By Woodrow Kroll
Part 8 - The Disappointment Of Sin Is Its Own Punishment
Hosea chapter 4. I want to begin at verse 8. Hosea chapter 4 verse 8 talks about the insatiable appetites that come to people who are given to sin. Hosea chapter 4 verses 8-12, "They feed on the sins of My people and relish their wickedness. And it will be: Like people, like priests. I will punish both of them for their ways and repay them for their deeds. They will eat but not have enough; they will engage in prostitution but not increase, because they have deserted the Lord, to give themselves to prostitution, to old wine and new, which take away the understanding of my people."
That's a pretty insightful passage.
"They will eat," verse 10 says, "but not have enough." One of the things that sin does is it creates the desire for more sin. Have you noticed that? Well sure you have, you're a sinner. I mean we all know that to be a part of our lives. When you engage in a certain kind of sin it kind of hooks you and it brings you in! People who start out just innocently going through some pornographic sites on the Internet get hooked into that and they spend hours in front of the screen, looking at things that are destroying their minds. Sin has an insatiable appetite.
Now, we've been enjoying some pretty good food here at the Cove haven't we? Tonight at the dinner table Linda came to me and she said you have two choices for dessert. You can have fruit or you can have red velvet cake. I said to myself, "now let me see, fruit, red velvet cake, fruit, red velvet cake." There wasn't any choice friends. I mean it just kind of hooks you; it brings you in, right? It's that same insatiable appetite.
There was a guy in Grinnell, Iowa; his name was Denny McNurland. Denny McNurland tried to eat a 205-ounce steak. I've got to think about this. This is half the cow. He tried to eat a 205-ounce steak. This is a 4-inch thick steak, a sirloin that weighted 13 pounds. It was the size of a small dog. Bad analogy there I know, but it was the size of a small dog. Well, I'm here to tell you, this fellow Denny McNurland failed. He was not able to eat this 205-ounce steak. He did eat 150 ounces of it, before he keeled over--more than 9 pounds of meat. You talk about an insatiable appetite!
The appetite we are talking about here though, is the appetite for sin. One of the things that we learn about this insatiable appetite is that in their greed these priests began to feed on the sins of their people. Notice what it says there in verse 9, "Like people, like priests." See, the priest learned that if the people went out and sinned and they had to bring a certain trespass offering to the priests, and the priests got a portion of that trespass offering. It wasn't too long until these priests realized that the more the people sinned, the more they got! There are some traditions, friends, where you sin, you confess, you can go back and sin again, and that's good for sitting priests. That's exactly what's happening here. The priests of Israel were not telling people they should not sin, they were not encouraging, they were doing nothing. They were feeding off the people!
Jeremiah chapter 5 talks about this. Let me just read a portion to you. "Go up and down the streets of Jerusalem... if you can find but one person who deals honestly and seeks the truth, I will forgive this city," says the Lord God, "I will go to the leaders and speak to them, surely they know of the way of the Lord, the requirements of their God...But with one accord they too had broken off the yoke...The prophets are but wind and the word is not in them...these people have stubborn and rebellious hearts, they have turned aside...The prophets prophesy lies, the priests rule by their own authority, and My people love it this way." That's Jeremiah chapter 5.
What Hosea, and Jeremiah, and Amos and these other prophets of the same time period are saying is that they were having an economic boom! Things were going very well in Israel and Judah at this time. Times were good; food on the table, shekels in the pocket. Things were going very well for these people, and while things were going economically very well, they were getting farther and farther from God on a daily basis and sin was drawing them in so they had insatiable appetites. The more they eat, they will eat and they will not have enough.
Micah had something to say about that. Micah chapter 6 and verse 14 "You will eat and not be satisfied," the prophet Micah says. "Your stomach will still be empty, you will store up but save nothing because what you save I will give to the sword."
Haggai has something to say about this. All these prophets are in the same period of time. Haggai chapter 1 verse 6, "You have planted much but harvested little. You eat, but never have enough. You drink, but never have your fill." Listen to this, "You earn wages only to put them in a purse with holes in it." If that is not a description of 21st century society I don't know what is. Working more, working harder, working overtime, saving up, eating more, gorging ourselves, saving money to put it in a purse that has holes in it and losing all this at the same time. One of the judgments that God can bring upon people like this is to simply to allow them to have insatiable appetites. They just can never get enough!
