CRITICAL NOTES.—
Hosea 5:12. Moth and rottenness] Destructive powers, one injuring cloths, the other wood and flesh; slowly but surely do they work (Job 13:28). The sinner has foes within and without; conscience gnaws like a worm, and Divine judgment falls like a plague.
HOMILETICS
DESTRUCTION SLOW AND SURE.—Hosea 5:12
The ten tribes are compared to a garment eaten by the moth, and Judah is consumed by rottenness. The moth is injurious to clothing. The worm penetrates both wood and flesh. Both prefigure the inward and outward corruption of Israel; destruction slowly and surely progressing (Job 13:28).
I. Destruction small in its beginning. The moth is a small and mischievous creature. Touch it, and you kill it; permit it to live, and it makes havoc in the dwelling. Sins of youth may be despised and indulged, but they harden the heart and prepare for greater sins. Nations are not destroyed at once; families and churches are not always suddenly overcome. Some moral disease, like the moth, quietly gnaws away their beauty and vitality. Pride, intemperance, and vice prey upon their reputation and royalty. They are crushed with the moth.
II. Destruction slow in its progress. Little by little the hardest wood is pierced. Silently and slowly do rottenness and decay work their end. Yonder river rolling to the sea, rises from some small spot, and widens as it flows to join the mighty deep. The inhabitants of primeval forests are often startled by the fall of some giant tree. For centuries it was strong and grand in its foliage, but fell a victim to rottenness and decay. Insects came and gradually bored its sides and peeled its bark; the wind and air got access to its centre and heart. Now it lies a helpless trunk, to blend in common dust—“the place thereof knows it no more.” Family honour, mercantile prosperity, and national enterprises, may be upheld and flourish for a season. But secret sins and religious declensions, luxury and effeminacy, are, like the moth, slowly working out destruction. Rottenness entered the nations of antiquity, and their grandeur decayed like a flower. Superstition and priestly ambition, a sectarian and worldly spirit, will destroy spiritual life in our modern churches; lukewarmness and pride will hasten their ruin, and make them “desolate in the day of rebuke.”
III. Destruction sure in its end. Wherever the moth dwells destruction is costly and sure. The house of the moth is not a mansion of iron, a lasting habitation which never falls to ruin. The most precious stores are devoured. Rich perfumes and purple apparel are consumed and frittered away. “The moth,” says Dr Thomas, “is often so small and secret in its workings that medical science can seldom find it out, and when it finds it out, though it may check it for a time, it cannot destroy it: the moth defies all medicine.” So the judgments of God upon sin may be small in beginning, but increase in severity, and at length bring death and destruction. At first God tries gentle measures, mild chastisements, then loss and decay in bodily health, family prestige, and national glory; finally, after respite and space for repentance, calamities wear out and destroy the impenitent. “For the moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worm shall eat them like wool.”
ILLUSTRATIONS TO CHAPTER 5
Hosea 5:11-14. Vice is sometimes punished instantly and sometimes gradually. This seems to be the method of Divine procedure. We have slow and rapid consumption in the bodies of men. We have the gradual decay and the sudden overthrow of empires, the seed-time of evil and the harvest of judgment. The changes of circumstances are so various and frequent, so great and sudden, that the same person, the same people, afford an example of the greatest prosperity and the greatest misery. Henry the Fourth of France was despatched by a sacrilegious hand in his carriage, in the midst of popular applause and the triumphs of peace. Like Herod, the grandson of Herod the Great, he found but one step between adoration and oblivion. The ruin which God inflicts upon the impenitent and presumptuous sinners is often beyond precedent most sudden and most fearful. What folly, then, to trust in man, when God can easily destroy him!