The Harvest of Rebellion

SCRIPTURE READING

We’ll be reading all of Hosea chapter nine this evening. Hear now the holy and infallible Word of God.

“Rejoice not, O Israel. Exult not like the peoples, for you have played the whore, forsaking your God. You have loved a prostitute’s wages on all threshing floors. Threshing floor and wine vat shall not feed them, and the new wine shall fail them. They shall not remain in the land of the Lord, but Ephraim shall return to Egypt, and they shall eat unclean food in Assyria.

“They shall not pour drink offerings of wine to the Lord, and their sacrifices shall not please him. It shall be like mourners’ bread to them. All who eat of it shall be defiled, for their bread shall be for their hunger only. It shall not come to the house of the Lord. What will you do on the day of the appointed festival, and on the day of the feast of the Lord?

“For behold, they are going away from destruction. But Egypt shall gather them. Memphis shall bury them. Nettles shall possess their precious things of silver. Thorns shall be in their tents. The days of punishment have come. The days of recompense have come. Israel shall know it. The prophet is a fool. The man of the spirit is mad because of your great iniquity and great hatred.

“The prophet is the watchman of Ephraim with my God, yet a fowler’s snare is on all his ways, and hatred in the house of his God. They have deeply corrupted themselves as in the days of Gibeah. He will remember their iniquity. He will punish their sins.

“Like grapes in the wilderness I found Israel. Like the first fruit on the fig tree in its first season I saw your fathers. But they came to Baal-peor and consecrated themselves to the thing of shame, and became detestable like the thing they loved. Ephraim’s glory shall fly away like a bird. No birth, no pregnancy, no conception. Even if they bring up children, I will bereave them till none is left. Woe to them when I depart from them.

“Ephraim, as I have seen, was like a young palm planted in a meadow. But Ephraim must lead his children out to slaughter. Give them, O Lord—what will you give them? Give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts. Every evil of theirs is in Gilgal. There I began to hate them. Because of the wickedness of their deeds I will drive them out of my house. I will love them no more. All their princes are rebels.

“Ephraim is stricken, their root is dried up. They shall bear no fruit. Even though they give birth, I will put their beloved children to death. My God will reject them because they have not listened to him. They shall be wanderers among the nations.”

The grass withers, the flowers fade, but the word of our God will stand forever. You may be seated.

SERMON INTRODUCTION

We see very clearly in our passage the seriousness in which God takes sin. Oftentimes, we sugarcoat when it comes to something like sin: “I made a mistake. It was an accident.” These little phrases can sometimes reveal a heart of half-hearted repentance, not a full repentance of a turning away from sin.

We can often even see this with cheap apologies between spouses or between a parent and a child—people who are familiar with your sin, people who live with you—in which the statement might be, “I’m sorry,” because what you really want is just to move on. There’s a very different posture if we say, in that marriage example, if you turn and look at your spouse and you stare them in the eyes and say, “Will you forgive me?”

In that moment, what are you actually doing? You’re taking the posture of a supplicant, not an “I’m sorry,” and “Let’s just move on.” “I’m sorry. Will you forgive me?” There’s an opportunity of reconciliation there, of forgiveness.

Now, we’ve talked a lot as we’ve gone through the Book of Hosea on their various different longings that they’ve pursued. We’ve seen very clearly that God remembers their iniquity. He punishes their sin, and it’s leading even to this exile in which the nations they even sought out a military alliance with are about to conquer them. It’s sobering to see.

Augustine, in his Confessions, wrote this. It’s perhaps one of the most famous quotes in all of Christendom: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

For many of us, those are probably familiar words, but I want you to consider just a brief biographical sketch of Augustine. Augustine knew what it was to search for satisfaction in all of the wrong places. He pursued intellectual achievement. Professional success was found around every corner for him. In a day and age without social media and without newspapers, Augustine walked into towns and was kind of like a rock star, with people wanting to come and hear him speak. He relates even in his Confessions that he knew every sexual pleasure, that he had all of the approval of others.

He wanted success; he got it. He wanted to be admired; he got it. Everything he set the plow to, he seemed to get. He experienced many things that people might spend their life pursuing, and yet he says he remained restless. He got everything he wanted, and he was restless. He had a brilliant mind, a promising career, friends that spread across the empire, relationships, opportunities, but none of them could give him the lasting happiness that he wanted.

