(I want to listen to this sermon)

Have you ever seen one of those little badges which carried the words "Smile God loves you"?

I remember them from a long time ago and thought that they had also disappeared a long time ago. I was wrong. During the week I came across a website with the address www.smilegodlovesyou.org . The front page carried this greeting:

Welcome to the Wonderful World of Encouragement

Where there is only Sunshine and Smiles!

Where every word is an encouraging word

And the skies are not cloudy or gray.

Now if there is a truth as there is in the sentence "Smile God loves you" it is certainly not the whole truth and the greeting, while doubtless pleasing to many an ear, is desperately misleading.

Of course such a message is appealing – that type of message always has been and I guess always will be.

It was the only type of message the people of Jeremiah's day wanted to hear. How they loved to hear that all was well, that they had nothing to worry about, that all would turn out fine, that message of "Peace, peace" was so positive, so encouraging, so pleasing to their ears. The only problem with that message of "Peace, peace" was that it was proclaimed by a bunch of false prophets – it was not the message that God wanted His people to hear!

Human nature hasn't changed and we're still by nature sinful people who prefer to hear messages that don't challenge us or call us to account. But God loves us too much to pass over uncomfortable truths in silence.

So He doesn't always send us comforting reassuring messages. Rather, in love, He provides us with a clear analysis of our true condition. We live in the real world and we must face up to reality. In His love He shows us the truth about ourselves. He tells us the truth about our sins and the wrong ways in which we've thought about them and tried to deal with them. He tells us about Himself – His implacable opposition to sin and what He does about it.

Men and women are religious creatures. God has made us that way and religion, as the hymn-writer Isaac Watts put it, never was designed to make our pleasures less. So we are not surprised as we read our way through the Bible to find several descriptions of how the people of God greatly rejoiced:

1Sam.11:15 "So all the people went to Gilgal, and there they made Saul king before the LORD in Gilgal. There they sacrificed peace offerings before the LORD, and there Saul and all the men of Israel rejoiced greatly."

1Ch.13:8 "And David and all Israel were rejoicing before God with all their might, with song and lyres and harps and tambourines and cymbals and trumpets.

1Ch.15:25 "So David and the elders of Israel and the commanders of thousands went to bring up the ark of the covenant of the LORD from the house of Obed–edom with rejoicing."

Neh.12:43 "And they offered great sacrifices that day and rejoiced, for God had made them rejoice with great joy; the women and children also rejoiced. And the joy of Jerusalem was heard far away."

In the presence of God and confronted with His goodness nothing is more normal than to rejoice. And we find this confirmed by the very numerous exhortations and commands to do just that: to rejoice.

We are familiar with the sentiment of verses such as:

Ps.2:11"Serve the LORD with fear, and rejoice with trembling."

Ps 32:11 "Be glad in the LORD, and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart!"

Ps 64:10 "Let the righteous one rejoice in the LORD and take refuge in him! Let all the upright in heart exult!"

And many of us will know what the apostle Paul writes to the church Philippi:

Phil.3:1; 4:4 "Finally, my brothers, rejoice in the Lord… Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice."

 Indeed in writing to the church in Thessalonica Paul even goes so far as to say:

1Th 5:16 "Rejoice always"

In the light of this general positive approval of the idea of rejoicing before God that we find in the Bible the opening verse of Hos.9 comes as something of a shock:

Hos.9:1 "Rejoice not!"

As far as God was concerned the rejoicing of the people of Israel was totally inappropriate. They were not in the right frame of mind to rejoice and their heart was certainly not right with the LORD.

Oh, it wasn't because Israel wasn't religious enough – far from it – if anything the people of Israel were far too religious! They loved the outward formality of it all – religion was everywhere in society – Israel was sure that all was well with the way she was doing things.

There was a problem though. Yes, religion was present everywhere, everywhere that is except where it really matters – the heart. Israel was very happy to go about her religious rites and festivals she just didn't want it getting out of control and begin to influence conscience and conduct!

In fact this people didn't allow their religion to get in the way of the way they lived at all! Their lives as seen by the LORD were characterised by sinful attitudes and actions – far from being a time to rejoice it was fast approaching pay-back time. Sin called for judgment and the stubborn refusal of the people to repent of their sin made judgment inevitable.

We are probably all likely to interpret our own behaviour in the best possible light. That is what Israel was doing. She didn't consider her behaviour to be anything out of the ordinary – after all she was only doing what everyone was doing. But what a sad situation it is when the people of God are happy to conform to the standards of the nations!

