Episode Transcript
Hosea 9, verse 9 this morning.
The title of the message is "Deep Corruption.
" Deep corruption.
As we continue in chapter 9 this morning, God continues to describe the plight of the Jewish people.
Specifically, He continues to describe the cause of all their troubles.
You know, when it comes to people's troubles, they usually want to treat the symptoms and they want to ignore the cause.
You know, a lot of times we do that.
It's more convenient to treat the symptoms and kind of disregard the source of those symptoms.
But if you want to treat the problem, you've got to go to the source.
A responsible person thinks this way.
If I am overweight because I eat too much, then I will not eat as much.
This will save me money on food, time eating, and make me healthier.
An irresponsible person thinks this way.
I am overweight, so I will buy bigger clothes so I won't look so fat.
One treats the symptoms and the other fixes the problem.
I was reading a news article this week about Southwest Airlines' new policy on customers of size.
And maybe you all have seen that.
You have several hands going up.
So if you're too obese to take up one seat and you have to sit in two seats on an airplane, you are now by Southwest Airlines considered a customer of size.
We have people of color.
Now we have customers of size.
And you can have two seats now for the price of one.
Everyone's in a category, by the way.
Everyone's in a category.
Everyone's victimized in this life.
You're the wrong color, you're the wrong upbringing, the wrong class, the wrong gender.
And because of that, you're a victim.
And none of that's true.
None of it's true at all.
God made us all equal no matter what color we are.
In Christ, there's neither male nor female, even though there are different roles that God has assigned us all.
And so you can't look at yourself and say, "Well, because of this that I have, this excuses me from being responsible.
This excuses me from my culpability.
I have nothing.
I'm not guilty of anything.
I can all blame it on A, B, C, or D.
" But policies like the customer of size policy giving an obese person one seat for the price of two, that doesn't fix the problem.
They treat the symptom, but they don't fix the problem.
They don't give people an incentive to lose weight.
They give them a bigger chair and then pass the expense down to the other customers.
These policies seem friendly on the outside.
Well, look how kind they're being to those people.
But I believe they're hurting people rather than helping them.
God wants to help you out of your trouble, not accommodate you in your trouble.
You see the difference?
God wants to help you out of your trouble, not accommodate you in your trouble.
And because of that, God always, always addresses the cause.
God always goes to the source of the problem and seeks to resolve it rather than cover it up.
God doesn't mince words when it comes to our sin.
And he doesn't pass our personal responsibility onto someone else.
God holds you and me accountable.
Just listen to how God addresses his people, Israel and Hosea 9.
First, God points out their condition.
He points out their condition.
He says they have deeply corrupted themselves.
See that?
That's a that's poignant language, isn't it?
They've deeply corrupted themselves.
I was in Indiana for Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays a little while back with my wife and my wife's mother is sitting down next to her brother at the Christmas table.
She looks over at her brother and she says, I think you're getting a little fat, Tom.
That's pretty blunt, pretty blunt.
And you know, God's being blunt here.
They've deeply corrupted themselves.
I love how God doesn't use carefully chosen words to keep from offending people.
He never does that in the Bible.
God didn't say, you know, they could really use some improvement, those Israelites.
God did say that through Hosea.
God didn't say they may want to consider taking a different direction.
God didn't say that either.
That would have been solved.
It still would have touched on the subject.
But through the prophet Hosea, God said they were corrupt.
I can just hear someone telling Hosea, well, now, Hosea, it's not what you said about us.
It's how you said it.
I mean, calling us corrupt.
That's very offensive, Hosea.
Telling people that they're corrupt, Hosea, that's not going to bring people to Jesus.
It's going to drive them away.
You need to show people the love of Jesus.
Oh, I hate hearing people say that.
Just love people to Jesus.
You can't love people to Jesus.
You cannot.
Here's a kingdom truth.
People cannot know the love of Christ until they know their need for Christ.
People cannot know the love of Christ until they know their need for Christ.
People don't come to Jesus when they are shown love.
They come to Jesus when they are shown themselves.
Jesus is the great physician.
People don't go to a doctor because they believe they're well.
They go to a doctor when they realize they're sick.
And the only way that you can let someone know they're sick is to point it out to them when they don't realize it themselves.
A few years ago, maybe you all saw this story, there was a TV reporter named Victoria Price.
And Victoria Price broadcasting on the news on television, she received a strange email from one of her viewers one day.
While watching the news, the viewer noticed a lump on the reporter's throat.
