So I'm gonna try to keep everything in its proper bounds this morning. But I do wanna welcome you. We're gonna be in Hosea chapter 12 this morning. So that's where I'm gonna invite you to turn with me. As you're settling in, let's open with a word of prayer. Let's ask the Lord to give us insight into his word to help us understand it and to help us obey it. Father, we are grateful for your love and for your steadfast loyalty to your people. And we are here this morning at the beginning of another week to worship you, to honor you with our presence, to honor you with the reading of your word, with the songs and prayers of your people, with the public reading of scripture and the teaching of it, and the proclamation of your word and preaching. And we pray this morning that you would be blessed in our efforts to honor and worship you, that your loving kindness would cover over a multitude of our sins, and that you would see your son reflected in our worship, that it would be acceptable and pleasing to you as it is offered to you in spirit and in truth. And Lord, as we read this morning from Hosea, I pray for your help, both that we would understand your word rightly, but also that we would live in light of its glorious truth, and that you would impress its meaning upon our hearts, that you would call us and convict us to obey and to walk in steadfast obedience to what you require from our hand. Lord, we pray this morning that you would be honored, that your ear would be attentive to us, and that you would be glorified in the heavens. In Christ's name, amen. Well, as we start out studying Hosea 12 this morning, I want to let you know it's not exactly a straight line. And if you've been reading ahead at all and you've come to Hosea chapter 12, you know what I mean. This chapter is somewhat notoriously difficult to structure or outline. And so it's kind of hard for us to just start at the front of the chapter in verse one and make our way through to the end of the chapter. We're going to try to do that as best we can, but I want to let you know if we're jumping in and out a little bit of different passages here, there's a reason that we're doing that, and that's because I'm trying to put this into a 30-minute format that's digestible instead of constantly having to go back and remind us of what the structure looks like. So it takes a few twists and turns, but the good news is that we don't have to understand every nuance and every image and metaphor and reference that the prophet makes in chapter 12. in order to understand the overarching message that he is getting to. In literary terms, chapter 12 is what we would call a divine lawsuit. It's a case that's being made against Israel by the prophet who is prosecuting them for their arrogance and their failure to maintain their covenant obligations to the Lord, who had communicated to them clearly the terms of the covenant that he intended for them to obey and to walk in. And he had been patient with them in all of their failures, going back even to the time of the forefathers and Abraham, as we'll see in this passage, the forefather Jacob, up to the present time when Hosea was carrying out his prophetic ministry. The framework of this lawsuit is set forth not just in chapter 12, and if you look, for instance, at chapter 12, verse 1, and if you look at the final verse of the chapter, you'll notice that they practically mirror each other, which is an indicator to us of where the structural boundaries of this chapter are. But really, you can extend even beyond that to the final verse of chapter 11 and even the first verse of chapter 13, and you can find that this passage is really bookended there and belongs to an even larger section that very confusingly differs in versination between the Hebrew text and the English text, and that's how we end up with some of these spillover verses that are going from the end of Chapter 11 into Chapter 12, across Chapter 12's boundaries, into Chapter 13, and then to compound the confusion a little bit, some translation traditions make distinctions in the early part of Chapter 13, and some do not. And so, that even shows you some of the ambiguity here of where this begins and ends. But I think at the end of chapter 11 and the very beginning, the first verse of chapter 13, are the boundaries of this divine lawsuit that Hosea is bringing on behalf, of course, of Yahweh against the Israelites. So in making this case against Israel, the prophet draws heavily on the life of Jacob, which we'll talk about in a brief way shortly. with the specific intention of drawing wayward Israel back to covenant faithfulness. A simple way to conceptualize this chapter is that the prophet is calling Israel to respond to God's revelation in the same way that Jacob did, which was with worship and obedience. He diagnoses Israel's wayward spiritual condition as an issue of forgetfulness. They had forgotten that they were in a covenant relationship with a God who had chosen them out of the world. And they also were being condemned for their deafness to God's Word, both an inability and a refusal to hear what God was speaking to them. His exhortation to them is unchanged from the rest of the book, and that is, return and wait patiently upon your God. I was joking at dinner last night with Jimmy. It would have been great if Hosea would have just warned the people at least one