Hosea 4-13
Then, after these first three chapters, we get, in the great body of the prophecy, details of the sins which had provoked this judgment. “There is a sin unto death,” as we read in 1 John 5. Israel, as a nation, I may say, committed it. All the prophets, I may also say, tell us this. “This iniquity shall not be purged from you until ye die,” says Isaiah to them. But Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones is the leading and the best-known scripture on this mystery. And the divine Prophet Himself talks to the Jews of His day of the Lord God, miserably destroying them as the wicked husbandmen, and says also to them, “Behold your house is left unto you desolate.” And surely it is a death-stricken land and people we see in them and their country at this moment. Surely it all tells us, “There is a sin unto death.” They are as a nation in Ezekiel’s valley or in Hosea’s graveyard.
But this death shall be triumphed over. The nation of the Jews shall have a resurrection, as the bodies of the saints shall have a resurrection. And then, as the saints in their glories shall fill and adorn the heavens, so Israel shall blossom, and bud, and fill the face of the world with fruit. “What shall the receiving of them be but life from the dead?” (Rom. 11:15).