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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.
Signs of Spiritual Adultery
Series Hosea
| Sermon ID | 101111181810 |
| Duration | 50:20 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday - PM |
| Bible Text | Hosea 4 |
| Language | English |
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