Sermon: Sin in Israel; Salvation in Immanuel

I'd like to ask you to take a Bible and turn to page 755. We've been going through the Book of Hosea this summer. We're a little more than halfway through, and my title for the sermon tonight is "Sin in Israel, Salvation in Immanuel." So page 755, but before we read and preach and listen, let's pray again and ask God's blessing on His Word.

Father, it was said of the Lord Jesus that His delight was in the fear of the Lord. Lord, we want to be those people as well. We want to have an affectionate awe for you in your great beauty. We want to have wholehearted worship before you in your great majesty, and we want to have overflowing obedience before you in your holiness. Lord, this is possible through your Word and through your Spirit as you open our eyes to the Living Word,

our Savior and our Lord Jesus. So we pray that you would do that tonight. We pray that you would work in me and through me and my words, that they would be your words. We pray that your words would pierce deep into our heart, giving us light and life in Christ, and we pray it in his precious name. Amen. So Sin in Israel, and Salvation in Immanuel. Two weeks ago, Pastor Kevin McKelvey reminded us that we really can't know deep joy in salvation

unless we have a correspondingly deep sense of sin. So here we are, a little more than halfway through Hosea, which for the most part has and will continue to be for a while an unrelenting catalog of sins that Israel committed. Now let's be honest, it's not fun to encounter accusations of sin every week, and frankly, it's not so easy to preach it either. But it actually is God's great mercy to take us into a deep understanding of sin that would

lead us to a profound sense of peace and freedom and joy in the gospel. So brothers and sisters, hang in there. I want to start with a quote from a Puritan, Richard Sibbes, that gives us a banner for the whole chapter tonight. Sibbes says, "There is more mercy in Christ than sin in us. There can be no danger, therefore, in thorough dealing. It is better to go bruised to heaven than sound to hell. Therefore, let us not take off ourselves too soon, nor

pull off the plaster before the cure be wrought, but keep ourselves under this work until," listen to this, "until sin be the sourest and Christ the sweetest of all things." That's our desire tonight. That's the goal of this sermon is that sin would become increasingly sour and Christ would become increasingly sweet. So tonight, we're going to consider two things. First of all, as we look at Hosea 8, we're going to look at the grievous sins of Israel and the fearful judgment

that God pronounced and was about to bring upon them. That'll take a little bit longer. A little bit shorter, but much more important, we're going to then look at the wondrous love and the amazing grace of our Savior in saving us from our sins. So first of all, sin in Israel. We're going to read Hosea 8:1-14. "Set the trumpet to your lips! One like a vulture is over the house of the Lord, because they have transgressed my covenant and rebelled against my law.

To me they cry, 'My God, we, Israel, know you!' Israel has spurned the good; the enemy shall pursue him. They made kings, but not through me; they set up princes, but I knew it not. With their silver and gold they made idols for their own destruction. I have spurned your calf, O Samaria; my anger burns against them. How long will they be incapable of innocence? For it is from Israel; a craftsman made it; it is not God. The calf of Samaria shall be

broken to pieces. For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. The standing grain has no heads; it shall yield no flour. If it were to yield, strangers would devour it. Israel is swallowed up; already they are among the nations as a useless vessel. For they have gone up to Assyria, a wild donkey wandering alone. Ephraim has hired lovers. Though they hire allies among the nations, I will soon gather them up,

and the kings and princes shall soon rise because of the tribute. Because Ephraim has multiplied altars for sinning, they have become to him altars for sinning. Were I to write for him my laws by the ten thousands, they would be regarded as a strange thing. As for my sacrificial offerings, they sacrifice meat and eat it, but the Lord does not accept them. Now he will remember their iniquity and punish their sins. They shall return to Egypt.

For Israel has forgotten his Maker and built palaces, and Judah has multiplied fortified cities. So I will send fire upon his cities, and it shall devour her strongholds.

If you look at verse one, we're going to take that as the theme verse, the key verse, the key text. It says, again, "Set the trumpet to your lips. One like a vulture is over the house of the Lord because they have transgressed my covenant and rebelled against my law." It's as if God is saying, "Judgment, like a vulture, is circling over my people, and it's about to swoop down and ravage Israel because they have broken

covenant with me." We're going to take a look at four covenant transgressions. We won't hit every verse, but most of the sins are going to be included in these four. So the first covenant transgression for which God is threatening judgment is the sin of self-deception. It's right there in verses two and three. Again, Israel says, "My God, we, Israel, we know you." Undoubtedly, they're relying on their Jewish ethnicity,