Eventually, Augustine came to understand that his problem wasn’t that he hadn’t found enough good things or enough places to have pleasure. His problem was that he was looking for satisfaction in things that could never provide that satisfaction. His heart was made for God. “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

This is really what we see here in Hosea chapter nine. They pursued many different things, and now the Lord is laying before them the harvest of their rebellion, what fruit actually grows from that tree. Israel had been given so much by the Lord. They had land, a harvest, families, prosperity, yet they were looking for satisfaction somewhere else.

They wanted the gifts of God, but not God himself. They wanted the blessings of the covenant without faithfulness to the one who really established it and who upheld it. Hosea warns them that the harvest of their rebellion will not be what they expected. Their joy will become sorrow. Their celebrations will become mourning.

Think about, even as we read the passage, the amount of times one of the most joyous moments in life—a child’s birth—or one of the most joyous things that a hand that’s set to a plow can have—a harvest coming in and a celebration of the abundance of food—we see those instead are going to be turned upside down.

Moments that should be celebratory are not going to be fruitful, and instead they’re going to be barren. The same temptation can often confront us, like Israel in Hosea chapter nine, like Augustine looking for happiness, satisfaction, and fulfillment everywhere else. We can constantly be tempted to look for life, joy, and security in things that cannot ultimately satisfy us.

So, we’re going to consider three things from Hosea nine together this evening. The points of the sermon are outlined for you in the back of your bulletin.

THE FALSE JOY OF REBELLION

But let’s begin with the false joy of rebellion. Hosea begins with a surprising command in verse one: “Rejoice not, O Israel. Exult not like the peoples.”

This is pretty unusual because God’s people were accustomed to even being commanded to rejoice. And here we are at harvest time. The threshing floor and the winepress—these are places of celebration, reminders of God’s provision, the abundance of the land, gifts given to them. But Israel’s celebration has been corrupted. They were rejoicing in their prosperity while pursuing the worship of other gods.

The things given to them from God’s own hand, they are taking and using for false worship. Hosea says they have loved a prostitute’s wages. Their harvest celebrations were expressions of gratitude to the Lord, but they had become moments of idol worship and unfaithfulness. Israel had taken the gifts of God and used them in the service of other gods.

They wanted the blessings of the covenant to continue without any of the faithfulness that they are called to. And so God announces that their harvest is going to fail.

Do you remember last week in chapter eight, we read this striking verse in verse twelve where God says to the people, “Were I to write for him my laws by the ten thousands, they would be regarded as a strange thing”?

This is how unfamiliar God’s people have become with God. And remember, Hosea sets up this marriage analogy at the very beginning of the book, that the prophet Hosea is going to go and marry a woman of whoredom, a prostitute named Gomer. And in the process of reclaiming her, it’s going to be a picture for Israel to see, like a billboard. And God says, “Your heart has wandered so far from me. Were I to write out everything, you still wouldn’t love me.”

Now, as a pastor, it comes about fairly regularly where a husband and wife might be kind of in a rut. Typically, what I’ve begun to observe is that husbands tend to ask the question, “Just tell me how I can love you. Can you just write me a list of what your expectations are, of the things that you actually want? Here, please just fill it out, and then we’ll stop fighting. We’ll have a faithful marriage.”

It doesn’t actually work that way. Even as in chapter eight that we read, were God to write out all of his commands by the tens of thousands, his personal word for every possible situation and scenario, is that a heart of affection? Is that a heart that actually loves? Is that a heart that’s in a relationship?

The same thread is continuing here in Hosea chapter nine. The harvest that their life has produced is a harvest of rebellion.

Verse two, we read, “The threshing floor and wine vat shall not feed them, and the new wine shall fail them.” The very things in which they were placing confidence, the things that should be joyful in a season to harvest, they’re not going to be joyful. The food’s going to be bad. The wine is going to be bad. Their grain is not going to sustain them. Their wine is not going to satisfy their thirst. Their abundance is going to disappear.

And verse three goes farther: “They shall not remain in the land of the Lord, but Ephraim shall return to Egypt, and they shall eat unclean food in Assyria.”

The land that was God’s gift to his people—the Lord had brought Israel into the land. He’d established them there. He had sustained them there. But now, because of their unfaithfulness, they are going to be carried away to Assyria.