time that judgment was coming, and we could have averted all of these repeated chapters here. So with the time we have this morning, we're going to try to trace out, first of all, why it is that Hosea goes back and invokes the forefather Jacob in this divine lawsuit. Why would he look back hundreds of years, going back even prior to the Exodus period, which this is the only place in his prophetic material that he does this, and invoke the figure of Jacob as part of his lawsuit? And once we've been able to answer that question, I want us to raise and then try to answer three subsequent questions about spiritual waywardness. Why it happens, how we avoid it, how we diagnose it and know that we've become spiritually wayward. And I want to let the prophet answer those questions for us and then us be able to make some kind of coherent application of what the prophet is saying to our own lives. So, if you start out, I want you to look first at verse 2, and we're going to read down to about verse 6, or until I feel like we've hit a good stopping point to discuss this first part. It says, The Lord has an indictment against Judah, and will punish Jacob according to his ways. He will repay him according to his deeds. In the womb, he took his brother by the heel, and in his manhood, he strove with God. He strove with the angel and prevailed. He wept and sought his favor. He met God at Bethel, and there God spoke with us. The Lord, the God of hosts, the Lord is his memorial name. So you, by the help of your God, return. Hold fast to love and justice and wait continually for your God. Throughout chapter 12, as I alluded to just a minute ago, Hosea identifies the nation of Israel by the name of one of its forefathers, Jacob. And this is something that the prophet only does in chapter 10 and here in chapter 12 throughout the entire book. Calling the nation by the name of one of its ancestors was not an uncommon thing, or to call them by the name of one of their tribes. And so you can read throughout Hosea, you can read throughout the whole Testament, and you'll see things like this. He's been referring to them as Judah, he's been referring to them as Ephraim, he's referring to them here as Jacob. It's not an uncommon thing that he would do this, but it does pique our interest that he hasn't called them or identified them with Jacob up to this point, And now he's chosen to do so. So we need to know that it's not unnatural, but it's also not arbitrary. For the first time in the book, he reaches back to the pre-Exodus area of Israel's history, and he pulls out one of the great national heroes to draw parallels between God's history with the nation of Israel and with their namesake, with Jacob, who would later, as we're about to read, be renamed Israel himself. Hosea first recalls the story of Jacob's birth. When Rebekah, Isaac's wife, was pregnant with twin sons, the Lord told her this, two nations are in your womb, and two peoples from within you will be divided. The one will be stronger than the other, and the older shall serve the younger. Now, I want to highlight that this was direct revelation. This was God speaking directly to Rebekah about the children who were in her womb. And there was something going on there that Moses maybe wasn't privy to, and God just has not chosen to tell. But there was something happening where she realized, even in her womb, that there was conflict going on here. I've walked with my wife through three pregnancies, and from what she tells me, having just one baby in the womb can feel like conflict going on in there. So there's two of them, and they appear to be fighting, and she senses that something is unnatural about this, I guess. And the Lord tells her, this is the way that it's going to be for your children. You're not just carrying siblings with their sibling rivalry. I mean, my brother and I never fought. Just don't ask him about that. And my kids, they never fight with their siblings, right? Just don't ask them or their mother about that. But there's this deep-seated conflict going on. And the Lord tells Rebecca, this is how it's going to be with your offspring. Not just sibling rivalry, but a longstanding, deep strife and conflict is going to exist between them. These two sons would be born, but it was not the oldest, Esau, who would ultimately hold Isaac's birthright. It would be the younger, Jacob. Hosea then recalls the story of Jacob's striving with the Lord. And this whole story in Genesis 32 is ambiguous. It leaves more questions than answers. And even when you dig into it, you still are left with some unanswered questions. And that's okay. There is plenty of room in the Scriptures for us to have unanswered questions and yet still be able to apprehend what the message of a particular narrative or story is about. And in Genesis 32, Jacob has his wives and his servants and his children, and they come to the river Jebok, and he sends them across the river, but he's left on the riverbank by himself. And in the middle of the night, with no kind of editorial introduction, with no background or explanation, we are simply told that a man wrestled with him until the breaking of day. And so what ensued was this all-night wrestling match on the bank of the river Jebok between Jacob and this individual who's only identified to this point as a mysterious man, a nameless man. And they're wrestling there, and