Jesus spoke to the religious leaders of His own day warning them of the danger of failing to understand just what was going on:

Mt.16:2-3 "(Jesus) answered them, “When it is evening, you say, ‘It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.’ And in the morning, ‘It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and threatening.’ You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times."

He spoke in similar vein to the city of Jerusalem:

Lk.19:43-44 "Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation."

Here in Hosea ch.9 the LORD is speaking about the day of Israel's visitation because her sin had become so all-pervasive

In order to try to make the people understand just how God considered their sin Hosea does not limit himself to describing their sin and corruption as being great he refers to three geographical locations. We do the same when we refer to locations such as Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Tiananmen Square

Each of the places Hosea referred to was associated with awful wickedness and the substance of his message was that the Israel of his day was  just as bad as the wicked of former days. How the people needed to understand how God assessed their way of living rather than simply to compare themselves with others!

1.       Gibeah – the history of this place is found in Judges 19+20 and makes for unpleasant reading.

Awful abuse and murder is met by the refusal to bring the guilty to justice. The outcome is civil war with great loss of life.

Hosea was telling the respectable, religious Israel of his day that in God's eyes they were just the same!

2.       Baal-Peor – was a place where Israel succumbed to the temptations of religious syncretism and began to worship false gods. The account is found in Numbers 25. Once again there was tremendous loss of life as God in judgment sent a plague upon the people – 24,000 were lost.

3.       Gilgal – had a more honourable place in Israelite history but in its latter days it had become the scene of great spiritual apostasy. All that took place now at Gilgal was illicit worship that called for God's righteous judgment.

If this is how God looked upon Israel then it was most certainly not a time for rejoicing – this was a time to mourn and a time to weep!

Hosea goes on to spell out at some length just what judgment will mean for this rebellious people.

How serious it was to misread the situation, to not realise that the day of visitation was at hand! And Israel had no excuse as the LORD had sent prophet after prophet to proclaim His word!

But Israel hadn't liked what the prophets had had to say! Instead of paying attention Israel had reacted by treating the prophets as if they were madmen who didn't have a clue of what they talking about. These mouthpieces of God were disregarded as fools, the spiritual men were not in their right mind.

Israel rejected God's messengers not because she didn't understand their message but because they didn't like it! Israel was wedded to her sin and sought to silence any other voices.

Well let us take note that little has changed over the years.

Jesus told His followers what to expect as they went out to preach the message of the gospel:

Mt.5:11-12 “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you."

The apostle Paul who laboured so hard to spread the good news of Jesus Christ was referred to as a babbler (Acts 17:18). He was accused of being out of his mind (Acts 26:24).  Paul himself knew he was considered a fool for Christ (1Cor.4:10) and that the word he preached was regarded as pure folly 1Cor.1:18).

And down through the centuries the serious message of God's word has been rejected by calling the messenger names! Christian, Puritan, Methodist, Fundamentalist, fanatic, extremist, Bible basher, God squad etc.

All this because the message must be proclaimed that:

·         God still hates sin

·         God still warns of its consequences

·         God still calls for repentance explaining that

·         Sin still can't be dealt with by formal religion

·         There is still only One way of salvation – but praise God that there is that way!!

And you see this is just why Jesus Christ came into the world to stand in our place. Where we had been guilty of stubborn sinful rebellion – He bore in His own body on the tree the full penalty. The rejection and abandonment that our sin warrants caused the Father to turn His back upon the Son – there is no nothing more for us to pay or answer for. "There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus."

What lessons should we learn from such a chapter as this in God's word?

ü  Let us learn to measure ourselves by God's standards and not by how others are getting on.

ü  Let us learn that even if our contemporaries think very little of sin God does and God is implacably opposed to it.

ü  Let us learn not to try to use religion as a cover for our failures as though some rites and practices in themselves will be effective.

ü  Let us not be satisfied with a spirituality that is no more than skin deep – God looks on the heart and what will He find in ours?

ü  Let us realise that we stand in need of God's help – we cannot save ourselves. Yes, we can tinker with things here and there but we cannot secure the complete salvation we need.

ü  Let us then go to God for the salvation that He offers to us freely in the Lord Jesus Christ. This salvation is a complete salvation. It saves us not simply from the consequences of sin but from sin itself – its slavery and pollution. A salvation that left us in our sin would not be worthy of the name salvation.

Amen.