Hosea 9:1 - Meaning and Application

Here Israel is charged with spiritual adultery: “O Israel, you have been unfaithful to your God” (Hosea 9:1). Their covenant with God was like a marriage covenant, by which they were joined to him alone and turned from all other gods. But when they set up idols, worshiped them, and trusted creatures for help, they acted like an unfaithful spouse. Other nations were idolaters, but Israel’s sin was worse, because they had been married to the true God. The sins of people who have professed faith and belong to God are more provoking to him than the sins of others.

As proof of this unfaithfulness, the prophet says they loved a reward on every grain floor. This may mean they loved giving gifts to their idols, offering sacrifices and firstfruits from every threshing floor. They took a strange pleasure in serving false gods with what they would have been unwilling to use for the Lord. It may also mean they loved to receive what they thought their idols gave them, the harvest and crop blessings they counted as payment from their lovers (Hosea 2:12). Those are drawn toward spiritual idolatry who value grain and earthly gain more than God’s favor and eternal life.

They are also told not to rejoice like other people. “Do not be glad, Israel,” because their joy does not fit their condition. What peace or joy should they expect while their unfaithfulness and witchcraft were so great? They should not act as if all were well. Instead, they should be sad, grieve, and weep (James 4:9). Judah, which stayed close to the true God, and even nations that never knew him, had more reason to rejoice than Israel did, because Israel had turned away from him.

Some think Israel had special reasons for public celebration at this time, perhaps recovered losses, gained victories, or made an alliance with a strong partner. But God tells them not to rejoice. Joy is forbidden food for the wicked. Whatever they were celebrating would not protect them or help them, as long as they were far from God and at war with him. If we do not make God our highest joy, we cannot expect much joy from earthly blessings. And the burden of sin and the fear of judgment should cast a dark shadow over wicked people’s happiness until they return and make peace with God.

They are then warned of destroying judgments for their spiritual adultery, just as Scripture had said long before: “You destroy all who are unfaithful to you” (Psalm 73:27). First, their land would stop giving its usual crops. Canaan, a fertile land, would become barren because of the wickedness of its people. They loved the reward of the grain floor and were full of harvest joy, yet they had no heart to grieve over sin. So God would humble them by taking away not only their pleasures, but even their food. The threshing floor and winepress would not feed them, and the new wine would fail them (Hosea 9:2). It would either be ruined by God’s hand or taken by men’s hands.

When people make the world and its gifts their idol and their main treasure, God may justly withhold even the basic things those gifts were meant to provide. Let those who look for their reward in the grain floor lose food from the grain floor. We lose the good things of this world when we love them as the best things.

Second, the land would not only stop feeding them, it would stop housing them. It would cast them out, just as it had done to the Canaanites before them (Hosea 9:3). They would not live any longer in the Lord’s land. Canaan was in a special sense the Lord’s land, the land marked by his dwelling and favor. God owned the land, and the people had used it as if it were their own, without paying what they owed him. So God would take it back. They had broken their lease, as it were, and would be sent away as bad tenants.

This shows the holiness and justice of God. Those who turn from him should not expect to stay long on his land. Sooner or later, the wicked will be driven out of the world. The land is also called the Lord’s land because it was a holy land, a land where God made himself known in a special way, where his prophets spoke and his oracles were heard. It was a little picture of paradise and a type of heaven. It was a great privilege to live there, but it was a great sin to rebel against God there. To act wickedly in such a land was a sad thing, and to be driven out of it was a bitter judgment, like being driven from Eden. Those who will not live under the Lord’s law and in the Lord’s love cannot expect to keep the privileges of his church.

Third, once they were thrown out of the Lord’s land, they would find no rest or satisfaction anywhere else. Like Cain, who was driven from the Lord’s presence and became a restless wanderer, Israel would have no settled peace. Some would return to Egypt, the old house of bondage, fleeing there from the Assyrian (Hosea 8:13). But they would lose themselves in the place where they hoped to hide and find help.

