The Arithmetic of Apostasy Text: Hosea 8:11-13
Introduction: The Covenant Lawsuit
We find ourselves in the middle of God's covenant lawsuit against the northern kingdom of Israel, identified here by its leading tribe, Ephraim. A covenant lawsuit is not like a modern civil dispute over a fender bender. This is a formal indictment brought by a suzerain king against a rebellious vassal. God, the great King, had entered into a covenant with Israel. He had given them everything: the land, the law, the promises, His own presence. In return, He required faithful obedience. But Israel had become a spiritual adulteress, chasing after every pagan deity that set up shop on a nearby hill.
Hosea's prophecy is a trumpet blast, a summons to the courtroom. God is the plaintiff, the prosecutor, and the judge. Israel is the defendant, caught red-handed. The evidence is overwhelming. And the verdict is coming. The principles laid out here are not limited to ancient Israel. They are perennial. God does not change, and the dynamics of human rebellion do not change. When a nation, a church, or an individual is covenanted to God, the stakes are eternally high. High blessings for obedience, and high curses for disobedience. What we see in Ephraim is a picture of what happens when God's people decide they know better than God. It is the story of how religious activity, when untethered from God's Word, becomes the very engine of condemnation.
Our own generation is awash in this very sin. We have more Christian books, more Christian music, more Christian conferences, and more Christian brands than ever before. We have multiplied our religious activities. But has it produced holiness? Has it produced faithfulness? Or have we, like Ephraim, simply gotten very busy sinning in the name of God? This passage is a severe mercy. It is a divine diagnosis of a spiritual cancer. God is showing us how the disease of will-worship progresses, from bad to worse, until the only thing left is judgment.
The Text
Since Ephraim has multiplied altars for sin, They have become altars of sinning for him.
Though I wrote for him ten thousand precepts of My law, They are counted as a strange thing.
As for My sacrificial gifts, They sacrifice the flesh and eat it, But Yahweh has not accepted them. Now He will remember their iniquity And punish them for their sins; They will return to Egypt.
(Hosea 8:11-13 LSB)
The Cancer of Will-Worship (v. 11)
We begin with the principle of corrupt multiplication.
"Since Ephraim has multiplied altars for sin, They have become altars of sinning for him." (Hosea 8:11)
Here is the logic of spiritual decay in a nutshell. Notice the subtle but devastating progression. Ephraim built many altars "for sin." The Hebrew indicates these were intended as altars for sin offerings. On the surface, this looks pious. More altars must mean more devotion, right? More opportunities to get right with God. This is the way the carnal mind always thinks. If a little religion is good, then a lot of religion must be better. This is the root of all man-made religion, what the Puritans called "will-worship." It is worship according to what we think is a good idea, rather than what God has explicitly commanded.
God had commanded one central altar in Jerusalem (Deuteronomy 12). This was to safeguard the purity of worship and to constantly remind Israel that there is only one way to God, His way. But Ephraim, after the kingdom split, had a political problem. They couldn't have their citizens going down to Judah to worship. So, out of political expediency, Jeroboam set up his own worship centers at Dan and Bethel, complete with golden calves. He multiplied altars. He thought he was being clever, making worship more convenient, more accessible. He was building altars for dealing with sin.
But God's diagnosis is blunt. Those very altars, intended to deal with sin, "have become altars of sinning for him." The supposed remedy became the poison. The place of intended atonement became the place of active transgression. How? Because any worship that God has not commanded is worship that God has forbidden. This is the regulative principle of worship. It is not that we are free to do whatever is not forbidden; we are commanded to do only what is prescribed. By inventing their own places and means of worship, they were not just breaking one of God's rules; they were fundamentally rejecting His authority as King. They were declaring that they, not God, were in charge of defining their relationship with Him. Every sacrifice on those illicit altars was not an act of piety, but an act of high rebellion. It was spitting in God's face with a prayer on your lips.
This is a perpetual temptation. We see it today in churches that introduce all manner of novelties into worship, things designed to be relevant or attractive or seeker-sensitive. They are multiplying altars. They think they are helping people deal with sin, but because it is not what God has commanded, it becomes a generator of sin. The worship itself becomes the sin.
The Alienation of the Word (v. 12)
The second step in this downward spiral is the rejection of God's law.
"Though I wrote for him ten thousand precepts of My law, They are counted as a strange thing." (Hosea 8:12 LSB)
This is the necessary consequence of the first step. Once you establish your own system of worship, God's Word inevitably becomes an obstacle. It becomes an embarrassment. It becomes strange. The word for "ten thousand precepts" can be rendered "the multitudes of my law." God had not been stingy with His revelation. He had given them everything they needed for life and godliness. He wrote it for them. It was their constitution, their story, their identity.
But now, because they have their own religious system running, the actual law of God feels foreign. It's like a letter from a distant relative you no longer speak to. It doesn't fit their new reality. When the preacher reads from Deuteronomy about the central altar, the people shifting on their pews in Dan and Bethel think, "Well, that's a bit awkward. That's a strange thing. Surely that doesn't apply to us anymore. We've moved on. We have a more modern, pragmatic approach."