Even their worship has been affected. In verses four and five, Hosea describes how their offerings will no longer be accepted to the Lord. This is a theme that we’ve observed several times throughout the Book of Hosea. They’re not worshiping rightly. Even when they bring cattle, they don’t bring their heart. Their worship is vain. It’s empty.

Israel had enjoyed religious festivals, but they’d forgotten whom the festivals pointed to, who was actually being honored at these festivals. And so now Hosea asks what they will do when the appointed feast days come. What are they going to do with those feasts that they’ve treated so vapidly? What will happen when the celebrations are gone and the people are scattered?

Verse six describes their flight from destruction. Egypt will gather them, Memphis will bury them, and weeds will overtake their treasured possessions. The people who once celebrated their harvests will now mourn their losses. The people who had enjoyed the abundance of the land will now be buried in a foreign land. The people who had thought their prosperity was secure will discover how quickly it can disappear.

There’s an important warning here for us. The blessings of God can become objects of our rebellion. The blessings, the things that you have been given to steward, the responsibilities that you have in life can become an object of your rebellion when you love them more than you love the hand that gave them to you.

We know what it is to find our happiness in things, in a career. “If I could only get that house, if I could get that new car.” But these things cannot ultimately satisfy you. You can feel secure that your bank account is healthy, that your investments are trending in the right direction, or you could be anxious: “Where’s the next tank of gas going to come from? The number keeps going up at the pump.”

Both abundance and little can become a tool of your rebellion. From a feeling of lack, it becoming a tool of your rebellion can become the false belief that, “Well, if God really loved me, he would give me”—fill in the blank.

None of these things are necessarily inherently bad. You should put gas in your car. You should look to be responsible with your finances, to care for your family, to drive a reliable car. You should feel comfortable in your home. But what happens when you begin to need them in order to be happy? When you need them in order to be satisfied? When your satisfaction, the resting of your heart, is found in having those things?

You can become more distressed over losing a comfort than over losing communion with God. That’s what’s happening in Hosea nine. Think about how quickly our hearts change when something we love is threatened: a difficult diagnosis, an unexpected expense, a strained relationship, a child making unwise decisions, a door closing that we had prayed would open. And suddenly the peace that we thought we had seems to disappear. We become anxious. We’re frustrated. We’re angry. Perhaps we’re even resentful towards God.

We may never say it out loud, but our heart begins to ask, “Why would God allow this to happen to me?”

The example of Augustine and why I gave you that little biographical sketch—Augustine understood this restlessness. He pursued success and recognition, and he enjoyed all of the pleasures that life had to offer. Yet none of them gave him the lasting peace that he was seeking. He discovered that sometimes he may obtain the very things that he spent his life pursuing, only to discover that it still wasn’t enough.

This is where Scripture talks about your throat like an open grave. It’s a bottomless pit. You get the job, but now you worry about keeping it. You purchase the house, but you worry about maintaining it. Your children reach one milestone, and immediately you begin worrying about the next. You accomplish something you’ve worked towards for years, and before long, you’re looking for something else. You’re always looking to move towards the finish line.

Why? It can be because you’re asking created things to give you what only your Creator can give you. You might be asking created things to give you that which only your Creator can give you. You might want your circumstances to give you peace, your possessions to give you security, your relationships to give you a sense of worth. But none of these things can bear the weight of your soul.

So, if you really ask yourself, what would have to be taken away before you would begin to doubt God’s goodness? What loss would make you question whether the Lord has been good to you?

The point is not that we should be indifferent to loss. We grieve, we pray, we lament, we bring our burdens before the Lord. But none of these losses can take away the greatest gift that we’ve been given: God himself.

The joy of rebellion is a false joy. The joy of thinking, “If I just live my way and get all of the things that I want and cut throats to even get there”—it’s empty in the end. The false joy of rebellion promises satisfaction that it can never deliver. Your heart will remain restless as long as you seek God’s gifts without God himself.

It took Augustine a long time to learn it, and even as we’re hearing this preaching from the prophet Hosea, we’re seeing that he’s still worried they’re really not getting it.

THE REJECTING OF TRUTH

So then we turn to verses seven to nine, the rejection of truth. Hosea turns from Israel’s false joy in the rejection of God’s Word, even in their festivals and their feasting, and he says this in verse seven: “The days of punishment have come. The days of recompense have come.”