we get the picture that there's this all-night back and forth. And apparently, it's in a deadlock, because Jacob can't be defeated, nor can he prevail. And they're fighting back and forth here on the bank, until the man just reaches up and touches his hip socket. and displaces it, and we're told later that he leaves limping, so this wasn't just a temporary thing. He actually puts his hip out a joint, and the reader of this goes, wait a minute, this was a fixed fight all along. This man could have crushed Jacob, but Jacob, because of his persistence, is not being crushed out. And I don't want to say that the man is toying with him. I'm not sure that's the theological term that we're shooting for here. But he's fighting with one arm behind his back, right? He's intentionally preventing himself from crushing and destroying Jacob here because he has a point that he wants to teach him. So he touches his hip socket. It comes out of joint. They're striving. And Jacob, the heel snatcher, is grasping onto this man the way he had grasped onto Esau. I think we're meant to invoke imagery of that birth story in this. And he's holding onto him until the sun just starts to peak over the horizon and the man says, you have to let me go, the day is breaking. And Jacob said, all right, turned him loose and no. He said, I won't let you go until you bless me. He had perceived in the midst of this fight that he was wrestling with God Himself. Now, at this point, there are all kinds of theological intrusions about we can't look upon the face of God, or God in this pre-incarnate state's not gonna have a physical body, and how do we answer all these questions? But there's no doubt in Jacob's mind that he is not wrestling with a messenger from the Lord, he's not wrestling with a prophet, he is wrestling with God himself here on the banks of the river. And he tells him, I will not let you go until you bless me. And here's the significant part of this story that I want you to think about as we return to Hosea. The Lord asks Jacob, what is your name? And Jacob told him. And the Lord said, no, no more Jacob, but Israel. This is the first time Israel is used in the Old Testament. No more will you be called Jacob, but Israel. strives with God, for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed. And to further confirm that Jacob knew he had a divine encounter here, he names the place Peniel, the face of God, because he had met the God of Abraham and he had met the God of Isaac face to face. All of these years, Jacob had fought His birth was a fight to come out of the womb where he had been fighting with his twin brother, and he snatches onto his heel and he comes out. And in his early life, he uses underhanded, deceptive tactics to elbow his brother out of the way and secure the birthright even though it had been promised to him. And then when you read Jacob's story, When you read the next several chapters, like chapter 26 all the way up to chapter 31 of Genesis, Jacob is just fighting with men everywhere he goes. He has to fight for a wife, right? He goes to get a wife, he's deceived, he's given the wrong wife, and he has to fight and serve Laban and take on another wife. And then once he has a wife, they have to fight for children. And her womb is closed. And she even comes to him and says, why has God done this to us? And he's taking the burden of that, and he strives with God, and God opens her womb. And his whole life has been this fight, this striving with man, this struggle. And he hasn't really entered into the identity of who he is. He is the heir of the promises that were made to Abraham and to Isaac. And now here on the banks of this river, God is with him face to face and is telling him, Jacob, everything that I have promised to Abraham, I am good for, and I am giving it to you. Everything I had promised to your father Isaac, I am good for, and I am giving it to you also. He is striven with God. He is striven with man. And now he is entering a new phase of his life where he's able to put all of the struggle and the disappointment and the heartache behind him and enter into a right relationship with God. Later, God speaks directly to Jacob and tells him to go to Bethel, where he had been previously and had stood up a pillar. And along the way to Bethel this time, He tells the people with him, throw off every idol and god and unclean thing that is with you before we go to the house of God. And you remember, for instance, one of his wives had stolen the little trinket gods out of her father Laban's household. And there's no reason to think they hadn't been polytheistic up to this point. But now he has seen the God of Israel face to face. He has been face to face with the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac. And he says, before we go up to Bethel, you're going to put away all of those gods. You're going to do away with all the idols. We're going to put on fresh garments. We're going to wash ourselves. And they go to Bethel and they not only put up a pillar, but they build a altar there to the Lord. And when they arrive there, The Lord says to him, your name is Jacob, but no longer shall your name be called Jacob, but Israel shall be your name. I am El Shaddai, God Almighty, be fruitful and multiply. A nation and a company of nations will come from you. This is what he had told Abraham, right? That's what he had told