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The Book of Hosea – Part 6, Hos 6:1-11

[Study Aired May 18, 2024]

In the previous chapter, Hosea 5, our Lord forecasted punishment upon the Bride of Christ. Typically, from experience and old Israel’s espousal to her Lord, it is a long and arduous process to route all the iniquities from our land.

We, the Gomer-like harlot that we were, if weak in the faith without implicit dedication to our husband, sometimes dally, tickling our ears with our old adulterous lovers’ (doctrines) and with dull, weak Leah-like unreciprocated eyes, like Jacob, despise her disunified spirit.

In the flesh, a husband’s marriage to an unconverted spouse has the same disunified spirit as a harlot has with her client. In the case of the converted husband and his unconverted wife’s refusal to be washed by the unifying word of God, she is deemed “unclean” effectively like Leah was to Jacob, to the point that he hated her even while she was ‘pleased to dwell with him.’ Conversely, the converted wife, married to an unconverted husband, has the spiritual tool of “chaste conversation” coupled with enthusiastically giving him her whole body as the Bride does for her Lord. Comparatively, it is much harder for a converted husband to win an unconverted wife since his only mechanism for winning her is spiritual, where her innate physical connectivity is mostly cursed.

However, and for the time being, like old Israel and Judah, we need to be vigilant not to return to our Gomer-like whoredoms only to again have our unrepentant hearts shredded (Hos 6:1). For the Bride of Christ, the cycle continues with repentance and His forgiveness on an expectant decreasing scale.

Eph 2:10  For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.

Israel and Judah are Unrepentant

Hos 6:1  Come, and let us return unto the LORD: for he hath torn, and he will heal us; he hath smitten, and he will bind us up. 
Hos 6:2  After two days will he revive us: in the third day he will raise us up, and we shall live in his sight.

It is upon the witness of two days having gone through the figurative past six days of man’s life on earth that Christ first gives His Elect a double portion of spirit for their understanding of the seven seals of Revelation 5. Can you feel the enlightenment, the deep understanding that comes from this revelation? Christ is the seventh-day Sabbath that revives us. Being smitten as Christ was physically smitten and having our flesh torn and being ground to powder, His little flock goes ahead of their brothers and sisters who remain in Babylon, and Christ begins to rebuild the New Man of God, the budding Christs (plural) on their figurative seventh day, today. The entire affair of change from the old man to the new is a symbolic three days of Christ-like ministry for personal spiritual change.

The term “birthday” is only twice featured in scripture, with a third mention alluding to Job’s children, who were apparently celebrating a birthday of one of the siblings. On each occasion, someone lost their head or, in Job’s children’s case, were crushed by the symbolised stone riches of Job’s wealth collapsing upon them.

Gen 40:20  And it came to pass the third day, which was Pharaoh’s birthday, that he made a feast unto all his servants: and he lifted up the head of the chief butler and of the chief baker among his servants.

Mat 14:6  But when Herod’s birthday was kept, the daughter of Herodias danced before them, and pleased Herod.

Mat 16:21  From that time forth began Jesus to shew unto his disciples, how that he must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day.

The number three symbolises the spiritual progression for the completion of judgment, and we torturously endure many revelations of denying Christ all the way to the First Resurrection before our perfection.

Mat 26:34  Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, That this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. 

2Co 11:25  Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep;

A most damning condition for the incipient Christian is reflected in the meaning of the name Capernaum, a village in Palestine. She represents our former Babylonian selves in the past, resting luxuriously in imagined peace believing we are saved without needing to be chastised.

Mat 11:23  And thou, Capernaum [G2584 = village of comfort. From G5151 Definition: 1. thrice From G5140 – three], which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell: for if the mighty works, which have been done in thee, had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day.

In fact, the Lord was so critical of Capernaum’s arrogant luxuriating in comfort that, most shockingly, she is depicted worse than Sodom.

Mat 11:21  Woe unto thee, Chorazin! [Chorazin = a furnace of smoke 1. a town in Galilee] woe unto thee, Bethsaida! [Bethsaida = house of fish 1. a small fishing village on the west shore of Lake Gennesaret, home of Andrew, Peter, Philip and John. Dung, mire]  for if the mighty works, which were done in you, had been done in Tyre and Sidon, [1. an ancient and wealthy city of Phoenicia, on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea, less than 20 miles (30 km) north of Tyre. Known for worshipping Ashtoreth] they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes.

