Dennis Tuuri

Sermon text today is found in Hosea chapter 6, verses 1-3, and our title is “Pressing On to Know the Lord.” Hosea 6:1-3. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Let me just say that this text is unusual in its context. All the stuff around these three verses are divine speeches of Yahweh, mostly of a stern and angry nature. And this is different. This is not a speech by Yahweh. This is rather a song. And some have called it a penitential psalm song.

We began Lent by reciting and singing the seven penitential psalms. And this is a penitential song much like that. And it seems very appropriate to preach on it in the context of our series of messages on Lent and returning to the Lord.

So Hosea 6:1-3: “Come, let us return to the Lord; for He has torn us, that He may heal us. He has struck us down and He will bind us up. He will revive us after two days. On the third day, He will raise us up that we may live before Him. Let us know. Let us press on to know the Lord. His going out is sure as the dawn. He will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth.”

Let’s pray. Almighty God, we thank you for your loyalty to your covenant. We thank you for your faithfulness. We thank you that this psalm urges us to particular actions based upon the sureness of your actions of love and fidelity to your covenant, to your people. Thank you, Father, for bringing us here together today to both strike us and to heal us that we might live in your presence. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

Loyalty. Would you say you’re a loyal person? What does it mean to you? And if you are loyal, are you loyal to a particular thing, particular group, particular aspect in your life? Loyalty, I think, is from one perspective in the book of Hosea, the deal. It’s the main thing. It’s an interesting word. The etymology of it goes back through the French to the Latin to a word that just meant legal. So loyalty is lawful. We could say it’s fidelity to a law, and specifically it had original reference primarily to subjects of a king and his law. So we have kind of developed it out and put it in different ways, but loyalty is a very important character attribute of the Christian man and woman, and we’ll see in a little while that probably is the main thing. And so it’s good to evaluate ourselves on our loyalty.

This text will bring us to that particular focal point. Now, what we’re doing is we’re continuing on. This is the fourth sermon in a series of sermons returning to the Lord. Our key verse on your handout today, and above the entrance in the foyer, we used from Isaiah: “And the Lord will strike Egypt. He will strike and heal it. They will return to the Lord and He will be entreated by them and heal them.”

And so we have this representation of being stricken, and maybe even some associations with Egypt because of the reeds, etc. And this has been the way to give you a visual representation and reminder of the Lord striking Egypt. But He strikes it so that she will turn and He will then have graciousness and mercy on Egypt and heal it. So even Egypt is the work of God’s hands. Isaiah goes on to say, and so very relevant to us as well.

As we began Lent, we had the little what some people call sin stones, those little red rocks. And the idea was to think of some particular sin or two or three that you really want to try to work on this Lenten season and get rid of in the power of the Holy Spirit. I would encourage you to remember what that rock was, if it’s not still in your pocket. If it is, what does it represent? What sin are you trying to break with? How successful have you been? And are you continuing to entreat the Lord to help you break off with particular sins? And the end result of that is healing. Now, the message we gave was essentially a message of return by repenting, and the end result of that is to be healed. We all want to be well and healthy and healed, and the way to do that is to return to God through repentance, and we’ll be healed.

In our second message, we talked about returning by thanking God for our sufferings. One of the biggest ways we sin is in the midst of our sufferings, which are fairly ever-present in various forms. We usually grumble and whine. That’s what our human, fallen human nature is like. And God would have us to be thankful in sufferings. And so that’s one very specific aspect of sin that we’re trying to get us all to focus on during Lent: to meditate on our sufferings and then give God thanks in the context of them.

Our third sermon from 2 Chronicles 30 was to return in humility to joy. And this is Hezekiah’s great Passover feast. And there the central message was we have to be humble, not stiff-necked. We’re supposed to break with the attitude of the fathers. We’re supposed to yield. The very center of the text is to go in and yield and enter and serve. Those are the three verbs at the very middle of 2 Chronicles 30: yield, enter, serve.

We’re to yield, we’re to enter in, and we’re to serve. Now, specifically, that’s talking about the Passover celebration. They were all commanded to, invited to, commanded to, just like the Lord Jesus sends out the gospel invitation, which is also a command to come and be at peace with Him. And that’s how that thing culminated: with the peace offerings, but the middle three verbs—yield, enter, serve.

I remember long time ago I was raised. I was baptized when I was six. I was a believer. Mom tells me I was quite devout. All I remember is I just sort of took off in the wrong direction around high school and lived like a total pagan for I don’t know, several years—five or six years. And I remember here in Oregon coming up here. We were going to, or I managed a little rock band, and we were going to move to Oregon, rent a big farm, and live on a farm and smoke a lot of marijuana and get the music together and be a real big hit. And we ended up in a little tract home out in Tiger—not quite what we were looking for.