The judgment that Hosea has been warning about is no longer some distant possibility. It is approaching. The Lord will hold his people accountable for their sin. But how does Israel respond? Hosea says, “Israel shall know it. The prophet is a fool. The man of the spirit is mad.”

Rather than receiving God’s warning, the people are going to dismiss the messenger. They treat the prophet as a fool and consider his message madness. They do not want to hear what God has to say because they do not want to confront the condition of their hearts.

And this is a familiar pattern. When people don’t want to repent, they often attack the person who points it out. “I’m doing just fine.” Rather than considering whether the warning is true, they question the character or the motives of the one delivering it.

We talked about this several weeks ago, where in Matthew we see Jesus teach the log and the speck, that you are to first look and remove the log from your own eye before removing the speck from your brother’s.

I gave you guys the example: if I was just covered in spaghetti from the top of my Geneva gown all the way down to my toes, but you spilled a little bit of coffee on your shirt, and if I came over and went, “Hey, I’m sorry, you’re a mess. Could you please go clean yourself up?” How would you respond? “I’m a mess? Have you seen yourself?”

This is the reality of the rejection that they’re giving to Hosea. The problem is not with the prophet, with God’s messenger. The problem is with the people, the hearers. Hosea explains that their hostility comes from the greatness of your iniquity and great hatred. Their rejection of the prophet is not merely an intellectual disagreement.

“Well, hey, you just read the Bible differently.” Oftentimes, isn’t that one of the other excuses that we hear? “Oh, I actually just understand that differently.”

This is the fruit of a heart that has grown hostile towards God. Verse eight adds that the prophet is a watchman over Ephraim, yet the people have made themselves his enemies. The one appointed to warn them of danger coming, like a man in a watchtower, an enemy on the horizon, has instead become their very enemy.

This is what happens when God’s Word confronts a rebellious heart. Instead of receiving correction, it resists it. Instead of humbling ourselves, we see it that we need to defend ourselves. Instead of allowing the Word to expose our sin, we find ways to avoid its message.

We do something similar, though perhaps in less obvious ways. Sometimes God’s Word confronts us with something that we have spent years justifying, convincing ourselves that that sin is not a big deal. Maybe we even really know what the Scriptures say. Maybe we’ve even read several Christian books on the topic, but we have thousands of reasons why our particular sin is different.

We know we need to forgive, but we keep rehearsing what the other person did. “Well, they’re really more wrong than I am.” Maybe we know that our anger is sinful, but we just justify it. “I’m just passionate,” or, “I just have really high standards. Their inefficiency annoys me. Wouldn’t it annoy you, too? Come on, be a support. Join in my annoyance. Justify my behavior.”

We know we need to repent, but we explain why our circumstances make our behavior understandable. Sometimes the hardest thing about God’s Word isn’t that we don’t understand it; it’s that we understand it perfectly well, but we don’t want to obey it.

And what happens when someone points out our weakness in us? What happens when a brother or sister confronts us? What happens when a sermon exposes something that we’d rather keep hidden? Do we become humble, or do we become defensive? We’re seeing the example here in Hosea chapter nine of a people who become defensive to God’s Word. Do we consider whether there is truth in what we’ve heard, or immediately begin preparing our response?

Perhaps we’ve been hurt by somebody who confronted us poorly before, and so we use that as the proof text. “Oh, if it goes anything like last time, it actually came out they were more wrong than I was wrong.” There’s a pride there.

There can be real wounds there of a brother or sister that mistreated you, but we should not conflate their sinful behavior confronting your sinful behavior as a justification for your sinful behavior. But we can’t let those experiences restrain the correction. We can become so protective over ourselves that even a loving correction feels like an attack.

Augustine’s story gives us a picture of the struggle. He was not unintelligent. He was a very intelligent man who simply needed someone to explain to him what Christianity was about, what Christ had done. His intellectual pursuits had been bound up in his pride and his unwillingness to look at God.

In his Confessions, Augustine describes knowing that he needed to change while still resisting the change he knew was necessary. He wanted truth, but he also wanted to restrain the control of his desires. He was misunderstanding the gospel: “Let me clean myself up first. Let me make myself more presentable.”

