll be on our website that you can pick up at some point. One of them on Hosea particularly, this is a commentary by Derek Kidner called The Message of Hosea. It's short, it's a little bit, just a good brief understanding of the book of Hosea and so as you're reading and studying Hosea with us, that might be a good resource for you just to work through as well. And then the other one that I wanted to just encourage you to, to kind of balance and charge your heart up devotionally, is a little paperback by John Bunyan, the Puritan preacher. It's called All Love's Excelling, and it's an exposition of Ephesians 3, 18 and 19. I've been reading this one a little bit once a week to go along with Hosea, and it's been very helpful for my soul. So those books will be on our website, and just thought they would be of help to you. as we continue our study through Hosea. I don't know what our world would be like if we didn't have signs. Think about this for just a minute. Can you imagine driving through a neighborhood that you aren't familiar with, looking for a particular house and a particular street, and there being no way of knowing if that was the exact one? You're looking for Smith Street and driving around and there's no signs to tell you anything about it. That would be a little bit frustrating for me because I like to know and see visually, here's the sign, go this way. For Christmas this last year, I bought my wife a GPS just to give us signals and signs whenever we were traveling somewhere. For her in particular, just to say, hey, We're traveling to this place, we might not know where it is, and the GPS will communicate back to us, turn right here, turn left there. She's decided to install the voice of a Hungarian grandmother that makes you feel a little bit guilty for even being in the car with her while you're turning, so that just annoys me a little bit, but how impractical, how important are those signs to have? How useful are they? Even on your car, on the dashboard, there are certain gauges and signs that tell you this is the state or condition of your car. They tell you how the oil pressure is doing, how the fuel level is, how fast you're even going. They're all there to compute and to give you information to say this is the status of how you're driving in this very moment. Wouldn't it be nice to have some sort of dashboard for your heart? or your church, just some sort of measurement stick that you could look at that would kind of give back to you some signs or some indications of how things are in your heart and in your life. I mean, I think that would be kind of nice. I could walk in on a Sunday morning, walk into the office, see the dashboard there, and kind of, oh, these people need some prayer here, so I'll do that. These people need the gospel more, so I'll speak about that. These people are doing really well, so I'll just encourage them. That would be nice to have that kind of a dashboard system of health in the church, and even in my life to know, okay, I'm not trusting God in this area, so I need to raise the bar there. That kind of a dashboard would be helpful, I think. We need signs and one of the things that I am so. convinced of as we look at this passage tonight is that this passage gives us some signs about our hearts. We've been talking about spiritual adultery for the last few weeks. That's one of the major themes of the book of Hosea as God has taken this family and made them a vivid picture of the nation of Israel and their relationship to God. And we've seen this case of spiritual adultery and we have to begin to wonder just a little bit, how did they get there? You see, for most people who are in adultery, it's not a matter of just one night deciding, hey, I'm just gonna go commit adultery. I'm just gonna go off and do that. For most people, adultery, even spiritual adultery, is a gradual shift. It's a movement away from a relationship with your spouse or with God that's not just instantaneous and like, hey, I think I'm gonna fling myself there. but it's something that's very subtle, very gradual. And if we had the signs, if we had the warning lights, if we had the indicators to tell us what direction we were headed in, could we avoid a disaster in our own lives? This passage tonight talks about the signs of spiritual adultery. They give us some gauges for our heart to be able to see and some gauges for the church to be able to understand and know how we can be drifting away from God and towards spiritual adultery. In fact, I wanna just communicate to you tonight that spiritual adultery is not a dramatic abandonment of God and his goodness. It's not something that usually happens in most people's life overnight. It's instead a slow, inclined shift away from who God is to how I want him to be. Spiritual adultery isn't a dramatic abandonment in most cases, of God and his goodness, but it's a slow, inclined shift away from who God is, away from rightly understanding and comprehending this is exactly who God is, and changing that to here's how I want God to be. Here's what I want this relationship to look like. Here's what I want God to function and to perform and to be like for me. Hosea 4 gives us some signs. It