And everywhere I’d go, people were witnessing to me about Jesus. I’d go hitchhiking, and the first thing the guy would start talking about is Jesus. And I had to get away from, you know, this Christian influence where all the band members were gathered because they were all getting converted is what was going on. The guitarist became a Christian. The keyboardist recommitted his life. My brother recommitted his life. I just wanted out. I went to look at a place to live, and the first thing the guy asked me was if I was a Christian.

And I remember I will always remember looking up. It was nighttime, and I saw all the stars up there, and I thought, you know, why am I swimming against this tide? What am I doing this for? And I felt like all I’ve been doing for four or five years is swimming against a raging river going nowhere, going down probably. And I sunk my head down and I told him, “Yes, I’m a Christian.”

Now, that’s I think what we’re supposed to do at the beginning of that process in 2 Chronicles 30: yield. I yielded. God broke my stiff neck. I humbled myself, or He did it for me, through the grace of His Holy Spirit and all those providences that happened. Yielding is the first thing. Now from there I got—I started entering into the worship service just like they were called to do there. I started doing that. I started to serve Christ.

The yield is that first verb there in the middle of 2 Chronicles 30, and it’s so important. You know, our kids grow up, and maybe they’ve never gotten to that place of yielding in the very center of their hearts to the Lord Jesus Christ. Frequently that happens in covenant homes. That happens as kind of a secondary blessing almost. Kids think they became a Christian. I thought I became a Christian that night. Looking back, I know what it was: it was recommitment, just like it would be for these people that Hezekiah’s message went out to.

They were all in the covenant, but he called them to yield from their individualistic ways to enter back into the praise and worship of Yahweh and to serve him. And then to go forth from their service, the very next chapter—I mentioned this last week, but I think it’s a good thing to remember: you know, we don’t come here because this is everything. This is preparation for the rest of the week.

In 2 Chronicles 30, they had yielded hearts. Some did, some didn’t. Some mocked and didn’t get blessed. They were cursed. But those that had yielded hearts entered into that joyous celebration. They returned and found joy and delight and gladness. And as a result of that, the very next chapter says they returned again. Now they returned to their homes, to their cities, and there they began to set up reforms. And the first reform that’s mentioned is tithing.

Oh, well, there’s the church and my money again. No, it’s—that’s the point. Tithing is the part for the whole. By way of symbol, when God tells us that with yielded, obedient hearts that have praised God, been brought to joy and worship, that they then go to their towns and it mentions the tithe—what He’s talking about is their whole life. You tithe on the produce from your work. It means the blessing of God on your work.

They were serving God liturgically so that they could then serve Him in their workplaces. And the sign of that service that they were doing it in a yielded, submissive way for Yahweh is paying Him the tenth and restoring the tithe because they knew they needed instruction. They knew it was the right thing to do to pay the king’s tax. So we talked about that, and that’s important.

It’s important that Lent has the result, at the end of the season, of making us servants once more—humble, yielded, full servants of Yahweh. And so that’s what we talked about last week.

And this week we’re going to talk about returning to resurrection life—second day, third day stuff. Boy, that’s right there, man. We’re on top of that when you heard it read, didn’t you? I hope you did.

Returning to resurrection life by making the knowledge of the Lord and His covenant our priority. The knowledge of the Lord and His covenant our priority.

Now, this is a prophetic book, and I believe that the prophets were not primarily social reformers. Their big message was not, “Well, it’ll be okay if you repent and everything will be okay. You won’t go into captivity.” I don’t think so. There was some of that. But the primary message of the prophets is a message of death to Israel. It’s a death proclamation. To the north, you’re going into captivity to Assyria. To the south, you’re going into captivity to Babylon. You’re dead. But additionally, in the midst of all this death stuff, there are pronouncements of resurrection life.

And this little three-verse song we just read is in the context of God destroying His people. But then there’s these glimmers in the midst of these prophetic announcements of death. Too late. The blows come. You’re going down. In the midst of that, there is still this wonderful gospel preached that the Lord God has stricken you to the purpose of healing you and reviving you. And that is surely going to happen.

So this twofold message of the prophets: Israel must die, Judah must die. And then Judah will be resurrected. This is given to us. This Judah is resurrected in these three verses in the midst—in the context of death. And so we have this song.

