The Wages of Whoredom Text: Hosea 9:1-9
Introduction: When the Party's Over
There is a kind of counterfeit joy that thrives in times of rebellion. It is loud, it is boisterous, and it is utterly hollow. It is the joy of the prodigal in the far country, flush with his inheritance, buying rounds for his new friends. It is the joy of a nation that has abandoned its God but still enjoys the residual capital, both moral and economic, of their faithful forefathers. They throw a party on the deck of a sinking ship, mistaking the lurch of impending doom for the rhythm of a new dance.
Hosea is a prophet sent to a people who had become experts in this kind of manufactured revelry. Israel, the northern kingdom, was steeped in idolatry, which the Bible consistently diagnoses as spiritual adultery. They had taken the good gifts of God, the grain, the wine, the oil, and instead of offering them back to Him in gratitude, they had used them to pay the hire of their false gods. They wanted the blessings of the covenant without the covenant Lord. They wanted the stuff, but not the giver of the stuff. This is the very definition of prostitution.
And so God sends Hosea to be a killjoy. He comes to shut the party down. He is the man who walks into the middle of the festival, turns off the music, and announces that the bill has come due. The message of Hosea 9 is a stark and brutal stripping away of all the props that supported Israel's delusion. Their prosperity, their land, their worship, their very national existence, it is all about to be foreclosed upon. God is coming to repossess His own gifts, which they had treated as wages for their whoredom.
This is a hard word, but it is a necessary one. A people that has forgotten how to lament has also forgotten how to truly rejoice. A people that cannot receive a divine rebuke cannot receive a divine blessing. Israel had confused the gladness of the pagans, a fleeting, circumstance-based giddiness, with the deep, covenantal joy that is rooted in God alone. And so God, in His severe mercy, is about to teach them the difference by taking away everything but Himself.
The Text
Do not be glad, O Israel, with rejoicing like the peoples! For you have played the harlot, forsaking your God. You have loved harlots’ earnings on every threshing floor. Threshing floor and wine press will not feed them, And the new wine will deceive them. They will not remain in the land of Yahweh, But Ephraim will return to Egypt, And in Assyria they will eat unclean food. They will not pour out drink offerings of wine to Yahweh; Their sacrifices will not please Him. Their bread will be like mourners’ bread; All who eat of it will be defiled, For their bread will be for themselves alone; It will not enter the house of Yahweh. What will you do on the day of the appointed festival And on the day of the feast of Yahweh? For behold, they will go because of destruction; Egypt will gather them up; Memphis will bury them. Weeds will possess their desirable items of silver; Thorns will be in their tents. The days of punishment have come; The days of recompense have come; Let Israel know this! The prophet is an ignorant fool, The inspired man has madness, Because of the abundance of your iniquity And because your hostility has abounded. Ephraim was a watchman with my God, a prophet; Yet the snare of a bird catcher is in all his ways, And there is only hostility in the house of his God. They have dug deep in corruption As in the days of Gibeah; He will remember their iniquity; He will punish their sins.
(Hosea 9:1-9 LSB)
Joyless Revelry (v. 1-2)
The prophecy begins with a command to cease and desist from their illegitimate celebration.
"Do not be glad, O Israel, with rejoicing like the peoples! For you have played the harlot, forsaking your God. You have loved harlots’ earnings on every threshing floor. Threshing floor and wine press will not feed them, And the new wine will deceive them." (Hosea 9:1-2)
God commands them not to rejoice. This is a shocking thing. Isn't joy a fruit of the Spirit? Yes, but true joy is a covenantal reality. Israel's joy was "like the peoples," meaning it was the pagan joy of a good harvest, a full belly, a successful business deal. It was a carnal, material joy, completely disconnected from the God who provided the bounty. Theirs was the joy of the adulteress who delights in the gifts from her illicit lover, blind to the fact that her own husband paid for them.
The charge is explicit: "you have played the harlot." Covenant unfaithfulness is spiritual prostitution. They loved the "harlots' earnings," the grain from the threshing floor, because they believed it was Baal, the Canaanite storm and fertility god, who gave it to them. They were having harvest festivals in honor of a false god, using God's grain. This is high treason. The threshing floor, a place of God's provision, had become a brothel.
And so the consequence is perfectly fitted to the crime. The very instruments of their idolatrous joy will become instruments of their judgment. "Threshing floor and wine press will not feed them." The new wine will "deceive them." It will fail. God is about to turn off the spigot. The things they trusted in will betray them. This is a fundamental principle of idolatry. Whatever you worship apart from God will eventually turn on you and devour you. You worship your stomach? It will fail you. You worship your wealth? It will be a witness against you. You worship sex? It will make you a slave.
Exile and Defilement (v. 3-4)
The judgment is not just economic; it is geographic and liturgical. It is a total reversal of their redemption story.
"They will not remain in the land of Yahweh, But Ephraim will return to Egypt, And in Assyria they will eat unclean food. They will not pour out drink offerings of wine to Yahweh; Their sacrifices will not please Him. Their bread will be like mourners’ bread; All who eat of it will be defiled..." (Hosea 9:3-4)
The land of Canaan was "Yahweh's land." It was the great wedding gift to His bride, Israel. To be driven from the land was to be divorced. It was the ultimate covenant curse. And where will they go? "Ephraim will return to Egypt." This is a dagger to the heart of their national identity. God brought them out of Egypt with a mighty hand; now, because of their sin, He is sending them back into bondage. Not literally to Egypt in every case, but into a state of Egyptian slavery, this time under the Assyrians. In Assyria, they will be forced to "eat unclean food," stripped of the dietary laws that marked them as a holy people. To be outside the land was to be in a place of defilement.
