Word of Salvation – Vol. 18 No.16 – April 1972

 

Sin Is The Cause Of Wrong Vision

 

Sermon by Rev. A. Nijhuis, B.D. on Hosea 9:7b

Scripture Reading: Hosea 9; John 10:19-31

Psalter Hymnal: 190; 289; 396:1,4

 

When we are confronted with the Word of God and this happens frequently – when we are confronted with the Word of God we can do two things: we can apply it to ourselves or we can try to escape it.  And, as a matter of fact, we can do that in a variety of ways.  We are quite clever in finding ways and means to escape from the force of the message passed on to us.  We can simply ignore that Word and act as if we did not hear it.  And if that is not possible we can forget it; anyway we can we try to put it out of our mind and out of our life.

The Lord Jesus Christ once told a parable: the parable of the sower, which shows us that some of the seed fell in good soil and brought forth fruit.  But not all the seed develops that way.  Some falls along the path: some is burnt by the heat of the sun and some is choked by the weeds.  It is always the same story of bearing fruit or of spoiling the seed.  Now this is not only the case when the Word of God is preached for the first time to people.  This process is also going on among those who know the Word, who are very much privileged by the Lord.  The Lord Jesus Christ spoke His Word to the people of Israel, to the people of God, to those to whom the Word of God had been entrusted for ages.  We can never say, “We are not involved; we don’t run the risk of turning away from the Lord and of not needing His Word.”  The Bible is dealing with this danger exactly among God’s people, the church.  That is also the case in the book of Hosea.  Today we are going to listen to the Word of God, in chapter 9 of this book, verse 7b, where we hear that

SIN IS THE CAUSE OF A WRONG VISION.

I.  Sin, brothers and sisters, young people, causes a lot of trouble to those who surrender to it and don’t want to be corrected by the Word of God.  A few of those troubles are mentioned in this chapter, Hosea 9.  In the first place he mentions the death of joy (vs.1).  Joy disappears when you disobey the Lord.  Real joy dies when you turn away from Him.  But that is not all that Hosea has to say about it.  He also shows to the people of Israel that their privileges vanish; they will not stay in the land promised and given to them by the Lord: they have to leave their territory and will be carried away in exile.  In addition Hosea tells them in the Name of the Lord that their children will be taken away from them and that the Lord will give them a miscarrying womb and dry breasts.  The Lord will cast His people off because they have not hearkened to Him.  Sin is not as innocent as we may think.  On the contrary, it upsets our whole life in the end.  When we want to walk in the ways of sin and don’t want to turn back to the Lord, we will get the wages of sin.  And those wages are really terrible.  Don’t underestimate the consequences of it.  Now Hosea points in this text to another calamity that is caused by sin: that we lose our normal vision; that we get a wrong idea of things we are not able to see properly anymore.  We become so confused by sin that we call the right things WRONG and the wrong things RIGHT.  This is really awful.

We are not able to estimate rightly what physical blindness means: to live in darkness always: that we cannot see the sun; that we cannot read; that we cannot see the faces of those whom we love.  We can only vaguely guess what blindness is.  Now there is also a spiritual blindness.  This does not mean that we are not able to see.  We can see, but we see things in an entirely wrong way.  That is what happened to the people of God in the days of Hosea, when they turned away from the Lord and went their own ways.  This is what they were saying about Hosea and about others who preached to them the Word of God in order to bring them back to the Lord and to His service.  They said, “The prophet is a fool, the man of the spirit is mad”.  They had a completely false concept of the prophetic Word and of spiritual life.  “The prophet is a fool”, “the man of the spirit is mad,” they were saying.  That was the view of the people of Israel.

