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The Book of Hosea – Part 7, Hos 7:1-16

[Study Aired May 25, 2024]

The Hosea 7 theme continues from Chapter 6 with Israel’s impenitent heart. With deep reverence and fear, and embarrassingly, sometimes not fearfully enough, the Lord’s Gomer-like Wife hears her Lord’s constant pleading to her to return to him and faithfully minister Him her espousal dues. 

Hos 7:1  When I would have healed Israel, then the iniquity of Ephraim was discovered, and the wickedness of Samaria: for they commit falsehood; and the thief cometh in, and the troop of robbers spoileth without.

What immediately springs to mind from the opening line of verse 1 is,

Mat 23:37  O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!

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.

What comes to mind from the next line of verse 1 is the Lord’s wife insolently parading around like Oholah and Oholibah with her skirts hiked up, displaying her thighs. To varying degrees, all women in the flesh are highly conscious of every detail of their bodily presentation and their male kin’s immense genuine gratitude. Israel, the aging harlot that she is, no matter how much attention she gives to removing physically every spot and wrinkle from her body, her lovers hiss in derision. 

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].

Lam 2:15  All that pass by clap their hands at thee; they hiss and wag their head at the daughter of Jerusalem, saying, Is this the city that men call The perfection of beauty, The joy of the whole earth?

Like stumbling upon a buried treasure in a field, not so the Bride of Christ! She, with the awe of discovering a hidden spring in a parched land and with a deep sigh of understanding, looks back upon her former harlot self in humiliation and paradoxical joy. She realises that the glory of her youth lewdly displayed for all leering lovers’ delight was a “falsehood” and her true glory designed for one man represented as Christ, she allowed to be stolen from her in her many partings with her “troop” of harlot-like friends in Babylon’s churches.

The symbolic 1,000 wives of Solomon’s court of ethnic beauties, the World, and particularly Ephriam and Samaria, who represent them as our brothers and sisters in Zionist Christendom, don’t realise that they are “spoiled” and ‘robbed’ of their beautiful spiritual femininity and are now just a dried-up old harlot.  As Hosea 7:2 says…

Hos 7:2  And they consider not in their hearts that I remember all their wickedness: now their own doings have beset them about; they are before my face.

It is dreadfully hypocritical for the Bride of Christ to look with derision upon her sisters remaining in Babylon for their unwitting harlotry. She remembers all too well that yesterday, she lewdly rioted with them.

1Pe 4:3  For the time past of our life may suffice us to have wrought the will of the Gentiles, when we walked in lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revellings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries:
1Pe 4:4  Wherein they think it strange that ye run not with them to the same excess of riot, speaking evil of you: 

Psa 106:39  Thus were they defiled with their works, and went a whoring with their inventions.
Psa 106:40  Therefore was the wrath of the LORD kindled against his people, insomuch that he abhorred his own inheritance.

It is the remaining nakedness of the Lord’s wife He abhors that sets her at odds “before [His] my face”; that is His mind.

1Co 2:16  For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we [The Bride only] have the mind of Christ.

Rev 1:1  The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants [who do and walk in all His commands] things which must shortly come to pass; and he sent and signified it by his angel unto his servant John: 
Rev 1:2  Who bare record of the word of God, and of the testimony of Jesus Christ, and of all things that he saw.

Hos 7:3  They make the king glad with their wickedness, and the princes with their lies. 

It takes the God-given proverbial ‘guts’ to leave mother and father behind and, with bright feminine eyes, enthusiastically run forward to our Husband to walk hand in hand with him, under his wing as a mother hen ‘loves’ her chicks together in the Lord’s vineyard to see if the pomegranates have budded. 

Our first father is Satan, and our mother is Babylonian Christianity in lockstep with Agar of Mt. Sinai.

Mat 23:37  O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not! 

Son 7:12  Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear, and the pomegranates bud forth: there will I give thee my loves. 
Son 7:13  The mandrakes give a smell, and at our gates [protecting His word] are all manner of pleasant fruits, new and old, which I have laid up for thee, O my beloved. 

Joh 8:44  Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. 

Gal 4:23  But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he of the freewoman was by promise. 
Gal 4:24  Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants [two separate marriages, the former, our first ‘mother’, divorced]; the [former] one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar. 
Gal 4:25  For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is [… still existing as harlot Christianity/Zionism], and is in bondage with her children.
Gal 4:26  But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all.