past deliverances in their history, and external religious observances, and they claim to intimately know God and love Him. But God says, "That is absolutely not true. You are hypocrites." God says, "You, Israel, have spurned, have rejected, have treated with contempt the good, and the enemy shall pursue you." They've actually rejected God. They don't love God. They've rejected Him, and they've held Him in contempt. So right off the bat, brothers and sisters, there's a warning for

us. It's easy to have a comfortable familiarity with God and to think all is well. Jesus addressed a church in Laodicea in the Book of Revelation, and he said, "You think you are prospering, and things are well with you, and everything's great." And he says, "In reality, you're wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked." It's so easy to be self-deceived in our relationship with God. We're easily self-deceived. Counselor Paul Tripp used to say we are blind to our

blindness. Jeremiah says the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Who can understand it? And so we are called to beware self-deception. Self-deceived people cannot be trusted. Now, how do we do that? Normally, we're just going to look inside and say, "Okay, I'm going to find my sin and deal with it." But if we're self-deceived, we won't see it. We'll miss a whole lot of things. We'll see other things, and we'll

misinterpret everything. The only way we can escape self-deception is to ask God to search our hearts. And there's a beautiful two verses at the end of Psalm 139 from David, and David says, "Search me, O Lord, and know my heart. Try me and know my anxious thoughts. You see if there's any wicked or grievous or offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting." It is imperative that we pray that prayer often because we don't see what we don't see because we

don't want to see it. So self-deception is a common and continual problem that can only be solved if we ask God to throw the searchlight of His Spirit on our hearts. You search my heart. You show me. You lead me by the hand into repentance. So the first sin is self-deception. The second sin is self-reliance. We see that in verse four, verses eight through 10, and verses 14. I'm just going to say some of the words from those verses.

God says they've appointed kings and princes. They've, in a sense, elected government leaders. They've made idols. They created a false religion. But He said, "It wasn't through me. I knew it not." So they're creating their own governmental structure and leadership. They've even made up their own religion. And that it says that they are swallowed up among the nations and have become useless. They've gone up to Assyria.

We've been hearing about Assyria in our morning services, Nineveh, the great oppressor of Israel. They're going to Assyria for protection. It says, "Though they hire allies among the nations, I will soon gather them up." What God is saying is, "You're relying on everyone and everything except me." Isaiah has a passage in Isaiah 30 that I think captures the theme here of self-reliance. God says, "Ah, stubborn children who carry out a plan but not mine,

and who make an alliance but not of my spirit, that they may add sin to sin." Who set out to go down to Egypt without asking for my direction, to take refuge in the protection of Pharaoh, and to seek shelter in the shadow of Egypt. So instead of going north to Nineveh, to Assyria, this one, they're going south to Egypt, but it's the same thing. We're looking to others and we're trying to take care of ourselves. In verse 14, we have a summary of this self-reliance.

It says, "Israel has forgotten his Maker and built palaces and multiplied fortified cities." In rejecting God and his covenant and his wisdom, Israel is seeking to be totally self-reliant and self-sufficient. They're trusting in their own self-appointed leaders. They're trusting in alliances with other countries, building fortified cities instead of trusting in the Lord, and living for luxury instead of delighting in the author of

life. Does that sound familiar? Electing leaders, building alliances, building strong cities, delighting in comfort, and trying to minimize all pain. If you did a random interview of 100 people in Lansing and you read those things and said, "Well, what do you think about those things?" They would say, "What else is there? This is what life's about." So business as usual. But underneath all of this, looking to their own

leaders, to their own religion, to other countries, to luxury, and so on, underneath all of this is the primal sin of all people. It goes all the way back to Genesis 3. It's the sin of Adam and Eve. Remember the serpent said, "When you eat of this fruit, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God," self-reliant. This self-reliance is the default mode of every single person in this room tonight. We're like grown-up two-year-olds,

"I'll do it myself." Our hearts move toward that. It's also the cultural air that we breathe. Whatever else, be true to yourself. And it's also the seed of self-destruction. Again, Isaiah said it this way, "You said in your heart, 'I will ascend to heaven,' but you are brought down to Sheol, to the far reaches of the pit." So just as we need to beware self-deception, we need to beware self-reliance. A short time ago, our country celebrated the 250th

anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. That was a good document. Independence from England, good thing. But don't ever declare a declaration of independence from God. We should be declaring a declaration of dependence on him. Like Jesus said, "If you abide in me, cling to me, rely on me, depend on me, and my words abide in you, you can ask whatever you wish and it will be done for you." So self-deception and self-reliance.

