Sermon: Love Like a Morning Cloud

Before we come to God's word tonight, would you please join me in prayer?

Father, as we just sang, would you instruct us by your word? Would you grant us your Spirit that we might learn from you? Would you send forth your word as an illuminating light to show us the path that we should walk, to convict us of sin that may be hiding in darkness, to draw our eyes up to you? Would you use this time to nourish and feed your people with your word? I pray these things in the name of your Son, Jesus Christ. Amen.

As we continue to work our way through the Book of Hosea this summer, we come to two chapters tonight. So I invite you to open your Bibles to Hosea chapter 6, page 754 if you are using the pew Bibles. And I am going to start at chapter 6 and read all the way through the end of chapter 7. Listen now, for this is the very word of God. "Come, let us return to the Lord. For he has torn us that he may heal us; he has struck us down and he will bind us up.

After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will raise us up, that we may live before him. Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord; his going out is sure as the dawn; he will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth. What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? What shall I do with you, O Judah? Your love is like a morning cloud, like the dew that goes early away. Therefore I have hewn them by the prophets, I have slain them by the

words of my mouth, and my judgment goes forth as the light. For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. But like Adam, they transgressed the covenant. There they dealt faithlessly with me. Gilead is a city of evildoers, tracked with blood. As robbers lie in wait for a man, so the priests band together. They murder on the way to Shechem; they commit villainy. In the house of Israel I have seen a horrible thing;

Ephraim's whoredom is there; Israel is defiled. For you also, O Judah, a harvest is appointed. When I restore the fortunes of my people, when I would heal Israel, the iniquity of Ephraim is revealed, and the evil deeds of Samaria, for they deal falsely; the thief breaks in, and the bandits raid outside. But they do not consider that I remember all their evil; now their deeds surround them; they are before my face. By their evil they make the king glad, and the princes by their treachery.

They are all adulterers; they are like a heated oven whose baker ceases to stir the fire from the kneading of the dough until it is leavened. On the day of our king, the princes became sick with the heat of wine; he stretched out his hand with mockers. For with hearts like an oven, they approach their intrigue; all night their anger smolders; in the morning it blazes like a flaming fire. All of them are hot as an oven, and they devour their rulers.

All their kings have fallen, and none of them calls upon me. Ephraim mixes himself with the peoples; Ephraim is a cake not turned. Strangers devour his strength, and he knows it not; gray hairs are sprinkled upon him, and he knows it not. The pride of Israel testifies to his face; yet they do not return to the Lord their God, nor seek him, for all this. Ephraim is like a dove, silly and without sense, calling to Egypt, going to

Assyria. As they go, I will spread over them my net; I will bring them down like the birds of the heavens; I will discipline them according to the report made to their congregation. Woe to them, for they have strayed from me! Destruction to them, for they have rebelled against me! I would redeem them, but they speak lies against me. They do not cry to me from the heart, but they wail upon their beds; for grain and wine they gash themselves; they rebel against

me. Although I trained and strengthened their arms, yet they devise evil against me. They return, but not upward; they are like a treacherous bow; their princes shall fall by the sword because of the insolence of their tongue. This shall be their derision in the land of Egypt."

I would encourage you to keep your Bibles open. We are going to look back at the text frequently. There is a lot in these two chapters, much more than we will be able to delve deeply into. What I want to do tonight is I want to consider these chapters by answering three questions. The first question is simply what is happening in these verses? I want to make sure that we have the big picture before we look more closely at a couple of aspects

Of these verses. I especially want to make sure that we understand the many images that appear in the passage that we just read. So our first question, what is happening in these verses? And to answer, I simply want to walk through this passage for a few minutes, verse by verse. As a reminder, in chapters one through three, God used an unfaithful marriage to illustrate the adultery and idolatry of His people. And then in chapters four and five, He has laid out His

accusations against Israel and has warned them of coming judgment. Israel has rebelled, and God will bring severe consequences. But chapter five ends with a ray of hope as the Lord says, "I will return again to my place until they acknowledge their guilt and seek my face and in their distress earnestly seek me." Seeming to imply that there is a time that the Lord expects when they would acknowledge their guilt and would seek His

face and earnestly seek Him. So that brings us to the beginning then of chapter six, and it seems to flow right out of that glimmer of hope. There is a shift in this chapter. Verses one to three begin with a new speaker. It's a little bit unclear, as I read through different people this week, who the speaker is. It may be the prophet who is calling out to God's people, and encouraging them to return to God, or it may be a group of the