It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the gospel. The understanding of the gospel is, “I’m a mess. I’m a sinner. Lord, save me.”

Think about it: if you were drowning, and before the lifeguard came, you were like, “Oh, hold on. Let me fix my hair first. Do I look well enough to be saved?”

Oftentimes, we can want God’s comfort without wanting his correction. But God’s Word does not exist merely to affirm everything we already believe about ourselves. It comes to expose us, to correct us, and lead us into truth.

God’s correction is not evidence that he has abandoned Israel. His correction, his disciplining of you, is not that he has abandoned you. It’s actually one of the ways he cares for you. He disciplines everyone he calls a son or daughter.

A physician who refuses to tell you about a serious illness isn’t actually showing you any compassion. A shepherd who refuses to warn a sheep about danger isn’t loving them. And in the same way, a God who never confronts our sin would not be treating us as his beloved children.

Sometimes we resist God’s Word because it threatens the very things that are keeping our restlessness at bay. We don’t want God to challenge our priorities, our ambitions, our relationships, or confront us. Why? We don’t want to change. We want to half-turn from our sin, but we don’t want to actually turn towards God.

We want him to reassure us without requiring or asking or prompting us to change. But the Lord loves us too much to leave us in our rebellion. Even as he sends his Holy Spirit to us to conform us more and more into the image of the new man, working sanctification in us, we need humility to pray and to say, “Lord, show me where I am wrong. Show me where I become divisive. Show me where I am making excuses for something you have called me to put away.”

The prophet’s warning is an act of God’s mercy. God was not silent.

A popular book in the ’90s was called Footprints in the Sand. I’m going to pick on it for a moment. If you have it, I’m not saying it’s a bad book, but I’m going to pick on the imagery for a moment. The whole setup was, “Look, here are the moments where there’s two footprints in the sand, and I’m following after Jesus. Here’s the moments in which we were walking side by side down the beach together. But look, wait, there’s only one set of footprints now. Oh, what happened there? Oh, he was carrying me there.”

So I’m going to pick on it just a little bit here. He does carry you. He does sanctify you. The Holy Spirit is working for your sanctification in your life. A satire that a Bible college professor I had wrote, an addition to the poem: “What’s that long stretch of a trench dug in the beach? Oh, that’s where he dragged me. That’s where I was reluctant to continue to follow him when life became hard. I didn’t even want to hold onto him, but he was holding onto me.”

It’s a fuller picture: God working in you the sanctification that he is bringing about. There are times in your life that that might even feel like suffering. Why? Because the thing that you won’t abandon, God in his providence might say, “I love you too much to let you have it. I’m going to take it from you.”

And for Israel, this is their comfort in the land. He is taking the very thing that was meant to be a good gift of a father who loves his children so that he might teach them.

THE FRUIT OF REBELLION

This leads us to our third and final point for this evening, the fruit of rebellion in verses ten to seventeen. In this final section, Hosea describes what Israel’s rebellion had produced. He takes the people back to the beginning of their relationship with the Lord.

Verse ten, we read, “Like grapes in the wilderness I found Israel. Like the first fruit of the fig tree in its first season, I saw your fathers.”

There’s a tenderness in these words that, in the heavy words of Hosea, we could overlook. But there’s a tenderness. The Lord describes his delight in finding Israel, like discovering grapes in the wilderness or the first ripe figs of the season. Israel was precious to him.

Really consider that imagery with me for a second: if you were wandering in the wilderness, you have a finite amount of food with you, you have a finite amount of water with you, and if you found grapes in the wilderness, you’d be pretty excited. Now, if your parents taught you to be suspicious of fruit that you don’t know exactly what it is, you might first go, “Okay, can I eat it?” But then, with great joy, you would pick that fruit.

“Like grapes in the wilderness I found Israel.” God has graciously chosen his people. He has plucked them like the first ripe figs of the season. It’s precious to him. He delivered them from slavery in Egypt. He brought them and sustained them through the wilderness, and he established them in the land. And Israel’s existence as a nation was the result of God’s gracious love and his ongoing faithfulness.

But the verse continues, “But they came to Baal-peor and consecrated themselves to the thing of shame, and became detestable like the thing they loved.”

Baal-peor refers to Israel’s idolatry in Numbers twenty-five. Rather than remaining faithful to the Lord, the people joined themselves in the worship of Baal. They exchanged the glory of God for something shameful, and they became exactly like what they worshiped.

