One thing I think it's important to keep in mind is that the penalty for sin---any sin---is death. (Romans 6:23) We have all sinned against God and, as a result, we must all face death with the exception of those believers who are still alive when Christ calls the church out of the world. Death is the penalty for sin. But because the Lord has compassion on us, He extends forgiveness and mercy toward us because He does not want to destroy us. He has been extending forgiveness and mercy toward the northern kingdom for many decades by the time Hosea is called to be a prophet to Israel, yet the majority of the people have not accepted His invitation to repent. We must repent in order to receive forgiveness but the people have clung to their wicked ways instead.
Because of this, the Lord says, "A sword will flash in their cities; it will devour their false prophets and put an end to their plans. My people are determined to turn away from Me. Even though they call Me 'God Most High' I will by no means exalt them." (Hosea 11:6-7) They kept making a conscious decision to disobey Him. A number of them are still giving lip-service to Him, referring to Him as "God Most High", but they don't exalt Him in their hearts and He will not exalt (honor or reward) them for merely going through the motions of worshiping Him.
This next statement is a cry from the Lord's heart. It pains Him deeply to discipline Israel. We can almost hear the anguish in His voice when He says, "How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I treat you like Admah? How can I make you like Zeboyim?" (Hosea 11:8a)
These two cities were mentioned in Deuteronomy 29 when the Lord warned the people that if they turned away from their covenant with Him, Israel would end up like the heathen cities He had destroyed. "It will be like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboyim, which the Lord overthrew in fierce anger. All the nations will ask: 'Why has the Lord done this to this land? Why this fierce, burning anger?' And the answer will be: 'It is because this people abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their ancestors, the covenant He made with them when He brought them out of Egypt.'" (Deuteronomy 29:23b-25)
The cities of Admah and Zeboyim must have been very wicked indeed, considering they are mentioned in the same verse as Sodom and Gomorrah, and this tells us that the Lord considers Israel's breaking of the covenant to be every bit as wicked (if not more so, because the Israelites knew the Lord in a personal way in which the heathens did not know Him) as the deeds of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboyim.
The Lord vowed to utterly destroy the land if the people turned to the idols of the pagan nations, and yet His compassion is stronger than His anger. He will allow the nation to be conquered by the Assyrian Empire, as we already learned in our study of the kings. He will allow the majority of the people to be taken captive and deported to other lands, which we also learned in our study of the kings. But He will not rain down fire and brimstone on the land. He will not allow every person from every tribe of the northern kingdom to perish. He will preserve a remnant from each of the ten northern tribes. Although He has the right to carry out the same judgment He carried out on Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboyim, He will not. The people have not kept their side of the covenant but the Lord cannot bring Himself to completely reject them. He refuses to be ruled by anger, unlike humans who often give themselves completely over to that emotion and end up going too far, doing things they regret later but cannot take back. So He says, "My heart is changed within Me; all My compassion is aroused. I will not carry out My fierce anger, nor will I devastate Ephraim again. For I am God, and not a man---the Holy One among you. I will not come against their cities." (Hosea 11:8b-9)
Have you ever said or done something in anger that you wished you could take back after your temper had cooled off? I know I have. There are times when we experience what could be called "righteous indignation", when we truly have been terribly wronged and have a right to be upset about it. But even when we have a right to feel upset we often handle it poorly. And then there are times when our anger is out of proportion to what has actually happened; we react too strongly because the thing that finally sets us off is something that's happened on top of several other frustrating things that already happened during the day. As human beings, we sometimes allow our emotions to get the better of us and we end up doing or saying things we wouldn't have done or said if we'd taken more time to think before reacting to our circumstances. The Lord, thankfully, doesn't operate that way. He's never going to become enraged and go too far. He's never going to take an action He'll regret later. The Lord, unlike us, is incapable of losing control in anger and doing the wrong thing. He is going to allow hardship to come to the northern kingdom but it's going to be a controlled form of hardship because He is God, not a weak and sinful human being.
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