Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1140
“Ephraim is joined to idols: let him alone.” Hosea 4:17.
TO what purpose these vast assemblies Sunday after Sunday? Why do you crowd these aisles and galleries till every seat is occupied, and every foot of standing room is filled? Have you, all of you, a zeal to worship? Do you all thirst to hear the Word of the Lord? Ah me! I am beset with fears and misgivings. My heart is troubled for full many of you. Many persons entertain the evil notion that preaching sermons and hearing sermons is a light matter. When the occasion is past, the exhortation closed, the congregations broken up and the Sunday over, they think that all is done and ended. The doors are shut and what they have heard they no longer heed any more than if they had been at the theater, and the curtain had fallen, and the lights were out.
To them the Sunday is but as any other day and the preacher but an orator who helps them to while away an hour. But it is not so. Whether we look for a result from the proclamation of God’s Word or not, you may be sure God looks for it! No man in his senses sows a field without looking for a harvest. No man engages in trade without expecting profit. Oh, Sirs, God is not mocked! He does not send His Word that it may return unto Him void. Neither does He think that it is enough when His servants have been as those who make pleasant music, or sing a sweet song and the audience may repair to the sanctuary as they would go to a theater—content to be pleased and careless about being profited.
Listen, then, to this solemn lesson! For every Sunday that I occupy this place I shall have to give an account before God. My fidelity to my congregation is of such solemn moment that were it not for the infinite mercy of God in Christ Jesus, I feel it had been better for me that I had never been born than to have to render in that account. Oh, the faults of which I am, myself, personally conscious! They fill me with shame, though they are, I fear, but few compared with what God, Himself, beholds in the service I attempt to render!
But, then, you also will have to answer for every sermon you have heard or may yet hear. Dare any of you imagine that an opportunity of hearing the Gospel is given to you that you may tread it under foot? Oh, what would dying men give to hear the Gospel again! What would lost souls in Hell give if they could have the opportunities of Grace again! They are priceless beyond all estimate and, as they are so precious, a strict account will be taken of them! The hearer who went his way and said, “I heard the sermon and I formed a judgment of the preacher’s style,” and flippantly quoted this or that, will find that another view of the service has been taken by Almighty God—and another form of reckoning will be carried out before His Judgment Seat!
Do you suppose that the preaching of the Gospel is no more than the performance of a play? Or shall men come and listen to the Truth of God, as it is in Jesus, preached earnestly to them with less concern than to an orator in Parliament? Are death and judgment, Heaven and Hell, to be looked upon as common themes which awaken nothing but a passing interest? You may judge so if you will—but God’s servants dare not think so, nor does God, Himself, think so.
The text suggests these enquiries. It appears that the Ephraimites, or rather the whole people of Israel, the 10 tribes, had been warned again and again and again—and because they did not turn at the warning, but refused the message of God and continued in their sin—at last God was provoked with them and He said to His servants, “Ephraim is joined to idols: let him alone.” No longer waste your powers on careless minds. On such a rock as that it is vain to plow. The case is become utterly hopeless! Cease your labor. Go somewhere else where your hallowed occupation will be more remunerative, where hearts will be touched and ears will be opened to the Word. “Ephraim is joined to idols: let him alone.”
Fearing lest there may be some in this congregation—no, being persuaded that there are some on the verge of being such, I shall try to speak, first, upon the sin which provoked this punishment. Then I will speak upon the strange punishment. And thirdly, upon such practical reasoning as arises out of the whole subject.
I. WHAT THEN, IS THE SIN WHICH PROVOKES THIS UTTERANCE, “Let that man alone”? The sin appeared to be, in Ephraim’s case, continuance in idolatry. Israel had set up idols. They knew the Lord, but when they separated from the tribe of Judah, Jeroboam, in order to keep them from going up to Jerusalem, set up golden calves. It was not intended that they should worship other gods, but the theory was that they would worship God, the true God, through the representation of an ox, which represented power.
It was a symbol which they conceived to be appropriate and instructive, just as they tell us nowadays, “We do not want people to worship idols, but they are to worship Christ through a representation of a cross, or of a man hanging on a crucifix. This will teach them and assist their devotions. They are not to worship the image, itself, but to worship God through the image. Now, be it never forgotten that this method of devotion is expressly forbidden in the Law and is contrary to one of the Ten Commandments. “You shall not make to yourself any graven image, nor the likeness of anything which is in Heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them nor worship them.”