It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will take it to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart his made glad. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. (Ecclesiastes 7:2-4)
Not all happiness and laughter is wise. Yes, Scripture commands joy, and God made feasts a great part of Israel’s yearly rhythm. But celebration is not intrinsically good. Neither is sorrow inherently bad. In fact, there are times when laughter and celebration are inappropriate. The wise know the proper time for all things. Fools, however, are marked by their incessant laughter. Their superficial and ill-timed happiness reveals their detachment from reality.
The last several chapters have shown that Israel’s dive into foolishness had also separated them from reality. Their repentance and worship were both false, so it should come as no surprise that their joy and happiness were false as well. In Hosea 9, we see that Israel was joyful and filled with celebrations, but those festivities only revealed their ignorance of the judgment that loomed just over the horizon.
Our text can be divided into two parts. Verses 1-9 rebuke Israel’s false joy and foolish celebrations, while verses 10-17 focus upon Israel’s impending barrenness.
REJOICE NOT, O ISRAEL // VERSES 1-9
As has often been the case here in Hosea, the opening verses give us the overall thesis of the oracle that follows. So it is here as well. Israel is first commanded to cease their rejoicing and to stop celebrating like the nations around them.
Why would the LORD say this?
A running theme of Philippians is the command to rejoice. Joy is a gift from God and a fruit of the Holy Spirit. Nehemiah even says that the joy of Yahweh is our strength. To that end, God gave His people feasts and festivals so that they could rejoice together in Him. Indeed, the Day of Atonement was the primary yearly time of solemnity and fasting. The three major feasts had their solemn assemblies attached to them, but they were fundamentally celebrations. Moreover, they generally took place in the spring and in the autumn alongside the harvests. Thus, harvests and fruitfulness are bound together with joy, celebrations, feasts, and festivals, which form the overall message of this chapter.
But if God desires the joy of His people, why is He commanding them against it here? For you have played the whore, forsaking your God. They had forsaken the LORD, who is their reason for rejoicing and exulting. Their joy was not in Yahweh, making it a false joy.
You have loved a prostitute’s wages on all the threshing floors. Since threshing floors were an essential aspect of harvesting grain, they often became places of idolatry. Fittingly, two of the most widely worshiped idols in Israel were Baal and Asherah, which were both associated with fertility and agriculture. And given mankind’s need for food and the difficulty in obtaining it throughout history, those gods made sense. Israel was essentially hedging her bets and praying to any deity who might actually keep them from starving.
Since we live in a time of unprecedented abundance, it is difficult for us to keep in mind the perpetual struggle for survival that our ancestors endured. Today, we consider agriculture a science, but for the ancients, it was faith. You sowed and watered a seed, but only the gods would cause it to grow and bear fruit. Without that understanding, this oracle will remain foreign to us. Their appeal to Baal was understandable but not excusable.
Notice, then, that verse 2 is the very thing that they are trying to prevent coming to pass. The threshing floors (grain) and the wine vats (wine) would fail them. Wine, of course, was the drink of celebration. Yet it was also a drink of safety. Most wine was mixed with water, which we now know killed the bacteria through the alcohol. Wine, therefore, helped prevent water-borne illnesses. Without grain, they would starve, and without wine, they would become ill.
Moreover, they would not remain in the land at all. In verse 3, God announces that He will send them off to their saviors. They will return to Egypt and go to Assyria. They refused to honor God as the Giver of their grain and wine; therefore, God would make good on His Word that He spoke in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. He would send them into exile.
Verse 4 describes the state of their exile. They will not be able to make offerings to the LORD. Remember that Israel still thought that they were worshiping Yahweh. Yet they did not make their sacrifices out of love and obedience to the LORD. Rather, they just enjoyed eating the meat (8:13). While they presumed that Yahweh would accept them, the LORD declares that He will full cast them out of His house.
Verse 5 then raises a fitting question: What will you do on the day of the appointed festival, and on the day of the feast of the LORD? The feasts and festivals are the virtually only aspects of worship that they really cared about because they were times of food and celebration. Therefore, God now asks what they will do whenever they are cut off from those feasts. Those festivals of joy will be replaced with pain and death.
