3986 — Perverted Sabbaths
Will you please explain Hosea 2:11? And there is another text in some of the Old Testament scriptures which speaks of God hating her Sabbaths.
W. A. K. The other text to which our correspondent refers is probably Isa. 1:13. The Lord does not here say, however, that He hates the Sabbath; but “your new moons and your appointed feasts My soul hateth.” Verse 14. The reason for this is shown by the context. Those feasts were kept, but they were kept by those whose hands were “full of blood,” and whose lives were filled with iniquity. The nation was sinful, laden with iniquity—children that deal corruptly. They had forsaken Jehovah, and despised the Holy One of Israel. “The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint.” Read the entire chapter. Now when such a people as that come before God and profess to worship Him, even on God’s appointed day and at the time of God’s appointed feasts, their whole worship is mockery. It is not that God has anything against the days, or the feasts, or the Sabbaths; but it is the days and Sabbaths kept in the way that this backsliding people kept them. Their oblations were vain oblations. The very incense they offered was an abomination. The very meetings were simply meetings of iniquity. It was “your new moons and your appointed feasts My soul hateth: they are a trouble unto Me; I am weary to bear them.” God would not even hear their prayers, because they had set up their iniquity in their heart. This, too, was the case with the ten tribes of Israel whom Hosea addressed. Read the context here. Israel had utterly turned away from God; and because she had been disobedient and had taken Baal-worship for God’s worship the Lord would take from her even her forms of worship, true tho these forms were. He would cause all her mirth to cease, and her feasts, and her new moons, and her Sabbaths, and all her solemn assemblies. Israel was taken away and sold as slaves into other lands, scattered among the heathen, where they could not keep their feasts and Sabbaths. All the ceasing was not because the Sabbath and the feasts were not good, but because Israel had made mockery of God’s worship.