Hosea 14:1-7

“O Israel, return to the Lord your God, for you have stumbled because of your iniquity; ² Take words with you, and return to the Lord. Say to Him, “Take away all iniquity; receive us graciously, for we will offer the sacrifices of our lips. ³ Assyria shall not save us, we will not ride on horses, nor will we say anymore to the work of our hands, ‘You are our gods.’ For in You the fatherless finds mercy.”

⁴ “I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely, for My anger has turned away from him. ⁵ I will be like the dew to Israel; He shall grow like the lily, and lengthen his roots like Lebanon. ⁶ His branches shall spread; His beauty shall be like an olive tree, and his fragrance like Lebanon. ⁷ Those who dwell under his shadow shall return; they shall be revived like grain, and grow like a vine. Their scent shall be like the wine of Lebanon.”

We have all been confronted this past weekend with the invasion of Israel by Hamas. These attacks will get worse and worse as we approach the end. The warring will drive the whole world to seek a solution, and this will be the dawning of the Anti-Christ, as we are told in Daniel in the first part of Daniel 9:27. Daniel is in the OT testament writing about the end times for the nation of Israel. I have heard so many people talk about God’s abandonment of Israel, and no manner of explanation, no number of verses seems to sway them. They are convinced that the New Testament church has replaced Israel, and this is absolute heresy. In Hosea 11:8-9, we see these several verses of love from God to Israel:

“How can I give you up, Ephraim? How can I hand you over, Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I set you like Zeboiim? My heart churns within Me; My sympathy is stirred. I will not execute the fierceness of My anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim. For I am God, and not man, the Holy One in your midst; and I will not come with terror.”

God says that His heart ‘churns’ within Him with the love that He has for Israel, and because of this, He will ‘not come with terror’ on Israel. God cannot and will not completely annihilate Israel. God has made promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and to David and others that need to be fulfilled. Jesus made it clear that these men are still alive since God is not the God of the dead but the living; He cannot betray these men whom He calls His friends.

In our text in Hosea 14 (and I encourage you to read the whole book), Israel returns to God and asks for forgiveness, confessing their sins (verse 2). God will always graciously forgive those who humbly acknowledge their sins and ask for forgiveness (1 John 1:8-9). They acknowledge three areas where they have forsaken God:

1. They sought salvation and deliverance in someone other than God (vs 3, the Assyrian).
2. They sought help in horses; most of the time, Jewish leaders and armies rode donkeys or mules. They went to places like Egypt to get fast horses, hoping they would help rather than trusting God’s power and help.
3. They will stop trusting idols, the work of their hands. They really learned their lesson in the two captivities in Assyria and Babylon, and once they returned, we do not see the rampant idolatry that was there before. They will know that the Anti-Christ is their enemy when he sets up an idol in the Temple (see Revelation 13).

In verse 4, God says, “I will heal their backsliding” and “I will love them freely.” These are awesome promises that God makes to the nation, and these kinds of promises are found all through the Old and New Testaments. Here is an example in Jeremiah 31:31-33:

“Behold, days are coming,’ declares the Lord, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,’ declares the Lord. ‘But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,’ declares the Lord, ‘I will put My law within them and on their heart, I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.”

A new covenant, one that will not be broken. “I will be their God, and they shall be My people.” You can find similar promises in Ezekiel 28:25-26, Amos 9: 14-15, and on we can go. Paul, in the Romans chapters 9-11, spends three chapters reminding us that God is not done with Israel. In Romans 11:25-29…

“For I do not desire, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion, that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in. 26 And so all Israel will be saved, as it is written: ‘The Deliverer will come out of Zion, and He will turn away ungodliness from Jacob; 27 For this is My covenant with them, when I take away their sins.’ 28 Concerning the gospel they are enemies for your sake, but concerning the election they are beloved for the sake of the fathers. 29 For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.”

Paul reminds us that Israel’s blindness will endure until the “fullness of the Gentiles” comes. Then they will repent, and God will restore them. What is the evidence that God is not done with Israel? The Deliverer comes out of Israel. Jesus is a Jew of the tribe of Judah and the rightful King of Israel. Notice in verse 26 that the Deliverer will “turn away ungodliness from Jacob.” God promised to restore Israel and that they will one day turn to Him in repentance and be saved.

As you can surmise, there are countless verses and passages that speak of, allude to, or outright prophesy about the restoration of Israel. The promise is that God is not done with them and that one day, they and He will be reconciled one last time, and that reconciliation will last for eternity. One day, they will accept Jesus as their Messiah and love Him forever. As we approach this culmination of 4,500 years of oversight that begins in the final verses of Genesis 11 with the call of Abram, it comes to fruition in the nation seeing the Anti-Christ for who he is, a fake Messiah, and then turning to call on Jesus.

This will be the cause of great trouble in Jerusalem, the likes of which has not been seen before nor will be seen after. The Man of Sin will turn on the Jews and begin to slaughter them; great wars will be the news of that Day, then Jesus will return (Revelation 19), and the WHOLE world will see Him and fear Him.

Once again, we can find security in God’s promises to Israel. Even when they fail, God will not. When they falter, God cannot. When they are unfaithful, God is 100% faithful all the time. In this, we have our security. The pain in Israel will continue until the Man of Sin brings a false peace. But this opens the door for the real Prince of Peace to arrive. Look up; our redemption is very near.

God bless you,

Dr. Sean Gooding

Pastor of Mississauga Missionary Baptist Church

How to Connect with Us

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“Thus says the Lord of hosts: ‘In this place which is desolate, without man and without beast, and in all its cities, there shall again be a dwelling place of shepherds’” (Jeremiah 33:12).

