Albert Barnes Commentary Hosea 9:7

"The days of visitation are come, the days of recompense are come; Israel shall know it: the prophet is a fool, the man that hath the spirit is mad, for the abundance of thine iniquity, and because the enmity is great." — Hosea 9:7 (ASV)

The days of visitation are come - The false prophets had continually deceived the people, promising them that those days would never come. They had put far away the evil day (Amos 6:3). Now it was not only at hand. In God’s purpose, those “days” were “come”—irresistible, inevitable, inextricable; days in which God would visit what, in His long-suffering, He seemed to overlook, and would recompense each according to his works.

Israel shall know it - Israel would not know by believing it; now it would “know” by feeling it.

The prophet is a fool, the spiritual man is mad - The true prophet gives to the false prophets the title they claimed for themselves: “the prophet” and “the man of the spirit.” Only the event showed what spirit was in them: not the Spirit of God, but a lying spirit. The people of the world called the true prophets “mad”—literally, maddened, “driven mad”—as Festus thought of Paul: You are beside yourself; much learning is driving you mad (Acts 26:24). Jehu’s captains called the young prophet whom Elisha sent to anoint him by the same name: Why did this mad fellow come to you? (2 Kings 9:11).

Shemaiah, the false prophet, who deposed God’s priest, set false priests to be “officers in the house of the Lord,” to have oversight of every man who is mad and makes himself a prophet, calling Jeremiah both a false prophet and a “madman” (Jeremiah 29:25–26). The word is the same.

The event was the test. Of our Lord Himself, the Jews blasphemed, He has a devil and is mad (John 10:20). And long afterward, “madness” and “phrensy” were among the names the pagans gave to the faith in Christ. As Paul says, that Christ crucified was to the Greeks foolishness and to them that perish, foolishness, and that the things of the Spirit of God are foolishness to the natural man, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned (1 Corinthians 1:18, 23; 1 Corinthians 2:14). The man of the world and the Christian judge of the same things by completely contrary rules, use them for entirely contrary ends. The slave of pleasure considers him mad who foregoes it; the wealthy trader considers him mad who gives away profusely.

In these days, profusion for the love of Christ has been considered a reason for depriving a man of the care of his property. One or the other is mad. And worldly people must consider the Christian mad; otherwise, they must admit themselves to be so most fearfully. In the Day of Judgment, Wisdom says, They, repenting and groaning for anguish of spirit, will say within themselves, This was he whom we had sometimes in derision and a proverb of reproach. We fools counted his life madness, and his end to be without honor. How is he numbered among the children of God, and his lot is among the saints! .

For the multitude of your iniquity and the great hatred - The words stand at the end of the verse as the reason for all that had gone before. Their “manifold iniquity” and their “great hatred” of God were the reason why the “days of visitation” and “recompense” should come. They were also the reason why God allowed such prophets to delude them. The words “the great hatred” stand quite undefined, so they may signify equally the hatred of Ephraim against God, good people, and His true prophets, or God’s hatred of them.

Yet it most likely means “their” great hatred, since the prophet uses it concerning them again in the next verse. The sinner first neglects God; then, as the will of God is brought before him, he willfully disobeys Him; then, when he finds God’s will irreconcilably at variance with his own, or when God chastens him, he hates Him, and (the prophet speaks out plainly) “hates” Him “greatly.”