people themselves seeking to stir each other up and stir up the rest of the people of God. Either way, it seems clear from some of what comes later that there was at least some movement within God's people towards this particular resolution to return. Particularly, it seems like there was a fed-up-ness with the discomfort of the judgment and a desire to move in a different direction. And so they say in verse one, "Come,

let us return to the Lord. For he has torn us that he may heal us, he has struck us down, and he will bind us up." There is a pretty old tradition within the Jewish faith at this time that God alone kills and makes alive, wounds and heals. See this in Deuteronomy 32, "See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me. I kill and I make alive. I wound and I heal, and there is none that can deliver out of my hand." So it seems

like these people are saying, "We want to return to God, for we know He is the one that has struck us down, and He is the one that can bind us back up." And they seem to assume from verse two that this will happen in due time. It's unlikely that they were expecting immediate results as though we were here today and we're like, "By Tuesday or Wednesday, He's going to come." But there is a sense that in His time, on the right day,

we are in need of reviving, and God is going to come and He will revive us, that we may live before Him. And they continue their exhortation, "Come, let us return to the Lord. Let us know. Let us press on to know the Lord." This idea of knowing the Lord is part of what has been the accusation against them. In chapter four, God says, "There is no knowledge of God in the land," and later, "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge."

So here they seem to have heard at least part of what God was saying, and they say, "Let us press to know the Lord." And then they put their confidence in the certainty of the sun rising and of spring storms coming. You can depend on it. In the same way that you can be sure every morning that the dawn will come, you can be sure that God will go out, and just as you can be sure that the rain will come in the spring, you can be sure that

He will come to us. So we have in these first three verses, the people of God saying, "Let us return to the Lord. He is the one that can heal us. We believe He will do it in His time. We want to know Him more, and we are sure of who He is."

In verse four, the text shifts back to the Lord, and the rest of our passage is the Lord speaking as He responds to these people. Perhaps a little bit surprisingly, it is not an encouraging or a positive response. He begins by saying, "What am I going to do with you?" He repeats that twice. It's not here that God is lacking wisdom or insight, needs help from somebody else. It's an expression of exasperation, exposing the position of the

people. "I've shown you through Hosea's marriage. I've told you over and over again, and you still don't get it. What else can I do to help you to see?"

He then uses this analogy of a morning cloud and dew that goes early away. It's appearance without reality. In a time of drought, there would be a hope for rain, and you'd see a cloud in the morning, and you'd think, "There is going to be rain today." Think of Elijah seeing that little cloud the size of a man's hand way off in the distance. "It's coming." And then it just dissipates when the sun comes out. Maybe a little bit of dew will refresh the land, but it

goes early away, and he's saying, "This is what your love is like. It does not stand the test of time. It is temporary. It is promise with no substance."

Goes on in verse five to say, "This is why I have cut and even killed my people with my words delivered through my prophets."

We often think of God's words as having life-giving power. By His word, everything was spoken into existence. His word is a spring of living water, but the word of God can also kill when He speaks in judgment and when He illuminates wickedness, casting it out, and here the light of His judgment shines into the darkness of sin, revealing it, and the light of His judgment cannot be overcome. Next, God declares His desire for

steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings in verse six. This is likely familiar to you. It is an oft-repeated refrain. Shows up in Amos and Isaiah, who both would have been contemporary prophets with Hosea. Shows up also in the Psalms, and even Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew points this out. It's clear. Outward pretense does not impress God.

In verse seven, God returns to His accusations, and He ties them against His people back to the first sin of Adam in the Garden of Eden. Like their first father, they were faithless with God. We see here that the heart of their sin is that they broke the covenant relationship that they had with God, just as Adam did, and that the sin runs deep in their hearts all the way back to their first father. God doesn't just leave it there. He gives examples of what the people have

done in verses eight and nine. You can read that without too much explanation. "Gilead is a city of evildoers, tracked with blood. As robbers lay in wait for a man, so the priests band together. They murder on the way to Shechem. They commit villainy." There is bloodshed in the land. The city is identified as a city filled with evildoers, and then God summarizes all of this in verse 10. He looks at Israel, and He sees

a horrible, defied, unfaithful thing in His people.

And then He adds this little comment in verse 11, just to make sure that Judah doesn't feel left out. Israel had been conquered by Assyria at this point, and perhaps Judah was thinking that all this was just for those bad people from the north. Lest they be tempted to think in such way, God makes sure to let them know there is a harvest appointed for you also, Judah. Your time is coming. If you continue to sow sin, you will reap

destruction. So as chapter six ends and chapter seven begins, God makes sure His people know that He would be glad to restore and to heal them, but that there is one big problem. Every time He looks at them to do so, He sees and remembers their evil. They are false. They steal. They raid. Their deeds and guilt are revealed as God looks upon them, and He remembers all of their rebellion. Their deeds surround them so that when He looks at them,

that is all that He can see.

