837 - Les Feldick Bible Study - Lesson 3 part 1 Book 70 - Israel's Glory is Still Ahead of Her - 1

https://lesfeldickbiblestudy.com Through the Bible with Les Feldick LESSON 3 * PART 1 * BOOK 70 ISRAEL’S GLORY IS STILL AHEAD OF HER - 1 Hosea 5:1 – 9:7 Okay, good to see everybody in again this afternoon and a beautiful, beautiful day in Oklahoma. We hope the rest of you out there in the countryside are experiencing the same thing. Again, we always like to welcome our television audience to a simple Bible study. Yet, we don’t want to just stay simple; we want to get into the deeper things. I usually like to cover things that I’m sure you don’t get in your Sunday school quarterlies. But, nevertheless, we don’t want to get beyond what folks can understand and learn to study and use your own Bible at home. We are getting response to that affect, that, oh, they’re enjoying their Bible. So, hopefully the Lord is accomplishing what He wants to accomplish. Again, we have to always thank you for your prayers, your kind letters, and your financial help. After all, we do have to pay the bills. And the Lord has always provided. I don’t have to have anybody make appeals. I don’t have to. The Lord takes care of it every month. So we thank you all from the depths of our heart. All right, now we are going to continue our study in the Book of Hosea. For those of you out in television, you can be turning to Hosea chapter 5. We’re going to start at verse 1. But again, we always like to make a little review update. Hosea, of course, is one of the Minor Prophets, which are minor only because they’re shorter in length than the Major Prophets. They say much the same thing. In fact, you compare the Major Prophets to the Minor Prophets, and it’s almost the same thing. As I was preparing this, I couldn’t help but think, you know, I so often apologize for repeating, and yet people constantly tell me – keep repeating! You know, that’s what the Book does. Do you realize how much it repeats and it repeats and it repeats? Because see, we’ve all got thick skulls. Israel had a thick skull. That’s what it takes before it finally soaks in. So anyway, in these first four chapters that we covered in our last taping time, the theme was that Israel as a whole--the divided Kingdom, remember the two tribes to the South were Judah and Benjamin and the ten tribes to the North, are called Ephraim or Israel-- yet their dilemma was the same. They had all fallen into idolatry. Now, we’ve got to be reminded that when God first brought the Children of Israel into the Promised Land, what did He instruct the Israelites to do with the Canaanites? Now, we think it’s awful. We think it’s cruel. But what did He instruct them? Don’t leave a one of them alive. Put them all to death. Why? Because God knew that if as much as one of them lived, it would be like leaven. We’re going to be looking at that later this afternoon. And little by little Israel would fall to the Canaanite gods and goddesses of paganism. The only way God could guarantee that it wouldn’t happen was not to have any around. Well, that was impossible you might say. So, a lot of the Canaanites stayed with them. And as Israel came up through history, they went deeper and deeper and deeper into idolatry. Even though the Temple was still operating down there at Jerusalem, the priests were just as rotten as the average Jew on the road. So consequently, this is what the prophets are dealing with – Israel’s abject unbelief and idolatry and how God is going to punish them for it. The purposes, of course, filter down and become applicable, I think, to at least three areas even for us today: Nations, Hierarchy of Denominations and Local Churches, and the Individual. Now think of that, as we look at all these things, that all these warnings deal at those levels. First of all for a nation and I’m constantly keeping our own beloved America in the back of my mind as I read this. We are a perfect parallel with the Nation of Israel. Oh, of course, we haven’t got a Temple. We haven’t got the prophets. But nevertheless, we’ve got the Word of God in every home. Our government has been saturated with it. You know, when we were in Washington a few years ago, I knew it from my old high school history, but it still doesn’t sink in like when you see it – that in every monument: the Jefferson Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Memorial -- everything is surrounded with Scripture! That’s what those men rested on; it was the Word of God. What a heritage! Israel was the same way. They came in as the chosen people, the Covenant People. They had all the promises of God. Yet when they began to turn against it, they asked for their own judgment. We’re in the same place as a nation today. We are asking for judgment to come. #LesFeldick #BibleStudy #Bible