Hosea 9:1–2: “Do not rejoice, O Israel, with joy like other peoples, / For you have played the harlot against your God. / You have made love for hire on every threshing floor. / The threshing floor and the winepress / Shall not feed them, / And the new wine shall fail in her.”

November 1st, 2021 by Pastor Ed in devotional

As a living illustration to His people of their relationship with Him, God instructed Hosea to marry a woman who was a harlot. When Hosea said, “you have played the harlot against your God,” he did so with great empathy and personal understanding, since his own wife had done the same. The “threshing floor and the winepress” were where sacred fertility or prostitution rites took place in an attempt to gain agricultural favor with the god Baal. To make matters worse, this form of pagan worship included sexual promiscuity. Israel was again being unfaithful in their commitment to worship God alone and remain set apart from the pagan practices of the nations around them.

We might be tempted to say, “How could Israel be so stupid to keep going back to false idols after God had done so much for them?” Yet every believer basically does the same thing when they put any material possession, person, or career in a place of higher importance than God. Like these children of Abraham, we will feel the tug of the world every single day of our lives. One sure way to lessen the pull toward things of the flesh is to keep our eyes on God and sharing the gospel, praying a prayer like that of John McKenzie, a Scottish missionary from the last century. As a young man, he knelt in a park on the edge of the Lossie River and prayed, “O Lord, send me to the darkest spot on earth.” God heard him and sent him to Africa, where he labored in the kingdom for many decades and led many to faith and eternal life in Jesus Christ.

“O LORD, send us to the darkest spot on earth.”