Hos 7:4  They are all adulterers, as an oven heated by the baker, who ceaseth from raising after he hath kneaded the dough, until it be leavened. 

Leavening makes bread light, fluffy and far taster than unleavened flat-bread. Unleavened bread signifies the stark, unadulterated reality of God’s word without a hint of man’s inclusions to make it more palatable with his self-appointed righteousness.

Exo 12:8 [Israel upon quickly coming out of Egypt, Babylon today] And they shall eat the flesh in that night, roast with fire, and unleavened bread; and with bitter herbs they shall eat it.

Exo 12:14  And this day shall be unto you for a memorial; and ye shall keep it a feast to the LORD throughout your generations; ye shall keep it a feast by an [spiritual!] ordinance for ever.
Exo 12:15  Seven days shall ye eat unleavened bread; even the first day ye shall put away leaven out of your houses: for whosoever eateth leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that soul shall be cut off from Israel.

1Co 5:7  Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us:
1Co 5:8  Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. 

Every baker knows that it takes only a hint of leaven to leaven the entire lump of dough. In verse 7, and since we are at first “all adulterers”, we shall see in the subsequent verses that we have been too drunk on our doctrine to add the Lord’s unadulterated leaven that glorifies His word and makes His bread delicious. 

My observations of bakers in Melbourne, Australia, no doubt indicative of the nation and the West, are that many of them are given to drinking alcohol while baking in the wee small dog-watch hours of the morning. Upon heating their ovens, and if they are too intoxicated, they could, most humiliatingly, even without alcohol, fall asleep, and the batch to be baked deflates. Hence, in verses 4-6 of Hosea 7, he has heated the oven and seemingly forgotten to place his consignment in the oven. Spiritually, unleavened and leavened bread denotes the constant swapping of our sinful to sinless condition until we are left without sin and paradoxically leavened most buoyantly with the Lord’s righteous leaven. Conversely, the leaven of our disappearing Pharisaical selves is our pride holding fast to our dogma. As verse 5 says, ‘stretching our hands with scorners’ of the same party (mind) spirit, thus displaying the nudity of our self-righteousness.

Exo 23:18  Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leavened bread; neither shall the fat of my sacrifice remain until the morning.

Lev 7:12  If he offer it for a thanksgiving, then he shall offer with the sacrifice of thanksgiving unleavened cakes mingled with oil, and unleavened wafers anointed with oil, and cakes mingled with oil, of fine flour, fried. 
Lev 7:13  Besides the cakes, he shall offer for his offering leavened bread with the sacrifice of thanksgiving of his peace offerings. 
Lev 7:14  And of it he shall offer one out of the whole oblation for an heave offering unto the LORD, and it shall be the priest’s that sprinkleth the blood of the peace offerings.

Hos 7:5  In the day of our king the princes have made him sick with bottles of wine; he stretched out his hand with scorners [He has joined hands with like-minded “fools” H3684 –  1. fool, stupid fellow, dullard, simpleton, arrogant one]

In Hosea 7:5, princes making us sick and biblically termed “revellings” are our treasured Babylonian friends outwardly and internally who, having gained Dutch courage (too much wine) and raucously proclaimed the hotly inflated dogma of agreement with each other (from the same batch of dough) are now exhausted. Now, bleary-eyed from wine, they all are like a big batch of buns past peak proofing (inflated, leavened) and indifferent from being left too long for the baking, are now deflated as they lie in wait for their drunk baker, effectively a priest of God too late to correct the mistake but regardless, he shoves them in the oven.

Inversely, the Bride, and with a shudder having recognised that same wretched condition in her former self, partakes of her Lord’s spirit and righteously divides the truth.

Gal 5:18  But if ye be led of the spirit [for this cause, as opposed to alcohol-fueled revellings], ye are not under the law.
Gal 5:19  Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, 
Gal 5:20  Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies,
Gal 5:21  Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings [G2970], and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.

Pro 12:23  A prudent man concealeth knowledge: but the heart of fools proclaimeth foolishness.

Revellings G2970 – Definition: 1. a revel, carousal a. a nocturnal and riotous procession of half-drunken and frolicsome fellows. From G2749 – Definition: 1. to lie [in wait] a. of an infant b. of one buried c. of things that quietly cover some spot.