When you abandon God's commands for worship, you will eventually abandon His commands for everything else. The Word of God becomes alien. You begin to treat the Bible as a collection of helpful suggestions, a source of inspirational quotes, but not as the binding, authoritative, and all-sufficient rule for your life. You start to say things like, "Well, that was for a different time," or "We need to be more loving than that," which is code for "We need to be more loving than God." The law that was meant to be a lamp to their feet becomes a strange, dusty artifact in a museum they no longer visit.
We are living in the midst of this. An evangelical subculture that has for decades treated God's law as a "strange thing" is now shocked, shocked, when its children walk away from the faith entirely. But why should they be? We taught them that God's Word is negotiable. We taught them that our feelings, our traditions, and our cultural sensibilities are the real authority. We sowed the wind of doctrinal indifference, and we are now reaping the whirlwind of mass apostasy.
The Abomination of Empty Ritual (v. 13a)
The third stage is where their religious activity becomes utterly profane.
"As for My sacrificial gifts, They sacrifice the flesh and eat it, But Yahweh has not accepted them." (Hosea 8:13a LSB)
They are still going through the motions. They bring their sacrifices. They kill the animal, they roast the meat, they have a big barbeque. From the outside, it looks like a religious festival. They are busy, active, and well-fed. They are sacrificing and eating. But God posts a sign over the whole affair: "Not Accepted."
Their worship has become nothing more than a religious potluck. They are just killing and grilling. The spiritual transaction is gone. Why? Because the first two conditions were not met. The worship was not according to God's command, and it was not offered in submission to His Word. Therefore, the sacrifices are just dead meat. God takes no delight in them. It is an abomination to Him.
Think of it this way. A man has a beautiful, elaborate wedding. He's got the tux, the flowers, the cake, the orchestra. Everything looks perfect. The only problem is, the woman he is marrying is not his betrothed; it's some other woman he just met. The ceremony, for all its pomp, is not a wedding. It is a grotesque parody. It is an act of profound unfaithfulness. This is what Israel was doing. They kept the sacrificial rituals, but they had divorced themselves from the God who gave them. Their worship was adultery.
And so it is with us. We can have our praise bands and our smoke machines and our slick sermons. We can have our budgets and our programs and our bustling activity. But if it is not worship according to His Word, offered by a people who tremble at His Word, then God does not accept it. It is just noise and meat. It is an offense to Him.
The Inevitability of Judgment (v. 13b)
This leads directly to the final stage: the execution of the sentence.
"Now He will remember their iniquity And punish them for their sins; They will return to Egypt." (Hosea 8:13b LSB)
Because their worship is rejected, their sin is not atoned for. It is simply piling up. And God's memory is perfect. When Scripture says God "remembers" their iniquity, it doesn't mean He had forgotten and it just came back to mind. It is legal language. It means He is now opening the case file. He is bringing their sin into the courtroom for sentencing. The time for warnings is over. The time for punishment has arrived.
And what is the sentence? "They will return to Egypt." This is a judgment freighted with terrible, ironic significance. Egypt was the house of bondage from which God had miraculously delivered them. Their entire identity as a people was based on the Exodus. God brought them out of Egypt. Now, because they have rejected Him, He is sending them back. Not necessarily to the literal land of Egypt, though some would end up there. The immediate fulfillment was exile to Assyria, which would become their "new Egypt," a new house of bondage. The point is the reversal of salvation. You have rejected your Deliverer, so you will return to slavery. You have despised your freedom, so you will be put back in chains.
This is the ultimate end of all false religion and cultural apostasy. When a people turn their back on the living God, they do not become free. They simply find a new master. When a nation rejects the liberty of the gospel, it will inevitably find itself in bondage to tyranny, whether it is the tyranny of a foreign power or the tyranny of its own decadent appetites. We are seeing this unfold in the West before our very eyes. Having rejected our Christian heritage, we are marching ourselves right back to a pagan Egypt of sexual chaos, state-worship, and spiritual darkness. The sentence for apostasy is always a return to Egypt.
Conclusion: The One True Altar
This is a grim diagnosis. Multiplying sin, despising the Word, practicing empty religion, and facing a return to bondage. This is the natural trajectory of any people who forsake the covenant. But this is not the final word. God's covenant lawsuit against Old Covenant Israel was a foreshadowing of a greater judgment and a greater salvation.
All of our multiplied altars, all of our will-worship, all of our religious games, all of it was judged at the cross. All the sins of all God's people were remembered there. They were placed upon Jesus Christ, the Son of God. He was the one true sacrifice, offered on the one true altar, once for all.
The law that we treated as a strange thing, He fulfilled perfectly. The sacrifices that we offered profanely, He replaced with the perfect offering of Himself. The judgment we deserved, He absorbed. He endured the ultimate exile, the ultimate return to Egypt, when He was cut off from the Father's presence, crying out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
Because of His work, God can now look at His people, clothed in the righteousness of Christ, and say, "I will remember their sins no more" (Hebrews 8:12). This is the staggering good news of the gospel. The covenant lawsuit has been settled. The verdict for all who are in Christ is "not guilty."
Therefore, our response must be to flee from the multiplied altars of our age. We must reject all will-worship and cling to the pure worship of God as He has commanded it. We must stop treating His law as a strange thing and delight in it. We must come to the one true altar, Jesus Christ, and offer up the only sacrifices He now desires: our broken and contrite hearts, our praises, and our very lives as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to Him. For we have been brought out of the Egypt of sin and death, and by His grace, we will never return.