Charges against an Unfaithful Wife

50 This is what the Lord says:

⁴⁵ But righteous people will judge these sister cities for what they really are—adulterers and murderers.

Hosea’s Wife and Children

² When the Lord first began speaking to Israel through Hosea, he said to him, “Go and marry a prostitute,^[a] so that some of her children will be conceived in prostitution. This will illustrate how Israel has acted like a prostitute by turning against the Lord and worshiping other gods.”

²⁵ On every street corner you defiled your beauty, offering your body to every passerby in an endless stream of prostitution.

³ Say to them, ‘Listen to this message from the Lord, you kings of Judah and citizens of Jerusalem! This is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says: I will bring a terrible disaster on this place, and the ears of those who hear about it will ring!

Judah Follows Israel’s Example

⁶ During the reign of King Josiah, the Lord said to me, “Have you seen what fickle Israel has done? Like a wife who commits adultery, Israel has worshiped other gods on every hill and under every green tree. ⁷ I thought, ‘After she has done all this, she will return to me.’ But she did not return, and her faithless sister Judah saw this. ⁸ She saw^[a] that I divorced faithless Israel because of her adultery. But that treacherous sister Judah had no fear, and now she, too, has left me and given herself to prostitution. ⁹ Israel treated it all so lightly—she thought nothing of committing adultery by worshiping idols made of wood and stone. So now the land has been polluted.

¹⁶ So we have stopped evaluating others from a human point of view. At one time we thought of Christ merely from a human point of view. How differently we know him now!