Hos 7:6  For they have made ready their heart like an oven, whiles they lie in wait: their baker sleepeth all the night; in the morning it burneth as a flaming fire.

The big batch of buns, symbolically Babylonian-deluded righteousness that has enough of God’s truth to be partially inflated, are unceremoniously baked regardless of their sinful condition and unwittingly, to them, made half-baked and distasteful. A silent remnant preparing to leave Babylon has nothing to do with her baker’s disgusting dainties; she has seen how the ‘bakers’, represented as her priests and kings, peddle their doctrinal merchandise. None call upon the Chief Baker, their Lord, for counsel.

Hos 7:7  They are all hot as an oven, and have devoured their judges; all their kings are fallen: there is none among them that calleth unto me. 
Hos 7:8  Ephraim, he hath mixed himself among the people; Ephraim is a cake not turned. 

Isa 64:4  And from forever they have not heard, nor did they listen. Eye has not seen a God except You, who works for him who waits for Him.
Isa 64:5  You meet him who rejoices and works righteousness, those who remember You in Your ways. Behold, You were angry, for we sinned. In them is eternity, and we will [a process] be saved. 
Isa 64:6  But we are all as the unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as a menstruation cloth. And we all fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away. 
Isa 64:7  And there is no one who calls on Your name, who stirs up himself to take hold of You. For You have hidden Your face from us, and have melted us away [Unturned; half-baked; cast out] because of our iniquities. 
Isa 64:8  But now, O Jehovah, You are our Father; we are the clay [for this cause, the dough], and You are our Former [Baker]; and we all are the work of Your hand.

1Jn 5:13  I have written these things to you who believe on the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have everlasting life, and that you may believe on the name of the Son of God. 
1Jn 5:14  And this is the confidence that we have toward Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us [His Wife in this age forward].
1Jn 5:15  And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of Him. 
1Jn 5:16  If any man see his brother sin a sin which is not unto death, he shall ask, and he shall give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death: I do not say that he shall pray for it. 

For this demonstration, if we see our brother inflated with the leaven of unrighteousness and not with the Lord’s spirit, we pluck him from the all-consuming lake of fire to be correctly baked today in the Lord’s oven for his spiritual gastronomical delight.

Jud 1:21  Keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. 
Jud 1:22  And of some have compassion, making a difference: 
Jud 1:23  And others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire; hating even the garment spotted by the flesh. 

Hos 7:9  Strangers have devoured his strength, and he knoweth it not: yea, gray hairs are here and there upon him, yet he knoweth not. 

In this apparently fast-closing age, and from the pinnacle of man’s Babylonian tower, almost all mankind sees its coming destruction yet, like a moth to a flame, are helpless to change the course to oblivion. The World’s mighty ruling men and women are in utter discord, violently disagreeing with others’ forced dogma and never coming to the truth. Of course, without the Lord’s spirit, it all is pre-designed to fail most miserably. Hence, he fights on classically propped up like Mr Biden, whose ‘grey hairs’ belie his supposed wisdom. The United States of America’s ostentatious adage as “leaders of the free world and democracy” is more and more becoming an embarrassing mumble since what she doesn’t know is that all her woes symbolising the World’s putrid state of affairs are foundationally spiritual. If we can’t see that very same condition within ourselves, we will, like them, be destined to ‘bake’ in the oven on the Eighth Day.

Mal 4:1  “For indeed the day is coming, burning like a furnace, and all the arrogant evildoers will be chaff. The coming day will burn them up,” says the LORD of Heaven’s Armies. “It will not leave them even a root or branch. 
Mal 4:2  But for you who respect my name, the sun of vindication will rise with healing wings, and you will skip about like calves released from the stall. 
Mal 4:3  You will trample on the wicked, for they will be like ashes under the soles of your feet on the day which I am preparing,” says the LORD of Heaven’s Armies. 

Rev 17:11 And the beast that was, and is not, even he is the eighth, and is of the seven, and goeth into perdition [destruction in the Lake of Fire].

Hos 7:10  And the pride of Israel testifieth to his face: and they do not return to the LORD their God, nor seek him for all this. 

