Albert Barnes Commentary Hosea 7

When I would have healed Israel – God begins anew by appealing to Israel, showing that all He had done to heal them had only served to make their sin more evident; and “that,” from highest to lowest, concerning all kinds and methods of sin. When the flash of God’s light on the sinner’s conscience does not enlighten it, it only discloses its darkness. The name “Israel” includes the whole people; the names Ephraim and Samaria are probably meant to designate the chief among them, Ephraim having been their royal tribe and being the chief tribe among them, and Samaria being their royal city.

The sins which Hosea denounces in this chapter are chiefly the sins of the great, which, from them, had spread among the people. Whatever healing methods God had used, whether through the teaching of the prophets or through His own fatherly chastisements, they “would not listen nor be reformed, but persisted even more obstinately in their evil ways. The disease prevailed against the remedy and was irritated by it, so that the remedy served only to “lay open” the extent of its malignity and to show that there was worse in it than at first appeared.” Paul says of all human nature, When the commandment came, sin revived (Romans 7:9).

Apart from grace, the knowledge of good only enhances evil:

“So, when God, made Man, present and visible, willed to “heal Israel,” then that iniquity of the Jews and wickedness of the Scribes and Pharisees was discovered, of which this iniquity of Ephraim and wickedness of Samaria was a type.

“For an evil spirit goaded them to mock, persecute, and blaspheme the Teacher of repentance who, together with the word of preaching, did works such as no other man did.

“For Christ did not please them—a Teacher of repentance, persuading to poverty, a Pattern of humility, a Guide to meekness, an Admonisher to mourn for sins, a Proclaimer of righteousness, a Requirer of mercy, a Praiser of purity of heart, a Rewarder of peace, a Consoler of those who suffered persecution for righteousness’ sake.

“Why did they reject, hate, and persecute Him who taught thus? Because they loved all that was contrary to it and wished for a Messiah who would exalt them in this world, disturb the peace of nations until he would by war subdue all the rest of the world to their empire, build for them on earth a Jerusalem of gold and gems, and fulfill their covetousness in all things of this sort.

“He once briefly expressed this mindset of theirs: How can ye believe which receive honor one of another, and seek not the honor which cometh from God only? (John 5:24).

“They then persecuted Him who willed to heal them, as madmen strike the physician offering them medicine, and they did not cease until they demanded that He, their King, be crucified.

“Thus was the “iniquity of Ephraim and wickedness of Samaria discovered” and yet filled up by them; and so they filled up the measure of their fathers, and revealed and testified that they were of the same mind as their fathers. In all these things they “committed falsehood,” lying against their King whom they denied and accused as seditious.”

For they commit falsehood – (that is, all of them). Falsehood was the whole habit and tissue of their lives:

“They dealt falsely in all their actions both with God and man, being hypocritical and false in all their words and actions, given to fraud and deceit, from the highest to the lowest.”

Night and day; in silence and in open violence; “within,” where all seemed guarded and secure, and “without,” in open defiance of law and public justice; these deeds of wrong went on in an unceasing round.

In the night, the thief cometh in, breaking into people’s houses and pillaging secretly; a troop of robbers spoileth without, spreading their ravages far and wide and desolating without resistance.

It was all one state of anarchy, violence, and disorganization.

And they do not consider in their hearts - Literally, they do not say to their hearts. The conscience is God’s voice to the heart from within; man’s knowledge of the law of God, and his memory of it, is man’s voice, reminding his heart and rebellious affections to abide in their obedience to God. God speaks through the heart, when by His secret inspirations He recalls it to its duty. Man speaks to his own heart, when he checks its sinful or passionate impulses by the rule of God’s law, Thou shalt not. “At first, people feel the deformity of certain sorts of wickedness. When accustomed to them, people think that God is indifferent to what no longer shocks themselves.” “They do not say to their heart” anymore, that “God remembers them.”

I remember all their wickedness - This was the root of all their wickedness, a lack of thought. They would not stop to say to themselves, that God not only saw, but remembered their wickedness, and not only this, but that He remembered it all. Many will acknowledge that God sees them. He sees all things, and so He sees them as well. This is a part of His natural attribute of omniscience. It costs them nothing to acknowledge it. But what God “remembers, that” He will repay. This belongs to God’s attributes, as the moral Governor of the world; and this, man would gladly forget. But in vain.

God does remember, and remembers in order to punish. “Now,” at the very moment when man would not recall this to his own heart, their own doings have beset them about; they are before my face. Unless or until man repents, God sees man continually, encompassed by all his past evil deeds: they surround him and accompany him wherever he goes; they attend him like a band of followers; they lie down with him and await him at his awakening; they live with him, but they do not die with him; they encircle him so that he can by no means escape them, until he comes attended by them, as witnesses against him, at the judgment seat of God. His own iniquities shall take the wicked himself, and he shall be holden with the cords of his sins. God remembers all their wickedness (Proverbs 5:22).