When Israel sinned, God didn't have to destroy Israel! All God had to do was let Israel have what Israel wanted and that was punishment enough. Because sin always leads us away from God, sin always leads us to an appetite for more sin and you can never be satisfied! I've often wondered, watching television over the last 20 years how television has gotten worse and worse and worse. And how those who wear clothes on television have worn less and less and less. There comes a point, friends, when there is nothing left, right? What do you do then? There is a point at which you can't go any lower, what do you do then? You can't take off anymore, what do you do then?
Sin has this insatiable appetite and God says "all right Israel you forget Me; you forget that I have blessed you. You will be like Gomer, you'll go away from the love of your husband, you'll become a prostitute, you'll live with prostitutes. You'll enjoy life but you will never get enough of it. One day you will realize one of the punishments of sin is the fact that you can't get enough sin! It'll trouble you because you'll want more and can't handle more." That's one response that God gives in bringing judgment.
Look at chapter 8 of Hosea. Let's see a second response. Not only is there this problem of an insatiable appetite, but notice in chapter 8. The 14 verses of this chapter talk about broken relationships. We're not going to read the whole chapter. Let me just point out what these broken relationships are. You look at the verses; I'll tell you in summary what's in those verses.
Verses 1 to 3 of chapter 8 talks about a broken relationship with God's covenant. These are the covenant people of God but their sin has gotten in the way of God performing all that He promised in their covenant. In verse 4 notice that it's a broken relationship with God's government. God wants to rule them and be good and kind to them but they've severed their relationship with His government. At the end of verse 4 and all of verse 5 it talks about a broken relationship with God's purity. They've lost the purity of being a separate people unto God!
Then in verses 6 through 9 it talks about a broken relationship with God's Promised Land. God had promised them, these people of God, this nation and they've broken that covenant with God.
In chapter 8 verses 10, 11, and 12 there's a broken relationship with God's blessing. God wanted to bless the people, but their insatiable appetite for sin was filling up so that they could not hold the blessing of God. Then verse 13 and 14, the end of the chapter, there's a broken relationship with God's pleasure. It says in verse 13 "the offer of sacrifice is given to Me and they eat the meat, but the Lord is not pleased with them." Damaging words, the Lord is not pleased with them. For the Lord not to be pleased with His people, what does that mean for the people of God?
The story here, the story line is of a husband and a wife who is unfaithful and yet in the unfaithfulness of this wife Gomer, this man Hosea continues to love her! Continues to be faithful to her! Continues to be chaste for her! Even though she is not for him and one day he brings her back into his arms, and brings her back into his life and he loves her the whole time and he forgives her of her sin, and this is a microcosm picture of the big picture of God and His love for Israel. God and His love for His people.
Sometimes, when God's people have wandered away from God, the bad attitudes of bad actions have led to bad leaders. They wandered away from God and God has to judge sin, and one of the judgments He gives sin is to simply allow sin to take its natural course, to let these insatiable appetites to want more and not be able to have more.
Another way He deals with sin is simply to cut and sever relationships. Listen, what makes hell "hell," is the absence of God there. It's that severed relationship, the possibility gone forever of having a relationship with a loving God. See, if Hosea had cut Gomer off, if Hosea had sent her way, her life would be over, her hope would be over, everything would be over; but it was that attachment to her that Hosea continued to love her and she knew he loved her.
For Israel it was that attachment to God, that God continued to love Israel. Even though they had broken their relationships with God, God would resolve the situation by bringing His people back to Him. That's the greatest love story of all time, friends. Not that we love God, but that He loved us! The amazing thing to me is not that I love God. I mean, what's there not to love about God? He's altogether lovely. What amazes me is that He loves me! I'm the one who strayed from Him. I'm the one who is engaged in spiritual adultery. I'm the one who has given myself to sin and so have we all. Yet, like Gomer, you and me, God, like Hosea, continues to love us and hold out His arms to us to welcome us back.
Well, I said that the insatiable appetite is one way God allows sin to take its natural course. Breaking off a relationship, that's the second one. Let me suggest to you a third way in chapter 10. In chapter 10 of Hosea beginning at verse 7 God allows judgment to come to us by simply hiding the end result from us. Sometimes He just lets us believe there is no relief in sight. You know, you've felt like this, haven't you at times. It's that one thing happens after another; it's like walking through a field of rakes. You step on the teeth of a rake and every time you take a step the handle comes up and hits you right in the face. It just seems to be piling on, doesn't it, one thing after another! I think we've all felt like that.
