SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 7/22/2015
11:06 PM
My Worship Time Focus:
The Kinds of Discipline
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Hosea
13:7-16
Message of the
verses: “7 So I will be like a lion to
them; Like a leopard I will lie in wait by the wayside. 8 I will encounter them
like a bear robbed of her cubs, And I will tear open their chests; There I will also devour them like a lioness, As
a wild beast would tear them.
9 It is your destruction, O Israel, That
you are against Me, against your help. 10 Where now is your king That he may
save you in all your cities, And your judges of whom you requested, "Give
me a king and princes"? 11 I gave you a king in My anger And took him away in My wrath. 12 The iniquity of
Ephraim is bound up; His sin is stored up. 13 The pains of childbirth come upon
him; He is not a wise son,
For it is not the time that he should delay at the opening of the womb. 14 Shall I ransom them from
the power of Sheol? Shall
I redeem them from death? O Death, where are your thorns? O Sheol, where
is your sting? Compassion will be hidden from My sight. 15 Though he flourishes
among the reeds, An east wind will come, The wind of the LORD coming up from
the wilderness; And his fountain will become dry And his spring will be dried
up; It will plunder his treasury of every precious article. 16 Samaria will be
held guilty, For she has rebelled against her God. They will fall by the sword,
Their little ones will be dashed in pieces, And their pregnant women will be
ripped open.”
Hosea continues to use similes and also metaphors to
describe the continued trials that God will bring upon them for their
disobediences and idol worshiping. He
says that He will be like a leopard and a lion as He waits on them to attack
them which will happen through the Assyrians.
We see in this section that Israel asked for a king, and this happened a
long time ago, and we could look at it in two different ways. We could go back to when Samuel asked the
Lord for a king at the request of the people of Israel, which angered by Samuel
and also the Lord, for they were not trusting in Him which is why they wanted a
king. When the kingdom split they also
had another king given to them, which was a bad king as all of their kings were
bad, that is disobedient to the Lord.
Now the Lord tells them that they will be without a king, and they have
been without a king for many centuries and even today they do not have a king,
however they do have a democratic form of government, but still now king until
the end of the Tribulation period when the Lord Jesus Christ will rule as their
king for 1000 years.
Dr. Wiersbe writes “The woman in travail is used in
Scripture to picture extreme pain and sorrow (13:13; Isa. 13:8; Jer. 4:31;
Matt. 24:8), but Hosea adds a new twist.
He sees the woman too weak to deliver the child and the baby too stupid
to come out of the womb! All the travail
was wasted.”
The Assyrians will come upon Israel like a desert storm,
hot and dry, as they smother the people and dry up the water courses. They will take all of the nation’s treasures,
and even their greatest treasures, their children and they will slay them
mercilessly. What is the reason for
this? The answer is that the nation will
not return to God.
We see in verse fourteen this statement: “Compassion will be hidden from My sight.” And the first part of this verse is something
that Paul uses in 1 Cor. 15:55 when he speaks about death, and the victory that
we have in Jesus Christ even through death.
However when Hosea wrote this it had a different meaning. Paul’s use of this quotation was used in a
different way and that is how this happens at times when the NT writers quotes
the OT it sometimes can have a different meaning than what the OT writer had in
mind for his time.
Dr. Wiersbe concludes his commentary with the following
words: “God revealed His love to Israel in
His past mercies and now in His present disciplines. Hosea closes his book with a third evidence
of God’s love.” We will begin to look at
it in our next SD on Hosea which will take us to the last chapter in Hosea’s
writing.
7/22/2015 11:29 PM
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