My God will cast them away, because they did not hearken unto him: and they shall be wanderers among the nations.
My God will cast them away, because they did not hearken unto Him - "My God;" "my" in contrast to "them" - i:e., the people whose God Yahweh no longer is. Also, Hosea appeals to God as supporting his authority against the whole people.
And they shall be wanderers among the nations - (2 Kings 15:29; 1 Chronicles 5:26, "The God of Israel stirred up the spirit of Pul king of Assyria, and the spirit of Tilgath-pilneser king of Assyria, and he carried them away, even the Reubenites, and the Gadites, and the half tribe of Manasseh, and brought them unto Halah, and Habor, and Hara, and to the river Gozan." Doubtless the Israelites of the ten tribes are not to be found settled in any one locality, but, according to the prophecy, are "wanderers among" all "the nations." The Jews of China, India, and Russia are probably the descendants of the ten tribes. The Jews of the countries originally constituting the Roman empire are probably descendants of Judah and Benjamin. The Jews of the various countries who met on Pentecost at Jerusalem (Acts 2:9-11) were doubtless many of them descendants of the ten tribes. "The twelve in the dispersion," addressed by James (James 1:1), and "the dispersion among the Greeks," alluded to by the Jews, who asked mockingly, was Jesus going to teach them (John 7:35), include the ten tribes, as well as Judah and Benjamin.
Remarks:
(1) They who are in favour with God may truly "rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory." For "in His presence is fullness of joy (Psalms 16:11). But, for men to rejoice when they have, like Israel, "gone a whoring from their God," and have therefore God's judgments hanging over them, is most unseasonable. Israel's prosperity under Jeroboam II had made her elated: what she "loved" was temporal goods, and these she greedily and insatiably sought as her "rewards" from her idols for her apostasy toward her God (Hosea 9:1). But inasmuch as she loved the temporal rewards, and rejected the real Giver of them, the rewards themselves should be taken away. The people thought their stores, were secure when the grain was on "the floor," and the grapes "in the winepress;" but even then God would cause them to "fail," and disappoint the people's hopes. No possession is secure that belongs to the forsakers of God.
(2) God claimed the Holy Land as peculiarly His (Leviticus 25:23). It was impossible, therefore, that H e could allow those to remain as tenants of the land who disowned Him as their and its Lord (Hosea 9:3). Similarly as "the earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof" (Psalms 24:1), He will not allow those who avowedly, or else practically, deny Him, to continue to cumber His earth. The Lord Jesus, to whom the kingdom of the earth belongs of right, will remove "out of His kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity" (Matthew 13:41).
(3) God had delivered the Israelites from their Egyptian house of bondage, that they might serve Him whose service is perfect freedom. But as they had voluntarily preferred the spiritual bondage of Satan to the liberty of the children of God, it was but just that they should be reduced again to a state of Egyptian-like temporal bondage. And whereas, of their own accord, in their own land, they had eaten the unclean things of idolatry, their punishment should be, that against their will they must eat unclean things in the land of their captivity. It is one of the strange perversities of man's sinful nature that they who have no scruple about neglecting the ordinances of God, when within their reach, feel acutely when they are, in righteous retribution, debarred from those outward privileges which mark a distinction between the worshippers of God and the pagan. Let us therefore prize and use aright our spiritual privileges. For "whosoever hath not (i:e., hath to no good purpose), from him shall be taken even that which he seemeth to have" (Luke 8:18).
(4) The present and past state of Israel for ages is graphically described in the prophecy (Hosea 9:4), that "they should offer no more wine offering to the Lord," the token of their joy in being accepted of God in times past. The peculiarity of their position is, without sacrifice they cannot be accepted of God; and sacrifices could only be offered acceptably in the promised land, and at the temple in Jerusalem, according to their own admission. But this the providence of God has rendered an impossibility for 1,800 years past. Thus, since they cannot fulfill even the outward liturgical requirements of the law-the very law which is their boast, witnesses against them that they are not living in a state "pleasing unto Him." Their sacrificing, if ever they attempt it, is a defilement, not an atonement, because not done, on their own showing, as God wills and commands it to be done. So also now that Christ our Passover has been sacrificed for us, to think to please God by any will-worship or merit of our own devising, is as loathsome to God as the offerings of one polluted by a dead body would have been in Mosaic times.
