Hosea 7:1 - Meaning and Application

Some readers connect the end of the previous chapter with the start of this one: “When I was about to restore my people from captivity, when I was ready to come to them in mercy, when I would have healed Israel, then Ephraim’s sin was exposed, and the wickedness of Samaria was shown.” Ephraim here means the land and common people, and Samaria means the court and chief city. The point is plain: just when God was reaching out to help, their sin showed itself in full.

In these verses, we get a broad picture of Israel’s condition, as seen in Hosea 7:1-2. God truly meant to do them good. “I would have healed Israel” means he was ready to restore both their spiritual health and their outward peace. Israel was sick and badly wounded, like the people described in Isaiah 1:6, but their case was not hopeless. God had both the power and the will to cure them.

He would have reformed them, setting them apart from their sins through his law and prophets. He also would have delivered them from trouble and restored their peace and prosperity. More than once, his healing work seemed to be taking hold, and their condition looked as if it might improve. Yet their own foolishness drove them backward again.

No one who remains unhealed and lost can blame God. He was willing to heal them and even take their ruin into his own hand. There are times when God shows special readiness to heal a troubled church or nation. If those chances are watched and used well, even a very bad case can turn toward life and health.

But Israel also stood in their own way. When God was ready to heal them, when reform and peace seemed near, their guilt came out and stopped God’s favor from going forward. What had been hidden or covered over was exposed. It was not hidden from God before, but the language is human, as when a surgeon probes a wound and finds it too deep for healing.

When God came near to examine Israel with kindness, he found their sin so open and their hearts so stubborn that he could not, in honor, give them the mercy he had planned. Sinners are not healed because they will not be healed. Christ would have gathered them, and they would not.

This guilt also broke out when efforts were made to reform them. Instead of becoming better, their sin became more violent and more bold, like a stream that rises higher when blocked. As soon as they began to prosper, they grew proud, careless, and secure, and that stopped their recovery. Sin is what turns away good things when they are already coming toward us. Many people ruin themselves by doing evil just when God is trying to do them good.

What was their great sin? In a word, they dealt falsely. Some understand this as idolatry. Others take it as cheating one another. More likely, it means they were lying to God. They claimed to want healing from him and said they were willing to be ruled by him, but they were not sincere. They lied with their mouths and flattered him with their tongues.

At the root of all this was a practical disbelief in God’s knowledge and rule, as Hosea 7:2 says. They did not stop to say in their hearts, “God remembers all their wickedness.” They acted as if he could not see, did not care, had forgotten, or would not call them to account. That is the sinner’s kind of atheism. It is as if a person said there is no God, or at least no God who judges rightly.

This is a terrible insult to God and a deadly trick on themselves. They say, “The Lord will not see” (Psalm 94:7). Yet they know, or have been told many times, that God remembers all their works. Still, they do not take that truth to heart and apply it to themselves. If they did, they would not dare to live as they do. One day, all who deceive themselves this way will be shown the truth.

Their own deeds have surrounded them. That means their sins have grown so many and so open that everyone can see them. Or it may mean the punishment for their sins has trapped them, so they cannot get free. Then it will be clear that their sins are before God’s face, not only seen by him but hated by him. Until God forgives and puts our sins behind his back, they remain before his face. Sooner or later, God will make plain to those who ignore him that he remembers all their works.

God had already begun to deal with them by judgment, as a warning of worse things to come. “The thief comes in, and the troop of robbers spoils outside.” Some take this as another example of their sin, that they robbed and plundered each other. It became so unsafe that even guests and hosts could not trust one another. But it seems more likely to be a punishment for their sin. They were troubled by thieves inside their own land, breaking into houses and shops, and by bands of robbers and foreign invaders outside.

So Israel was far from being healed. They were getting fresh wounds every day from thieves and spoilers. All of this came from sin, as punishment for robbing God, as in Isaiah 42:24 and Malachi 3:8, Malachi 3:11. The chapter then turns to a more specific account of the sins of the court, the king, the princes, and those around them, along with the signs of God’s displeasure against them.

Their king and princes were pleased with the wickedness and shameless behavior of their subjects, and that only made the people bolder to do more evil (Hosea 7:3). They made the king and princes glad with their wickedness. It pleased the rulers to see the people follow their wicked laws and examples in idol worship, as well as in other sins and immoral acts. They also liked hearing them flatter and praise them in their evil ways. When Herod saw that his wickedness pleased the people, he went further in it (Acts 12:3). People do the same with rulers even more easily when they see that their sin pleases the prince.

In particular, they made the rulers glad with their lies. This included false praise that honored the prince’s favorites, and false accusations and complaints that darkened the reputations of those the prince disliked. Anyone who enjoys slander and mean stories will never lack people who feed them such talk. Proverbs 29:12 says, “If a ruler listens to lies, all his officials are wicked, and they will make him glad with their lies.”

