Albert Barnes Commentary Hosea 4:6

"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I also will forget thy children." — Hosea 4:6 (ASV)

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge – “My people are,” not, “is.” This accurately represents the Hebrew. The word “people” speaks of them as a whole; “are” relates to the individuals of whom that whole is composed. Together, the words express the utter destruction of the whole, one and all. They are destroyed for lack of knowledge, literally, “of the knowledge,” that is, the only knowledge that in the creature is real knowledge, that knowledge, the lack of which he had before complained—the knowledge of the Creator.

So Isaiah mourns in the same words, therefore my people are gone into captivity, because they have no knowledge (Isaiah 6:13). They are destroyed for lack of it, for the true knowledge of God is the life of the soul, true life, eternal life, as our Savior says, This is life eternal, that they should know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent. The source of this lack of knowledge, so fatal to the people, was the willful rejection of that knowledge by the priest;

Because you have rejected knowledge, I will also reject you, that you shall be no priest to Me – God marks the relation between the sin and the punishment, by retorting on them, as it were, their own acts; and that with great emphasis, “I will utterly reject you.” Those, thus addressed, must have been true priests, scattered up and down in Israel, who, in an irregular way, offered sacrifices for them, and connived at their sins. For God’s sentence on them is, you shall be no priest to Me. But the priests whom Jeroboam consecrated out of other tribes than Levi, were priests not to God, but to the calves.

Those then, originally true priests to God, had probably a precarious livelihood when the true worship of God was deformed by the mixture of the calf-worship, and the people “halted between two opinions;” and so they were tempted by poverty also, to withhold from the people unpalatable truth. They shared, then, in the rejection of God’s truth which they concealed, and made themselves partakers in its suppression. And now, they “despised, were disgusted” with the knowledge of God, as all do in fact despise and dislike it, who prefer anything else to it. So God repaid their contempt to them, and took away the office, which, by their sinful connivances, they had hoped to retain.

Seeing you have forgotten the law of your God – This seems to have been the sin of the people. For the same persons could not, at least in the same stage of sin, despise and forget. Those who despise or “reject,” must have before their mind that which they “reject.” To reject is willful, conscious, deliberate sin, with a high hand; to “forget,” an act of negligence. The rejection of God’s law was the act of the understanding and will; forgetfulness of it comes from the neglect to look into it. This, in turn, stems from the distaste of the natural mind for spiritual things, from being absorbed in things of this world, from inattention to the duties prescribed by it, or from shrinking from seeing that condemned which is agreeable to the flesh. The priests knew God’s law and “despised” it; the people “forgot” it.

In an advanced stage of sin, however, a person may come to forget what he once despised; and this is the condition of the hardened sinner.

I will also forget your children – Literally, “I will forget your children, I too.” God would mark all the more that His act followed on theirs; they first, then He says, “I too.” He would repay them, and do what was not characteristic of His goodness to do first. Parents who are careless about themselves, about their own lives, even about their own shame, still long that their children should not be like themselves. God tries to touch their hearts where they are least steeled against Him. He says not, “I will forget you,” but I will forget those nearest your heart, your children. God is said to forget when He acts as if His creatures were no longer in His mind, no more the objects of His providence and love.