HAVE I MISLAID GOD HOSEA 8:14

I. Introduction

A. Verse 14 is the final verse in this chapter which contains a message of judgment. Calamity was about to come upon these people.

1. The prophet names five causes for the coming judgment.

a. First transgression and rebellion (1)

b. Second - Set up kings and princes without consulting God (4)

c. Third - they set up an idol calf for worship (5-6)

d. Fourth - their reliance on Assyria rather than God (9)

e. Fifth - they set up altars but used them for sinning (11)

B. Then in verse 14 which is our text this morning, God summarizes the whole situation.

II. What Is the Malady? (14) Israel has Forgotten His Maker

A. Having made this statement he describes the resultant activity - building palaces and fortified cities.

1. When you lose the consciousness of God as your Maker, you become insecure and seek your security in material things.

2. It's tragic when a person forgets God.

B. Does this mean that they no longer had an intellectual awareness of God? I don't think so!

1. People do not forget God intellectually. So in that sense they cannot forget God.

2. What then is the idea of forgetting God? In order to understand we must go to the Hebrew word SHAKAKH

C. Hebrew word quite simply means to mislay.

1. Israel has mislaid His Maker.

2. When you mislay something - you haven't forgotten it, but you have mislaid it. We obviously didn't consider it

really important or we don't use it very often hence our forgetfulness.

3. To mislay God means we didn't really consider Him very important or we spent so little time with Him, our

awareness was severely diminished.

III. To Understand This Idea Better, We must turn to the writings of Moses and see how he used this Hebrew word.

A. In Deut. we have Moses' farewell address to the nation of Israel.

1. In that address several times, he warns them of one grave peril. What is that peril? Forgetting God.

2. Whenever he warned them of this, - he used this same word.

B. Deut. 4:9 gives us a definition of what it means to forget God.

1. It is the personal neglect of the things that are intellectually believed and the failure to make them the central

things of life.

2. It is the failure to perpetuate what we believe to our children.

C. Deut. 6:10 - In other words, when you are blessed and become prosperous, beware that you don't mislay God.

1. There is a greater danger when we are prosperous to depart form God than when we are in poverty.

2. In poverty, we tend to call upon the Lord when we prosper we tend to become self sufficient.

D. Again in Deut. 8:11, 17

1. Once again we have God mislaid - the evidence is in the fact of their neglect of His commandments.

2. Also their pride in their own accomplishments. It wasn't God's blessing but their own power and ability that

produced the wealth.

F. These are but a few scattered sentences from the farewell discourse of Moses.

1. But it does reveal the sense of danger that Moses had for these people.

2. He looked down the years and saw the entire nation in peril of forgetting God.

3. Since they cannot intellectually forget God, they could put Him out of circulation, in effect, mislay Him.

IV. What is the Process? How can We Mislay God?

A. We give mental assent to His existence without seeing to it that our conduct corresponds with our belief.

1. Without spiritual action energizing mental assent, we have spiritual dullness - apathy.

2. God intellectually accepted without response in obedience will produce a fading consciousness of His reality.

3. God is relegated to church on Sunday, but is left there until we get back next Sunday.

B. Is that is your lifestyle - then you have mislaid God.

1. That is not Christian and it is not acceptable.

2. God is lost to us as an active power . He has no real touch upon our lives.

3. He is sort of a nice fable - a children's fairy tale.

VI. What Happens Next?

A. King James says they began building temples Revised Version says they were building palaces. Which is right?

1. They are both right and yet both wrong.

2. The Hebrew means spacious buildings. They were probably building temples and palaces. Idea is spaciousness.

3. The passion of the nation came to be the desire to build spacious buildings.

4. The passion for bigness is a symptom of our capacity for God.

B. When we as humans mislay God then we try to build big things without God.

1. Mr. Dooley, a satirist wrote an article on machinery many years ago.

2. In the article he said; we are all running around and building, putting up things we call skyscrapers.

3. Called that by everyone except the sky, we visit them go up to the top and still have to look up into the sky.

4. We build skyscraper but we are still buried by hand.

5, What acid satire in that statement.

C. Then the prophet says; they build fortified cities.

1. If the building of great buildings signifies the quest for a spaciousness and bigness.

2. Then the building of fortified cities signifies our quest for security. That is our desire to dwell in safety.

D. Security and Safety Against What?

1. The lack of God and the things that result from it.

2. We have mislaid God so we have built our great cities and our weapons of war.

3. But all of our weapons never give us a sense of security against the outbreak of war.

4. We feel that insecurity at this moment.

B. All of our national problems could be solved if people who had mislaid God would come back to the point of their departure and begin to walk with Him again.

1. Would I steal from you if I am in fellowship with God.

2. Would I curse my fellow human.

3. Would I physically harm anyone whom God loves if I am rightfully related to God.

4. It's really very simple; the difficulty comes in making the choice and determining to get in line with God.