gives us some dashboard marks to say here is how you know you're headed towards spiritual adultery. Here's how you know that you are inclining and shifting one step away again and again and again from God and His goodness to making God who you want Him to be. So let me pray once again. And then we're gonna look at this passage in depth tonight and see these four signs. There's four different charges that God brings against Israel and they each serve as a sign for us of spiritual adultery and what that looks like in our own lives. But let me pray and then we'll unpack this text together. Father, it is by your grace again that we come to this place to worship you, to sing of how good and kind you have been to us, and to humble our hearts and to submit to your word. Lord, we are thankful as New Covenant believers that you have shown us in your word the failings of the nation of Israel as a way to teach us and to warn us that they serve as an example to us so that we won't reject you, so that we won't fall into spiritual adultery. God, I pray tonight that as we hear these warnings and these charges against the nation, that the signs that they had ignored and disregarded, Father, would not be the very things that we would ignore and disregard, but that we would check our heart, that we would check our church, and that we would not be found out to be spiritual adulterers. Give us humility tonight, Lord. Give us open hearts, open ears. We thank you in Jesus' name, amen. Four signs, four charges here that this text has for us about spiritual adultery. Here's how you know it's coming in your life. And let me say again, this is not an easy text to just walk through. This deeply burdens my heart. I see it here. Look with me at verse one there, chapter four. God now shifts from the story of Hosea and Gomer, and he comes directly, and some believe that this, from chapter four to chapter 14, were a collection of Hosea's sermons to the nation. Here's what Hosea said. Here's what God said through Hosea to the people of Israel to say, this is how you're abandoning me. This is how you're walking away from me. And there's very, very detailed specifics about what that looked like. The word controversy there in verse one, it's a statement of a legal lawsuit. Here's God coming to the nation and saying, we're gonna have a little lawsuit. You're being served right now, as it were, and I am going to come and charge you and complain against you for how you have abandoned me. This is how you've been living, and I don't like it. There's four particular charges in this text that God brings against the nation, and they serve as signs for us of spiritual adultery. The first one is there in verses one to three, and it's this. Spiritually adulterous people disregard the holiness of God. They disregard the holiness of God. The end of verse one there, there's some statements about the moral condition of the nation. Here's what they lived like. God says there is no faithfulness or steadfast love and no knowledge of God in the land. Three things that God is looking for from these people. Faithfulness, that might be translated truth. A love for and a conviction and a following of what is true and right. God says, I don't see that there. Steadfast love, the Hebrew word hesed, it's that deep, committed, sacrificial, we'll go the extra mile kind of love. He says, I don't see that in the nation. And there's no knowledge of God in the land. These people pretend to know me. They pretend like they have a relationship with me. But it's not there. This isn't necessarily the objective doctrine of God that they don't know. It's the relational knowing of God. It's that having that relationship that's in the heart and saying, we love God, we know Him, we hear Him, we follow Him. That's as I look at my people, these people, and I don't see that at all. It's not there. In fact, what is there is found in verse two. There is swearing, lying, murder, stealing, and committing adultery. That's half of the 10 commandments right there that God says they're violating day after day. They break all bounds and bloodshed follows bloodshed. These are a violent, murderous, law-breaking, God-rejecting people. What's the result of that? The result's there in verse three. The land and all who dwell in it languish. I mean, everything's barren. There is nothing thriving in the nation. Even he talks about nature, the fish, the beast of the field, the birds. They're taken, they're gone. It's like Israel is a desert. All because they've disregarded the holiness of God These people have turned aside from what God had called them to, what God had commanded them to be as a people set apart and holy unto Him. They had completely disregarded that and said, no, we have another way of living that we'd like to try. We're gonna pursue other values, other things. And so what you see at the end of verse one and verse two there is a people that have broken the bounds on what it means to know and to follow the holiness of God, and they've given that up to try it their own way. The people that God called out of the wilderness that took and redeemed and walked them through the Red Sea and then brought them to Sinai where he showed