Hosea 8
by David Groendyk

Verses 1–3 really set the tone for the whole of this chapter: Israel are a bunch of hypocrites. Although they claim to know God and love God, their lives and actions are actually miles from God. The rest of this chapter details the ways Israel thought they were living for God, when in reality they were sinning the whole time.

For instance, in verse 4, Israel had set up leaders—kings and princes—who they thought would be strong political leaders who would rule well; however, Israel never consulted God about those choices, and these kings and princes turned out to be huge moral failures. Indeed, you can read through the books of 1 and 2 Kings and see that not a single king in all of northern Israel’s history turns out to be God-fearing or God-obeying. Another example: again, in verse 4, Israel made gold and silver statues, but (obviously!) these idols were not made in accordance with God’s laws. Similarly, in verse 13, Israel offers many different kinds of sacrifices to God, and yet none of these sacrifices were the ones God had actually prescribed; they were inventions of the Israelites’ own hearts. These are not the sacrifices God had wanted, so he rejected them.

This chapter forces us to examine our own lives. Is everything that you do in your life governed by God’s Word? Or is it governed by your own human wisdom? We are so often like Israel in that we have deceived ourselves into following our own way rather than the way of God. We so often completely deceive ourselves that the commands in God’s Word start to sound strange and foreign and unrealistic (v. 12). If God’s way of living in Scripture sounds foolish or stupid to you, you are starting to look too much like the unbelieving world. A quote I’ve heard many times from Kevin DeYoung (though I don’t think he came up with it) is: “Worldliness is whatever makes sin look normal and righteousness look strange.” Be on guard against worldliness. It will slowly seep into your life if you let it, and it will slowly take over your mind and draw you away from God.

Let me ask my earlier question again: Is everything that you do in your life governed by God’s Word? Or, like Israel, are you going around setting up immoral kings and building golden statues and offering illicit sacrifices in your life (metaphorically speaking) without having any clue what Scripture says about those things? Is there anything that you might be doing in your life that you think is ok when in reality it is sinful? One of the problems with hypocrisy is that we can think we are doing the right thing when in reality we can be missing the mark by miles. And the scary part is that even a small miss, if it goes undetected, will lead to more and more and greater and greater sin (v. 11).

Superficially, Israel said they loved God; beneath that mask, however, they were only doing things that displeased God. Hypocrisy is a sin that even the most seasoned Christian must be on the look-out for in his or her life. Take some time today to evaluate different areas of your life: family, work, friendships, hobbies, speech, desires, leisure time. Have you considered what God’s Word says about each of these things? Are there any of God’s commands that you know you are ignoring or refusing to follow? Pray to God that he would help you identify and mortify the ways you might be living in sin. And don’t be afraid if he does uncover sin; it is a good thing to see your sin, repent of it, and cling to Christ more! It gives us a chance to know God and love God more deeply and to appreciate Christ’s sacrifice for us more fully.