Hosea 13

Hosea 13

Unforgettable

I.                    Forgetting God leads to death, but trusting faithfully in Him is eternal life; so we must let nothing take His place in our lives (Vv. 1-3)

a.       There was a time when Ephraim loved and served God with such zeal that whoever crossed their path was subject to be moved to awe and surrender to Him. But they came under the temptation common to all humanity, and instead of relying on God for strength and security, they began to look to themselves, and to worship foreign gods in order to attempt to control their world other people. The result of diverting part of their loyalty from God to themselves and false gods, was the rapid diversion of all of their worship and adoration from God to idols. The consequence of their turning from and forgetting God was the spiritual death of their nation. This spiritual death then led to the decline and death of their souls and the soul of their nation. As their soul died individually and nationally, they continued deeper into sin, invested themselves and their resources more fully into idol worship, and became less and less tolerant of anyone who didn’t share the same devotions as them. Ultimately the final consequence of forgetting God, turning away from Him, and turning towards idolatry was the physical death of the individual and nation. God says that Ephraim has chosen to go their own way, refused to remember Him and trust Him, and now they’ll be given what they want. They chose to live through their own strength and understanding of no substance, to invest themselves in serving idols of no substance, and now they’ll reap an existence and end with no substance. Today we forget God, let anything and everything else take His rightful place in our hearts and lives. We don’t know His promises because we’ve replaced them with our own desires, and we keep pursuing other things in our own strength, craftiness, intelligence, institutions of mankind, and the approval and praise of people. And even though they continue to prove fruitless, and we see the unmistakable symptoms of death surrounding us and growing, lawlessness, injustice, immorality, violence, chaos, hate, and selfishness, we continue to drift farther away individually and nationally. (Vv. 1-3; Gen. 3:1-13, 19; 48:13-20; Exod. 32:1-8; 1 Kgs. 11:26; 12:20-33; Ps. 1:4-6; 68:1-2; 1 Cor. 10:1-14; Gal. 5:19-23; Eph. 2:1-3; Col. 3:5-7; 1 John 5:19-21)

II.                 Forgetting God leads to death, but trusting faithfully in Him is eternally life; so we must trust in His desire and exclusive power to save! (Vv. 4-16)

a.       Both God’s faithfulness to justly judge the unrepentant sin of those who reject and forget Him, and His faithful desire and exclusive power to save all who turn faithfully to Him are validated in the last half of this chapter. He has always been faithful to Shepherd His people and provide all they needed even when life was the leanest. He called them to maintain an exclusive love relationship with Him because He’s their only hope for salvation and life. But instead of growing in gratefulness, love, loyalty, and closeness to Him, they became complacent, ungrateful, proud hearted,  and forgot Him. God is their only deliverer, provider, and protector, and the people have chosen to turn their backs on Him and faithlessly pursue false saviors who are powerless to deliver them from any of the dangers of life and temptation in our sin broken and fallen world. In the absence of the protection, guidance, and provision of the Good Shepherd, His people will be ravaged by the lions, leopards, bears, and wild beasts which surround them and seek to exploit and devoir them. They cause their own destruction because they reject their only source of help. God can no longer look over their sin. Their unnatural and illegitimate relationship with false gods will result in an agonizing labor, a breech birth, and ultimately a baren womb. They’ll be cruelly and ruthlessly overthrown by the Assyrians and other Gentile nations into the future. They forgot God and the result will be death, but God reveals that He never forgets them. Not only will God never forget His wayward people, but He also declares that He’ll never stop working on behalf of people to defeat the enemy of death under which all of humanity suffers. Even though He must hold them accountable for stubbornly and continually rejecting Him, He’ll always be faithful to save those who turn to Him. God has won the victory over death through Christ, He desires to save, and He alone has the power to save us, but we must trust in and cling to Him alone, not in ourselves, others, or human institutions. (Vv. 4-16; Exod. 20:1-7; Deut. 6:4-15; 32:15-20; Ps. 121; Prov. 30:8-9; Isa. 45:14-25; Ezek. 37:1-14; Dan. 7:1-28; Matt. 22:36-40; Luke 19:10; John 3:16; 10:10; 11:21-27; 14:6; Acts 2:22-24; Rom. 3:21-26; 5:6-11; 6:4-14, 23; 8:28; 10:8-13; 1 Cor. 15:54-58; 2 Cor. 5:17, 21; Eph. 2:4-9)