It’s an important principle. We become like what we worship. This is either for our restoration, as God intends for us to be as his image-bearers, or for our ruin, because we’re resembling something that we were not meant to image. When we give ourselves to the things of this world, those things begin to shape our hearts, our very affections, our desires, and our lives.

And Israel had been called to belong to the Lord, but they gave their affection to idols, and the consequences were devastating.

In verses eleven to fourteen, Hosea describes the loss of their children, and this is really a description of the loss of their future. Ephraim’s glory will fly away like a bird. There will be no birth, no pregnancy, no conception. Even if children are raised, they will be taken away as they’re brought into exile. The future of the nation is going to disappear.

These are difficult words because children are a sign of God’s blessing, the continuation, the promise to Abraham, like the stars in the heavens, like the sand on the seashore. Israel’s rebellion is bringing the opposite of the fruitfulness that God had intended. What should have been a source of joy is now going to be a source of grief.

Then in verse fifteen, the Lord identifies the place where their rebellion has been especially evident, at Gilgal. This was a place associated in Israel’s history, but it had become the center of wickedness. God declares, “Every evil of theirs is in Gilgal. There I began to hate them.”

It’s striking. It probably makes you even think of in Genesis when God says his heart was grieved because of the wickedness of men. The language is strong. The Lord’s covenant love is not a sentimental approval of everything that his people do. His holiness means that he opposes sin and that he brings judgment.

This is what we even heard in First Peter a couple of weeks ago, that God’s judgment even begins in the household of God. Now, in Christ Jesus, you are found with the assurance of pardon because of his alien righteousness given to you. You are still called to faithful obedience. Israel here is going to be driven out of the house because of their wicked deeds.

Verse sixteen continues with this image of barrenness. Ephraim is struck down, its root is dried up, and it will bear no fruit. And then finally, in verse seventeen, it brings the passage to its conclusion: “My God will reject them, because they have not listened to him. They shall be wanderers among the nations.”

This is the fruit of rebellion. The people who were planted in God’s land are going to become wanderers among the nations. The people who enjoyed his blessing will experience his judgment. The people who refuse to listen to his Word will discover the consequences of their refusal.

Notice the repeated emphasis on fruitfulness throughout this passage. Israel once enjoyed the fruit of the land, flowing with milk and honey. But because they abandoned the Lord, their harvest has failed. Their children would be taken as they’re going into exile, and their nation would become barren. Their rebellion produced exactly the opposite of what they wanted. They wanted autonomy. They wanted “my own way.”

This section raises a question that reaches to some of the deepest hopes and fears of human life: What kind of fruit is your life producing?

Most of us want our lives to count for something. We want to be good husbands or wives, faithful parents, useful members of our community, people who leave something worthwhile behind. You want your child to flourish. You want your marriage to grow. You want your church to be healthy.

But what happens when the fruit you hope for doesn’t appear? What happens when your children don’t follow the Lord as you hoped they would? What happens when your marriage is harder than you expected? When years of faithful service produce very little? When you look at your own spiritual life and wonder if you’re actually growing at all?

Some of you might be praying for a child who’s wandered from the Lord. Some of you are watching a relationship, and you feel like it’s deteriorating before your eyes. Some of you have served faithfully for years, and you feel like your labors in evangelism just don’t make a difference. Some of you might even be discouraged about your own spiritual maturity. You thought you’d be farther along by now.

We must be careful not to turn this passage into a simplistic promise that faithful Christians will have successful things, or that being faithful with what God has given you will grant you success like some sort of American prosperity gospel. Hosea is announcing God’s particular covenant judgment upon a particular unfaithful nation. Suffering and disappointment are not automatically evidence that God is displeased with you.

The passage does, however, confront a temptation common to all of us. We want the fruit, and sometimes we don’t want to be dependent upon God. We want to control the outcome. We want guarantees. We want to see the results of our effort. And when those results don’t come, we can become bitter, envious, discouraged. We can begin to question if God is even good.

And perhaps underneath all of that is the same restlessness that we’re seeing in this passage with Israel: that we believe that if things just turn out well, if our marriage is good enough, if our role at work grows on a trajectory that matches that of our peers, if our spiritual growth is visible enough that people leave us alone.

