For Israel hath forgotten his Maker, and buildeth temples; and Judah hath multiplied fenced cities: but I will send a fire upon his cities, and it shall devour the palaces thereof.
For Israel hath forgotten his Maker - (Deuteronomy 32:18, "Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and hast For Israel hath forgotten his Maker - (Deuteronomy 32:18, "Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and hast forgotten God that formed thee").
And buildeth temples - to idols.
And Judah hath multiplied fenced cities. Judah, though less idolatrous than Israel, betrayed want of faith in Yahweh by trusting more to its fenced cities than to Him: instead of making peace with God, Judah multiplied human defenses (Isaiah 22:8; Jeremiah 5:17, "They (the Babylonians) shall impoverish thy fenced cities, wherein thou trustedst, with the sword;" Micah 5:10-11). Pusey refers this to the days of Jotham, between 758 and 741 B.C. Although Jotham was a religious king, the corruption of the people at this time is specially recorded - "The people did corruptly."
But I will send a fire upon his cities. Sennacherib took all Judah's fenced cities except Jerusalem (2 Kings 18:13).
Palaces thereof - namely, of the land. Compare as to Jerusalem, Jeremiah 17:27; Amos 2:5, "I will send a fire upon Judah, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem."
Remarks:
(1) Even the professing Church, "the house of the Lord," shall not be spared when its members 'transgress the covenant, and trespass against the law of its Lord' (Hosea 8:1). It is in vain that such professors "shall cry" in the day of judgment, "My God, we know thee" (Hosea 8:2). God will not acknowledge as His the workers of iniquity. He will not own as true children of either the literal or the spiritual Israel such as walk not in the faith of the patriarch who first received the name.
(2) The Israel of Hosea's day was only Israel in name. Having "cast off" God, they had cast off in Him and with Him "the thing that is good" (Hosea 8:3); for He is the center and the essence of all that is good. In 'setting up' their several kings they did not consult God, or seek to please Him, therefore He owned none of their proceedings (Hosea 8:4). So blindly headstrong were they in their sin that they seemed to act as if their aim was "that they might be cut off." Thus all sinners who pursue objects, the end of which, according to God's law, is death, are really, though they do not stop to consider it, choosing hell as their portion. Oh the infatuation of those who rush blindfold on their eternal ruin! Would that they could be taught by the case of Israel to see the suicidal madness of their course. Israel cast off her God for the golden calf of her own making; and in righteous retribution the calf which was her trust "cast her off" (Hosea 8:5). So all the idols of men, wealth, beauty, and ambition, fail men in their hour of sorest need; and sooner or later all who have forsaken God for them shall have to say of them, as Cardinal Wolsey said of his royal patron, 'Had I but served my God with half the zeal I served my king, He would not in mine age have left me naked to mine enemies'
(3) What rendered Israel's sin peculiarly aggravated was, it emanated from herself. She knew what she was doing. She was not ignorant that a calf-image, 'made by the workman,' could not be, and "is not God" (Hosea 8:6). Their boasted name as "Israel" only rendered their sin the more inexcusable. Therefore they and their "calf" should be "broken in pieces." As they had sown, so must they reap-the same grain, but with an awful increase. Wind" was the seed, the destructive "whirlwind" was to be the harvest (Hosea 8:7). So all unbelievers sow the wind of vanity and emptiness here, and shall reap the whirlwind of destruction hereafter. As chaff they shall be borne along as the sport of it to their doom. Their undertakings either have "no stalk" or else, if they have stalk, have no full grain in the ear, so as to yield "meal;" or if even they "yield" stalk, and grain, still hostile "strangers: shall "swallow" all up. The hopes of sinners are disappointed, some at the very beginning, others in a further stage of progress; and at last the most prosperous transgressors here shall be swallowed up by the powers of darkness and the waves of the ever-burning lake.
(4) Hosea prophesied that Israel should be a dishonoured "vessel among the Gentiles," though at the time Israel, however disliked, was rather an object of envy than contempt among the neighbouring nations; for still the fame of Solomon's wisdom, and the wide extent of his kingdom, were proverbial in all the East, as indeed the former is to the present day. No power but the Spirit of God could have enabled him so accurately to foretell the state of Israel for more than two thousand years: "swallowed up," and yet not destroyed, "among the nations," - yet not amalgamated with them. The very cause of their exile was that policy whereby they expected to ensure their permanence as a nation: "For they are gone up to Assyria," saith the prophet. Like the untamed "wild ass," they rushed into the wilderness of the Gentile nations, there to bring on themselves their own ruin. The very nations, Assyria and her subject-peoples, whom Israel "hired" to help her, God "gathered" to destroy her (Hosea 8:10). The true position of the Israel of God in the world is to be "alone by himself" (Hosea 8:9). Whenever professing believers, instead of making God their confidence, have recourse to the godless world and its unhallowed powers, at the cost of religious principle, to save them from anticipated evils, God, in just retribution, makes those very world-powers the instruments of executing His judgments on them.
(5) Ephraim tried to secure himself from divine judgment for sin, by raising "many altars" (Hosea 8:11). But God declares these very means, taken for the expiation of sin, to be but "altars to sin," and that He will prove them to be such by inflicting punishment for them. The devices of 'will-worship' and formalism will never avert, but rather will hasten, the penal consequences of men's guilt. And what will most aggravate sin is, if the transgressor had within his reach the divinely-written record of 'the great things of God's law' (Hosea 8:12), and yet treated it "as a strange thing." How many there are among us who, though commanded by God, to have His word continually "in their heart," on their lips, and before their eyes (Deuteronomy 6:6-9), are practically strangers to it, or only know it to explain its holy strictness away, and to widen the narrow way pointed out by it, so as to suit the carnality and worldliness of themselves and of society around them! The religious services and gifts of all such, however highly meritorious the worshippers may account them, are regarded by God as mere offerings made for the gratification of their own "flesh" (Hosea 8:13). The "iniquity" which they suppose to expiated such sevices, is all "remembered" by God "now," at this very time, and will bring down, a speedy visitation of judgment. While they 'build temples' as memorials of their Maker, they all the while in heart 'forget' Him (Hosea 8:14). Therefore their defenses against calamity shall prove unavailing. The only services which God will "accept" (Hosea 8:13), are those which are done in accordance with His 'great law' from the Gospel motives of "repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ" (Acts 20:21). May we all ever live under the controlling power of those motives!