The third sin is false worship. We see it in verses five and six and in verses 11 through 13. Again, God says to Israel, "You have spurned the good," rejected, held it in contempt. And then he says, "I have spurned your calf." Now, that's kind of shorthand for, I have rejected your whole system of false worship. But doesn't that word calf kind of like, really? A calf? They have burned into their corporate memory the first calf incident, which was in

Exodus 32. Moses is up on the mountain and he's gone a long time, and they don't know where he is, and they get all panicky, and they get all lusty and they say, "Let's build a calf and worship it, and then let's go back to Egypt." And Moses comes down the mountain and he sees what's going on, and he smashes the Ten Commandments. And then he has that golden calf pulverized into dust and mixed with water, and every Israelite had to drink that bitter

water. So even with this golden calf incident and God's anger at that burned into their memory, historically, when the kingdom split in 930 BC, Israel in the north, Judah in the south, King Jeroboam, who was the king of the north, was so bent on being independent from Judah and Jerusalem and the temple, that he had two shrines built in the north, one in the far north in Dan and one in the south in Beersheba. And calves were going to be the center of worship

again, hard as that is to believe, and this idolatrous worship continued long after Jeroboam. In fact, it's still going on because God says, "I've spurned your calf." The calf was to be broken in pieces, even as the original calf was. In addition, as far as false worship, it says that Israel had multiplied altars for sinning. Now, that's very strange. And it says, "They have become for them altars for sinning." Well, first of all, just multiplying altars

period was disobedience. God says there's one place where you offer sacrifices, and that's in the temple in Jerusalem. So any other altars are off base. But these altars, and I think the best way of understanding they built altars for sinning, is they built altars to offer sacrifices to atone for their sins. But those other multiplied altars became places of gluttony and drunkenness and sexual immorality. These altars became places where unrepentant sinners offered

ungodly sacrifices to take away their sins, and instead all they did was increase their guilt and God's wrath. The third way that we see God addressing false worship is in verse 12. He says, "Were I to write for him, Israel, my law by the ten thousands, they would be regarded as a strange thing." This verse tells us that Israel had become so numb and so insensitive to God's word that even if he were to multiply it exponentially and every Israelite had

their own copy of the Torah, it would be a strange thing to them. So what would that look like today? God's word multiplied exponentially. Well, it would look like this. I did a little research. Do you know that there are 900 English translations? Nine hundred. So that's more English translations than you could ever get through in your lifetime. And most of us have multiple copies of the Bible in our house. So God has multiplied it 10,000 times.

In fact, my wife Judy and I live in one house, and our daughter, Stephanie, and her family live next to us, and I would say if you went through all the shelves in both houses, we would have probably 10 to 15 different Bibles. So we have that situation today, and the research shows that Bible sales are up. God has multiplied by ten thousands His word, and yet many people don't read the Bible. It just gathers dust. Or if they do read it, they read

it quickly and kind of superficially. There's no engagement with the word. There's no connection with the living God. There's no repentance, there's no real worship. So we are in danger in our culture of all of these forms of false worship. And for all these reasons, the Lord utterly rejected their worship as false, as hypocritical, and abhorrent to Him. And again, false worship is still a problem today. The first and second commandments out of the 10 address our

worship. The first commandment warns against worshiping anything or anyone but the living God, the true God, the God of the Bible, not a god of our own making, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And we all know that anything we look to, it doesn't have to be fashioned. Most people don't have a shrine in their house with a little golden thing that they bow down before. But anything visible or invisible that we look to, that we find our ultimate joy in, that we

trust in more than God, is a God substitute. It's an idol. Anything in creation, anything, even good things, can become idols if we allow them to have more value than loving God with all our heart and loving our neighbor as ourself. The second commandment addresses not the what we worship or the who, but the how. As Presbyterians, once again, we look to the Westminster Confession. Our catechisms hold to what is called the

regulative principle. That says that we should only worship God as He has commanded us in Scripture. Some people think if it's not forbidden, go ahead and do it. The Westminster Confession and the regulative principles say if God has not commanded it, don't do it. Now, there's lots of questions involved in that that we don't have time to address, but it should at least be clear that Scripture is meant to direct our worship as we meet together as much

as in all other things in life. And we love to say at URC, we aspire to this, we don't do it perfectly, but we love to say that we read Scripture, we preach and teach Scripture, we hear Scripture, we pray Scripture, we sing Scripture, we see Scripture in the sacraments, and we seek to live out Scripture. So self-deception, self-reliance, and false worship. Three big categories of covenant transgression. The last thing we want to notice about sin in Israel