Isaac. Kings will come from your own body. and the land that I gave to Abraham and Isaac I will give to you, and I will give the land to your offspring after you." So, the question that we're trying to answer is why does Hosea invoke Jacob in this divine lawsuit in chapter 12? Well, the relevance of Jacob's story for Hosea's purpose is this, that Jacob was their forefather, who had striven with man and with God, but had finally come to understand that he was chosen by God out of the world and was in an undeserved covenant with Him. And Jacob's response to this calling was obedience and worship. So what had happened in Jacob's life, was that he had striven with God, faced disappointment and frustrations, and even his own failures to be who he was. And he realized once he was confronted face to face with God, who he truly was. He was chosen out of this world. This isn't something to be embarrassed of or ashamed of. It doesn't have undertones that should be demeaning. He's saying, I'm God's own man that has been chosen out of everyone that could have been chosen. He's chosen me. He's brought me out of this. And He's going to bring from my body kings to rule over the earth. And He's going to give me offspring and me nations. And his response to that is, I am going to obey the Lord and I am going to worship Him. He is a changed man once he is finally confronted face-to-face with the truth of who he really is. And I mean that in the most positive sense. Now I want to say one thing that's totally off the script here, totally, it's barely germane to this, but The Old Testament guy in me has to say this. You're going to go back home doubtless and you're going to read commentaries on Hosea 12, right? Because this is all so fascinating. You're going to go and you're going to read that, and you're going to read about the use of Jacob, and you're going to find commentators in your study Bibles and commentators here and there, and they're going to say, well, Hosea invokes Jacob because Jacob's a deceiver. And Israel had been deceptive against God, and so he's trying to draw this negative parallel. And in doing that, they come in with like a D9 caterpillar and just wipe out, just erase the beautiful contours of this story. And they turn this beautiful picture of a patriarch who is confronted with who he is in God. and they turn it into some kind of negative connotation with his deceptive practices, which I think is just an altogether misguided interpretation of what's happening here. Hosea, in this divine lawsuit, is saying Israel needs to have the same confrontation with God that Jacob had had, and their response needs to be the same response that Jacob had there on the banks of the river Jabbok. In verse five, Hosea invokes God by name, the Lord, the God of hosts, and calls on Israel to return to him because he has chosen the nation, just like he had chosen their forefather Jacob, out of the world for himself. It was time for Israel to put off their deceit, put off their idolatry, their wickedness, and return to the God who had made an undeserved covenant with them. In the face of their rebellion against God, the prophet summons them, return and wait continually for your God. A summons like this might seem unnecessary or even self-defeating. If God's people are chosen by him, why would they be in such a wayward condition in the first place? And if they are chosen by him, how would they know that they've fallen into such a condition? And if they are chosen by Him and they have fallen into this condition and they've been made aware of it, what are they to do? And these are a few of the practical questions I want us to answer and try to put the prophet's message here into our own context. If God's people are chosen by Him, why would they be in such a wayward condition in the first place? How did Israel, God's chosen people, end up on the cusp of annihilation at the hands of the Assyrians and in the crosshairs of God's judgment? The prophet throughout the book gives plenty of reasons for this, but there are two in particular that he gives in chapter 12. Number one, Israel's pride caused them to believe that they, not God, had made them great. And secondly, they had refused to hear God's warnings to them, no matter how often or how clearly God spoke these warnings to them. In verses 7 and 8, Hosea draws an analogy between Israel and an underhanded businessman. And then in this analogy, Israel has dealt unlawfully with their neighbors, so they're working with unjust scales. And in the analogy here, they're being an oppressor to those who are weak. And this is a violation of the covenant terms that God had set forth to them at Sinai. And yet, while they're living in this moral corruption, as we talked about a couple weeks ago in chapter 10, they're watching the Northern Kingdom flourish. They're watching the borders expand, the military has grown and become stronger, they've restored a national economy. Everybody, by all accounts, seems pretty happy with the syncretistic system of worship that they have established. They seem happy with the relations that they have with their neighbors. So, if they're flourishing like this, there must be a reason for it. And they assumed the reason was because the God or gods that were overseeing them must acquiesce to this or condone it. But also they had in their own industry, in their own might, built these