However, we don’t hear such words only from these people.  We read them time and again in the Bible.  Not only Hosea was spoken of that way; so were Isaiah and Micah and others who were speaking the Word of God.  In ch.28 of the book of Isaiah we read the account of how he, after a period of private ministry, spoke about the political situation of his days.  The politicians were playing the fool.  They were trying to gain national security by going down to Egypt.  Then Isaiah warned them, “Woe to the proud crown of the drunkards of Ephraim, and to the fading flower of its glorious beauty.”  Right in the middle of the message of Isaiah, we hear these men, mocking the prophet, laughing at him.  They considered Isaiah to be a fool, a madman, who has lost his reason.  And later in the history of Judah Shemaiah, the false prophet, attacked Jeremiah in a similar way.  He said: Jeremiah is mad.

When we turn to the New Testament, to John 10, of which I read a portion to you, we find that the enemies said that He had a demon; He was mad too.  Or, just to mention one other example, when the apostle Paul was speaking to king Agrippa, suddenly Festus, the Roman governor, broke in and said, “Paul, you are mad!” (Acts 26:24).

How many after that got the same treatment: Luther and Calvin, George Whitefield and the Wesleys, William Booth and Billy Sunday and many others who proclaimed the Word of God.  And how many followed the Lord Jesus Christ to death because they stuck to the message they had to preach.  And often this abuse of prophets came at the hands of the church, of the people who knew the Word of God.  Prophets are not saying the things the people like to hear, but they are called by the Lord to pass on His message, even if it is very unpleasant to listen to; even if it is condemning our way of life and our attitude.

Hosea was such a fool in the sight of the people, a fool for the sake of His Sender, and for the sake of His people.  They called him “a fool”, a madman.  They considered him to be a silly man who talked nonsense, an empty talker, to be dismissed as unworthy of any attention.  “It is just a waste of time to listen to him.”  That was the opinion of the people of God in Hosea’s days about the messenger of God.  Centuries have run their course since the time of Hosea.  And things have changed quite a lot.  The conditions of life today are in many ways entirely different from the conditions of life then.  Lots of things change all the time: the way we dress, the way we live, the way we do things.  But there are also things exactly the same.  The real basic things have not changed.  Our human heart has not improved, has it?  Death is still there and suffering and sin.  Yes also the gospel is still there thanks to the Lord.  And people react in a similar way and respond in the same way to the good news: by faith or by unbelief.  There are still people who respond in this way: the prophet, the preacher of the Word of God is a fool: the man of the spirit is mad.  The gospel is no more popular today, is it?  And the preacher who sticks to that gospel is not very popular either.  But what about us?  What is our attitude towards the Word of God?  Especially what is our reaction when that Word of God comes to us and condemns our sins, our trespasses, our weaknesses, our failures, our lukewarmness, our greediness, our laziness, our lack of love, our unwillingness to listen to the Lord?  What is our response?  OBEDIENCE?  REPENTANCE?  Do we turn away from what is wrong with us?  Or are we blaming the circumstances, our fellow-Christians, our office-bearers, the minister: calling him a fool, a madman: in order to continue our wrong attitude, covering up our sins that way?

* * * * *

II.  But why did the people of Israel brand Hosea as a fool and a madman?  What was behind it?  What was the reason for their turning away from him and calling him names?  What were the grounds of this view, of this false conception?

Well the answer is not far away.  Just let us turn to the last words of the text: “Because of your great iniquity and great hatred”.  These words suggest a piling up of their iniquities.  That is what happens to sin.  Sins increase all the time, they grow like weeds.  The earlier you pull them out the better it is.  If you don’t they grow and grow and grow.  This was the case with Israel: their iniquity and their hatred were great.  Now sin has the characteristic of separating us from God.  That is even so among men.  When a child is disobedient to his father or mother, there is a gap – not a generation-gap, but still a gap because of that disobedience.  A good child feels that too.  It is not so much concerned about the punishment it will get, but it feels all the time there is something between father or mother and myself.  It is not anymore as it used to be.  There is only one way to restore the good relationship again, that is by confessing what was wrong and to turn back to my parents.  The same is true in regard to our relationship to God.  Sin separates us from Him.  The fellowship is disrupted.  We are strangers now.  And it will only be restored if we turn back to our heavenly Father.  Now in our text we read about GREAT iniquities.  That was at the back of the criticism of the prophet.  That was the reason why they hated God and, of course, they hated also the messenger of God.  They did not like the minister, they did not appreciate his message, his sermon, but the real reason was that they were separated from God; they did not like Him; they did not love Him as they should.  But they covered their iniquity by blaming Hosea.  He was no good in their eyes.  He was a fool, a madman.  They hated him.