Drunkenness and wild feasting were also common at court (Hosea 7:5). “The day of our king” was a feast day for them, perhaps his birthday, his day of accession, or some holiday he had set apart. On that day, the princes gathered to drink the king’s health, got him into their company, and made him sick with bottles of wine. It seems the king was not usually a heavy drinker, but on this special day the princes drew him into it through their schemes, the good wine, the lively company, and the toasts they pressed on him. Because he was not used to it, it made him sick.

This was rightly treated as a serious crime, even treason, against the king. It was no excuse that it happened on the king’s own day. That made it worse, because while they claimed to honor him, they dishonored him in the highest way. If it is a great insult to make an ordinary person drunk, and there is a warning against it in Habakkuk 2:15, it is much worse to do so to a king. The greater a man’s rank, the greater the shame of seeing him drunk. Proverbs 31:4-5 says, “It is not for kings to drink wine.”

Drunkenness is a great harm to a man, and especially to a ruler. First, it harms his health. It made the king sick. Drinking in this way goes against nature itself. It is strange that people who are otherwise reasonable can be drawn to something that offends God, hurts their souls forever, and also disorders their bodies right now. Second, it harms his honor. When he was drunk, he stretched out his hand with mockers. The one trusted with ruling a kingdom lost control of himself. He forgot the dignity of a king, because he made himself friendly with players and buffoons, and with company that brought shame. He also forgot the duty of a king, because he joined the atheists and the irreverent scoffers of religion, whom he should have silenced and put to shame. He sat with the scornful, those who had reached the height of disrespect toward God. He joined them, said what they said, did what they did, and used his authority in support of them. Good people are often made the joke of drunkards (Psalm 69:12; Psalm 35:16). But how sad for a land when its king acts like a child and stretches out his hand with those who make such fools of themselves (Ecclesiastes 10:16).

Adultery and sexual impurity also spread widely among the courtiers. This is described in Hosea 7:4, Hosea 7:6, and Hosea 7:7, and drunkenness is mentioned in the middle because wine fuels lust like oil feeds a fire (Proverbs 23:33). Those inflamed with fleshly lusts, those who commit adultery (Hosea 7:4), are compared again and again to an oven heated by the baker (Hosea 7:4): “They have made their hearts ready like an oven” (Hosea 7:6), and “they are all hot as an oven” (Hosea 7:7).

An unclean heart is like a heated oven, and its filthy desires are the fuel that keeps it burning. It is an inward fire that stays hidden inside. In the same way, adulterers and sexually immoral people secretly burn with lust, as Romans 1:27 says. The heat of an oven is intense, especially in this picture. The baker keeps stirring the fire and adding fuel until the bread is ready, kneaded and leavened. That means these people are like an oven at its hottest, even too hot for the baker, as Dr. Pocock notes, so hot that he must stop adding fuel while the dough is fermenting, so the heat can lessen a little. In the same way, the lusts of an unclean heart burn fiercely.

The unclean also wait for the right time to carry out their evil desires. After they have made their hearts ready like an oven, they lie in wait for prey. The eye of the adulterer watches for twilight (Job 24:15). Their baker sleeps all night, but in the morning it burns like a flaming fire. A baker lights his oven, adds enough fuel, goes to bed, and sleeps through the night. In the morning he finds it fully heated and ready for use. So these wicked people, after forming some sinful plan to satisfy greedy, proud, revengeful, or unclean desires, keep those plans alive in their hearts. Even if they hold back for a while, the fire inside keeps glowing, and as soon as they get the chance, what they have planned breaks out into open action, like a fire bursting out when it finds air. So they are all hot as an oven.

Lust in the heart is like fire in an oven. It heats everything inside. But a day is coming when those who make themselves like a fiery oven through their own evil desires, if that fire is not put out by God’s grace, will be made into a fiery oven by God’s wrath (Psalm 21:9), when the day comes that will burn like an oven (Malachi 4:1).

They also resisted the proper means of reform and correction. They had devoured their judges, those few good judges among them who might have put out these fires that were heating them up. They attacked them and would not let them do justice. They were ready to stone them, and may actually have done so. Or, as some think, they provoked God to take away the blessing of good government and leave everything in confusion. Their kings fell one after another, along with their families. That could only throw the kingdom into disorder, break it into rival groups, and lead to much bloodshed.

There are angry conflicts among them. They are hot like an oven with rage and malice toward one another, and this leads to the destruction of their judges and the downfall of their kings. “When a land sins, it has many rulers,” as Proverbs 28:2 says. Yet in all this trouble and disorder, no one calls on God. No one sees his hand in these judgments or asks him to lessen the blows, or at least very few do. None, or almost none, stir themselves to seek God, as Isaiah 64:7 says.

This shows that people are not only inflamed by sin, but hardened in it, when they keep living without prayer even in times of distress.