Luk 12:48  But he that knew not [Sodom, Tyre & Sidon], and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. For unto whomsoever much is given [Babylonian Christianity and supremely the Elect of God], of him shall be much required: and to whom men have committed much, of him they will ask the more. 

Regarding Paul’s thorn in the flesh that remains in each of the Lord’s Elect before being perfected on the third day IN the developing New Heavenly Jerusalem, where he and we spiritually perish, he says,

2Co 12:8  For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me.

Luk 13:32  And he said unto them, Go ye, and tell that fox, Behold, I cast out devils, and I do cures to day and to morrow, and the third day I shall be perfected.
Luk 13:33  Nevertheless I must walk to day, and to morrow, and the day following: for it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem.

Hos 6:3  Then shall we know, if we follow on to know the LORD: his going forth is prepared as the morning; and he shall come unto us as the rain, as the latter and former rain unto the earth.

Mal 4:1  For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the LORD of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.
Mal 4:2  But unto you [The Bride who…] that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall.

Christ is the rising sun, the morning star who has healing in His wings, pictorially seen as shafts of light imaged as a red anvil-shaped storm cloud, an eagle’s wing lanced with bright shafts of sunlight. He is the sailor’s warning for the deluge of life-giving rain on the Saints today and the latter fiery rain at the end of the One-Thousand Years culminating in the Lake of Fire upon every conception of human life since the creation.

Exo 19:4  Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you [Old Israel physically and now, the Elect of God] on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself.

Rev 12:14  And to the woman [Old and New] were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, into her place, where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time, from the face of the serpent.

Calves grown into young yet mature beasts are stall-fed grain (not genetically modified grain and hormone enhanced) and specialised fodder, which enhances the meat’s flavour, particularly when seasoned with salt (Col 4:6). Being raised in a stall restricts muscle movement and makes the meat more tender on the plate. That imagery represents our Lord’s tender mercies upon His young Wife. As Christ is, so is she.

Isa 53:1  Who hath believed our report? and to whom is the arm of the LORD revealed? [His Bride, of course!]
Isa 53:2  For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.

Php 2:5  Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: 
Php 2:6  Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:

Hos 6:4  O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee? O Judah, what shall I do unto thee? for your goodness is as a morning cloud, and as the early dew it goeth away.

To the non-spiritual eye, our Lord sounds as if he is lamenting Ephraim and Judah’s wretched plight of harlotry as something beyond his control. She is depicted as a fatted calf in its youth, even as his very own Aholibah, glorying in her seductive beauty only to dry up in the midday heat of chastisement as just another old harlot with bruised teats.

Eze 23:1  The word of the LORD came again unto me, saying,
Eze 23:2  Son of man, there were two women [representing Ephraim and Judah], the daughters of one mother [… one church with one doctrine made void by fornication]:
Eze 23:3  And they committed whoredoms in Egypt; they committed whoredoms in their youth: there were their breasts pressed, and there they bruised the teats of their virginity. 
Eze 23:4  And the names of them were Aholah the elder, and Aholibah her sister: and they were mine, and they bare sons and daughters. Thus were their names; Samaria [representing Ephriam in the north of Israel] is Aholah, and Jerusalem Aholibah [in the south].
Eze 23:5  And Aholah played the harlot when she was mine; and she doted on her lovers, on the Assyrians her neighbours.

Eze 23:11  And when her sister Aholibah [The Priests of God represented as Jerusalem portraying the future Bride of Christ] saw this, she was more corrupt in her inordinate love than she, and in her whoredoms more than her sister in her whoredoms. 
Eze 23:32  Thus saith the Lord GOD; Thou [the younger, Aholibah] shalt drink of thy sister’s cup deep and large: thou shalt be laughed to scorn and had in derision; it containeth much [humiliation].

Eze 23:43  Then said I unto her that was old in adulteries, Will they now commit whoredoms with her, and she with them? [… when you’re just an old dried-up harlot having dissipated the glory of your youth upon all the outwardly superb young men?]
Eze 23:44  Yet they went in unto her, as they go in unto a woman that playeth the harlot: so went they in unto Aholah and unto Aholibah, the lewd women.

To the stubborn and stony heart, those scriptures humiliatingly stop the mouths of the mighty lions we once thought we were in the glorious beauty of our Aholibahish youth.

Hos 6:5  Therefore have I hewed [divided into two parts, Judah in the south and Ephriam representing the rest of Israel in the north ~ Aholah and Aholibah; Old Israel and the New Israel of God] them by the prophets; I have slain them by the words of my mouth: and thy judgments are as the light that goeth forth. 