Moving on to verse three in chapter seven, we read that those evil deeds are a delight to the kings and the princes. Those who should be promoting and modeling righteousness are glad to see the treachery of the people.

This is a messed-up place, and Hosea is now going to use a series of illustrations to try again to describe the wickedness of the people and to warn them of the danger that they find themselves in. There are four illustrations here. The first is in verses four through seven and is that of an oven that is overheated. This is representative of fiery passions, especially inordinate sexual desires, intense fires that would drive the adulterer, eventually consume

him. But we also see drunkenness in verse five, again, of the kings and the princes, the leaders of the people, as well as burning anger in verse six In the end, these passions, these lust and anger and drunkenness inflamed by sin, they burn up those who are subject to them, devouring the rulers and the kings, and leaving none who call upon God.

Second image appears in verses eight through 10, a cake that is not turned. Imagine a pancake that never gets flipped over. It's overcooked on one side and undone on the other. The people of Israel conform to the nations around them. We've read about the kings and the princes. As the kings and the princes go, so go the people. Just want to give a quick warning here, because I didn't know where else to fit it in. A particular warning to those who are in

authority, whether you're a parent, whether you're a husband with a family, whether you're an elder or a mentor, sin in your life trickles down. And that happened here in Israel. As the kings and the princes of Israel go, so go the people. They conform to the nations around them. They are not wholeheartedly devoted to God. They are half-baked. They are useless, and they're even dangerous to those that would be around them.

And worst of all, as we see in these verses, they are unaware, like Samson, who did not know that the Lord had left him. They are blinded by their sin. They do not know the danger they are in. Their strength is gone, and they do not know. They have gray hairs. They are in old age as a nation, about to expire, and they do not know it. They are proud. They do not return to the Lord, even though they are in such a precarious position, and

even though He has told them over and over again.

The third image that we have in verses 11 and 12 is that of a dove.

If you're like me in the scriptures, when you hear a dove, you often think of peace or beauty, but here it is representing the folly of God's people. They are naive, silly, and without sense. They are senseless to the danger all around them. They are warned, and they see destruction, but they do not repent. They think that Egypt or Assyria will protect them, but as they fly to those places for help, God says that He will catch them in His net and humble

them in His discipline.

Verses 13 through 15, God continues His accusations that they have strayed from Him, rebelled against Him, lied about Him. Even though it was Him who gave them strength, they have turned and used that strength to devise evil against Him. They wail out in their distress, but not to God and not from their hearts. They instead beat themselves up in the pursuit of grain and wine. They are ungrateful. They are defiant, even as they are under

His judgment and discipline, and they continually show contempt for God. And as chapter seven ends, we have this final image. God comes back to the idea that they started with of returning to Him, and He states that they are indeed returning, but not toward Him. They are like a treacherous bow, a weapon that is faulty. It does not shoot the arrows straight back to Himself, but in all the wrong directions. Unpredictable. You never know which

way it's going to go or if it's going to go at all. Again, like the half-baked cake, it is a useless instrument and a very dangerous one. And God is calling out their hypocrisy and their pretense of returning. The end result is death and derision, you see in verse 16. The leaders are killed, and the people are made to look ridiculous as they are in the eyes of the surrounding nations. So I want to go back to the question that we started with.

What is in these verses? At least some of the people of God talk of trying to return to God, and then God restates his accusations against the people. They have lied and murdered, been adulterous and treacherous. They have rebelled against God and shown contempt for His kindness to them. They have defiled themselves by breaking both tables of the law, sinning in their interactions with God as well as with each other. Their love for Him is short-lived, like the dew that disappears

from the grass. And so God, again, warns them of the judgment and the destruction that will come if they continue to walk in such ways. So that's what's in these verses. Hope it makes a little bit more sense looking at it now than maybe the first time that we read through it. What I want to do with the rest of our time is I want to consider two more questions We already looked at the Shorter Catechism earlier, but I want to go

to a question of the Shorter Catechism to help us think through these two questions. Question number three in the Shorter Catechism asked what the scriptures primarily teach, and the answer is that the scriptures primarily teach two things. First, what is man to believe concerning God? And second, what duty God requires of man. What man is to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of man. I want those to be our second and third questions tonight.