fortifications. They had established these borders. They had built this economy. They had done all of this in their own strength. And they had deceitfully elevated themselves to the place where now they were in control of their own destiny. They were who they were, established firmly in the land, and securely, so they thought, in the land, because of their own might. And in the midst of this, they had forgotten that it was God who had brought them out of slavery. that it was God who had driven out the Canaanites before them. It was God who had established them in the land. It was God who had given them kings in the years prior, who had established a foundation that even allowed them to secure the meager things that they had secured now under the later kings in the divided kingdom period. Whatever prosperity they had was fleeting and it offered them no real security at all, though they didn't know this. Now God was telling them that he would personally intervene to remind them that he, not they, was in control of their lives. Israel had lived as slaves in Egypt, traveled and dwelled in tents as nomads. Now they were secure in cities. But God warned that the illusions of wealth and security could not save them and he would make them to live in tents once again. they would return to the condition of a nomad. After they had lived like princes, they would go back to dwelling in tents. Now, Hosea's audience might object, if you had told us this, we would have changed course, right? Yet God had spoken clearly to Israel about the stipulations of the covenant. He had spoken to them through the prophets. He had spoken to them through the great prophet Moses. He had spoken to him at Sinai. He had spoken to him subsequently through a series of other prophets, even some of the prophets whose speeches are recorded in the scriptures. Amos, for example, part of Isaiah's prophecy. Jonah, all of these men preceded Hosea. So the Lord had spoken to them. He had spoken to them, as Hosea says here in chapter 12, in parables and in dreams, in verse 10. He had multiplied visions. The prophets gave parables, which is a way of saying the prophets preached. They didn't just get up and read a manuscript from God, but they actually got up and explained what the Lord was saying. They painted vivid pictures of what obedience and disobedience in the covenant would mean for the people. Now, I have to move quick. We end up in a wayward condition when our pride causes us to forget that everything we have is from the Lord, and when our stubbornness makes us unwilling to hear his voice. I mean this as a heartfelt warning this morning and a reminder for us all. that it's entirely possible that we, even being chosen by God before the foundation of the world, are drifting from the Lord right now because we have forgotten what the Lord has done for us. You could have showed up here today, this morning, having forgotten what the Lord has done for you, so caught up in all the cares of life, the cares of business, the cares of family, the cares of projects, the cares of busyness, and all of those things have caused you to forget that every good thing you have has come from the Lord. And you could show up this morning with a stubborn desire or will that is bent against hearing God's word. Though you hold it in your hand, though you can pull it out of your pocket in most cases, though you'll hear it taught and you'll hear it preached, it's possible to show up and hear this, but totally refuse it. And if that happens, you've begun to drift. Now, if you know the answer to the first question, if God's people are chosen by him, why would they be in such a wayward condition? We know the answer to that. They're in this wayward condition because they're prideful and because they won't hear God's word. Then you know the answer to the second two questions. How would his people know that they have fallen into such a condition? Well, here's four reasons that they would know they had fallen into this condition of drift away from the Lord. Number one, they had arrogantly considered their success as their own and not the work and covenant faithfulness of God. Number two, they had forsaken exclusive worship of Yahweh for idols. Number three, they had ignored the terms of the covenant with him. And number four, they would not hear the word of the Lord. We can know that drift has begun. by applying these same questions to ourselves. And you have to urge caution here, because this isn't an exhaustive list of all the questions you could ask. And without the help of the Lord, we don't know to ask these questions well, and we don't know a true answer to them without God giving us His help. But we can ask ourselves if we have forgotten that every good thing, our health, our family, our church, our career, our home, our relationships, our greatest experiences, all of these things, are things that come from the hand of a gracious God. Our place in the people of God, if you truly belong to Christ and to us here this morning, your place here is because of the faithfulness of God towards you, as is all of your siblings in Christ here this morning. We can consider whether our love, passion, enjoyment of anything rivals our love for, or our passion for, or our enjoyment of God himself. We can ask ourselves if we are walking in true submission and obedience to God's commands as he has revealed