Think of these people, these privileged people, these church-people.  Mark the process.  They were disobedient to the Lord.  What was next?  Well, they forgot Him.  They failed to maintain the vital relationship with Him.  They put Him out of their life, out of their calculations.  And the result?  They misinterpreted Him.  With what result?  They hated Him!  They fell back to the level of the heathen people.  But it was much worse with them because they were so exalted by the Lord above all the nations of the world.  The natural man, who does not know the Lord is at enmity against God.  Sin blinds men.  And so he gets a wrong opinion of God.  They imagine Him to be cruel and unfair and distant and unconcerned and unknown and unloving.  But that is not God: that is man’s vain imagination.  This wrong idea comes from sin, and blindness that has resulted from sin.  No wonder that the people of Israel hated Hosea.  That is the way it goes.

That happened before.  Think, for example of that story of king Ahab.  He was the king over the Ten Tribes.  And the king over the two tribes was Jehoshaphat.  Now Ahab was a wicked king.  And Jehoshaphat was a well-meaning king, but without much backbone.

These two kings formed an alliance to fight the common enemy.  Before the battle Jehoshaphat wanted a meeting with Ahab.  He did not feel very safe with the undertaking: he wanted a kind of religious sanction.  And Ahab had arranged a wonderful gathering.  He got prophets of his own together, and one of them Zedekiah, arranged a very remarkable show.  He put on horns of iron to show how victorious Ahab and Jehoshaphat were going to be.  Jehoshaphat however was not yet satisfied and he said: is there not a prophet of the LORD as well?  There was one, named Micaiah.  Now hear what Ahab said concerning him: “the king of Israel said to Jehoshaphat, there is yet one man by whom we may inquire of the Lord, Micaiah, the son of Imlah: but I hate him”.  Why?  “For he does not prophesy good concerning me, but evil.”  That was the trouble.  Micaiah was a true prophet of the Lord.  And prophets like that will not make terms with sin, even if this means imprisonment.  Ahab knew this, and so he hated him.  So it ever is.  The reason for the wrong conception is found in the wrong attitude towards the Lord of the prophets.  And that conception leads to hatred and to imprisonment or even worse to death.  Israel, your iniquity is great and great is your hatred.  That is why you hate the prophet; that is the reason why you don’t accept his message.  That is why you call him a fool and a madman.  Now we know from the book of Proverbs that a fool despises wisdom and instruction.  Fools make a mockery of sin.  They laugh about it.  A prophet, a prophet of the Lord is always at war with sin.  That attitude is the ultimate in wisdom.  Therefore the man that counts him a fool, is really the fool.  And I’ll mention again the apostle Paul who was accused of being mad by Festus.  What did Paul say?  This: “I am not mad, most excellent Festus, but I am speaking the sober truth”.  It was Festus who was mad and whose view of life was wrong.  How often do people say of you, of us, that we are mad simply because we stick to the Word of God?  How often is the church today accused of being a bunch of fools?  Or is it so that we try to become sane in the eyes of the world and attempt to please men and to act according to the rules which are acceptable to human wisdom?

Perhaps some people will say we are silly when they are confronted with the gospel of Jesus Christ, or when faced with the will of God which is still true today.  But how many say “You are mad”, when we don’t feel ashamed to stick to the wisdom of God.

Have we lost something?  Or is the world not so hostile anymore?  Have we lost our vision of God and the vision of the greatness of the message entrusted to us?  There is only one way to get the right vision.  Through God’s Word and Spirit:

            Come, Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove,
            With all Thy quickening power;
            Kindle a flame of sacred love
            In these cold hearts of ours.

Amen.