Then He will requite all; not the last sins only, but all. So when Moses interceded for his people after the sin of the calf, God says to him, go lead the people to the place, of which I have spoken to you; behold My Angel shall go before you; nevertheless, in the day when I visit, I will visit their sin upon them (Exodus 32:34); and of the sins of Israel and their enemies; Is not this laid up in store with Me, and sealed up among My treasures? to Me belongeth “vengeance and recompense; their foot shall slide in due time” (Deuteronomy 32:34–35).

The sins, forgotten by man, are remembered by God, and are requited all together in the end. A slight image of the Day of Judgment, the Day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God, against which the hard and impenitent heart treasures up unto itself wrath!

They are before My face - All things, past, present, and to come, are present before God. He sees all things which have been, or which are, or which shall be, or which could be, although He shall never will that they should be, in one eternal, unvarying, present. Why then should man cherish an idle hope, that God will not remember, what He is ever seeing? In vain would you think, that the manifold ways of man are too small, too intricate, too countless, to be remembered by God. God says, They are before My Face.

They make the king glad with their wickedness - Wicked sovereigns and a wicked people are a curse to each other, each encouraging the other in sin. Their king, being wicked, took pleasure in their wickedness; and they, seeing him pleased by it, set themselves more to do what was evil and to amuse him with accounts of their sins.

Sin is in itself so shameful that even the great cannot, by themselves, sustain themselves in it without others to flatter them. A good and serious man is a reproach to them.

And so, the sinful great corrupt others, both by aiding them in their debaucheries and to avoid being reproached by their virtues, and also because the sinner has a corrupt pleasure and excitement in hearing tales of sin, just as the good rejoice to hear of good.

Therefore Paul says, who, knowing the judgment of God that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them. (Romans 1:32).

But since they all—kings, princes, and people—thus agreed and conspired in sin, and since the sin of the great is exceptionally destructive, the prophet here most upbraids the people for this common sin. He does so apparently because they were free from the greater temptations of the great, and so their sin was more willful.

“An unhappy complaisance was the ruling character of Israel. It preferred its kings to God. Conscience was versatile, accommodating. Whatever was authorized by those in power was approved.”

Ahab added the worship of Baal to that of the calves; Jehu confined himself to the sin of Jeroboam. The people acquiesced in the legalized sin.

This is much like if today, marriages that God’s law deems incestuous, or remarriages of divorced persons, which our Lord pronounces adultery, were to be considered permissible simply because human law no longer attaches any penalty to them.

They are all adulterers — The prophet continues to picture the corruption of all kinds and degrees of people. “All of them,” king, princes, people; all were given to adultery, both spiritual, in departing from God, and actual (for both sorts of sins went together), in defiling themselves and others. “All of them” were (so the word means) habitual “adulterers.” One only pause there was in their sin, the preparation to complete it.

He likens their hearts, inflamed with lawless lusts, to the heat of “an oven” which “the baker” had already “heated.” The unusual construction “burning from the baker” instead of “heated by the baker” may have been chosen in order to express how the fire continued to burn of itself, as it were (although at first kindled by the baker), and was ever-ready to burn whatever was brought to it, and even now was all red-hot, burning on continually; and Satan, who had stirred it, gave it just this respite, “from the time when he had kneaded the dough,” until the leaven, which he had put into it, had fully worked, and the whole was ready for the operation of the fire.

The world is full of such people now, ever on fire, and pausing only from sin, until the flatteries, by which they seduce the unstable, have worked and penetrated the whole mind, and victim after victim is gradually leavened and prepared for sin.

In the day of our king, the princes have made him sick with bottles of wine - (Or, “with heat from wine.”) Their holidays, like those of many people today, were days of excess. “The day of their king” was probably some civil festival, such as his birthday or his coronation day.

The prophet acknowledges the king, in that he calls him “our king.” He does not blame them for observing the day, but for the way in which they observed it. They turned their festival into an irreligious and anti-religious carousal, making themselves like the brutes which perish, and tempting their king first to forget his royal dignity and then to blaspheme the majesty of God.

He stretched out his hand with scorners - as it is said, Wine is a mocker (or “scoffer”). Drunkenness, by removing all power of self-restraint, brings out the evil that is in a person.

The “scorner” or “scoffer” is one who neither fears God nor regards man (Luke 18:4), but makes a jest of all things true and good, whether human or divine. Such were these corrupt princes of the king of Israel.

With these individuals, the king “stretched out his hand” as a sign of his good fellowship with them, showing that he was one with them. He withdrew his hand and his association from good and sober people, and “stretched” it “out,” not to punish these scorners, but to join with them, just as people who are drunk reach out their hands to anyone they meet as a sign of their drunken, would-be friendliness.

With these, the king drank, jested, played the buffoon, praised his idols, scoffed at God. The flattery of the wicked is a person’s worst enemy.