Those with spiritual eyes easily see in those scriptures the multiple representations of the two prime women (fatted spiritually – negatively and positively) in scripture. Hosea, Jehu, and all the prophets preceding and succeeding her amply warn of her luxuriating in her beauty and disregarding her Lord’s admonitions to be colloquially seen as ‘mutton dressed as lamb.’ The Lord’s chosen to hopefully become the very Elect are the King’s (meaning, Christ’s) daughter who has previously been known to dress and refurbish herself to optimistically seduce her ‘bedfellows.’

2Ki 9:30  And when Jehu was come to Jezreel, Jezebel heard of it; and she painted her face, and tired her head, and looked out at a window. 
2Ki 9:31  And as Jehu entered in at the gate, she said, Had Zimri peace, who slew his master?
2Ki 9:32  And he lifted up his face to the window, and said, Who is on my side? who? And there looked out to him two or three eunuchs. 
2Ki 9:33  And he said, Throw her down. So they threw her down: and some of her blood was sprinkled on the wall, and on the horses: and he trode her under foot. 
2Ki 9:34  And when he was come in, he did eat and drink, and said, Go, see now this cursed woman, and bury her: for she is a king’s daughter.

Hos 6:6  For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.

There is no greater “mercy” upon any man than what Christ is doing to his Elect, His Wife! Since ‘all things are hers’ (1Co 3:22-23), she, with wide eyes now that she spiritually sees, starkly understands her miserable condition all the way from Egypt to the cross. Her endless works of sacrifice and by the sweat of her strength, even for some into the twenty-second century, she is alarmed yet joyfully sees her former self.

Isa 1:11  To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the LORD: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats.
Isa 1:12  When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts?
Isa 1:13  Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting. 
Isa 1:14  Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them. 
Isa 1:15  And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood.
Isa 1:16  Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; 
Isa 1:17  Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. 
Isa 1:18  Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. 

That “mercy” the Lord desires is in the ridiculously simple act from our heart to acknowledge our sins and rely on Christ’s strength to rebuild the spiritual Temple within. When compared to the Old Covenant Laws, how gloriously merciful is the simplicity in Christ’s methodology in relying totally on His strength to overcome the man of sin. Looking back to Sodom, Egypt, Babylon and Old Jerusalem being one and the same and recalling an exhilarating sensuality or material item long gone is not advancing the spiritual Adam but covertly displays one’s underlying heart not fully devoting our ‘land’ to our Husband (Account of Ananias and Sapphira – Act 5:1-11).

2Co 11:2  For I am jealous over you with godly jealousy: for I have espoused you to one husband [not a husband of the Old Covenant and personal sacrificial works], that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ.
2Co 11:3  But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ.

Hos 6:7  But they like men [the flesh as opposed to the spirit] have transgressed the covenant: there have they dealt treacherously against me.

Our “covenant” is the sacred marriage agreement we have with Christ, our spouse. Our natural feminine tardy desire to stir up the gift of God, the holy spirit, can result in insidious hypocrisy of accusing our spouse of the very thing we do spiritually to Christ. Thankfully, Christ’s desire for mercy over judgment emphatically keeps Him from being hypocritical (as if!) of His law. We know that it is impossible for God to lie (Heb 6:18), but not so many husbands in the flesh become bitter against their wives, remembering her in the glory of her youth, full of righteous sensuality, vigour and enchantment.

2Ti 1:6  For this reason, I am reminding you to fan into flames the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands (ISV).

The fast-disappearing orthodox act in the apostolic era of the laying on of hands was a symbol of being imbued with the holy spirit. A person of the time, and likewise today, having his eyes and ears open for the first time, is being highly spiritually aroused that we all first equate with the natural in sensual incitement. As we naturally age, those heady days of glorying in our youth often become a dull glow that the directly correlating spiritual likewise needs to be fanned alive daily.

Job, speaking concerning Leviathan, is the forthright antipathy of Christ in every respect of Job 41:21! With the experience of Shulamite poetic arousing drama, it is easy to see the righteous sensuality depicting its spiritual counterpart using only one verse from Job:

Job 41:21  His breath [Leviathan’s/Christ’s] can ignite coal; and flames proceed from his mouth.

Son 1:2  Let him kiss me over and over again! Your love is better than wine (ISV).

Only a harlot would suffer with righteous disdain for her hire’s dissolute repetitive kissing of lies, but not the Shulamite, the Bride of Christ she represents.