It is relatively easy to see our lust of the eyes and lust of the flesh, but following on its heels is pride, the most tenacious of sins that stubbornly sustains the foundational lust. Consequently, symbolised by Pharaoh in Moses’ day, we can hopefully, in this age, sequentially receive one plague to change our hearts. Yet, like Israel, if we harden our hearts and do not return to our Lord to acknowledge our sins, plague after plague can occur until maybe all the symbolic plagues of Egypt upon the spirit of our old man drag us out of the wretched condition of being a “silly dove.”

Rom 7:18  For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing: for to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. 
Rom 7:19  For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.
Rom 7:20  Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. 
Rom 7:21  I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. 
Rom 7:22  For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: 
Rom 7:23  But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. 
Rom 7:24  O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?
Rom 7:25  I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.

Hos 7:11  Ephraim also is like a silly dove without heart: they call to Egypt, they go to Assyria. 
Hos 7:12  When they shall go, I will spread my net upon them; I will bring them down as the fowls of the heaven; I will chastise them, as their congregation hath heard. 

The term “silly” means spacious and wide. The definitive ‘silly dove’ is the Blue Rock pigeon, a pest common to the World’s cities and used for pigeon racing primarily for its renowned homing instincts. To mitigate the individual being targeted for a peregrine falcon attack, these pigeons congregate in flocks on the ground and confidently in the air, roaming ‘spaciously and wide’ and appearing arrogant for their abilities to tease and dodge predators. They are strong and agile flyers, and therein lies another attribute of being “silly” since they trust in their own strength to out-fly a falcon, a symbolic “evil bird” being Satan and his demons (Pro 28:26, Gen 3:19). It is a wonderful sight to see a falcon coming up from below a large flock of pigeons cunningly increasing the flock’s altitude to masterfully put in a stoop that causes repeated flock fragmentation and rejoining, similar to a school of fish being attacked by barracuda as he singles out a weak victim (Matt 26:41, 38, Gal 4:9… ‘weak and beggarly elements’). Spiritually, mankind is a “silly dove” who likewise congregates in Babylon’s churches and other religions; “silly doves” figure as women symbolising churches (2Ti 3:6… ‘weak and silly women’/individual harlots and churches), believing their unwitting predator pastor’s every word as he plunders their wallets and spiritual minds. If not happy with that ‘predator’, they go to Egypt and Assyria, representatives of other doctrines that speak smooth and more agreeable words to their ears.

2Ti 4:3  For the time will come when they [the ‘silly doves’ searching ‘far and wide’] 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. 
2Ti 4:5  But watch thou [the Bride] in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, make full proof of thy ministry. 

The glaring outward representation of a “silly dove” is the West ditching all vestiges of Christianity’s partial light of understanding for every Egyptian, Assyrian, Sodom, Capernaum, and Old Jerusalem “spacious and wide” putridness to ensure immutable end-time darkness.

Mat 6:22  The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. 
Mat 6:23  But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! 

Christ, the chief ‘fowler’, has spread a net upon them and caught them in strong delusion. Chastisement has already been lit upon the Bride of Christ, and she is learning to love her Lord’s fiery word. Her sisters in Babylon are yet to be ruled with the rod of iron in readiness for her chastisement in the Lake of Fire (Rev 20:7-10).

Jer 2:17  Hast thou not procured this unto thyself, in that thou hast forsaken the LORD thy God, when he led thee by the way?
Jer 2:18  And now what hast thou to do in the way of Egypt, to drink the waters of Sihor? or what hast thou to do in the way of Assyria, to drink the waters of the river? 

Hos 7:13  Woe unto them! for they have fled from me: destruction unto them! because they have transgressed against me: though I have redeemed them, yet they have spoken lies against me. 
Hos 7:14  And they have not cried unto me with their heart, when they howled upon their beds: they assemble themselves for corn and wine, and they rebel against me. 
Hos 7:15  Though I have bound and strengthened their arms, yet do they imagine mischief against me. 
Hos 7:16  They return, but not to the most High: they are like a deceitful bow: their princes shall fall by the sword for the rage of their tongue: this shall be their derision in the land of Egypt. 

Jer 2:19  Thine own wickedness shall correct thee, and thy backslidings shall reprove thee: know therefore and see that it is an evil thing and bitter, that thou hast forsaken the LORD thy God, and that my fear is not in thee, saith the Lord GOD of hosts.

1Pe 1:1  Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the strangers scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, [the Lord’s little scattered flock, the…]
1Pe 1:2  Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ: Grace unto you, and peace, be multiplied.