Let’s look at the text. If you have your handouts, it’s right there at the top. If not, just open your Bible up. Three verses. I just want to talk about it a little bit and then we’ll start filling in the blanks on the outline.

So I’ve kind of set it up the way I sort of see it. There’s this statement: “Come, let us return to the Lord.” And then there are three statements about God, and then there’s a concluding remark that kind of matches the first remark. “So that we may live before Him” is the—it links up with “Come, let us return to the Lord.” We’re returning to the Lord not momentarily but so that we might live before Him, that we might live in His presence, that we might be with Him always.

So that’s kind of the bookends of those middle three things. The middle three things: He has torn us. Now the word tear there—strong, powerful, ripping, rending apart, killing sort of word, not a little bit of tear. He has ripped us apart that He may heal us. Now, see, that’s better than just saying He has torn us apart and He will heal. That’s going to come next. That’s a true statement. But what this wonderful gospel message is: the sword of the Spirit that cuts us up is also the sword that brings us back together.

Worship, the preaching of God’s word cuts us, but it also heals us. And those providential acts of God in history rend His people horribly. It’s horribly violent—the imagery of God throughout Hosea, what He does to His people. But it’s to the end that His people may be healed. Isn’t that great? I mean, that’s a really good thing. “He has torn us that He may heal us. He has struck us down.” And again, that means to smite, basically to kill.

“He has struck us down and He will bind us up.” So you have these two-fold messages of what He’s going to do: that His judgment is not the end. His judgment is to a much better end that we might be healed and bound up. And then the third statement about what He’s doing: “He will revive us after two days. On the third day, He will raise us up.”

Now, most of your translations will say that differently. They’ll say, “He will revive us after two days, He will raise us up on the third day,” or something like that. But literally, the second and third days are placed next to each other in the Hebrew text. Okay? And we’re familiar with that. That’s important to us. That’s why I changed this particular translation a little bit. “He’ll revive us. Second day, third day, raise us up.” So our center of attention is to the second and third days.

And of course, immediately this side of the cross, given the predictions that Paul and others made, that on the third day—the writings tell us, Paul says that on the third day He had to be raised up. Well, here’s one of those writings. Ultimately, of course, God’s Israel—His true Israel—is the Lord Jesus Christ. So while he’s talking about them nationally, they’ll be resurrected. Really, the death and resurrection of Israel is a symbol of the coming, real work to be done through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And so Jesus will be raised up on the third day, revived on the second day. It’s interesting to think about being revived on the second day, what that looked like, but I’m not going to talk about that today. But clearly this links us to the clear gospel message of the resurrection of the Savior on the third day. “He’ll raise us up.” And again, the purpose: “that we may live before Him.”

And then there’s a second section of lines here. “Let us know. Let us press on to know the Lord.” Here the structure is a little different. The first structure was return to the Lord so that we can live in His presence, and something in between. Here we got the double statement given first, and then the things that follow it are linked together.

“Let us know. Let us press on to know the Lord.” So double statement—what are we doing? We’re trying to know the Lord and to do that we press on to know the Lord. And if we wanted to look at it chiastically, we have “Let us know, let us press on to know the Lord.” And so the emphasis is on the pressing on at the center of that verse.

And then another pure statement about God again in His blessings to us: “His going out is sure as the dawn.” That’s a daily reference, right? Every morning the dawn. “His going out is as sure as the dawn.” So you know this is absolutely sure these blessings that will come to us. “He will come to us as the showers, as the spring rains that water the earth.” So, you know, clearly refreshment, life comes forth as a result of the spring rains. April showers bring May flowers, right? So He’s going to bring life back. This resurrection life imagery is still going on.

And now the imagery being used is water. That God is this wonderful water to His people. And He’s water that’s regular. Okay, the water comes in the spring. So, you know, we got these—the regularity of the rains that are happening, the spring rains that water the earth. There’s a regularity to it. And the same thing with the dawn. There’s a regularity. That’s every morning. There’s a seasonality to the regularity of God’s blessings that are being used by way of illustration to us to assure us that as we turn and press on to know Him, He’s got great things in mind for us.

He’s got great things for us. And we need to hear that if we’re trying to return to the Lord, repent from specific sins, repent from general sins, trying to increase our knowledge of God. God gives us tremendous motivation in every one of these texts we’re looking at. And here the motivation is to know the Lord Himself.