From these verses, what is it that these verses teach us about the nature of God? What is it that man is to believe concerning God, and what is it that these verses teach us about the duty that God requires of man? What is the duty God has for man? So I want to start with the question: what do these verses teach us about the nature of God? What is it that we are to see about God as we read through these two chapters? And I want us to see four things about God from these verses.

First, God is a personal God. He is not some sort of impersonal force or robot that does whatever he is programmed to do. Seems like the Israelites were in danger of thinking of Him as some sort of automated machine, like the sun coming around the Earth or the rain in springtime. They just needed to wait, and He would soon come back to them, no matter what they did. They were right that He is steadfast and unchanging,

that you can depend on Him like the sun or the rain. But He is not the same as the sun and the rain. They are bound by rules of nature. God is bound only by His own character. He required them not just to know about them, but to have a personal, experiential knowledge of Him, their God. The God who had entered into a covenantal relationship with them, that which He accused them of breaking in verse seven. The God who identified Himself to them in Exodus 34 as "The

Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. Keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty."

This God is revealed in these two chapters of Hosea. He is a personal, relational, covenantal God. And in addition to the personal nature of God, we see that He is indeed, as He described Himself in Exodus 34, "Merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness." This is a long-suffering God. His people have been faithless. They have failed to heed His warnings time and time and time again. They have not responded to His

discipline and His judgment. And so what does God do? He tries again.

He disciplines those He loves. He continues to show them what they are doing, and He continues to warn them of the danger that they are in. He does not walk away. He does not give up on them. He reiterates His charges against them again and again.

Brothers and sisters, it does not always feel good when God shows us our sin, but it is such a mercy that He is willing to do so, that He is willing to call to repentance, that He is willing to warn us of the danger that we are in. God disciplines those He loves. God, our God, is a long-suffering God who is gracious and merciful with His people,

slow to anger.

We also see that God is a God who will by no means clear the guilty. Again, as He revealed Himself in Exodus 34. This seems to be something that the people in Hosea 6 don't quite understand. They depend on the mercy of God, but they fail to see the justice and the holiness of God. But God is absolutely dependable. He will always judge sin and evil and wickedness. He will never turn a blind eye. You can depend on Him to execute

perfect justice. So over and over again, He reminds the people that He would heal them and He would restore them, but that they are filled with sin, and His just and holy nature cannot.

This brings us to the fourth thing that we see about the nature of God in these verses. God is personal, He is gracious, He is just, and He is omniscient He sees everything. He never has to guess in order to execute justice. He doesn't have to wonder what happened as a parent might, trying to distinguish the stories of two children. He doesn't have to guess at the intentions of the heart. He sees everything, and He knows everything.

Before the light of His judgments, everything is revealed. He misses nothing. One of the great lies of sin is that it promises it can remain hidden and private. But everything we do, we do before the face of God. The Israelites forgot that. You and I would do well not to.

So what do these verses teach us about the nature of God? Teach us that He is personal, gracious, just, and all-knowing. Our last question for tonight, what do these verses teach us about the duty God requires of man?

Specifically, I want us to consider, what do these verses teach us about the nature and the duty of repentance? As we see here in the first three verses, a attempt at returning to God, an attempt at repentance,

but it is clear from God's response that the people's repentance in verses one through three is a false repentance, and we can learn a good deal about the real thing from the counterfeit that we see in these verses. So, what do these verses teach us about the nature of repentance? Again, there's four things I want us to see from these verses that we learn about repentance. First, and maybe most glaringly, repentance requires

a recognition of sin.

Perhaps you were like me, and when I first read these chapters and beginning to prepare, I was thrown off a little bit. It seems like there is such promise in verses one through three, such a hope that God's people were turning and returning to Him, and then God's response makes it clear that this hope was misguided. Despite the call to return at the beginning, God will say, "There are none who call out to me. There are none who seek me."

I want you to notice for a minute what is missing from verses one through three. The people make a lot of true statements about God. They look to Him to be faithful, but there is no acknowledgment of their sin. They did not acknowledge that they were in the wrong. Perhaps they make a passing allusion to it in saying that they need to return, but nothing about the fact that they are being torn and struck down because of their iniquity.

There is no confession that they have been wicked and rebelled against their always faithful God. And God's response shows the weight of sin, the seriousness with which sin must be faced.

And I want to linger here for a minute because I believe that this is a particular danger in our culture. James Montgomery Boice, discussing these verses, made the following comment, "The problem is that the evangelical movement in America in the 20th century is shallow. It speaks of salvation, but it does not grapple with sin, and since it does not grapple with sin, there can be no true repentance."

