I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness - God is not said to find anything, as though “He” had lost it, or knew not where it was, or came suddenly upon it, not expecting it. “They” were lost, as relates to Him, when they were found by Him. As our Lord says of the returned prodigal, “This my son was lost and is found” Luke 15:32. He “found” them and made them pleasant in His own sight, “as grapes which a man finds unexpectedly, in “a great terrible wilderness of fiery serpents and drought” Deuteronomy 8:15, where commonly nothing pleasant or refreshing grows; or “as the first ripe in the fig-tree at her fresh time,” whose sweetness passed into a proverb, both from its own freshness and from the long abstinence (see Isaiah 28:4). God gave to Israel both richness and pleasantness in His own sight; but Israel, from the first, corrupted God’s good gifts in them. This generation only did as their fathers. So Stephen, setting forth to the Jews how their fathers had rebelled against Moses, and persecuted the prophets, sums up; “as your fathers did, so do ye” Acts 7:51. Each generation was filling up the measure of their fathers, until it was full; as the whole world is doing now Revelation 14:15.
But they went to Baal-Peor - “They,” the word is emphatic; these same persons to whom God showed such love, to whom He gave such gifts, “went.” They left God who called them, and “went” to the idol, which could not call them. Baal-Peor, as his name probably implies, was “the filthiest and foulest of the pagan gods.” It appears from the history of the daughters of Midian, that his worship consisted in deeds of shame Numbers 25.
And separated themselves unto that shame - that is, to Baal-Peor, “whose” name of “Baal, Lord,” he turns into “Bosheth, shame” . Holy Scripture gives disgraceful names to the idols, (as “abominations, nothings, dungy things, vanities, uncleanness,” in order to make people ashamed of them. “To this shame they separated themselves” from God, in order to unite themselves with it. The Nazarite “separated himself from” certain earthly enjoyments, and consecrated himself, for a time or altogether, to God; these “separated themselves from” God, and united, devoted, consecrated themselves “to shame.” “They made themselves, as it were, Nazarites to shame.” Shame was the object of their worship and their God, “and” their “abominations were according as they loved,” i. e., they had as many “abominations” or abominable idols, “as” they had “loves.” They multiplied abominations, “after their heart’s desire;” their abominations were manifold, because their passions were so; and their love being corrupted, they loved nothing but abominations.
Yet it seems simpler and truer to render it, “and they became abominations, like their loves;” as the Psalmist says, “They that make them are like unto them” Psalms 115:8. : “The object which the will desires and loves, transfuses its own goodness or badness into it.” Man first makes his god like his own corrupt self, or to some corruption in himself, and then, worshiping this ideal of his own, he becomes the more corrupt through copying that corruption. He makes his god “in his” own “image and likeness,” the essence and concentration of his own bad passions, and then conforms himself to the likeness, not of God, but of what was most evil in himself. Thus the Pagan made gods of lust, cruelty, thirst for war; and the worship of corrupt gods reacted on themselves. They forgot that they were “the work of their own hands,” the conception of their own minds, and professed to “do gladly” “what so great gods” had done.
And more widely, says a father , “what a man’s love is, that he is. Lovest thou earth? thou art earth. Lovest thou God? What shall I say? thou shalt be god.” : “Naught else maketh good or evil actions, save good or evil affections.” Love has a transforming power over the soul, which the intellect has not. “He who serveth an abomination is himself an abomination” , is a thoughtful Jewish saying. “The intellect brings home to the soul the knowledge on which it worketh, impresses it on itself, incorporates it with itself. Love is an impulse whereby he who loves is borne forth toward that which he loves, is united with it, and is transformed into it.” Thus in explaining the words, “Let Him kiss me with the kisses of His Mouth,” Song of Solomon 1:2, the fathers say , “Then the Word of God kisseth us, when He enlighteneth our heart with the Spirit of divine knowledge, and the soul cleaveth to Him and His Spirit is transfused into him.”