Abraham said that my exceeding great reward—you know, is Yahweh. Or Yahweh told Abraham rather: “Your exceeding great reward is Me.” You know, we think of all the blessings, all the things He gives us, but ultimately it’s Him. Any parent who has a child who’s grown up much at all knows that ultimately, yeah, they want things, but ultimately what they want is the presence of the parent. So easy to forget that because they kind of hide it up in the teen years. They don’t want to admit it. But you know, a wise parent knows that the most important thing for their child to get them ready for adult life is the presence of the parent.

And that’s what this is. The great blessing is the presence of the parent. Okay. So, that’s just going over the text.

Now, I want to put it in its context in the book of Hosea and make just a few comments. And as I said, I’ve left blanks on your outline. You can fill them in. And the first blank I want you to fill in is “need.” The need for repentance—the nature of God and man. So we need to repent. We need to repent because God is who He is and we are who we are.

God is—I’ve got in your outlines: God the moth, God the rust, God the lion, and God the absent. Well, Hosea 5, if you look in your scriptures at verse 12, God says—and these are the verses that lead up to this wonderful penitential song in 6:1-3. What’s immediately preceded it are these verses:

“Therefore, I will be to Ephraim like a moth and to the house of Judah like rottenness. When Ephraim saw his sickness and Judah saw his wound, then Ephraim went to Assyria and sent to King Jareb. Yet he cannot cure you nor heal you of your wound. For I will be like a lion to Ephraim and like a young lion to the house of Judah. I, even I, will tear them and go away. I will take them away and no one shall rescue. I will return again to my place till they acknowledge their offense. Then they will seek my face. In their affliction they will earnestly seek Me.”

And that’s the immediate verses and context for our psalm song we just looked at. “They’ll earnestly seek Me. They will press on to know Me,” after these judgments happen. But the judgments are due to the nature of God.

First, God is like moth. Now, this word is a tough word to translate. “I’ll be to Ephraim like a moth.” Some people actually—I saw a translation this week, a good translator who said it was more like pus. “I’ll be like pus and I will be like infection.” The idea is that God is a devouring kind of thing to you and it’s bad. It’s real bad. And then after that it says you know that He will be like a lion that rips you apart. Okay. And then it says that the final culmination of His cursings against you and His judgments against you is absence of presence.

If what we want ultimately—even though we may not know it—is to live in the presence of God, the worst thing He can do is leave. Better to have Him there striking us than for Him to leave. Sounds counterintuitive, but that’s what He does. He withdraws presence. I do believe that at certain points in parenting, this is applicable—to withdraw presence from a child. This is what God does.

Now, this phrase about moth and rottedness, I think this may be what our Savior picks up on in the Gospels. In Matthew 6:19: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal.” And He says it again in another text in the Gospel. So, you know, when we read that text in the New Testament, I think it’s a reference back to this moth and rust, moth and corruption or rusting away thing.

When we don’t want to live in the presence of God, when all we want are earthly blessings not related to our Father in Heaven, then God Himself is moth to us and rust to us and all that we have will be eaten up by Him. The nature of God is to punish sin. The nature of God is to punish sin.

And so because of that, there is a need for repentance. The nature of God and the nature of man is what yields this as well. We just read that when God’s judgments come to them, the nature of fallen man, the nature of rebellious man, is not to look for God for healing, but to go someplace else, to go to Assyria to help. And this was the big thing going on in this particular period of time: alliances with foreign nations to fight off other foreign nations.

So they were always thinking real politic instead of biblical politic. You know, real politic is the idea that you make strategic alliances in the world and you keep the thing balanced and you have what we’ve had in the United States for the last 50, 60 years. It just blows up a few years later and this dictator you’re propped up and that one you’ve propped up and you kind of make the board all even and then it goes bump again and you don’t know what’s going on.

That’s man’s efforts when he looks to something—his own political wisdom—rather than God for salvation. And we do the same thing. We have problems in our lives. We try to fix them without direct reference to God. So the nature of man is to look elsewhere for help. And because of that, we need to repent of that specifically.

Just before verse 12 in Hosea 5, we read verse 11: “Ephraim is oppressed and broken in judgment because he willingly walked by human precepts.” This is funny. When I was doing my study for this, Flynn had just come into my office and he was talking about some psalm. He says, “Well, Psalm it goes this, this, and then blah blah.” He said, not remembering the specific words, right? Blah blah. And so then he walks—I said, “Okay.” So he goes back to his office and I immediately then turned to this text in my Word Bible commentary text and they translate this that “he willingly walked by blah,” and then in the footnote it says the particular Hebrew word is sort of like our blah blah. It was funny, so I thought I got to mention that. It seems like that’s important to mention, and what it is: human precept is one translation of what otherwise could be translated blah blah, because it’s about the same.