(5) A day is coming when despisers of holy things shall wish to have again the opportunities which now they make so light of. Man would like to have God at His command-not to be at the command of God; to have him near as a Helper in times of adversity, and yet to put Him to a distance in times of prosperity. But this cannot be. They who forsake God in the days of His visitation of grace shall be forsaken of God "in the days of His visitation" of wrath and "recompence" to the ungodly (Hosea 9:7). "Nettles" and desolation "shall possess" (Hosea 9:6) their treasuries; whereas the treasures laid up in heaven by the godly are abiding. Then, too late, the worldly man, like Israel, "shall know" himself to be "a fool," and the godly man, whom he had charged with madness (2 Kings 9:11; Jeremiah 29:26; John 10:20; Acts 26:24), shall be known to be the truly wise man. The teachers who flattered the pleasure-seeker and the mammon worshipper, in their God-hating ways, shall be in the end unmasked; and the everlasting contrast shall be manifested between the spiritual "watchman," who walked in continual communion "with God" (Hosea 9:8), and the false teacher, who was "a snare in all his ways," being himself the embodiment of "hatred" to vital godliness-and this "in the house of his God"!
(6) The depth of Israel's corruption is compared to the corruption of Benjamin, when, in the days of the Judges, they espoused the cause of the men of Belial, w ho treated so revoltingly the Levite's concubine in Gibeah. For a time Benjamin seemed to prosper, but in the end they were exterminated, excepting 600 men. So, though Israel now prospers for a time, saith Hosea, "God will remember their iniquity, He will visit their sins" (Hosea 9:9). What aggravated their sin was God's past loving-kindness to them. He had "found" them when they were lost "in the wilderness" (Hosea 9:10). He had made them pleasant to Himself, as the grape or early fig (Isaiah 28:4) is to the taste. But these same persons went off to Baal-peor, the foul and shameful idol of lust; and the people who had been "separated" unto God as His special people, "separated themselves unto that shame," and became filthy, like the filthy god "they loved." Let us remember, what we love, that we are. If we love God we are insensibly becoming more and more like God: if we love earthly objects, we are unconsciously becoming more and more earthy ourselves. He who parts from God parts from his own true "glory" (Hosea 9:11): and the earthly riches which he has made his glory "make themselves wings," "and shall fly away" (Proverbs 23:5). Like the fruitfulness of Ephraim, for which, as his name implies, he was famed, but which was turned by God for his sin into barrenness "from the birth, and from the womb, and from the conception;" so the fame of backsliding professors shall at last be turned into shame, and their cherished aims shall prove abortive in every stage, from their first conception to their attempted completion.
(7) The worldly, in their madness, say virtually to God, "Depart from us, for we desire not the knowledge of thy ways" (Job 21:14). But saith God, "Woe to them, when I depart from them" (Hosea 9:12). When God departs from a people or an individual, then indeed "the glory is departed" (1 Samuel 4:21). God repays in kind those who depart from Him, by departing from them; and what else is the chief horror of hell, except that God is not there? Terrible as is the withdrawal of all God's gifts, it is as nothing com pared with the withdrawal of God Himself.
(8) Ephraim, as his neighbour Tyrus, was "planted" by a special providence "in a pleasant place," like the primeval Paradise; but now, on account of "all his wickedness" (Hosea 9:15), he was as a blasted and "smitten" tree, with "dried up root," and therefore without hope of "fruit" in time to come (Hosea 9:16). The God who is love itself, because of their "great barred" (Hosea 9:7), and their provocations in the very scenes of His former loving-kindness (Hosea 9:15), now "hated them" with that holy abhorrence with which He must ever regard that which is opposed to love. He cast them, away, to become "wanderers among the nations," like Cain, with the brand of His displeasure attending them everywhere, "because they did not hearken unto Him" (Hosea 9:17). If, then, God so punished the apostasy of His own elect nation, what guarantee of impunity can any Christian nation, or any individual professors, have, that they shall escape the wrath of God, if they fail to bring forth fruits consonant to their high calling? Lot us not be high-minded but fear. For "if God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest He also spare not thee" (Romans 11:20-21).