them in his word. We can consider whether we are listening closely for and obeying God's word. And if we ask these questions and answer them honestly with the Lord's help, then we can be alert to spiritual waywardness in our own lives, just as Hosea was calling the people to reckon with their own. Finally, let me conclude by looking at Hosea's call to return. It's easy reading thousands of years after Hosea's ministry to gloss over how dire Israel's circumstances had become. God had patiently, long-sufferingly dealt with Israel in spite of literally countless instances of unfaithfulness. And Israel had become prideful, arrogant, idolatrous, and inattentive to God's word. And so he was about to rain destruction on them. Now you can sit back and kind of like you're watching a History Channel documentary and picture in black and white the Assyrians up to the north and they're gonna march down on this little dotted line down to the south and they're going to conquer Israel. But this wasn't a History Channel documentary to the Israelites. The Assyrians were innovative, cunning warriors. It wasn't the Romans who had invented crucifixion and it wasn't the Babylonians. It was the Assyrians who just put a stake in the ground and sat people on it outside the city gates to punish rebels. It was the Assyrians, at least in the Near East, who had invented the concept of deportation. They had thought, what is the most humiliating way to defeat an enemy? Well, it's to go to his house and strip him out of it, and begin marching him back to our lands, and now we'll tell him where he lives, and we'll tell him where his family goes, and we'll tell him when they come and go, and we'll completely abolish this unique identity they have. You can read, there's a 40 or 50 page, and it's public access out there, University of Massachusetts published a thing, and I read this just specifically to refresh on some of this, about Assyrian war crimes and tyranny. They would take rebels and gouge their eyes out so that they would march blindly to their new land. They didn't want them to know where they were going. Asher Benapol, the king just prior to the conquest in 722, wrote about how he would skin the people alive and then would drape the skins over the city walls. This is of the defeated warriors. So that the people would come out in the mornings and they would see the skins of their relatives draped there. And they would know what awaits them when they come into the city. And then they would burn them alive. They would flog them in the streets. And Israel was aware of this. Assyrian conquest had been going on for some time. And probably by this time, the first of the northern cities had already fallen. This was serious and terrifying for Israel. So what he commanded them to do was this. turned from their wicked ways, returned to the Lord who had brought them out of Egypt, reaffirmed their commitment to walk in his covenant and find peace and security in him. The prophet's message in verse 12 and 13, which invokes again the prophet Jacob. It says this, Jacob fled to the land of Aram, there Israel served for a while, for a while he guarded sheep, and by a prophet the Lord brought Israel up out of Egypt, and by a prophet he was guarded. And just to get to exactly what he's talking about here, he says just like Jacob was a guard, was a sheep herder to protect Laban's sheep out there in the field at Aram, God's covenant with Israel was to protect and guard them. It was to safeguard them. And now in their pride and their arrogance and their refusal to listen, that safeguard was gone and the Assyrians were approaching. For us, the heart of this call to repentance is the same, but the mechanics are different. What God has done for us in spite of all of our own wickedness is promise us peace with him and safety from his righteous judgment if we will seek refuge in his son. That is what it means to preach the Christian gospel, right? Come and seek refuge in the son of God, the Christ, who has borne his wrath against you on your behalf. The brutal death of Christ confirmed to us in God's word is the record of God's wrath being poured out upon his son. And this was done in our place that we may, in turn, be cloaked in Christ's righteousness and presented without blame before the Father as one of His own children. I said when I taught on chapter 10, it's impossible, it's indescribable to think of this exchange. And my opinion of that has not changed in the last two weeks. It's still unthinkable to see the wrath of God poured out on His Son and the righteousness of His glorious Son imputed to us. Who could think and dream of such a thing? For those who are outside of Christ, this is a call to turn from sin, to look to Christ as Savior, to confess your sins before God, and to plead his forgiveness. And for those who are as people yet wayward, this is a call to remember the covenant that God has made with you in his blood, to throw off your pride and idolatry, to return to Him and to fellowship continually with your God. O Lord, give us this morning the grace and the wisdom to turn quickly from our foolishness and our sin and to seek your face. May you bless your people who you have bought with the blood of your Son. Amen. Good morning, brothers and sisters. Let's pray together. We have much to pray for this morning, so let's turn our hearts toward the Lord together.