SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/25/2015
6:28 PM
My Worship Time
Focus: He will restore us
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Hosea 14:4
Message of the
verses: “4 I will heal their
apostasy, I will love them freely, For My anger has turned away from them.”
In this SD we will be looking at the second sub-section
under the main section entitled “God’s Promises for the Future.” This is the second to the last SD that we
will do on the book of Hosea as our next one will finish the book and then it
is onto Joel.
I would like to begin at the last section of this verse “For
My anger has turned away from them.” I
can see from this phrase that God’s anger had a beginning and then an end. I have mentioned the fifteenth chapter of the
book of Genesis in many of my Spiritual Diaries and in that section we can see
that God’s anger does have a time in which it will come about and then a time
when it will end. God is speaking to
Abraham in this section and actually giving him a part of what is called the Abrahamic
Covenant in this chapter, and God tells Abraham that his family will end up in
Egypt where they will be treated badly, but then He will punish the Egyptians
for their treatment of the children of Israel.
God also tells Abraham that his family will then return to the land
which is called the Promised Land where Abraham was at that time and one of the
reasons that it will take four hundred years for them to return is “for the
iniquity of the Amorite is not yet complete’ (Gen. 15:16b).” God’s anger will be perfectly complete
against the Amorites when Israel returns to destroy them. God’s anger was complete against Israel as seen
in the last portion of this verse. One
more thing I want to say that I have said before and that is that there is a
difference between how God treated the Amorites and the rest of the nations
that were in the Promised Land before Israel defeated them and how God treats
Israel and that is Israel is God’s people or even described as His wife and
therefore He will treat them like family, He will discipline them in order to
bring them to repentance where He just destroyed the other nations. Let’s look at Jeremiah 14:7 “"Although
our iniquities testify against us, O LORD, act for Your name’s sake! Truly our
apostasies have been many, We have sinned against You.”
Dr. Wiersbe explains that the sin that Israel had
committed did not just begin over night, but he compares it to a sickness and
when a person collapses from sickness it did not happen overnight, but probably
begins with an infection that has been working in the body for weeks or even
months. He writes “When sin gets into
the inner person and isn’t dealt with, it acts like an insidious infection: it grows quietly; it brings loss of spiritual
appetite; it creates weariness and weakness; then comes the collapse.” He goes on to write “For example, when Peter
denied his Lord three times, that sin didn’t suddenly appear; it was the result
of gradual spiritual deterioration. The
denial began with Peter’s pride, when he told the Lord he would never forsake
Him and would even die for Him. The next
stage was sleeping when he should have been praying, and then fighting when he
should have put away his sword. Peter
should have left the scene (‘I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the
flock shall be scattered abroad’ [Matt. 26:31; Zech. 13:7]; but instead, he
followed to see what would happen and walked right into temptation.”
Every believer knows what 1 John 1:9 says “If we confess
our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us
from all unrighteousness.” We as
believer as told that we are to keep a short list with the Lord, in other words
we are to confess any sin shortly after we sin.
After we sin, similar to a healing from a sickness we need a period of
recuperation and that is what Hosea is speaking of concerning Israel, a time
when they need to come back into fellowship with the Lord and begin again with Him
remembering that the successful Christian life is a series of new beginnings.
7/25/2015 6:56 PM
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