But even some good or even some subpar, some twisted desires there—these can become things that you seek in replacement for God himself.

Augustine had spent years pursuing recognition and achievement, and he enjoyed many of the pleasures of life, yet none of them gave him rest. When he finally came to faith in Christ, he did not become a man without responsibilities. He did not become a man without disappointments or struggles. He became a man whose deepest allegiance and satisfaction was found in Christ, continuously saying, “My heart is restless unless it rests in God.” Not just the first day that he believed, but throughout all of his days, looking to have his heart rest in God.

Christianity does not teach us to despise the good gifts that God gives. It teaches us not to worship them. It teaches us to not find our rest there, that cannot sustain our souls. We can enjoy our families. We can enjoy our careers, the blessings of a good harvest in life that God gives us. We can work diligently. We can even be proud of accomplishments appropriately. We can desire a fruitful life. We can desire to continue to grow in spiritual maturity.

Israel’s problem was that it wanted all of that fruitfulness, but it did not want the Lord. It wanted it on its own terms.

“You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

It’s what we see in Hosea nine. Israel had been given so much by the Lord, but they kept looking everywhere else for satisfaction. And I wonder, where do you look for satisfaction?

If you do not know Christ Jesus as your Savior, where can you find your satisfaction? A relationship? A career? A house? What would be your wildest dream that you would fill in if your ultimate satisfaction is not the wonderful statement from the Heidelberg Catechism that, “I am Christ’s, and he is mine”?

If you have a life that you are living in such a way where you are looking for satisfaction under every rock, nook, and cranny, know that I don’t believe you’re going to find it anywhere out there. I believe that you can find it in the pages of Scripture, in the story of the God-man Jesus Christ, who, in perfect obedience to his Father, was born, lived a perfect life that none of us could confess that we could live—a perfect life.

He was crucified. He was pierced for our transgressions, put in a tomb, and three days later raised from the dead. There is a surety in the satisfaction that can be found in Jesus Christ. Why is there a surety? The tomb is still empty. He is still raised, and he is seated on a throne on high, from which he will come to judge the living and the dead.

There are good gifts that he has given in his world. But if you confuse it as something ultimate, if you look to replace it in a spot that only Jesus Christ can be, as Savior and Lord of your life, the reality is, like the people in Hosea nine, you are always going to want for more. You are always going to be searching for the next thing that can satisfy.

And what happens when that bad harvest comes? What happens when the rain of life comes pouring down and drenches you?

Now, dear Christian, tonight you’ve heard the reminder of that good news of Jesus Christ for you, the place that your satisfaction can be found, your only comfort in life and death, that you are Christ’s and he is yours. This passage began with a command for Israel not to rejoice. You are not the nation of Israel. You have great reason to rejoice, now and always.

Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, he is your good news in the past, in the present, and the future. Take comfort there when other things try to take the place of your Savior. Guard it in a way that relationships that are important to you, that you would guard and cherish, like the way that you would guard your spouse or that you would protect your child.

Don’t neglect the God who has done so much for you by putting him off in the corner. Cherish knowing his Word. Cherish that process of sanctification, of becoming more like him. Dream even about your sanctification. I don’t mean dream like when you sleep at night. I mean, if you were to look at your life, dear Christian, and say, “What would it look like for me to be more sanctified? What would it look like for me to be more like Christ?”

Do you have a dream there? Do you ever take it to your Lord, who is able to make you more like Christ, and do you cry out in prayer, “Lord, help me turn from these sins and help me turn to be more like the new man in Jesus Christ”? Cry out to him.

Let’s pray together.

CLOSING PRAYER

Our Father, Lord, we do thank you for the work of your Son and our King, Jesus. Lord, tonight, as we look at the sobering words of Hosea chapter nine, Lord, we know that there is a comfort in the gospel, that there is even a comfort that we will read in later chapters for your people, for Israel, as you will even bring back a remnant that is repenting, that loves you, is part of your holy catholic church.

Lord, help us to have a desire to see our sin more clearly, to walk in repentance more earnestly, to be transformed by the work of your Spirit more and more into the image of the new man. Help our hearts to rest in you alone. Help us to feel the unrest, the dissatisfaction that can come from things we seek to put in your place.

Pray all of this in Christ’s name, amen.