them his glory and gave them the way that they were to live and said to them all throughout the book of Leviticus, be holy because I am holy. They've disregarded that holiness of God. They've walked away from it. God is what? Holy? Nah. They've refashioned God in their own image. And they've disregarded and forgotten who He was. This, I don't have to go very far to help you see what that looks like today, even in our own lives. When it gets to the point in our hearts where we're looking at and we're crafting God out of who we want Him to be, what we want Him to be like, how we want Him to be, we're beginning to disregard and reject the holiness of God. I mean, how many people, how many of us sit and think and ponder and go, God is holy. What does that mean as I come and stand before him? That he is infinitely pure, that he is valuable above all other things, that he is completely other and separate from me and who I am. That category of thinking about God is largely lost in our world and in our culture today. Stephen Lawson in his book, Made in Our Image, says this about the holiness of God. He says, my heartfelt concern for the church today is that God's holiness is a forgotten attribute. I believe this because I am convinced that there is too much shallowness and irreverence these days regarding God. If the user-friendly God falls short anywhere, it is in regard to divine holiness. To hear many people talk today, God is a happy God, a helpful God, a laughing God. But a holy God? Hardly. turn on the Average Christian broadcast, read the Average Christian book, listen to the Average Christian speaker, and you will probably not be awestruck with a sense of God's holiness. Our culture today even pushes against the holiness of God. We're constantly kicking against it. Even in prominent denominations in our country, the value and the worth that God says is, this is my holiness. This is what it means for me to be God. This is the way I have defined this world and the way you should live in it. Churches are abandoning and disregarding it again and again and again. That's why you see homosexuality in the church, such a prominent thing. It's because we've disregarded the holiness of God. This is a serious sign of spiritual adultery. Can you look to your heart and your life and say, here's an area where God calls me into light, and I'm not doing that. I'm not walking in that way. And there's not faithfulness, there's not obedience, there's not a knowledge of God. It's an indicator to you and to me of our spiritual adultery. Look at those three things again in verse one. The three things that God looks for. Faithfulness, steadfast love, and a knowledge of him. Those are the positive indications of what it means to walk with God. That is what the Holy Spirit produces in our life as we follow and walk with Jesus. Is there faithfulness to God and His truth? Faithfulness to who He is in your life? Is there a steadfast love, a devotion, a commitment, a sacrificial following of Him? Is there a knowledge of Him? In fact, that very thought of the knowledge of God takes us to the second sign of spiritual adultery. And that's found in verses four through 11. Spiritual adulterers, here's the second thing, spiritual adulterers devalue the Word of God. They devalue the Word of God. Here in verses 4-11, God turns now from talking about the nation and looking to Israel, And it's astounding even. Let no one contend. Let none accuse. It's like God kind of gets in the midst of the children and says, hey, stop pointing fingers at one another, okay? Stop just looking at each other and saying it's their fault, it's their fault. For with you, God says at the end of verse four, for with you is my contention, O priest. God goes right to pointing the finger at the religious leaders. He comes right to the priest of the people and says, you're the ones I have the problem with. You're the ones who are causing the issue. You shall stumble by day, the prophet also shall stumble by night, and I will destroy your mother. The language there of them stumbling and with the prophets as well, God is just gathering all the religious leadership together into one category and saying, you're the problem here, you're the reason, why, what are they doing? Verse six, my people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge. God just lays out the charge right there. My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge. They do not know me. They do not understand my ways. They do not understand who I am and my holiness and what I have called you and redeemed you to. Why? Because you've rejected knowledge. You've forgotten the law. The charge that God lays there against the religious leaders is nothing less than a charge of saying you've disregarded, you've devalued my word. Experientially, that was true of the nation. How many times over the centuries did they find, did they lose and then come back and find the law of God, the word of God again and again? It was like, hey, let's hide the Bible and then Things get really bad, the nations conquer us and we're digging up some ruins and like, there it is again, oh my. Again and again that happened. These people had rejected and