Verse 6 makes that clear. Egypt will gather them up. Memphis, which was one of Egypt’s chief cities, would bury them. Their treasures would be covered in nettles, and thorns would grow within their very tents. This, of course, is a picture of sin’s curse coming upon them. Yahweh had lessened the effects of the curse for His people in the Promised Land but would no longer do so once He exiles them from the land.
The point is that Israel enjoyed the blessings of Yahweh without actually loving Him. They delighted themselves in the grain and wine that He gave them, and they loved the parties that He commanded to them to have. But they did not love the LORD. They were like a wife who is constantly seeing other men. She even goes so far as to pay for their meals and hotel rooms with her husband’s money, while wearing the dresses and jewelry that he had purchased for her. But the analogy is only complete if we also picture her lovers as worthless men who are only interested in using her. The LORD’s warning to Israel is like the husband saying, “All of your ease and comfort comes from me. If I hand you over to your lovers, they will only abuse you.”
This is certainly a warning for us as individuals. It is all too easy to rejoice in God’s gifts without actually loving Him as the Giver. That is a failure to honor Him as God and to give thanks to Him, the root sins listed in Romans 1. We should be constantly vigilant for these areas in our own lives.
But this also has a broader societal application. We are right to find many parallels to ancient Israel in our own day. Like Israel in Hosea’s day, we live in a time of great prosperity. Of course, we may not feel very prosperous, but we each live lives of comfort that Medieval kings could only dream about. Israel owed its prosperity to the LORD, and we owe it to the West’s Christian foundation, which has been actively and systematically destroyed through secularism. Once Darwin gave us a secular origin story, Freud gave us a secular remedy for guilt, and Marx gave us a secular heaven, the West widely rejected God.
And the effects of rejecting the Giver are all around us. Consider the greatness of the arts that accompanied the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Puritan eras. Compare that artwork to what secularism has produced. Much of purposefully avoids being beautiful and instead favors the shocking and horrific. Two upcoming holidays are symbolic of the decline. Thanksgiving, which was established as a call for the whole nation to collectively give thanks to God, has become primarily about gluttony. And even then, Halloween continuously threatens to overshadow it, leaving us bearing a closer resemblance to the death-obsessed Egyptians than to pilgrim settlers from which we descend.
And instead of mourning, there is only celebration.
Verses 7-9 announce that the day of judgment had indeed arrived. And notice the irony of verse 7: Israel shall know it. Their ignorance has been one of the primary indictments that the LORD has brought against them, but now, at last, they will actually know something… their punishment! This is rather like the ironic use of the word ‘return’ in 8:13 and 9:3. Since they would not return to Yahweh, they will instead return to Egypt.
The second half of verse 7 is difficult to interpret, but it seems to be the people’s view of Hosea. They see him as a fool. But he is a watchman with God, that is, a spiritual watchman to warn the people of God’s coming judgment.
But what good is a watchman if a city refuses to hear his calls? Their iniquity and hatred had blinded them to Hosea’s message. His oracles were foolish in their sight. They had become like the men of Gibeah who caused a civil war in Israel through their heinous sin in Judges 19-20.
Such is always the case with sin. It blinds us to the oracles of God. Whenever our vanities are rebuked, we scoff the prophetic word away, often assuming that it must apply to someone else.
Here is a simple test. Paul says that all Scripture is for teaching, reproof, correction, and education in righteousness. Each of those words is corrective in nature. Yet when was the last time that Scripture genuinely rebuked and corrected you?
BARRENNESS FOR ISRAEL // VERSES 10-17
With the overall warning against Israel’s false festivities established, the second half of the chapter focuses on Yahweh’s punishment of Israel. Continue to notice that these verses use the imagery of harvests and fruitfulness.
In verse 10, the LORD compares Israel to grapes in the wilderness and the first fruits upon a fig tree. Vines and figs are the standard biblical imagery of comfort, security, and domesticity. Here wild grapes and first fruit figs are images of future potential. Neither is a full and bountiful harvest, but they are clear evidence of fruitfulness nonetheless.