is not so much a separate category of sin, but it's an underlying dynamic that we see all the way through here. It's the principle of sowing and reaping. We see it in chapter 8, verse 7. "For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind." This verse summarizes the entire spiritual dynamic in Hosea 8. Israel sowed unbelief. They sowed pride and rebellion. They broke the covenant with God, and they're about to reap

fiery destruction. Now, this whole principle of sowing and reaping is taken up by the Apostle Paul in Galatians 6, verses seven and eight. Here's what Paul says about sowing and reaping. "Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap. For the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption. But the one who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life." What does God want us to see and

understand from Paul's words? First of all, God wants us to see that contrary to our culture, contrary to modern psychology, we are not primarily victims of nature and nurture. Nature, you know, is everything that has to do with your body, your heredity, your genetics, the way your brain is wired, strength, weakness, sickness, health. And nurture is all the ways that we are influenced by other people, our family of origin, our

peers, any traumas we've experienced, and certainly our whole culture. Now, these things are important. We care about those things. God cares about those things. But nature and nurture do not determine who we are or what we do. There is a deeper dynamic that is in the human heart, and it starts with what is it we want the most? What is it that we deep down believe? Our desires and our beliefs, the things we live for, and that sets up this whole

process of desires and thoughts and so on, sowing and reaping. Here's an adage that I think captures the principle of sowing and reaping. Sow a thought, reap an act. Sow an act, reap a habit. Sow a habit, reap a character. Sow a character, reap a destiny. I think God wants us to see that this law of sowing and reaping is absolute and inexorable. You always reap what you sow eventually. Where we get tricked is sometimes the

reaping doesn't come right away. It may come later. I saw that principle shown on TV recently as I was watching a rerun of the show "The Americas," narrated by Tom Hanks. Beautiful show. And in this show, they were in South America, and they were talking about this whole big, long mountain chain that goes along the west coast of South America and how this mountain chain is so big that storms off the ocean can't get over it.

And I forget what country it's in, but they showed this place called the Atacama Desert. And Tom Hanks, I believe Tom, says it is the driest place on Earth. And they showed pictures of it, just brown rocks and sand. The least moisture of any place on Earth because the storms can't get over to water it, until they do. About once every 10 years, there is a storm so big that it goes over the mountain, and it just drenches this

large, dry desert. And I'm sure using time-lapse photography, they showed what happens when all this storm water, rain, falls on this desert. And you just watched literally the desert bloom. Every kind of flower, every hue, every color, every square inch of this desert just came alive with color. Now, that's a positive thing. Tom Hanks said that some of those seeds lay dormant for 10 years. In a negative sense, that's what can happen with us.

We sow to the flesh, but it may lay dormant for a while. It doesn't come back until later. So the law of sowing and reaping is inexorable. So there's two outcomes. You can sow to the flesh and reap corruption, decay, and destruction, or you can sow to the Spirit and reap eternal life, holiness, wholeness, and ultimately happiness. Now, if all of this is true, especially about sowing and reaping, and we see it lived out in Hosea 8, they

sow the wind and they reap the whirlwind. We may feel tonight like the disciples who probably cried out more than once to Jesus, "Then who can be saved?" I've sowed a lot of bad seeds. I have broken covenant with God just like Israel. Who can be saved? How do we repair a broken covenant with God? How do we escape the inexorability of reaping what you sowed? Now, you know the answer. The answer is the name above every name.

It is the name which is the only name given among men on earth by which men can be saved. It is the name that someday every knee will bow. It's Jesus. But we need to go through that a little more carefully. This will be a little bit shorter part of the sermon, but this is where God rescues us. And by seeing the horror and the inexorability of sin and judgment,

God wants us to go higher into grace and thankfulness and a life lived for his glory. So we've looked at sin in Israel. Now we're going to look at salvation in Emmanuel. Pastor Kevin quickly quoted this verse this morning, Matthew 1, where the angel says to Joseph, "She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. For he will save his people from," not what happened to them, not what they suffered primarily, "He will save his

people from their sins." All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet, "Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel." Emmanuel, God with us, saves us from the broken covenant and the law of reaping and sowing. Now, the covenant that God made with man. A little bit of very brief covenant theology here. The covenant that God made with mankind has always,

from the beginning, required personal, perpetual, and perfect obedience. But this covenant was broken right off the bat by Adam in the garden. It was broken by Israel countless times through the centuries, as we just saw in Hosea 8, and has been broken by every one of us continually. David said in Psalm 1:30, "If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins, who could stand?"

