They sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains, and burn incense upon the hills, under oaks and poplars and elms, because the shadow thereof is good: therefore your daughters shall commit whoredom, and your spouses shall commit adultery.
This chapter is scathing to say the least,
Hosea 4:11-12 (KJV)
Whoredom and wine and new wine take away the heart.
My people ask counsel at their stocks, and their staff declareth unto them: for the spirit of whoredoms hath caused them to err, and they have gone a whoring from under their God.
God doesn't accuse; He knows it to be fact that they are drunken, involved in whoredom, erring, and seeking counsel from others beside Him. There is nothing in this passage to suggest any good of the people. So, when the text says, “They sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains, and burn incense upon the hills, under oaks and poplars and elms, because the shadow thereof is good,” I take this to be negative as well. Various commentaries suggest they like the shadows because it hides their evil deeds. Sin likes darkness. Sinners cover their sins. They have no intention of quitting the sin, but neither are they comfortable being exposed.
I see another application among those who follow a path of worship different from the Bible. There are those who claim to worship God but want to do it in the most comfortable way possible. Not like the Anabaptists, who refused the shelter of Rome under the shadow of the Catholic Church. Not like those faithful believers who were brutally slaughtered because they would not yoke with the Protestants. Not like those who lost their lives because they owned a Bible, rejected infant baptism, and worshiped in secret conventicles.[1]
These today look for places of worship where the music pleases their ears rather than God’s, where the atmosphere seems more like a Saturday night sock-hop than a worship service, where the message, if there is one, is more about themselves than about the Lord, and where sin is minimized, and man’s potential is the focus. The shadow of today’s spiritual whoremongers may look more like a church building than a tree, but it is no less true that they are attracted to it because “the shadow thereof is good.”
#SpiritualWhoredom #FalseWorship #SinfulShadows #TrueWorshipVsFalse #GodlyWorship
Lost in the Shadows: The Deceptive Allure of Comfortable Worship
[1] Early Baptist Churches in England (pre-1600's) were called “conventicles” which means “an illegal place of worship.
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