dismissed what God had taught, what he had said. And because of that, because the religious leaders were at the front end of that, God says I will reject you from being a priest to me. I will forget your children because you've forgotten the law of God. This is serious, it gets even worse, and here you see the state of their religious life in 7 through 11. Verse 7 says, the more they increased, this is talking about the priest, the more there were more priests. the more they sinned against me. That could be a good sign in a church or in a people where there's more and more religious leaders, that God is working, that something is happening there, but it's not a sure sign because here, as the priest increased, so the sin increased. What were they doing? Verse eight, they fed on the sin of my people. They were greedy for their iniquity. The priest had figured out a pretty good loophole at this time. If people continue to sin and sin is on the rise in the nation, guess what else is on the rise? Sacrifice. And if sacrifice is on the rise in the nation, guess what that means? Lamb kebabs are on the rise in our nation. I mean, they were looking at it in a completely selfish manner. The priests were the ones who got the best portions or the, the grilled portions, I should say, of the sacrifices. It wasn't just discarded and thrown away. It was given to the priests and their families for food. And so they're looking at it as an economic benefit. People keep sinning, sacrifices keep increasing. If sacrifices keep increasing, we have steak every night. Isn't that a good deal? Out to make a profit on the sin of God's people. And God says, he promises them, and it shall be like people. Like the way I judge them, I will judge the priest, and I will punishment them for their ways. I will repay them for their deeds. They will eat, but not be satisfied. They will play the whore, but not multiply, because they have forsaken the Lord to cherish whoredom, wine, and new wine. These priests, these religious leaders, these people were all about pleasure for themselves. They were all about greed and gain. and they had just expressed itself in their whoredom, their drinking, their drunkenness, all of that, which God says at the end of verse 10, takes away their understanding. What a decrepit state, even from the religious leaders, the people who had access to the law, who could speak into the people and say, this is the holiness of God, this is who he is. This is the Word of God completely disregarded, completely lost and devalued. Friends, tonight, this isn't hard for you to grasp where I'm going with this, I hope. When you and I begin to disregard, to devalue, to diminish and set aside God's Word, warning lights should come on about spiritual adultery in your hearts. When you're, instead of picking up the word of God to feed off what he has to say and who he is to you, when you're putting that aside to figure out how Oprah wants you to do things or Dr. Phil or something else out there, what the culture and the media says, this is how you should live life, spiritual adultery, that meter should be running high, the flag should be waving. Far too many churches today Far too many people that would claim the name of Christian have nothing to do with the word of God. They don't know it. They don't understand it. Their pastors and preachers don't even bring it to bear on their lives. And just like the priest of old, they're out to make a buck. They're out to feed off the sins of people. It's a sign of spiritual adultery. When your leaders, when your pastors and elders don't show you the gospel and the word of God, spiritual adultery is running high. When you and your home are disregarding, devaluing, forgetting God's word, danger. Think about this, scripture says that the word of God is living and active, it's sharper than any two-edged sword. All scripture is inspired by God and it is useful for teaching, training, equipping, rebuking, so that the man or woman of God may be equipped for every good work. God has given us his word so that we might know of his love and grace, and so not that we would perform better, but so that we would see Jesus and what he has done for us, and that we would be transformed by the Holy Spirit and walk with him. If we don't know God's word, if we're not careful to pay attention to God's word, How can we think that we might be in a relationship with God? Even in a marriage, if there isn't attention given to, through communication and talking with the spouse, how can that be healthy? How can that be good? John MacArthur says, Israel had failed. When you destroy a biblical base, all you're going to get is chaos. Everything bad had begun to happen because they wouldn't hear the word of the Lord. When we start deciding that the scriptures aren't helpful, or aren't good enough, or aren't the center of our life and practice, we're in the danger zone of spiritual adultery. Third sign here then, This is in verses 12 to 14. Not only have these people dismissed the holiness of God and disregarded it, not only have they devalued God's word, but thirdly, they had begun to denigrate the worship of God. Worship was a joke for these people. Verse 12, 