Well here in chapter 10 verse 7 He speaks about no relief being in sight. "Samaria and its king will float away." I mean here they are floating down the river, down the stream; they're going to be carried into captivity. Samaria, the capital of Israel, and its king will be carried away by the Assyrians. Then He says in verse 8 "the sights of idolatrous worship will be destroyed." Again in verse 8 He talks about these thorns and these thistles covering what at one time prospered. I mean these people sunk a lot of money into their sin and God says, "Look, I'm going to make it so that you don't see any relief in sight. You will have to come back to Me."
Numbers chapter 33 and verse 52 says, "drive out all the inhabitants of the land before you. Destroy all their carved images and their cast idols, and demolish all their high places." That was God's command to the people. You know what happened? Instead of driving out all the pagan practices, driving out all these foreign and pagan places, they imbibed them all and God turned right around and used these foreign and pagan armies to drive them out of the land.
God not only has a sense of humor, He has an incredible sense of irony. The very thing that they were to get rid of, so that God could bless them, God used because they would not get rid of them. See what He is doing here? He's allowing sin to come to its natural consequences. God doesn't have to do anything to punish us for sin. He just has to allow us to sin. Sin itself is punishment enough. We're just too dumb to know that. Israel is learning it by a hard lesson.
Notice in verse 8, Israel will beg for relief from God's wrath. It says in verse 8, "Then they will say to the mountains, 'Cover us!' and to the hills, 'Fall on us!'" Does that sound familiar to you? If it does it is because you've been reading in Revelation chapter 6 about the opening of the sixth seal. When all the kings and the mighty men go to the rocks in the mountains and they say to the rocks and mountains, "Fall on us and hide us from the wrath of Him who sets upon the throne." Israel will beg for relief from God's wrath and she won't get it. God is going to make them believe that there is absolutely no end in sight because they haven't come to the natural consequence of their sin yet.
Then look at verse 9. God will remind Israel of the depth of her sin. "Since the days of Gibeah, you have sinned." Now this is not the first time we've encountered this in our study of Hosea. Back here in chapter 1 verse 4, He made this almost tangential reference to Jehu. But there was a reason for that, and the reason was that Jehu had over reacted when God told Him to punish the house of Ahab. Now He makes an almost tangential reference here to the evildoers of Gibeah and you say to yourself, "Gibeah? What does this have to do with anything?" The Israelites would know Gibeah very well.
You may remember the story in Judges 19. It's not the kind of story I like to read often. It's the story of a Levite who has gone from Bethlehem to his home in Ephraim and he got as far as the city of Gibeah, and there he spent the night with his concubine. The men of Gibeah pounded on the door because they wanted to have a homosexual relationship with that man. The men of Gibeah pandered after this stranger, and this stranger sent his concubine out instead. These bisexual Gibeonites raped this woman repeatedly all night long and left her dead on the doorstep the next morning. This man was so outraged he wanted to outrage the rest of Israel and he cut the body of this concubine in 12 parts and sent a part to every corner of the nation of Israel and Judah.
Now I want to tell you friends, that's not a story you often want to repeat, but it is not a story Israel could ever forget. So in Hosea here, hundreds of years later, it says that, "Did not war overtake the evildoers in Gibeah?" He makes reference to the fact that since the days of Gibeah you have sinned. These people knew exactly what he was talking about. The natural consequence of sin is punishment enough for sin! God does not have to do much more other than allow us to sin, and bear the consequences of that sin.
Then finally in verse 10, "When I please, I will punish them; nations will be gathered against them to put them in bonds for their double sin." See, God will punish Israel in His own time, in His own way, but for now just being separate from them, just not blessing them, just withdrawing His love from them for a short season, is more punishment than Israel can bear.
I'm going to tell you, friends, once you get a good taste of God's love, once you've tasted to see that the Lord is gracious, and you missed tasting Him the next day. You missed that! After a couple of days you can get away from that and after a couple of years you don't miss it anymore and that is judgment enough! Just what you're missing from not having a relationship with God. The Israelites have decided to go after other gods and so they don't have a relationship with the one true God who can satisfy.
Remember the cycle here. Israel sins, God responds to that sin with judgment. The great thing about the third part of the cycle is that God resolves the judgment by saving His people and calling His people back because His love is ever open to those people, just like it is open to you and me. God is incredibly patient with those who sin. He says, "In my own time, as I please, I will punish them, but for now, I'm not going to actively punish them. I'm simply going to allow them to have the fruit of their own sin."
I want to tell you, if you've been in a situation in life where sin has been devastating to you, you know that God doesn't have to punish you. Sin itself is punishment enough.
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