Evangelical Lutheran Diocese of North America

Tuesday after Judica

Posted on March 15, 2016 by Pastor Dulas under Devotions
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Scripture: Hosea 13:9-14 (NKJV)

9 “O Israel, you are destroyed, but your help is from Me.

10 I will be your King; Where is any other, that he may save you in all your cities? And your judges to whom you said, ‘Give me a king and princes’?

11 I gave you a king in My anger, and took him away in My wrath.

12 “The iniquity of Ephraim is bound up; His sin is stored up.

13 The sorrows of a woman in childbirth shall come upon him. He is an unwise son, for he should not stay long where children are born.

14 “I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death. O Death, I will be your plagues! O Grave, I will be your destruction! Pity is hidden from My eyes.”

Devotion

Our text for today has God describing Israel as lost because of their continued rejection of the One True God, and their constant desire to run after idols in whom they have placed their hope. God, as always, calls one to see his error, and in mercy is calling for repentance and recognition of Him, that He is their only Savior! But because of their hardened heart, God sees the need for Israel to see how it is a fearful thing for them to fall into the hands of the living God.

Today, Satan is still urging God’s people to refuse to see the seriousness of sin, to refuse to believe that sin is folly, and that those who live in it bring about their doom (Prov. 5:22-23). To such a person the same sense of humor could be implied as in the second part of Hosea 13:13, as God says: “Israel, you didn’t have enough sense to know when it was time for you to be born.”

May we during this penitential season be strengthened to see that all sin is a hateful thing in the sight of the Lord, but with contrite hearts be encouraged by remembering that Jesus Christ has defeated our sin. Its wage has been paid, and Satan has been defeated through Christ’s sacrificial suffering, death, and resurrection from the grave.

We pray: Make me see Thy great distress, anguish, and affliction, bonds and stripes and wretchedness and Thy crucifixion; make me see how scourge and rod, spear and nails, did wound Thee, how for man Thou diedst, O God, who with thorns had crowned Thee. (TLH 140, vs. 2)

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