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 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. Here's what's going on here in this passage. God says your worship is a joke. Now understand that these people hadn't just given up completely on the worship of God. They hadn't said, you know, we're just gonna set aside worshiping God, sacrificing, praying to Him. No, not at all. What they had done is they had taken who God is, and they had said, all right, we like certain aspects of God, and so we're going to mix what we know and what we like about him with what we want to have happen, and even what the other nations are doing as they worship God. And so they had begun to synchronize the worship of God with the worship of false gods. and they thought, it's still worshiping God. This happens today just as much when you get Muslims and Jews and Christians and Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses all together and you say, hey, let's just worship God together. It's the same God, it's the same one, right? No, that's exactly what the nation was doing here. Baal, oh yeah, isn't that just our Yahweh? I mean, you call him Baal, we call him Yahweh. It's the same thing, right? and their practice of worship had denigrated. The physical demonstration of that worship completely lost. Now, because they were integrating the worship of Baal with the worship of Yahweh, now they were saying, hey, stick pole that we call God, tell us what's going on. Tell us what's happening in our lives, verse 12. Their walking staff gives them oracles. That's just our iPhones today, by the way. Kidding. Maybe. as the worship of Baal had even increased. The worship of Baal was a very sexual religion. And so they even began to incorporate that into the worship of Yahweh. It's the same God, right? So the practice that they have for Baal, well, let's just bring those sexual practices in with what we're doing with Yahweh and we'll call it the same and it'll be good. So there you get verse 13, they sacrificed on the top of the mountains, right? That's Judaism, sacrifice, good. God likes that. Those were the high places in the Old Testament. Again, not where God had commanded them to sacrifice, but that's what they're doing. They're like, hey, yeah, we're sacrificing and burn offerings on the hills. Like, hey, that's right, that's what God commands. And then under the oak, poplar, terebinth, and Hosea is speaking a little bit tongue-in-cheek here. This is where the adultery is happening. This is where the sexual practices of their worship that they were integrating had begun. Their daughters playing the whore, brides committing adultery, and they were calling it worship. God even goes so far in verse 14 to tell the men, I'm not punishing the women over this, because you're the ones who are leading the charge on this. You men are the one who are leading the nation into it. The men themselves go aside with prostitutes and sacrifice with cult prostitutes, and that's why your daughters are doing that, because you're just, you're showing them, hey, here's the example, this is how you worship God, and they're like, okay, we're in on it too. And a people, end of verse 14, without understanding shall come to ruin. Their worship was completely not the way God had called for it. It was not holy, it was not pure. It wasn't right worship. You see, when we begin to denigrate the right worship of God, when we begin to treat worshiping God like it's something for us instead of for God, We begin to slide towards spiritual adultery. We begin to walk away. That's exactly what these people were doing and that's exactly what it looks like and can look like in our own hearts. When worship is about your preference and your desires and what you want to do, you're just turning God from who he is into how you want him to be. When your attitude and your heart in coming to worship is about what do I get, and how do I feel, and who talks to me, and me, me, me, me, when that song makes me feel good, wave the flag, see the light flashing on the dashboard, danger. The sign of spiritual adultery. When we mix in sin, blatant sin with our worship, spiritual adultery. No one here would accept, I don't think, if you were in a marriage relationship, for your spouse to honor you and to adore you in a loving and right way, but yet in a manner that wasn't towards you. My wife wouldn't accept it if I came in one afternoon with flowers and said, hey, I'm gonna give these to somebody else, but they're for you. I'm gonna be with somebody else, but I'm thinking about you. How do we do that with God? God, I'm here to worship you, but it's really about me. I'm here to make much of you right, but it's really about me. When we denigrate worship like that, we're spiritually adulterous. Are you worshiping God on your own terms? Do you get frustrated when worship doesn't fit the categories you want for it? And I'm not talking about like styles and music, I'm talking about when you come to worship, does it bother you when your back isn't scratched, when you didn't get something? When we started this service, one of the things, not just the service tonight, but this Sunday evening service, one of the things that