Albert Barnes Commentary Hosea 8:12

"I wrote for him the ten thousand things of my law; but they are counted as a strange thing." — Hosea 8:12 (ASV)

I have written to him the great things of My law - Literally, “I write.” Their sin then had no excuse of ignorance. God had written their duties for them in the Ten Commandments with His own hand; He had written them of old and manifoldly, often repeated and in diverse manners.

He wrote those manifold things “to them” (or “for them”) by Moses, not for that time only, but so that they might be continually before their eyes, as if He were still writing. He had written to them since, in their histories, in the Psalms. His words were still sounding in their ears through the teaching of the prophets.

God did not only give His law or revelation once for all, and so leave it. By His providence and by His ministers, He continually renewed the knowledge of it, so that those who ignored it should have no excuse.

This ever-renewed agency of God He expresses by the word, “I write,” what in substance was long ago written. What God then wrote were “the great things of His law” (as the converted Jews on the day of Pentecost speak of “the great” or “wonderful things of God”) or “the manifold things of His law,” as the Apostle speaks of the manifold wisdom of God (Ephesians 3:10), and says that God at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets (Hebrews 1:1).

They were counted as a strange thing by them - These “great,” or “manifold things of God’s law,” which ought to have been continually before their eyes, in their mind and in their mouth (Deuteronomy 6:7–9), they, although God had written them for them, “counted as a strange thing,” a thing quite foreign and alien to them, with which they had no concern.

Perhaps this was their excuse to themselves, that it was “foreign” to “them.” As Christians say now: that one is not to take God’s law so precisely; that the Gospel is not so strict as the law; that people, before the grace of the Gospel, had to be stricter than with it; that “the liberty of the Gospel” is freedom, not from sin, but from duty.

They say that such and such things belonged to the early Christians while they were surrounded by pagans, or to the first times of the Gospel, or to the days when it was persecuted. They argue that riches were dangerous when people could scarcely have them, not now, when everyone has them; that “vice lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness”; that the world was perilous when it was the Christian’s open foe, not now, when it would be friends with us and have us friends with it.

They claim that love not the world was a precept for times when the world hated us, not now, when it is all around us and steals our hearts.

So Jeroboam and Israel too doubtless said that those prohibitions of idolatry were necessary when the pagans were still in the land, or while their forefathers were just fresh out of Egypt. They argued that it was, after all, God who was worshiped under the calves; that state policy required it; and that Jeroboam, appointed by God, had to carry out that appointment as best he could.

With these or similar excuses, he must doubtless have excused himself, as if God’s law were good, but “foreign” to “them.” God counts such excuses not as a plea, but as a sin.