Ezekial 37:1-14

“The hand of the Lord came upon me and brought me out in the Spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley; and it was full of bones. ² Then He caused me to pass by them all around, and behold, there were very many in the open valley; and indeed they were very dry. ³ And He said to me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”

So I answered, “O Lord God, You know.”

⁴ Again He said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them, ‘O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! ⁵ Thus says the Lord God to these bones: “Surely I will cause breath to enter into you, and you shall live. ⁶ I will put sinews on you and bring flesh upon you, cover you with skin and put breath in you; and you shall live. Then you shall know that I am the Lord.’”

⁷ So I prophesied as I was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and suddenly a rattling; and the bones came together, bone to bone. ⁸ Indeed, as I looked, the sinews and the flesh came upon them, and the skin covered them over; but there was no breath in them.

⁹ Also He said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, ‘Thus says the Lord God: “Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.”’ ¹⁰ So I prophesied as He commanded me, and breath came into them, and they lived, and stood upon their feet, an exceedingly great army.

¹¹ Then He said to me, “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They indeed say, ‘Our bones are dry, our hope is lost, and we ourselves are cut off!’”

We are continuing our look at God and His commitment to Israel. There have been so many issues along the way, with misinterpretations and verses taken out of context and the fact that we underestimate the commitment of God to Israel and, in turn, us. God cannot break His promises to Israel and the commitments He made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Today, we will look at a prophecy made about Israel coming back from the dead after a long time of ‘death.’ In this context, Ezekiel is in Babylon, living there as a part of the exiles who have been taken captive by Nebuchadnezzar. They would be there for 70 years, and in the process, God sends two sets of prophecies, one to Daniel (see chapters 7-9) and then a series to Ezekiel. We will look at this particular one today and see that it was fulfilled in the last generation, and we see the results of its fulfillment today.

As Jesus was preparing his disciples for His death, He made a prediction about the Temple in Jerusalem that was fulfilled in AD70 by General Titus of the Roman army; Matthew 24: 1-2,

“As Jesus left the temple and was walking away, His disciples came up to Him to point out its buildings. ‘Do you see all these things?’ He replied. ‘Truly I tell you, not one stone here will be left on another; everyone will be thrown down.'”

Between AD70 and about AD135, the Jews from Israel were scattered throughout the whole world. They went to every continent and country to find refuge. The nation was dead. A few stragglers lived in the area, and war after war was fought for control of Israel. We have examples of the scatterings from the lives of men like Phillip in Acts 8; we find Jews living in Galatia, Ephesus, and Rome; and just about everywhere Paul went as a missionary, he was able to find Jews. Even my little Barbados is home to one of the oldest synagogues in the world. We are thousands of miles from Israel.

Notice in the prophecy that the bones come to life in stages; in verse 8, we get the sinews, then the flesh, then the skin, and then in verse 9, the breath.

In the late 1800s, the British established the British Mandate that would begin to rebuild Israel; there were just 56,000 Jews living in Palestine by the end of WW1. By 1945, there were just under 400,000 Jews living in Israel. And by May 14th, 1948, just over 500,000 (CJPME.org) Jews lived there when the nation of Israel was declared to be an independent state by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. He is the architect behind the modern state of Israel. God, of course, was the one who actually put it all in place.

President Harry S. Truman was the first head of state to recognize Israel as an independent state. In 1967, during the Six Day War, the Jews regained control of Jerusalem, and on May 14th, 2018 (exactly 70 years, one generation) after the declaration of independence, President Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and began plans to move the US Embassy there. In 2021, the last time we had a count, there were almost 9.4 million Jews living in Israel, and there are more returning to live there every day. Israel is a thriving economy filled with medical and agricultural advances. They sit on one of the largest natural gas finds in the world. Slowly but surely, just like the prophecy in Ezekiel, life came back to Israel, and she is here to stay.

Just in case we are not sure about whom the prophet is speaking, God makes it clear in verse 11, “These bones are the whole house of Israel.” There can be no doubt as to the subject of this prophecy, and we can see the nation of Israel today, and many have traveled there as tourists. The country came back to life, not just back to life, but came back gradually in stages, as described in Ezekiel 37. We can see this tangible fulfillment of prophecy more than 2,000 years after it was spoken.

Let us finish up our thoughts today with a look at Ezekiel 37:21-23. Here, we see two more promises made to Israel.

“Then say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord God: “Surely I will take the children of Israel from among the nations, wherever they have gone, and will gather them from every side and bring them into their own land; and I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king over them all; they shall no longer be two nations, nor shall they ever be divided into two kingdoms again. They shall not defile themselves anymore with their idols, nor with their detestable things, nor with any of their transgressions but I will deliver them from all their dwelling places in which they have sinned, and will cleanse them. Then they shall be My people, and I will be their God.”

God will unite them into one nation again. When they went into captivity via Babylon and Assyria, there were two kingdoms – the Northern and Southern – but God promises that they will be one again. Today, there is only one Israel. But He goes even further. God promises, in the context of the future, that they will be His people and He their God. They will no longer follow after idols and strange gods. Jesus is coming soon to fulfill this just as sure as we see Israel alive and well in front of our eyes, according to Ezekiel 37.

God bless you,

Dr. Sean Gooding
Pastor of Mississauga Missionary Baptist Church

How to Connect with Us

On Facebook (live broadcast of Sunday’s Message at 11 am): https://www.facebook.com/MississaugaMissionaryBaptistChurch

Join us on Zoom every Sunday (10:30 am) for Sunday Service AND every Tuesday at 8:00 pm for Bible Study: Meeting ID: 700 794 460 Passcode: 032661; https://us02web.zoom.us/j/700794460?pwd=M3NFRG91ZW5Sa2Z3amVyWkFnYXd6QT09

Online: https://www.mmbchurch.ca

Email: support@mmbchurch.ca