And the viewer was concerned about that reporter.
So he wrote an email and he pointed out the lump to the reporter.
He told her that she needed to go see a doctor about it.
The lump ended up being cancer.
Cancer that had spread to her lymph nodes.
And by God's grace, she recovered from it.
Do you know what that reporter said?
The reporter said, "I never noticed the lump until someone pointed it out.
" There's a good spiritual application there, isn't it?
That concerned viewer saved that woman's life.
Not by paying her compliments, but by pointing out something that was wrong with her.
If you really want to show love, if you really want to share the love of Jesus, then tell people the truth about their sin and their lost condition.
God not only pointed out their condition, but God pointed out their culpability, that means their guilt.
Do you know what the word reflexive means in grammar?
Reflexive.
Reflexive means the subject that's committing the action and the object that receives the action like, you know, Jim, Hit, Tom.
Jim is the subject, Tom is the object, Hitting is the action.
Well with reflexive, the subject that's committing the action is the object that's receiving the action.
They're one and the same.
Underline the word they.
They.
That's the subject.
Now underline the word themselves.
They are the subject and the object.
Whom did they corrupt?
They corrupted themselves.
They weren't corrupted by the nations around them.
Sure, they were influenced by them.
They weren't corrupted by them.
They weren't corrupted by the devil devil's temptation.
You know, the devil tempts everybody.
That doesn't mean you have to yield to it.
Big business wasn't to blame you.
What we like doing today, if something goes wrong, will we like suing someone with big pockets?
It's got to be their fault.
It's the government's fault.
It's businesses fault.
If I burn my lap with coffee, it's the McDonald's fault.
Whatever.
It's got to be somebody else's fault.
But big business wasn't to blame.
Big government wasn't to blame.
There wasn't anybody that Israel could point their finger at and say, "They're to blame for corrupting me.
" Except themselves.
Israel corrupted themselves.
We don't like culpability, do we?
We don't like being the ones that fault for how we turn out.
We like being able to protest.
We like being able to blame.
We like being able to sue someone for the messes that we get ourselves into.
We like being able to say, "Well, my son just got with the wrong crowd.
" Well, now, if you're the parents of the other people in that wrong crowd, they're saying their son got with the wrong crowd.
There's all kinds of crowds out there.
Who chooses what crowd we go with?
We do.
Man, if you're with the wrong crowd, you are the wrong crowd.
God says, "No, it's your fault.
You are corrupt.
We have to get blunt.
You are to blame.
You're culpable.
You did it yourself.
" Here's a kingdom truth.
Restoration doesn't come by confessing other people's sins.
It comes by confessing our own.
I'll say that again.
Restoration, healing, forgiveness, however you want to put it, doesn't come by confessing other people's sins.
It comes by confessing our own.
God pointed out their condition.
They were corrupt.
God pointed out their culpability.
They were guilty.
God pointed out their corruption.
God said they have .
.
.
What is the adverb?
Deeply corrupted themselves.
Deeply, not just corrupted themselves.
Deeply corrupted themselves.
The Hebrew word translated corrupted means destroyed, by the way.
Sometimes you'll see the word God destroyed or the people corrupted, one and the same word.
Israel had destroyed themselves.
The situation was more dire than that because God said they had deeply corrupted or deeply destroyed themselves.
That means the damage was so deep that it was irreparable.
If you have a piece of wood that's rotten, sometimes you can't.
You can salvage that wood by maybe cutting off the rotten end or sanding it off or something.
Then the wood's solid underneath.
You can repaint over it or whatever and everything's fine.
If that wood is rotten to the core, then it cannot be salvaged.
It's only good to toss in the fire, toss in the scrap pile.
Sometimes when we say, "Oh, that person's rotten to the core," that's the same thing as saying they're deeply corrupted.
It's the same thing.
No matter how bad you've been in life, let me tell you this, let me assure you this, God will save anybody who will come to him.
You may say, "Well, maybe I'm too far gone.
I'm a basket case for God.
" Listen, God will save anybody who will come to him, but there are some people who are so completely, purposefully, and permanently in this state of rejection of God and denial of God that they will never come to him no matter how much God pleased with them to do so.
That's the way it was when God sent the flood upon the earth.
God saw that all man had corrupted his way.
There's another reflexive.
They were deeply corrupted.
Noah preached to them for years, and no matter how much God reached out his hand to say, "Come back to me.