These verses make it clear we have to grapple with our sin if we want to come before a holy and just God. Even if we want to be quick to know the answer, to know that there was one who was raised on the third day that we might also be raised up, even that loses its weight if we don't understand the weight of the sin that He came to pay for. Returning one more time to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, question 87 asks the question, "What is repentance unto life?" And

here is the answer, "Repentance unto life is a saving grace, whereby a sinner, out of a true sense of his sin and apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ, doth with grief and hatred of his sin turn from it unto God, with full purpose of and endeavor after new obedience." So repentance requires knowing that God is merciful, knowing that in Christ we can come to God with our sin, but it also requires a true sense of, and a grief over, and

a hatred of sin. If you do not feel the heavy weight of sin that Christian in "Pilgrim's Progress" felt, if you do not grieve over your sin, if you do not hate your sin even more than you hate the sins of others that inconvenience you, if you feel like God or the people around you make too big a deal of your mistakes or your struggles or your temptations, then you may not understand the depth of sin. Pray that God will be merciful to reveal to you your sin so that you

can see it rightly and clearly and can turn from it to new life in Christ. Second, we see that repentance is a matter of the heart. It is not simply about words, we see that in chapter 6, verses 1 through 3, or even in actions, we see that in chapter 6, verse 6, "I desire steadfast love, not sacrifice, knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings." God does not want you to simply say the right things or to go through the right motions.

He wants your heart and your affections, and He is worthy of your heart and your affections. So do not content yourself with superficial turning to God where there is no depth, but your love is like a morning cloud. Seems like there might be something there, maybe a little bit, and then it vanishes into nothing. Third, we see that repentance has to stand the test of time. How do you know if repentance is true or if it is like the

dew that goes early away? You have to wait. If you are frustrated with others because they are hopeful but cautious about a professed repentance in your life, you need to remember the sinfulness of your sin. It takes time for true repentance to show itself in its fruit. We need to be patient with ourselves, with others, and with the Lord.

I found this comment by Matthew Henry helpful, "Goodness is neither pleasing nor profitable that does not persevere." Repentance can happen in a moment, but true good repentance will persevere. It will show itself over time, and it will be pleasing to the Lord, and it will be profitable. Finally, repentance is not presumptuous. This was another fault of the people of Israel. They assumed it was automatic. It was what God is in the business to do.

Follow the right steps, punch in the right numbers, and there is forgiveness and restoration. There's no mention in their call to return of any change to be made to return to God. Nothing that it would demand of them, simply a matter of using God to be rid of the discomfort of the judgment and to be more comfortable in life. God is in the business of forgiveness. He is also in the business of conviction and of transformation.

God's people in these verses did not heed the warning. God told them of their sin, He warned them of the coming judgment, and He even disciplined them to humble them, but they did not turn from their sin. That does not need to be your story. These chapters give you a chance to ask yourself, do you know your sin? Do you see your sin? Oh, do not be naive to the sinfulness of sin, to the horrible nature of sin, as chapter 6, verse 10

describes it. Are you quick to see the sin and shortcomings of others and slow to see your own? Even now, are you hoping someone else hears this message? When someone cares enough to help you see your sin, do you grieve over your sin, or do you take offense that they would dare to point it out? Do you grieve over your sin? Do you despise your sin? When is the last time that you grappled with your own sin? When is the last time that you acknowledged your sin against someone else,

against God? Do you hate sin? And do you know God? Do you know your God, the personal, gracious, just, omniscient God of the scriptures? Not just know about Him, but do you know Him? The one who in His love sent His Son into the world to suffer and die, and who on the third day was raised up, that our sins might be forgiven and that we might be raised up with Him and live before Him. This God declares in His word that if you say you have no sin,

you deceive yourself, and the truth is not in you. But if you confess your sin, He is faithful and just to forgive your sin and to cleanse you from all unrighteousness. Confess your sin, acknowledge the heinousness of it, and run to the mercy of God in Christ. Heed the warnings of scripture. He is absolutely unchangingly dependable. He will forgive your sins, and He will reconcile you to Himself. Would you pray with me, please?

Father, would you give us eyes to see, and would you give us ears to hear? Those who need to hear a warning, would you help us to do so? Those who need to hear your comfort, would you help us to do so? Would you help us to rightly see our sin, to rightly see our Savior, that we might rejoice in Him, that we might worship Him, and that we might know the joy of having no more condemnation for those who are in Him. We pray these things in the name of our faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

Amen.