Because Ephraim hath made many altars to sin, altars shall be unto him to sin.
Ephraim multiplied altars intended for worship, yet those very altars became to him instruments and opportunities for sinning instead of a way to draw near to God. What was erected in the name of devotion did not lead upward but turned aside into transgression. This altar-building stood together with Israel's casting away of what is good and its regarding of God's law as a strange and foreign thing. Rejection of good and estrangement from the law formed the setting in which false worship flourished.
The lesson is that religious observances devised in opposition to God's law do not take away sin but increase and deepen it. Such worship hardens wrongdoing rather than cleansing it. The same warning reaches to the exalting of a day of worship established by human authority above God's Sabbath. To honor a man-made day in place of the Sabbath repeats Ephraim's error of turning worship into sin.
Ephraim multiplied altars intended for worship, yet those very altars became to him instruments and opportunities for sinning instead of a way to draw near to God. What was erected in the name of devotion did not lead upward but turned aside into transgression. This altar-building stood together with Israel's casting away of what is good and its regarding of God's law as a strange and foreign thing. Rejection of good and estrangement from the law formed the setting in which false worship flourished.
The lesson is that religious observances devised in opposition to God's law do not take away sin but increase and deepen it. Such worship hardens wrongdoing rather than cleansing it. The same warning reaches to the exalting of a day of worship established by human authority above God's Sabbath. To honor a man-made day in place of the Sabbath repeats Ephraim's error of turning worship into sin.