So many people jump right into the middle of a study of the prophets, without an adequate understanding of history and find themselves totally at sea in some cases, not understanding what at all the prophet was talking about and jumping to the wrong conclusions in other cases. One of the more interesting cases in point can be found over in the book of Hosea if you would like to turn over there with me momentarily before we go back to First Kings.

In Hosea, an interesting statement is made very early in his prophecy. God is speaking through Hosea to Israel and He says in Hosea 2:11 “I will also cause all her mirth to cease, her feast days, her new moons, and her sabbaths, and all her solemn feasts.”

Now the implication of this, some people look at this and I have actually seen this Scripture quoted as a proof text to show that the Holy Days would one day be done away with and superficially reading across the top of it, you might very well arrive at that conclusion. The problem is that the people who would make that decision and you yourself as a matter of fact, reading through this area without necessarily having the understanding of the history behind this might arrive at a conclusion like that. You might try to say “When will it be”. The context doesn’t allow a post-millennial cessation of these festivals. This seems to be a time of Israel’s trouble at the very end time.

Well, if you had understood that Hosea was not a prophet writing to Judah, but was a prophet writing to Israel, very late in their history, actually at the time of King Jeroboam the second, not Jeroboam the first that we have been reading about. If you understood that Jeroboam had changed the Holy Days of God and that the ten northern tribes never observed the Holy Days that you and I are acquainted with from Leviticus 23, you would never arrive at such a conclusion.

For indeed, the instant they divided the kingdom, as soon as Jeroboam had settled himself in the North, he established a different feast on the 15th day of the eighth month, changed the Feast of Tabernacles and implication is, he changed far more than that.