Let’s remember as we continue through Hosea and the rest of the “minor” prophets (so-called only because the books are shorter) that the purpose of prophecy is not so much to foretell the future but to change how we live today. And we do that by identifying similarities between the people’s behaviors then and ours today.

Case in point, Hosea’s diagnosis in chapter 7:

Woe to them, for they have strayed from me! Destruction to them, for they have rebelled against me! I would redeem them, but they speak lies against me. They do not cry to me from the heart, but they wail upon their beds; for grain and wine they gash themselves; they rebel against me. (Hosea 7.13, 14, ESV)

They pray but only for material things while they rebel against God. James called out the same behavior:

What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.

You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. (James 4.1 – 4, ESV)