Hosea 7
v.13
Woe to them, because they have strayed from me! Destruction to them, because they have rebelled against me! I long to redeem them but they speak lies against me.
Israel “spake lies against God,” when he said, “these are my rewards which my lovers have given me” Hosea 2:12, or when, “they returned not to Him” but “called on Egypt,” as though God would not help them, who said that He would, or as though Egypt could help them, of whom God said that it should not.
We lie when we give thanks to another for God’s provision.
v.14
And they do not cry out to Me in their heart When they wail on their beds; For the sake of grain and new wine they gather together as sojourners; They depart from Me.
But if anyone multiply prayers, crying and weeping as he may, yet not with any intent to gain God Himself, but to obtain some earthly or passing thing, he cannot truly be said to “cry unto the Lord,” i. e., so to cry that his cry should come to the hearing of the Lord. This is a cry like Esau’s, who sought no other fruit from his father’s blessing, save to be rich and powerful in this world. When then He saith, “They cried not to Me in their heart, etc.,” He means, they were not devoted to Me, their heart was not right with Me; they sought not Myself, but things of Mine. They howled, desiring only things for the belly, and seeking not to have Me. Thus they belong not to “the generation of those who seek the Lord, who seek the face of the God of Jacob” Psalm 24:6, but to the generation of Esau.”