Turn from your sin," those people weren't interested.
There's some people that are so deeply corrupted, they have made that blatant choice in life to forever reject God and go their way no matter how much God pleads with them.
If you desire to be forgiven by God, you desire to be accepted through his son Jesus Christ, then you may.
That's God putting that desire in you.
But when you desire to reject God and reject his salvation, even when you know it's true, just like the people that crucified Jesus, they just did it anyway.
That's deep corruption.
God said this deep corruption, he compares it, he says they were deeply corrupted.
Look back in your text, "As in the days of Gibeah," the days of Gibeah.
Now the days of Gibeah refer to a terrible thing that once took place in Gibeah in the book of Judges.
Basically what happens is a Jewish man and his wife were traveling home.
They were from out of town, they were traveling home one night, and they decided to stay the night as they were passing through in the Jewish city of Gibeah, which belonged to the tribe of Benjamin.
That night, just like in Sodom and Gomorrah, that's what it reminds me of, that night a crowd of homosexual men, like in Sodom, attempted to rape the man who came into town.
He was inside an elderly man's house who had taken them in, and after some coercion from the elderly man and all, the citizens of the city finally were talked into raping the man's wife instead of him.
So they raped her all night long until she died.
But when word got out, what those wicked men did who were from the tribe of Benjamin, their fellow Jews from the other tribes, knew that that kind of wickedness could not be tolerated in Israel.
They knew God would judge that nation if they tolerated that.
So correctly so, they decided to put those evil men to death.
That's what needs to happen to sexual predators, by the way.
They need to die.
These two, Brother Andy, you remember this, we would have monitors on the sexual predators DPS would, and DPS would track those predators knowing that they would re-offend.
Do you remember that?
Knowing they would re-offend.
They told us that they were beyond redeemable.
There's no way they'll ever quit.
So they kept a monitor on them, and sometimes they would cut the monitor off.
And I'm like, if we know they're going to re-offend, why don't we make it so they can't re-offend anymore?
It's easy to track someone when they're in a cemetery.
And so these people decided, rightly, we're going to put these murderous, sexual, perverted people to death for their crime.
Judges chapter 20, verse 12 through 14, Judges chapter 20, verse 12 through 14 says, "And the tribes of Israel sent men through all the tribe of Benjamin, saying, 'What wickedness is this that is done among you?
Now therefore deliver us the men.
'" The children of Belal, when you see the children of Belal in the Bible, it literally means no good people.
The people who just know good.
Belal means good for nothing.
Those children who are good for nothing, which are in Gibeah, that we may put them to death and put away evil from Israel.
But the children of Benjamin would not hearken to the voice of their brethren, the children of Israel.
But the children of Benjamin gathered themselves together out of the cities unto Gibeah to go out to battle against the children of Israel.
So here you have all these righteous men coming in and they tell, they don't want to fight with their brethren.
So they tell the leaders of the city, "Hey, just send the guilty party out.
We're going to put them to death.
" That's all we ask.
We're going to hold them accountable for this.
But instead of sending the guilty party out, the people of Benjamin said, "No, here's what we're going to do.
We're going to protect these people and we're going to take up arms against all of you people, even though you'll outnumber us.
What, an 11 to 1?
You outnumber us and we're going to fight for these people's rights to live this alternative lifestyle.
That's what they're doing.
" So they come out to fight for them.
And you know what?
For them to come out against so many people to be so outnumbered, they were willing to die for their sin.
That's how deeply corrupted they were.
When someone's willing to die for their sin and unwilling to repent, they're bad off.
They're surrounding them, willing to protect the sexual predators.
When people are willing to fight to the death to resist God's word and keep their sin, there's nothing you can do for that city but to destroy it, which the other tribes did.
That's the way Israel had become in Hosea's day.
They were like those people in the land of Gibeah willing to fight for their sin.
And this is how it's going to be in the last day during the Great Tribulation.
I want you to listen to how the Bible describes the people who join with the anti-Christian government known as the beast at the end of the age in Revelation 16, verse 10 and 11.
It says, "And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast.
" Or you could say capital would probably be a good way to put that.
"And his kingdom was full of darkness, and they gnawed their tongues for pain, and blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and repented not of their deeds.
" That's deep corruption.
That's when people say, "I'm in terrible pain.
God's punishing me for my wrong, but I am going instead of saying, 'God, I'm sorry.
God, I'm wrong.
God forgive me.
God have mercy.
' Instead, they shake their fist at God.