I told the worship team and all the leaders involved was this, this service is not for us. I'm not here for me. And I love you, but I'm not here for you. I'm here for God. I'm here to hear his word and to humble myself to it. I'm here to sing his praise and exalt him. When we make church about us, it's Israel part two. I mean, we're playing the sequel in our lives. There's one more here. I told you to wear a hard hat. I mean, this is hard. One more sign here, verse 15 to 19. Spiritually adulterous people deny the judgment of God. They deny the judgment of God. Look at how God plays this out. Though you play the whore, O Israel, let not Judah become guilty. It's funny, God just kind of says to Judah, hey Judah, don't be like them. Don't hang out with them. He says in the continuation of verse 15, enter not into Gilgal. Nor go up to Beth-Avon, and swear not as the Lord lives. What he's doing here is he's warning Judah about Israel's apostasy, about their spiritual adultery. And he's saying, Judah, don't get messed up with Israel. Don't hang out with them. The place Beth-Avon is a play on words there. God's specifically talking about the city called Bethel, or the house of God. And when God calls it Beth-Avon, he's calling it the house of evil. He's saying the place they worship, It's a house of evil, it's not a house of God. Don't swear as the Lord lives, don't say as God lives, because what they mean is they're God, that they've made up. They're like a stubborn heifer. They're like this cow that won't move. They're like a lamb that God can't feed. They're not a lamb, they're just like a cow. They're joined to idols, God says, leave them alone. They love to drink. And when they're done with drinking and drunk, they go whoring, their leaders love shame, and they're just ashamed. They're just wrapped up in their sacrifices. They're wrapped up in their worship. Here's what God is saying is, these people have denied that God will judge them. They have denied that there's any consequence between God and their actions. God's like, they're just a stubborn cow. That's how they are. Like God's saying, okay, Israel, here, you're being an adulterer. You're walking away from me. Come back. And they're like, what? God's not gonna judge us. There's nothing bad coming down the pipe for us. I mean, come on. and they're just stubborn. And so they continue to pile on their practice more and more and more. They continue to just dive deeper and deeper and deeper into it. This is what God says of our hearts in Romans 1 when he says, as we just dive into sin more and more and begin to lust after it and love it, God says, I gave them over. They're just denying judgment and so I just gave them over. I gave them over. Or Peter, in 2 Peter 3, when he talks about these false teachers and false prophets that deny that God will even come back, that his return, that Jesus' return is even imminent. They say, where is your Messiah? Where is your Savior? He's not coming back. God says they're just denying and pushing back judgment. That's a sign of spiritual adultery. When we would say, God's not gonna zap me for that. God's not gonna get me for that sin. that thought, that way of life. Come on, God's not really gonna, He's not gonna really deal with that in my life. And that's just on practical, day-to-day kind of things. I mean, how many times in our hearts have we had that attitude? We've, our conscious tells us, you've violated God. You've violated his word. You've sinned against him. Maybe it was an attitude that we had towards someone else or a lie that we spoke to a friend to get out of an awkward situation or a business deal that we did just to, it wasn't right. And our conscious and the Holy Spirit tells us, not right. And we say, come on. It's not that big a deal. God's not really, Really pushing on us on that one. Not gonna really judge me for it. Doesn't bother him that much, does it? Every time we begin to deny God's judgment against us, we diminish his holiness. It goes back to the very first sign. God's not holy. His word doesn't say that. I can worship him on my own terms. He's not gonna judge me. And it becomes this cycle. Back and forth again and again. And by this time, every light on the dashboard should be going off saying, trouble, spiritual adultery. That's what happens here with Israel. Even as a church, if we begin to fail to believe that God cares about how we worship and how we live, we don't repent and we don't follow his word and live as a church corporately as he has called us to, We're just denying his judgment on us. That's why scripture is so clear about those who teach, that they should not do it quickly. They should not take up the office of teacher quickly. There's a higher standard in teaching that God calls them to. It's because he doesn't want his name dishonored. He doesn't want his people led astray. He doesn't want us to the point where we're just denying that God's gonna judge in any way. Even this doctrine of the denial of God's judgment has come full front today in the evangelical American church where you have pastors that are writing books that are real popular saying, yeah, hell, not so much. We just kind of die and maybe