Yet they did not last: But they came to Baal-Peor and consecrated themselves to the thing of shame, and became detestable like the thing they loved. Baal-Peor was where, in Numbers 25:1-9, Israel’s men took Moabite women from themselves and began to worship Baal. Israel was essentially do the same in Hosea’s day. Moses said that they yoked themselves to Baal of Peor. Here they have consecrated themselves to shame. They, therefore, have become as detestable as the god they worship.
Therefore, in verse 11, Ephraim’s glory shall fly away like a bird. What does that mean? We can gather the imagery of Israel’s glory being flighty like a bird, but what exactly is Israel’s glory?
Their children.
No birth, no pregnancy, no conception!
The LORD would take away their own fruitfulness by taking the next generation from them. Even if they bring up children, I will bereave them till none is left. Notice that they are indeed like grain with no head from 8:7. They will not conceive, but even if they do, their laughter will be taken from them. This is all the more tragic since Yahweh will call Israel His own son in 11:1. Their beginning was so full of promise, but now it is only shame and judgment. Woe to them when I depart them from them!
In verse 13, Yahweh then compares them to a young palm in the meadow or perhaps to the city of Tyre. The verse is very difficult to understand. If a palm is the picture, as the ESV translates, then it is again a reference to fruitfulness. If it is speaking of Tyre, the picture is likely one of judgment. Tyre was an island city that boasted of never being captured (that is, until Alexander the Great had his soldiers fill the channel with dirt and attach it to the land). Tyre was a supplier of purple dye, which made it one of the wealthiest ancient cities. If Tyre were planted in a meadow, it would undo the very heart of their security. Thus, Yahweh may be saying something like, “You think that you are as unconquerable as Tyre. Sure, but only if Tyre were in a meadow.”
Either way, the judgment of the second line is devastating: but Ephraim must lead his children out to slaughter. The ESV notes that it is literally him who slaughters or the slaughtering one. Of course, in a sense, this is the LORD simply giving them over to their sin. We know that worship of Molech was also present in Israel, which required child sacrifice. So, God is, in a way, giving them more of what they are already doing.
Indeed, notice how the remainder of the chapter again focuses on the taking away of their children. In verse 14, Yahweh gives them a new gift… of barrenness. Verse 16 is another structural similarity to verses 11-12 and 8:7. They will be fruitless, but even if they manage to actually have children, the LORD will take them away.
Having addressed past idolatry at Baal-Peor, Gilgal in verse 15 was a place of present idolatry for them. And verse 17 ends with a promise to make them pilgrims among the nations that they so longed to imitate.
George Schwab points out that there is a loose parallel between verses 10-12 and 13-17. In 10a, Israel was an attractive fig tree, and in 13a, Ephraim was a young palm. In 10b, God detested them at Baal-Peor, and in 13b-15a, He hates them at Gilgal. In 11-12a, God’s judgment is to take away their offspring, and He gives the same judgment in verses 15b-16. Verse 12 ends with Yahweh declaring that He would leave them, and verse 17 ends with Him promising to reject them.
The repetition of those same beats and warnings is meant to cause us to pay attention. It is as if we are supposed to read it thinking, “Didn’t He kind of already say that?” Yes, but we coast along on autopilot so often that God frequently needs to repeat Himself.
I also see an echo of Pharaoh’s dream here in twofold pronouncement, almost as if God is saying, “The repetition means that it will surely come to pass. So let all who have ears to hear be wise like Joseph and prepare for the spiritual famine, for the coming exile.”
Note what God’s judgment is in both sections: barrenness. Why is it so significant that God was going to bereft them of their children? It doesn’t sound so bad. No birth, no pregnancy, no conception! We happily do that to ours today. Many today would gladly welcome God’s judgment.
But it ought not be so. Both biblically and historically, children have been considered one of life’s greatest joys. We are reminded of this in the classical image of a father having a celebratory cigar upon having a child. God’s creational mandate, His first command, for humanity was to fill the earth with children, to cover the earth with His image through more of His image-bearers. Indeed, children are sometimes called the fruit of the womb, the product of a seed sown in a fertile field.
And like grain and wine, children are a gift and blessing from Yahweh Himself. Even as we try to reverse-engineer the process of life, the LORD Himself must still give the spark of life if a sperm and egg are to become a new life.