They blaspheme his name and refuse, still repent of their sins.
" They are willing to die and go to hell to keep their sin.
That's deep corruption.
And people are like that today.
We have people just like that today.
And you would not understand it if the Bible did not describe it, because it makes no sense at all.
They will be willing to die in pain rather than repent and obey their loving creator.
They will be like those in the day of Gibeah, in the days of Noah, where the only thing left to do is to destroy the people who are left in this world.
Look back here, text, "Therefore," Hosea said, "Therefore, that is because they are unwilling to repent like the people in Gibeah, he that is God will remember their iniquity.
" And that word remember means to mark it down, like marking something on a calendar.
God's going to mark their choice down so that he won't forget their stubborn choice to rebel against him.
And look back here, text, "He will visit their sins.
" Just as the rest of Israel visited the sins of the tribe of Benjamin on account of those in Gibeah, just as those homosexual predators were willing to fight to the death for their sins in Gibeah, I believe we have many in our nation today who would do the same if given the choice.
In fact, I was told recently that historically every nation that has embraced homosexuality has eventually fallen and that none have ever recovered from it.
In the 1930s, British anthropologist J.
D.
Unwin studied 86 cultures that stressed across 5,000 years.
And he found that without exception, when those cultures restricted sex to marriage, they thrived.
Strong families headed by faithful spouses made for bold and prosperous societies.
That's what he found.
But not one culture survived more than three generations after turning sexually permissive.
In the book of Hosea, God says a nation that embraces sexual perversion is deeply corrupted.
He says, "As in the days of Gibeah, the homosexuals trying to rape that man.
" God calls homosexuality deep corruption that will be marked out and will be remembered when Judgment Day comes.
And those who stand up for them like Gibeah shall also fall with them.
Understand this this morning as we close.
There are no alternative lifestyles, but there is an alternative to sin.
Amen.
There's no alternative lifestyles, but there is an alternative to sin and that is to confess and forsake it before it's too late.
Don't be deeply corrupted.
Don't allow yourself to continue denying and rejecting the loving God who created you.
Deep corruption is deep destruction.
God didn't destroy those people.
They destroyed themselves.
They were rotten to the core and nothing rotten can enter into the kingdom of God.
Almost every day, my dad loves keeping his yard like a like a park, like a state park.
I say, "Daddy, what'd you do today?
" "Oh, I rake leaves and I burn sticks and stuff like that.
" You see, there's some things he just doesn't want in his yard, some things he just doesn't want on his property.
So he burns them.
And people who are deeply corrupted, people who have destroyed themselves and rejected God's forgiveness through Christ, God has to do the right thing.
He has to put them where they belong and he's going to put them in the fire so that the rest of us who trust Christ as our Savior will be able to enter into a kingdom where there's no corruption at all.
This morning, I was teaching on circumcision in the class next door, how they were circumcised on the eighth day, those little babies were.
And I told the people that the number eight is a new beginning.
One day's in a week, the eighth day is a new week.
It's a brand new beginning.
And that's how God worked the calendar in his creation.
And so I told them that on the eighth day, the natural part of that man, which represents Adam, was put away forever, making him a new creature.
It was an Old Testament picture of if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature, new creature.
Old things have passed away.
All things have become new.
Brother Richard, why are you telling us that for?
Because to enter into the kingdom of God.
You have to be made new.
Creation blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God because corruption cannot inherit in corruption, the Bible says.
That's why Jesus said you must be born again.
If you do not know Christ as your Savior, let me assure you, God wants to fix you.
He wants to fix your corruption.
He wants to take it and just put it away forever, just like that circumcision.
Put it away in the tomb where Jesus was buried and let you come out a new man in Christ Jesus, a new woman in Christ Jesus.
And I pray that you will accept him as your Lord, your Savior, before it's forever too late.
Father, we thank you so much for your precious word.
I thank you, Father, that there are no alternative lifestyles, but in the gospel there is an alternative to sin.
I thank you, Father, for the forgiveness you've given us in Jesus.
I thank you, Father, God, for the stern warnings of deep corruption.
I thank you, Father, God, that when all is said and done, there's only one person to blame, Lord.
That's ourselves.
And I pray, Father, that there have been you here today that have not confessed their sins to you, accepted responsibility for their guilty lifestyle, and accepted the free pardon of sin and the grace of Jesus Christ.
I pray they will today before it's too late.
In his name we pray.
Amen.