we'll hang out in a purgatory-ish kind of place and then everybody's in, right? It's a blatant disregard for God's Word and for the truth that He takes sin very seriously. So let me ask you tonight, I hope you brought a hard hat, but I hope you brought a soft heart. Are there signs of spiritual adultery in your life? is the holiness of God and the word of God and the right worship of Him and even His judgment. Is that stuff you're playing with in your heart? Is it stuff you're kind of pushing to the side and just, oh, not that big a deal. I got today and that's what's important and tomorrow will take care of itself, right? If I was just to leave us in this passage tonight alone, send us out, We would be heavy. Just grovel for a while, I think. But I've gotta take us to the gospel once again. Because herein is the hope. Every single one of us, let me just say this clearly, every single one of us are spiritual adulterers. I don't care how long you've been a Christian, we are. We've denied the holiness of God. We've devalued his word. We don't worship him rightly. We deny his judgment in our own lives. We are spiritual adulterers. This message points the finger right at us. And yet in Jesus, we have one who perfectly upheld the holiness of God. who lived perfectly and fulfilled fully the law of God in every point, in every way, and the good news is he did that for us. Jesus gifts you his holiness. That's how you get right standing with God. And when we have devalued and disregarded the word of God, Jesus comes as the word of God. He is the living word of God, and he perfectly valued and fulfilled God's word at every point in his life. So where we fail with the word of God, Jesus upholds it, and for our sakes, fulfills everything in the word of God, and he gifts it to us. His righteousness is ours. His being the Word of God is ours. And where we have failed to perfectly worship the Father in spirit and in truth, Christ lived a perfect, sinless life and fully worshiped the Father, fully worshiped God in our place, for us, so that we might worship Him. And he gifts that to us. Where you have failed in your worship, Jesus perfectly fulfilled and worshiped God for you. And where you and I have constantly, day after day, denied the judgment of God, Jesus took it for us. the wrath that we deserve, the punishment that Hosea 4 talks about, that Romans 1 speaks about, the wrath of God against the unholiness of man. Jesus died taking the judgment of God in our place for our sin. On the cross, he absorbed the full weight of the wrath of God for us. So that in Christ, all those who would repent and believe in Jesus, We're perfectly righteous in Jesus. We have, because of Jesus, received and because of him, in him, fulfilled the word of God. In Jesus, we are worshipers, right worshipers of God. And in Jesus, the judgment of God was taken away for us so that we could stand before God and sing his praise over and over again and rejoice in him and one day stand before him fully in his presence because he loves us and he took our sin for us. The remedy that I want to give you tonight isn't to go home and to try better and to do more good things and to work harder at being righteous. The only remedy that this text gives us is Jesus. That we would turn to him and that we would embrace him by faith, say you are my righteousness, I receive that, I take that and I am thankful. Would you repent and believe? Would you turn to Jesus tonight and embrace him Let me pray, and I'm gonna ask the worship team to come, and we'll sing a few more songs. Father, how we are so fickle. Every sign of spiritual adultery is true of us, God. How we need a Savior, and that Savior is your Son, Jesus. Lord, tonight I would pray that as we think about these signs of spiritual adultery, that one, they would be very real to us, Father, and that we would search our hearts and see, God, what the gauges are telling us, that we would examine our lives and see, are there signs of our spiritual adultery? Would we examine our church and see, are there signs of spiritual abandonment and whoredom before you, God? And Lord, in response to that, as we see that, would we repent of those things, but would we not place our hope in what we do or how we perform, but would we place our hope in Jesus? Would we turn to him who is fully and perfectly fulfilled and obtained all righteousness for us and who has taken the full weight of your wrath on the cross for our sin, and would we cling to him, would we hold fast to Jesus as the remedy for our spiritual adultery. Lord, would we make much of Him? Not much of ourselves. Jesus, You are the remedy, and we thank You. And we come and we worship to You tonight, and we sing praise to You, and we thank You for Your grace. May, by Your Spirit, You work in our hearts, transform us, and we ask these things in Your name. Amen. This message has been brought to you by the Santa Rosa Bible Church. Our purpose is to lift up the Lord by living out the word, loving one another, and leading others to Christ. Be sure to visit us on the web at www.srbible.org or come visit us in person at 4575 Badger Road, Santa Rosa, California 95409. You can also give us a call at 707 538-2385.