This defilement extends to their worship. In exile, true worship is impossible. They cannot pour out drink offerings or make sacrifices that please God. Why? Because the only authorized place for sacrifice was the Temple in Jerusalem, which they had already abandoned for their high places. Now, in a foreign land, even the pretense of worship is stripped away. Their bread will be like "mourners' bread," which was ceremonially unclean. Anyone who ate it was defiled. Their food will be for their own survival ("for themselves alone"), not for fellowship with God. It will not enter the house of Yahweh. Their sin has cut them off from the table of the Lord.
Feasts of Famine (v. 5-6)
The prophet then asks a devastating, rhetorical question.
"What will you do on the day of the appointed festival And on the day of the feast of Yahweh? For behold, they will go because of destruction; Egypt will gather them up; Memphis will bury them. Weeds will possess their desirable items of silver; Thorns will be in their tents." (Hosea 9:5-6)
All your life is oriented around these feasts, these parties. What are you going to do when the calendar says it's time for the Passover, but you are a slave in Assyria? What will you do on the Day of Atonement when there is no temple, no priest, and no sacrifice? Your entire identity is about to be erased. The rhythms of grace will be replaced by the drumbeat of judgment.
The future is destruction. "Egypt will gather them up; Memphis will bury them." Memphis was a famous Egyptian necropolis, a city of tombs. This is Hosea's grim poetry. You are going back to Egypt, not for a second exodus, but for a funeral. Your national life is over. And what of the prosperity you loved so much? Your silver treasures will be overgrown with weeds, and your homes will be filled with thorns. The curse of Genesis 3 comes upon them in full force. The land itself will fight against them, erasing the memory of their ever having been there.
The Prophet and the Fool (v. 7-9)
The climax of this section identifies the source of the conflict and pronounces the verdict.
"The days of punishment have come; The days of recompense have come; Let Israel know this! The prophet is an ignorant fool, The inspired man has madness, Because of the abundance of your iniquity And because your hostility has abounded... They have dug deep in corruption As in the days of Gibeah; He will remember their iniquity; He will punish their sins." (Hosea 9:7, 9)
The time for warnings is over. The "days of punishment" are here. And what is Israel's reaction to this news? How do they receive God's messenger? "The prophet is an ignorant fool, the inspired man has madness." This is what the people are saying about Hosea. They are so deep in their sin that when a true word from God finally arrives, it sounds like insanity to them. Their moral compass is so broken that they call the watchman a madman. Paul says the same thing: "the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him" (1 Cor. 2:14).
Why do they say this? Because of the "abundance of your iniquity" and "your hostility has abounded." Their sin has made them hostile to God, and therefore hostile to His truth. Verse 8 is a bit tricky, but the sense is that Ephraim, who was supposed to be a watchman alongside God's true prophet, has instead become a trap, a "snare of a bird catcher." The official, state-sanctioned prophets were telling the people what they wanted to hear, trapping them in their sin. There is "hostility in the house of his God." The very center of their religious life is defined by opposition to the true God.
Finally, Hosea compares their sin to a historical benchmark of depravity: "the days of Gibeah." This refers to the horrific account in Judges 19-21, where the men of Gibeah committed a monstrous act of rape and murder, leading to a brutal civil war that nearly wiped out the tribe of Benjamin. For a prophet to say, "You are as bad as Gibeah," was the ultimate indictment. It was to say that the foundational rot had reached the heart of the nation. And because of this deep corruption, judgment is not just possible, but certain. "He will remember their iniquity; He will punish their sins." God's memory is perfect, and His justice is inescapable.
Conclusion: The Foolishness of the Cross
The world always thinks the prophet of God is a fool. When Noah built a boat in the middle of dry land, his neighbors thought he was a fool. When Jeremiah warned of Babylon's invasion, the establishment threw him in a cistern and called him a traitor. And when the ultimate Prophet came, the Word made flesh, they called Him a blasphemer, a glutton, a drunkard, and a madman, and they nailed Him to a cross.
The cross is the ultimate expression of what the world calls foolishness. "For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God" (1 Cor. 1:18). To the world, it is madness to believe that salvation comes through a crucified criminal, that victory comes through surrender, that life comes through death.
Israel's sin was that they tried to build a kingdom without the cross. They wanted the feasting without the fasting, the crown without the thorns, the resurrection without the crucifixion. They wanted a God who would bless their threshing floors but never challenge their harlotries. And that God does not exist.
The judgment that fell on Israel is a picture of the judgment that all our sins deserve. We too have played the harlot, loving the gifts more than the Giver. We too deserve exile from the presence of God. We too deserve to have our feasts turned to famine and our joy to mourning.
But on the cross, Jesus Christ entered into that exile for us. He became the ultimate exile, cast out from the city, forsaken by His Father. He ate the bread of mourners and drank the cup of God's wrath. He went back to "Egypt" for us, bearing the full curse of our slavery to sin. He endured the ultimate "day of punishment" so that we could be brought into the eternal "feast of Yahweh."
Therefore, our joy is not "like the peoples." It is not based on the harvest or the stock market. Our joy is in the "foolishness" of a God who would rather die for His adulterous bride than let her go. He is the one who finds us on the threshing floor of our sin, pays our debts, and brings us home. And that is why we can rejoice, not with the hollow revelry of the world, but with the deep, unshakable joy of the redeemed.