And because children are a blessing, barrenness is a bitter effect of life under the curse of sin. Like bodily illnesses, it wasn’t necessarily caused by direct and personal sin, but it is certainly the effect of general sin.
Barrenness was also an existential concern. It meant being, in a sense, cut off from the future. Past generations have always considered their descendants to be a kind of continuation of themselves. And that is quite true. Whether we know their names or not, we are each shaped by the actions of our ancestors, who among all the people that have ever lived were, at least to some degree, survivors.
But Israel treated that gift flippantly, even offering their children to Molech. And sadly, we are no better. Although there have been localized echoes throughout history, the global decline in birth rates is one of the most troubling modern issues. Though our ancestors fought desperately for survival and very often buried as many children as they had, we have ceased reproducing through sheer inconvenience. Children are avoided because they are an interruption into our lives, disrupting the ease and comfort that we prize more than anything else. And when pregnancies do still happen, millions of them are still given over to Molech, who now works through pharmakeia and through clinics rather than temples.
I point this out because it displays again the reality of Romans 1. When God judges a people, He most often simply gives them the desires of their heart. He lets them have exactly what they think they want. That is the irony of God giving them over to the nations. Israel was already mixing with the nations. So their punishment is to wander among the nations. As Lewis rightly said, “All get what they want; they do not always like it.”
MOURNERS & OUR ETERNAL INHERITANCE
Israel’s false joy kept them ignorant of the coming judgment, which would strip them of one of life’s greatest joys: their children and, therefore, their future. As is always the case, Christ gives us the proper conclusion to both halves of this chapter.
First, Jesus Himself affirms the wisdom of Ecclesiastes. After all, He did not say, “Blessed are those who celebrate, for they shall do so eternally.” No, He said, “Blessed are the mourners, for they shall be comforted.” There is a time to rejoice as well as a time to mourn. Avoiding all sorrow is not optimism but foolishness. Sorrow is meant to lead us to repentance. If a person never laments their sin, they will never actually repent of it. If I believe the rattling of my car to be nothing serious, I won’t ever make the time to take it to a mechanic. Again, Israel was given to a false joy that was nothing more than foolishness.
Sadly, there are still large segments of this thinking in the church, especially within the prosperity gospel movement, where to lament is essentially to lack faith. But that is not the picture of Christianity in Scripture. We yearn for Christ’s return precisely because the world is broken by sin and so are we!
As it turns out, the world often hates mourners because spiritual sobriety threatens to ruin their good time. Everyone hates a party-pooper. So it was with Christian and Faithful at Vanity Fair. They brutally martyred Faithful simply for pointing out the vanities that they worshiped. And so it always is. We can easily identify the vanities that have the greatest hold on our heart by considering what we might have the hardest time surrendering, especially the things that illicit anger from us. Think of Bilbo as Gandalf encouraged him to give up the Ring, “What business is it of yours what I do with my own things!”
Like the ancient Israelites, the pleasures around us numb us to what ought to rightly cause us to mourn. Indeed, that is why they are called amusements; they keep us from musing upon the realities of life.
We cannot receive the comfort of Christ unless we first mourn our need of Him. And in Him, we receive true joy. Joy that does not avoid painful truths. Joy that mourns over sins and rejoices that Christ has trampled over them through His death and resurrection. Indeed, for those who receive Christ by faith, we comforted in our mourning through the gift of the Comforter. Our Lord brings us the hope of eternal life in Him, where there shall be no more sorrow, sin, pain, or death. Amen! But until that day comes, He has given us His Spirit as the guarantee that our inheritance will indeed come. The Spirit is the seal upon our hearts, reminding us that, come what may, our future is secure in Christ. That alone is the source of joy that avoids both foolish celebration as well as hopeless despair.
Indeed, the Table before us is the perfect display of our life in Christ, which is to be sorrowful yet always rejoicing. It is here that we are pointed back to the cross, where sorrow and love flowed mingled down. In the bread and cup, we mourn that the King of Glory was slaughtered for the sins that we ourselves have committed. But they also summon us to taste and see the goodness of our God, who has rescued from our folly and pulled us from our determination to walk the road of death. O Christian, come mourning your sin, and come rejoicing in Your Savior.