So we need a savior who can repair the covenant and can interrupt the law of sowing and reaping by doing two things. First of all, we need a savior who can perform personal, perpetual, and perfect obedience in our place. And we also need a savior who can bear the punishment and the curses due to the covenant breakers. So we're going to look at the specific sins that we saw in Israel and consider how Emmanuel, Jesus, saves

us from those and every other sin. We need someone to reverse the curse of sowing and reaping. The first sin we saw was self-deception and hypocrisy. Jesus, how does he save us from that? Well, Jesus said to people who were trying to get him in trouble, "Which one of you convicts me of sin? If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me?" We see that Jesus comes to reverse the curse of self-deception and hypocrisy by his

impeccable sinlessness. We talked about self-reliance. We need a savior to save us from the law of sowing and reaping of self-reliance. And we see in John 5, "So Jesus said to them, 'Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise.'" Jesus comes and reverses the curse and breaks the law of sowing and reaping of

self-reliance by his absolutely continuous and glad and wholehearted dependence on his Father. We saw the sin of false worship. Jesus said, "In sacrifice and offering, you have not delighted," external worship, "but you have given me an open ear. Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required." Then I said, "Behold, I have come. In the scroll of the book it is written of me, I delight to do your will, O my God. Your

law is within my heart." Jesus reverses the curse of false worship by his wholehearted worship and his overflowing obedience. And any sin that we could look at in the Bible, we will see Jesus doing the opposite, living an impeccably perfect life, personal, perpetual, perfect obedience. So we have one who reverses that. But Jesus not only reversed the curse by perfectly living our life, but he also bore the curse due to all our

covenant rebellion. Remember verse one. There's a vulture swooping, the vulture of judgment, and that vulture's got to swoop down. It's got to land somewhere. Sin must be punished. And Paul says in Galatians 3, "For all who rely on works of the law," in other words, try to repair the covenant breach themselves and try to perform personal, perpetual, and perfect obedience, "are under a curse." For it is written, "Cursed be everyone who does not

abide by all things written in the book of the law and do them." If we try to repair the broken covenant and reverse the law of sowing and reaping ourselves, we just increase our curse. But then he says, "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, so that in Christ Jesus, the blessing," He takes the curse, we get the blessing of Abraham, "might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised

Spirit through faith." So we could say we sowed to the flesh, and Jesus reaped the curse.

Jesus repairs the covenant by doing two things. He takes the curse so that we get the blessing of Abraham. What is the blessing of Abraham? It's righteousness by faith. It's justification by faith. The moment you put your faith in Christ, all your sins are forgiven, and you are credited with the perfect righteousness of Christ to cover all your past, present, and future sins. So you can leave the courtroom. The verdict has already been pronounced, and it's not even not

guilty. It's righteous. Some of us live continually in the courtroom, just not sure how the judge is going to judge. Have we done enough? Have we made up for our sins? Are we being good enough? We're still living in the courtroom, but justification by faith says, no, you can leave the courtroom and never ever, ever come back. So justification of faith, the blessing of Abraham. We also receive the promised gift of the Spirit.

That is the medicine of life. God himself comes to live within us, to make whole what was diseased and evil, to give us new desires and new power to start living for Him. So not only can you leave the courtroom, you can leave the hospital because you've been given the medicine that will make you alive.

So as we close here, let me repeat the quote of Richard Sibbes that I read at the beginning. "There is more mercy in Christ than sin in us. There can be no danger in thorough dealing with our sin. It is better to go bruised to heaven than sound to hell. Therefore, let us not take off ourselves too soon nor pull off the plaster before the cure be wrought, but keep ourselves under His work until sin be the sourest and Christ the sweetest

of all things." One last thing. What would that look like? What would that sound like for sin to be sour and Christ to be sweet? We all know who John Newton was. The former slave trader in the 1700s, converted powerfully, became an Anglican priest, wrote "Amazing Grace" and many, many other beautiful hymns, preached sermons, and also wrote letters to people. Just amazingly wise, helpful counsel. Great man of God. When he was

not too long left to live, he said, "I'm old now, and I've forgotten many things, but two things I remember. One, I'm a great sinner.

Two, Christ is a great savior." Let's pray.

Lord, would you take my poor stumbling words

and my imperfect attempt to point to Christ, and would you just rivet our eyes on Him, the sin bearer, the curse, the one who became a curse for us, the one who has reversed the curse so that we are blessed beyond our imagination, forgiven and counted righteous, given the precious Holy Spirit to live in us. And Lord, as we close out this service, would you draw each one of us with cords of kindness to the Savior, maybe for the first time,

probably for most of us, maybe the 10,000th time, but lead us to Christ again. Open our eyes to see His beauty and to apply all of His amazing gospel benefits. And we pray in His name. Amen.