If we walk according to human wisdom, human precepts, human laws, and try to get out of the tight jams we’re in by using our wisdom, our worldly wisdom, right, and human precepts, then it’s a nothingness, right? Our nature is to turn to things that appear to have some ability to help us, but in reality are just blah blah. It’s all it is.

Next time you do it—this week you try to figure out a way out of something by yourself without appeal to the Lord, His word, His people—remind yourself all you’re doing is turning to blah blah blah. That’s what it is.

So the nature of mankind—the nature of mankind—is also involved in specific sins. After this text in Hosea 6:10, we read: “I have seen a horrible thing in the house of Israel. There is the harlotry of Ephraim. Israel is defiled.” So the nature of man, and throughout Hosea, sexual sin particularly is a big emphasis. And so the nature of men, also—when he moves away from God, particularly man, men now, not women, but men particularly—they engage in sexual sins. It’s horrific.

This week I found out so many things that I really didn’t want to know about: various, you know, a pastor back in Iowa, a good solid guy supposedly, and you know, he’s now been charged with three counts of forcible rape and basement counseling women, women. You know, it’s just horrific what men do to women in our culture. And I don’t know if it’s always been like this, but it’s horrific. And you know, in God’s eyes it’s just filthy. It’s just filthiness.

Sexual sin. God would have us—if you haven’t done it yet, man, and you have any kind of propensity this way—He’d have you pick up one of those sin stones as a reminder to break with filthiness in your homes, in your private offices, with your computers. It’s filth in God’s sight. He despises it. It breaks down everything. Breaks down the nature of the family. And whether you think you, you know, will end up being charged or not—and if you’ll get into that kind of sin, well, you know, there’s a road that gets you there. And you better break off from that road today. Today.

May the Lord God grant that at Reformation Covenant we would have families that are solidly built without the kind of filthiness and wickedness that so often seems to penetrate the Christian church. There was an article this couple of weeks ago about the Catholic sex abuse cases and the author was saying, “Well, you know, it looks worse than it is because in Protestantism, you know, every church is individual, so they don’t have huge numbers,” and you know, there’s a lot of truth to that. Sexual abuse is always one-off, but I mean, how often do you turn on the radio and find out that this youth worker or that soccer coach or this guy over here? I mean, it’s really become quite horrific and we just need to stop it.

We have to stop it. So, the nature of man—whether it’s the specific sins that we’re prone to that have been described in Hosea 6, or our general nature to turn to our own wisdom and counsel and to turn to sources other than God, to the Assyrians, for the answer to our problems—the nature of man, mixed with the nature of God who hates this stuff and will be a moth or pus or infection, a destroyer, a lion who rips you to shreds—that’s the nature of God. Okay? That’s what He does to sin.

Those two things combined tell us we have a real need for repentance. We have a real need for repentance.

So we have a need for repentance. And the next point is there is a goal to this repentance. What’s the endgame? What’s the exit strategy? Right? Where are we going with this repenting? The goal of repentance, this text tells us, is to know the Lord and to live in His presence. That’s what it says here. “Come, let us return to the Lord. Why? That we may live before Him. Let us know Him and press on to know the Lord.”

That’s the end goal. The goal isn’t that we know God to some other end, you know? That’s not the deal. The deal is the knowledge of God and relationship with God is everything, and all the blessings to the world and to our lives and to the nation and to our culture come from the goal of repenting, which is to know Christ, to know God, to know God the Father through Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit to know God.

What does it mean to know God? You know, this is kind of an interesting word. This is a word that is prominent in our text. It’s also prominent throughout the book of Hosea, this knowledge of God, and it can mean a lot of different things. There are verses that talk about how God knows man. So He understands him. He completely is aware of who man is. Adam and Eve ate from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge—same basic word—knowing good and evil. There are verses in the Bible that talk about men knowing how to sail, knowing how to play a musical instrument, knowing how to hunt. So there’s particular skills you can have—a scientific knowledge of, so to speak.

But of course it’s not restricted to that. Proverbs 14 is another verse. It says that he gives prudence to the simple, to the young man knowledge and discretion. So to get this knowing of God in Proverbs, He gives us a whole series of proverbs to teach us about God. In Deuteronomy 34 and Exodus 33, God says that he knows Moses by name and he knows Moses face to face. So the relationship between Moses and Yahweh is a close relationship that really sets us up for what we’re supposed to be like.

It sets us up for the knowledge that occurs between the Son and the Father. And we want to enter that as we come into union with the Lord Jesus Christ. So to know things—to know—can also mean to know: “Adam knows his wife Eve.” Same thing there—that it means a knowledge of somebody that isn’t just intellectual. It means to have intimate relationships with one’s wife or one’s husband. And this is knowing as well.

