Albert Barnes Commentary Hosea 7:3

"They make the king glad with their wickedness, and the princes with their lies." — Hosea 7:3 (ASV)

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.