Others would be carried away as captives to Assyria and forced to eat unclean food. This may mean food that was unfit for people to eat, spoiled and rotten, showing that they would be brought down to extreme poverty, like the prodigal son who wanted to fill his stomach with husks. Or it may mean food that was unfit for Jews to eat because their law forbade it. It is likely that while they lived in their own land, they kept the food laws, even if they broke God’s law in other ways, and even took pride in that. But since they would not keep God’s law in other matters, they would no longer be allowed to keep it in this one, and this would be a fair punishment for their sin in eating food offered to idols.

When we suffer in our food, and are forced by want or by health to eat or drink what does not please us, we should admit that God is right to deal with us this way. We have sinned in the matter of food, and we have given ourselves too freely to what tastes good. In this way, unpleasant food should remind us of our misuse of God’s gifts.

In the land of their enemies, where they would be driven, they would have no chance to honor God or to seek his favor by offering any acceptable sacrifice. They would be cut off from the outward signs of religion, from the marks of God’s grace, and from the means of being brought back to him. That would show that God had rejected them, turned away from them, and no longer owned them as his people.

They would have no sacrifices to bring, no altar to bring them to, and no priests to offer them. They would not even be able to bring drink offerings to the Lord, much less any other sacrifices. If they did offer them, neither they nor the sacrifices would please him, because they could not bring lawful offerings, and their hearts would not be humbled.

Instead of joyful sacrifices and praise, they would eat the bread of mourners, the food of people in grief. They would live in sorrow and loneliness, mourning for dead relatives and for their own suffering. So even if they had the chance to sacrifice, they would not be in a fit condition to do it, since they were forbidden to eat holy food while in mourning (Deuteronomy 26:14). Everyone who eats the bread of mourners is unclean and not fit to come near the altar.

Their daily bread, the food they must have in order to live, would not be brought into the house of the Lord. They would have no house of the Lord to bring it to, or, if they did, they would not be in a proper state to bring it there. So the return of their sacred feast days would be very sad for them (Hosea 9:5).

What will you do on the solemn day, on the weekly Sabbath, on the monthly new moon, and on the yearly feast days, like Passover, Pentecost, and the Feast of Tabernacles? The feasts of the Lord are solemn days, and when we are invited to them, we should seriously ask what we will do there. But here the question is meant for those who would be deprived of the comfort of those feasts. What will you do then? You will spend those days in sorrow and grief, when you could have spent them in joy and praise if only you had not brought this on yourselves. You will then learn the value of blessings by losing them, and you will know the worth of spiritual food by feeling a famine for it.

When we enjoy the means of grace, we should think about what we would do if we lost them, whether they were taken from us or we were no longer able to attend them.

They would perish in the land of their scattering (Hosea 9:6). They had gone out of the Lord’s land, where they could once spend both Sabbath days and ordinary days in comfort, and they had gone because destruction was coming. They went to Egypt because their own country was being destroyed by the Assyrians, and they comforted themselves with hopes that they would return after the storm passed. But those hopes would fail. They would find graves in Egypt, just as their rebellious ancestors once complained of (Exodus 14:11). Egypt would become their burial place, gathering them up like the dead are gathered for burial, and Memphis, one of Egypt’s chief cities, would bury them. Scripture often joins gathering and burying together (Jeremiah 8:2; Job 27:19).

Those who think they can escape God’s judgments are likely to meet death in the very place where they hoped to save their lives. Their land, which they left behind and hoped to return to, would become a ruin. Their tents, where they had lived and stored their goods, the pleasant places of their silver, would be torn down and left in ruins, so overgrown with nettles that if they ever came back, they would find no fruit and no shelter there. It would give them neither food nor a place to live.

Those who make money their god call the places of their silver their pleasant places. By contrast, those who make the Lord their God count his tabernacles lovely and his worship a delight (Isaiah 64:11). But the pleasures of being near God cannot be taken away by chance or change. The pleasant places of men’s silver, whether bought with silver, stored with silver, or adorned with silver, can be laid waste and covered with nettles, and then all the pleasure people took in them will vanish too.