So there’s a comprehensiveness to the term that goes beyond intellectual attainment. It includes the ideas of wisdom. It includes the ideas of, you know, a fuller understanding of somebody that we could say is involved emotionally, psychologically, as well as intellectually. So there’s a comprehensiveness to this word “know.” It’s an interesting verse.

What is not knowing God? Well, in 1 Samuel 2:12: “Now the sons of Eli were corrupt. They did not know the Lord.” So if you don’t know the Lord, it’s related in this case to the corruptness of the sons of Eli. By the way, again, sexual sin of a abusive nature with women that they had control over in terms of the job function being performed. So the sons of Eli are corrupt. They don’t know the Lord.

Samuel didn’t know the Lord for a while. In verse 7 of 1 Samuel 3: “Now Samuel did not yet know the Lord, nor was the word of the Lord yet revealed to him.” Now this is when Samuel is a young boy left with Eli right at the tabernacle. And so that’s what’s going on. But Samuel as a young boy does not yet—not yet—know the Lord.

Now I think that’s an interesting text and worth just a comment. As our children grow up, they know the Lord in one sense, right? They know of Him intellectually. They know of Him, you know, in terms of the liturgy. They know that He’s the one responsible for everything. But there’s a sense in which there is a quickening of that knowledge, we could say, as they move into their older years as children.

Samuel did not yet know the Lord. How can that be? He was raised by godly parents. They must have taught him things. I’m sure they did, but he didn’t know the Lord yet. So there is something to the fact that our children mature. We all mature in our knowledge of the Lord. But in this case, he just didn’t know the Lord yet.

So there is a time at which our children come to a fuller knowledge of the Lord.

In Exodus 10, the knowledge of the Lord comes from His actions. We’re supposed to teach our children His actions of the Exodus. It says, so that they may know that the Lord is your God. When God moves to punish people that are after His people, the end result is that they, His people, might know Him. And in Ezekiel chapter 6, verse 7, the same thing is true when God moves against Israel: “The slain shall fall in your midst, and you shall know that I am the Lord.”

The knowledge of the Lord is also related then to His judgments in history against His people when they break covenant with Him. So a knowledge of the Lord—if that’s the goal—what is it all about? It doesn’t just mean some sort of, you know, mystical relationship with the Father. It means some particular things. There’s an intellectual component to it. There’s a knowledge of His word. Of course, He reveals Himself by His word, but he also reveals Himself by His actions in history. And those actions are to be interpreted covenantally.

And when we understand the covenant and God’s fidelity to the covenant, our knowledge of the Lord grows. It becomes larger and larger.

Now, interesting verse in Jeremiah 22: “Shall you reign because your enemies, because you rather enclose yourself in cedar? Did not your fathers eat and drink and do justice and righteousness? Then it was well with him. He judged the cause of the poor and needy. Then it was well. Was not this knowing Me, says the Lord? Yet your eyes and your heart are for nothing but your covetousness, for shedding innocent blood and practicing oppression and violence.”

So God says here that to know Him is to do these things that the fathers did. They did justice and righteousness. They judged the cause of the poor and the needy. “Isn’t this knowing Me?” He says. To know God is to walk in conformity to the covenant arrangement that He’s brought us into. To know God is to know Him covenantally. And the covenant describes for us His actions. The world is interpreted on the relationship of that covenant. And we’re supposed—we are bound—to do particular things in that covenant as well, to emulate His rule on the earth. And when we do that, we know Him. We know Him when we’re like Him. When we image Him in our actions, in our families, in our church, and in our culture, then we know God. That’s what God says.

So there is a knowledge of God. Sin—it gets in the way of knowing God. Another consequence of knowing is to infer knowledge about him. You can’t know God. You in—you lose the ability to distinguish who He is because of your sins. Sins blind us. So to put off sins is an essential step to the end goal, which is to know the Lord.

Now the next thing is there’s an ongoing action. There’s an ongoing action of repentance, and that ongoing action is to press on to know the Lord. The ongoing action is the word you need to fill in on number three on your handouts: “pressing on.” The ongoing action is pressing on to know the Lord. So we know the goal, but then there’s an action required to obtain that goal, and that’s to press on. To press on, to move ahead. This word can be used about pursuing, enemies pursuing us. They’re pressing on. They’re running after us, trying to kill us. It can talk about God pursuing people as well.

