They delight the king with their evil, and the princes with their lies. Sermons
I. THE HEAT OF LUST. (Ver. 4.) "They are all adulterers, as an oven heated by the baker," etc. Their debaucheries, i.e., were not the fruit of mere impulse. They were gone into as the result of forethought and preparation. Libidinous thoughts were encouraged. New gratifications were planned; the matter was reflected on and matured; the act of indulgence was anticipated in imagination. Time was thus given for the lustful desire to permeate the whole nature, when, like dough fully leavened, the evil intent was ready to be converted into deed. Lust, to use the figure of James, conceives, and brings forth sin (James 1:15). Learn: 1. The importance of guarding against the inception of lust. It is in its beginnings that lust is most dangerous. The wrong thought, the lustful look, the dallying with desire, - it is there the evil lurks. From this there is but a step to evil intent. The fire burns, the dough is prepared; it will be a wonder if actual sin is not some day the outcome. 2. The importance of regulating thought as a means to the control of the passions. Thought can be so directed as to feed and inflame passion; it can also be so ruled as to check and control it. The wicked use this power of thought for a bad purpose; nor less earnestly should we attempt to use it for a holy one. It is only through care of the thoughts, and through strict control exercised over them, that inward and outward purity can be preserved. II. THE HEAT OF WINE. (Ver. 5.) "In the day of our king the princes have made him sick [or, 'are sick '] with heat of wine," etc. Royal feast days were days of recognized and premeditated debauch. Wine maddens and inflames the nature. 1. Drunkenness stands in close relation to lust, with which it is here brought into connection. It is lust's most powerful auxiliary. "Whoredom and wine" (Hosea 4:11). Sensuality, in turn, predisposes to excess in drinking. It loosens restraint. It destroys self-control. It inclines to animal indulgence generally. 2. Drunkenness is degrading in its own effects. (1) Degrading to the body - "made sick." It sickens and bestializes. It injures health. It bloats and disfigures the countenance. A more degrading spectacle can hardly be conceived than a helplessly intoxicated man. (2) Degrading to the soul. It takes from it its self-respect. It begets a heartless, scoffing, irreverent disposition, and leads to association with those who are of this character. The King of Israel is here represented as striking up fellowship with "scorners " - mockers at Divine things. 3. Drunkenness prepares the way for strife and plotting. The drunkenness is the nexus between the adulteries and the conspiracies. Pot-companions are rarely stable friends. They do not really trust each other. Carousals lead to quarrelling. The strong and unscrupulous see with contempt the weaknesses of the rulers, and plot against them. III. THE HEAT OF ANGER, (Vers. 6, 7.) "They have made ready their heart like an oven, while they lie in wait," etc. We have here the result of the carousals and the scorning in plots and conspiracies. These are: 1. Secretly prepared; like the oven got ready beforehand, the dough also being kneaded and leavened. 2. Silently waited upon. It takes time for a plot to mature, as it takes time for the leaven to permeate the dough. A good example is furnished in the case of Absalom, who first, by fair speeches and complaisances, stole the hearts of the people of Israel; then, after the leaven had had time to work, got leave of absence, and, with two hundred men accompanying, had himself proclaimed king (2 Samuel 15:1-14). 3. Hotly executed. There is no mercy in the fierceness which at length breaks out in bloody deeds. The pent-up heat burns like an oven. The anger of the wicked is ruthless, cruel, unsparing. It had proved to be so in Israel's history. Dynasty after dynasty had been swept away by assassination. Pekah, probably the then reigning king, was himself afterwards murdered by Hoshea. Yet Israel refused to take the lesson. "There is none of them that calleth upon me" (ver. 7). - J.O.
And they consider not in their hearts that I do remember all their wickedness. What the prophet affirms of God's ancient people is gravely distressing.I. THE FACT ASSERTED. God remembers the wickedness of men. Wickedness denotes what is hateful and destructive. Men may excuse it, deny it, forget it; but God remembers it. 1. This fact is clear from the declarations of His Word. 2. From the perfections of His nature. "The Lord is a God of knowledge, and by Him actions are weighed." 3. From the equity of His government and a future judgment. You that forget God, and forget your sins, know that God remembers. II. THE EVIL STATED. That men forget this fact. The evil lamented is inconsideration. The want of consideration appears — 1. In men's continued commission of sin. 2. In their doing this without regret. 3. In their readiness to extenuate sin. 4. In their disregard of future consequences.Wherein then consists the evil of this want of consideration? (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (T. Kidd.) I. A FACT IN THE DIVINE PROVIDENCE OR GOVERNMENT. "I remember all their wickedness." "Remember," as applied to God in Scripture, does not represent a faculty of the Divine mind, but a state of God's nature, or the conduct of God in some particular instance. The text means, "Your sins are ever before Me." 1. God remembers all kinds and degrees of sin. 2. All the sins of all men. 3. He remembers accurately and completely. 4. Continually and for ever. And — 5. With a practical result, that He may act upon His recollection.Then how wonderful is God's patience and forbearance! How entire must God's pardon be when He forgives a sinner! How complete will be the transactions of the judgment day! How full will future and final punishment be! II. THIS FACT IS FORGOTTEN BY THOSE WHO OUGHT TO REMEMBER IT. They do not think or reflect, at least, so as to feel. III. GOD'S COMPLAINT OF THIS FORGETFULNESS. God complains of forgetfulness, because it sears the conscience, leads to false views of a man's position, is personally offensive to God, and is frequently the occasion of final ruin. God does not hate you as a being, but lie does hate your character. And this offensiveness to God is continually increasing. You can consider this matter, and at once. Enter then the path of serious thought and pursue it. (Samuel Martin.) Homilist. I. GOD REMEMBERS men's sins. "I remember all their wickedness."1. This is a wonderful fact. When we think of the infinite greatness of Him to whom the universe is as nothing. Sin is no trifle in the eye of Him whose glory is His holiness. 