The most lamentable form of dealing treacherously against our husband is graphically experienced in the flesh of Leah-like disunity of spirit with Jacob. Jacob was unaware that Leah’s marriage to him was the tradition that the elder daughter must be first married before her younger sister Rachel, whom he loved. Jacob effectively ‘hated’ Leah for her God-given separation of like-mind, just as the Great Whore today unwittingly hates the Lord’s Bride. As such, Jacob unconsciously dealt treacherously with Leah. Try as she might to win Jacob’s affection with mandrakes sensualities and subsequently the majority of tribal Israel, disunion of spirit will never trump the works of the flesh.

Spiritually, our treacherous transgression of the covenant in Hosea 6:6-7 is blaming Old Israel, alive and well today, for the world’s plight of Zionism. In our physical marriages, it is represented as a converted husband blaming his unconverted wife (symbolically Old Israel) for not understanding nor wanting to be washed by Christ’s commandments. It is first experienced most ‘bitterly’ by a husband and his wife’s innate indolent boudoir intimacies consequent to Eve’s curse from Eden. Since a husband is to be head of the wife and understand spiritually Christ’s word, there is barely a husband in the flesh who understands her curse and is thus more profoundly likewise cursed and condemned for (unconsciously) not understanding that curse. Mercy is to be expressed by a believer for the babe in Christ or non-believer, and if that believer rages his Deuteronomy 24:1 displeasure upon his spouse for their unbelief, the following verse is likely to apply:

Jas 2:13  For he shall have judgment without mercy, that hath shewed no mercy; and mercy rejoiceth against judgment.

Hos 6:8  Gilead [Gilead = rocky region] is a city of them that work iniquity, and is polluted with blood.

A husband dealing treacherously with the innate and inevitability of a physically dis-inflamed wife unwittingly condemns himself equally innately with a “rocky” (i.e. stony) heart that pollutes the New Temple he is supposed to represent with the blood of his iniquity.

Hab 2:12  Woe to him that buildeth a town with blood, and stablisheth a city by iniquity! 
Hab 2:13  Behold, is it not of the LORD of hosts that the people shall labour in the very fire, and the people shall weary themselves for very vanity?

Such an obtuse husband labors with his two-fold child of hell-like self-righteous inflamement vainly attempting to change his wife when he should rather have mercy upon her God-given tardiness.

Eze 3:18  When I say unto the wicked, Thou shalt surely die; and thou givest him not [meciful…] warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine hand.

The hypocritical husband who is self-righteous and gives no mercy earnestly seeks mercy himself.

Probably no more profound measure of mercy is there than Christ for His Bride’s sins even before she has learned to swiftly acknowledge them herself (Jer 3:13, Rom 7:24-25).

Hos 6:9  And as troops of robbers wait for a man, so the company of priests murder in the way by consent: for they commit lewdness. 

There is no greater robber than Satan, who goes about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour. So, too, we were such while in Babylon, heaping to ourselves co-conspirators to justify our lies. Accordingly, they murder Christ and His word afresh and relatively innocent blood is on their hands.

2Ti 4:3  For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; 
2Ti 4:4  And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.

Hos 6:10  I have seen an horrible thing in the house of Israel: there is the whoredom of Ephraim, Israel is defiled.

It is bad enough that Ephraim, representing the body of Israel, is full of harlotry. However, the greater blame lies at the feet of her Priests in Judah, you and I, who hold the oracles of God with Oholibah’s intent. A little bit of wink and nudge harlotry, colloquially expressed as ‘boys will be boys’, had already leavened the entire Body.

Gal 5:9  A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump. 

1Co 5:6  Your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump?

1Co 5:5 [Reverse order] To deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. 

1Co 6:20  For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.

Hos 6:11  Also, O Judah, he hath set an harvest for thee, when I returned the captivity of my people.

The little harvest of the first seeded fruits is with Judah, representing the little flock of the Lord’s faithful Elect whose harvest is in progress this very day since the cross – it is only she who can begin to understand that statement.

Luk 18:7  And shall not God avenge his own Elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them? 
Luk 18:8  I tell you that he will avenge them speedily. Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?

The Priests of God, His Elect who are predestined before the creation to be His Priests, receive the most blessed inheritance of Christ, their Husband. In being given that office, they are automatically given mercy, initially seen as torturously being ground to powder and utterly consumed by fire. Upon them joyfully enduring their chastisement, they “returned [their] captivity” in coming out of Babylon and are named by their Husband as “my people.”

1Pe 1:3  Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead,
1Pe 1:4  To an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you, 
1Pe 1:5  Who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. 

Amen!