A few verses: perhaps with an overflowing flood He will make an utter end of his place, and darkness will pursue His enemies. Same word. So pursue—in other words, to press on—is not a kind of a soft word. It’s a very active, very energetic, very hard word of moving on very deliberately with all kinds of energy. It’s like being hounded, right? We’re to hound on, so to speak, like a bloodhound toward a knowledge of the Lord. So this is what God does and this is what we’re called to do as well.

In Psalm 23, we read: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” That word “follow” is the same word “pursue.” And so follow probably is not a real good translation. A better translation might be: “Only goodness and mercy shall pursue me and I’ll dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” God’s blessings are said to overtake us, pursue us, just as the curses overtake and pursue us when we’re disobedient.

Okay? So there’s an intensity to pursuing God that I want us to recognize here. And I want you to ask yourself: what is your level of intensity as you pursue a knowledge of the Lord?

Now, now you know, think about it, analyze yourself. This text reminds us of the nature of God, the nature of man, the need to come to repentance. The goal is knowing Him. Are you taking the action—the required action—to make that a reality in your life? And the required action is pressing on. Are you pursuing a knowledge of the Lord?

Now, part of that’s pursuing a knowledge of the Scripture. That’s part of it. In fact, in Hosea chapter 14, He says, “Take words with you. Return to the Lord. Say to him, ‘Take away all iniquity.’” He wants us praying to Him. And earlier in the text, it said that His words were actually how He—what He used to strike against us as well.

So words are real important in Hosea. God’s words come against us, and we need to press on through words, but we also need to press on with actions. Are you pressing on? Are you pursuing a knowledge of God? Are you pursuing a knowledge of His Scriptures? Are you pursuing relationship with His people? Because that’s where we find the knowledge of God as well. And then, are you pursuing Him behind all of that? Pursuing a knowledge of the Lord.

All week long, I’ve been singing a Bob Dylan song to myself from his album many years ago. He had a song called “Pressing On.” “I’m pressing on. I’m pressing on. I’m pressing on to the higher calling of my Lord.”

Second verse: “Shake the dust off of your feet. Don’t look back. Nothing can hold you down. Nothing that you lack. Temptation’s not an easy thing. Adam given the devil reign because he sinned. I got no choice. It runs in my vein. That’s why I’m pressing on.”

He understands his fallen nature. He understands what the scriptures teach about it, at least whether he still applies it to himself or not. Disobedience to God and rebellion runs in our veins, so to speak. It is the old man. And because of that, we need to struggle hard to press on to the knowledge of the Lord.

Nothing the old man likes better than to become religious. If it’s just a matter of religiosity and we got some kind of morality going on and we don’t do really bad things, but we don’t really have an ongoing relationship with Christ or with the Father through Christ—the scriptures say that to reach the goal is to know God, and to do that we have to press on, to press on, to press on.

So that’s the ongoing action.

The means of repentance is the primacy of covenant loyalty. And this is where I began talking about loyalty. You know, the scriptures tell us in Hosea—you know, it’s quoted in the New Testament as well—in Hosea chapter 6: “I desire mercy and not sacrifice and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.”

So now we have that parallel to the knowledge of God that we’re supposed to press on. We’re to have mercy instead of sacrifice. What’s mercy? Well, it’s this Hebrew word we’ve talked about a lot over the years, and it really primarily means covenant loyalty. Yes, it has the aspect of mercy to it and helping people. But the basic idea of it is covenant loyalty. Loyalty to God’s covenant. He is loyal to us. He brings the sun up. He makes the seasons go around. He is covenantally faithful. And what God says is in parallel to knowing Him is to be covenantally faithful, to be loyal to the covenant and to the God of that covenant.

And it’s disloyalty to that covenant that gets them into trouble. Listen to this analysis in Isaiah 4 of what happened that led to all this action:

“Hear the word of the Lord you children of Israel, for the Lord brings a charge, a controversy, against the inhabitants of the land. There is no truth or mercy or knowledge of God in the land. By swearing and lying, killing and stealing and committing adultery they break all resistance with bloodshed upon bloodshed. Therefore the land will mourn. Everyone who dwells there will waste away with the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. Even the fish of the sea will be taken away.”

Why? He gives specific violations of the Ten Commandments. You know, he quotes the commandment against false swearing—that’s third commandment. Lying, ninth commandment. Killing, sixth commandment. Stealing is the eighth commandment. And committing adultery, the seventh commandment. He quotes the covenant law. They’re guilty of covenant violations. And when we’re guilty of covenant, violating the covenant and not holding fast to it, not being loyal to it, then you see, we’ve denied the knowledge of God. We know Him no more.