2. This is not only a wonderful, bat a solemn fact. God not only observes and knows my sins, but He remembers them. II. MEN DISREGARD God's remembrance of their sins. Why, then? 1. Because other thoughts engross their minds — thoughts of worldly wealth and power. 2. Because this thought, if it occurs to them for a moment, is too painful to be entertained. III. That men's disregard of God's remembrance of their sins LEADS THEM TO REVEL IN INIQUITY. "How their own doings have beset them about; they are before My face." Here we have — 1. Their sins in general. They are abundant and daring. Their sins encompass them on all sides, and they perpetrate them without shame under the very face of God. 2. Some of their sins are specified here. They made them glad "with their lies," with the lying praises with which they crowned the favourites of the prince, and the lying calumnies and censures with which they blackened those whom they knew the princes disliked. (Homilist.) The great stone-book of nature reveals many strange records of the past. In the red sandstone there are found in some places marks which are clearly the impressions of showers of rain, and these so perfect that it can even be determined in what direction the shower inclined, and from what quarter it proceeded; and this ages ago! So sin leaves its track behind it, and God keeps a faithful record of all our sins.Now their own doings have beset them about Down from the dark ages comes the story — if memory is true to its charge — of an expert blacksmith, who was such a master of his trade, and withal so proud of his skill, that he often boasted no man could break a chain made by him. In time the blacksmith himself was imprisoned and manacled. With the hope that he might make his escape, he examined the chain to see if it was possible to break it, when, to his horror, he discovered that the chain was one made by his own hands, which no living man could break, himself included. The chain forged by his own hands made the blacksmith a helpless, hopeless prisoner in that vile dungeon. Is it not the same with us? Each of us is forging a chain we cannot break. Every bad habit becomes a link in the chain, which will bind, in hopeless slavery, the soul that makes it. Acts form habits. Let your acts be beautiful and Christlike, and your habits will be likewise,(Paul S. Biggs Shipley.) The prophet now arraigns all the citizens of Samaria, and in their persons the whole people, because they rendered obedience to the king by flattery, and to the princes in wicked things, respecting which their own consciences convicted them. He shows that the defection which then reigned through all Israel ought not to be ascribed to the king or to few men, but that it was a common evil, which involved all in one and the same guilt, without exception. If they wish to east the blame on their governors, it will be done in vain. As soon as Jeroboam formed the calves, as soon as he built temples, religion instantly collapsed, and whatever was before pure, degenerated. How was the change so sudden? Even because the people had inwardly concocted their wickedness, which, when an occasion was offered, showed itself; for hypocrisy did lie hid in all, and was then discovered. It often happens that some vice creeps in, which proceeds from one man, or from a few; but when all readily embrace what a few introduce, it is quite evident that they have no living root of piety, or of the fear of God. They then who are so prone to adopt vices were before hypocrites; and we daily find this to be the case. When men become corrupt in their whole life, and degenerate from the pure worship of God, they are justly deemed adulterers. The prophet compares them to an oven, because they were not corrupted by some outward impulse, but by their own inclination and propensity of mind. They had been set on fire by an inward sinful instinct, and were like a hot oven. The blame rested wholly on themselves.( John Calvin.) In the day of our king the princes On the king's birthday, or some other solemnity yearly observed, the princes induced the king to drink until he became sick, and forgot and prostituted his place and authority by joining with scorners, or men eminently dissolute. Doctrine.I. Days which men will have observed as days of festivity and solemnity do ordinarily prove days of great miscarriage and provocation against God. 2. Drunkenness and sensuality are heinous and crying sins, especially in rulers. It is a sad challenge that they should be given to "bottles of wine." 3. Nobles and princes and great courtiers are ordinarily great plagues and snares to kings, who, having their ear and countenance, do make use of it for no other end but to draw them to sin against God. 4. It is the height of sensuality, when men not only become brutish themselves, but dare invite and tempt others to the same excess of riot, and by all means draw them to drunkenness. 5. Men by their intemperance do not only draw on the guilt of misspending time, and abusing the good creatures of God, but of self-murder and abusing their own bodies also. 6. Days of feasting and intemperance do also ordinarily prove days of great insolence and boldness in other sins. 7. It is also the great sin of drunkenness, that by their sensuality they deprive them. selves of the use of reason, and render themselves contemptible, and like beasts, that they can neither know their place nor duty. The king debased himself to keep company with lewd persons and look like them. (George Hutcheson.) People HoseaPlaces Assyria, Egypt, SamariaTopics Deceit, Glad, Lies, Princes, Rulers, Sin, Themselves, Treachery, WickednessOutline 1. A reproof of manifold sins.11. God's wrath against them for their hypocrisy. Dictionary of Bible Themes Hosea 7:3-5Library October 6. "Ephraim, He Hath Mixed Himself" (Hos. vii. 8). "Ephraim, he hath mixed himself" (Hos. vii. 8). It is a great thing to learn to take God first, and then He can afford to give us everything else, without the fear of its hurting us. As long as you want anything very much, especially more than you want God, it is an idol. But when you become satisfied with God, everything else so loses its charm that He can give it to you without harm, and then you can take just as much as you choose, and use it for His glory. There is no harm whatever in having … Rev. A. B. Simpson—Days of Heaven Upon Earth Inconsideration Deplored. Rev. Joshua Priestley. Prayer to the Most High On the Animals Book vii. 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