The whole text here really is about covenant loyalty. God’s covenant loyalty—there’s no doubt about it—but that He’s stricken His people so that He might heal them. There’s no doubt but that He will bind up those whom He’s torn apart. There is no doubt that just as He brought waters of damnation earlier in the book of Hosea, now He brings the gentle waters to His people to refresh them. There is no doubt that to His people, to His chosen one, and all those in faith, in union with Him through faith, there is no doubt that He’ll be raised up on the third day.

There’s no doubt to that because God is covenantally faithful. The question is, will we hear the call to respond to this wonderful gospel of resurrection life through the covenantal faithfulness of God and commit ourselves afresh to loyalty to the God of the covenant and to seeing Him as the object of our lives, to know Him, and therefore commit to press on, to press on?

“I’m pressing on to the higher calling of the Lord.”

That’s the question before us this morning. We have great blessing from God described to us. God says that the primary thing for us is covenant loyalty. This is again, later in the text, He tells Ephraim: “What shall I do to you, O Judah? What shall I do for your faithfulness, your loyalty? Your loyalty is like a morning cloud and like the early dew it goes away. Therefore I’ve hewn you by the prophets. I have slain them by the words of my mouth.”

So He says, “Take words, come back.” And by implication, what he’s saying is, “Be loyal to this covenant. Make it the only thing that governs your life as you walk into it this week. Make the knowledge of God the first thing. May nothing else in your life be seen apart from a desire to press on to know the Lord Jesus Christ, to know the Father through Jesus and to know the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit.

That’s what your life is to be this week. And nothing short of that will end up with you resurrected, raised up on the third day. Nothing short of that will let you be healed from the terrors that God puts to your soul. Nothing short of that is acceptable in the sight of God. He calls us to remember that.

Yeah, it’s good you’re here. It’s good to ritually come together and enter into the sacrifice. But He prefers loyalty, faithfulness, mercy—has said to everything else. It is number one. Jesus said the same thing. But I go—but He tells people to go and learn what this means: “I desire mercy and not sacrifice. I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

May the Lord God grant us the grace to repent of not being loyal to His covenant this past week and a renewed effort to press on to know the Lord this week. Moving on, pressing toward the mark, being—having mercy means having focus on the covenant relationship we have with God and acknowledging His covenantal headship over us.

He says that He’ll bring the waters, the spring waters. He says He’ll be like the dawn to His people. It’ll be like the rising of the dawn. He pledges Himself in those terms to covenant loyalty.

This is actually, I think, what it means in Revelation 3: “So then, because you are lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth.” A lot of what does it mean? What does it mean? Well, in Genesis 8:22, we read that while the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer and day and night shall not cease. That’s the promise of a covenantally faithful God, a loyal God to His creation. And He says that if you’re not loyal like He’s loyal with that kind of seasonality of what we do, then He will spew us out of His mouth, which means to be spewed forth out of the only place of safety and blessing.

Hope is based on the covenantal work of God, the covenantal promises of Him found throughout the scriptures.

Finally, it is the only place of safety to us. It is the only place of safety to us. The assurance of repentance—the assurance of repentance is the safety of the presence of the Lord.

Psalm 91, a fairly long psalm. I won’t read it all. I’m going to read it at the closing, but it talks about the dangers that are round about us all the time. And this is what it says as it moves to its conclusion in verses 14 and following. Verse 14 says: “Because he has set his love upon me, therefore I will deliver him. I will set him on high because he has known my name. He shall call upon me and I will answer him. I will be with him in trouble. I will deliver him and honor him with long life. I will satisfy him and show him my salvation because he has set his love upon me.”

Those who prioritize the knowledge of God and commit themselves to press on to know the Lord in everything that they do this week—those who are covenantally loyal to the Head of the covenant, God, to the word of the covenant, His law, to the context of the covenant, the faithfulness of all that we do and say as His people—to those people, the Lord God promises the assurance of preservation in the times of trouble.

Let’s commit ourselves to press on to know the Lord.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for this wonderful little three-verse song in the middle of a description of tremendous judgment—a three-verse song assuring us, Lord God, of your covenantal faithfulness to your people. Bless us that we may be those who return to you, who might know you, Lord God, and might press on to a full knowledge of who you are.

Forgive us for the times when we just kind of put you to the side and go through our ordinary lives. And help us this week, Lord God, commit ourselves afresh in our returning to you today, to return to our places this week, being covenantally loyal, having mercy and has said in all that we do and say, pressing on to know you. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.