They Will Eat and Not Have Enough

"They shall eat, but not have enough; they shall play the whore, but not multiply, because they have forsaken the LORD to cherish whoredom." Hosea 4:10

They will eat but never have enough.

That is one of the most accurate sentences ever written about the human heart, and God says it about people who are getting exactly what they went after. This is not a verse about deprivation. They are eating. They are getting the thing. And it is doing nothing.

Charles Darwin said near the end of his life that he was not the least afraid to die, and in the same season he wrote to a friend that he had very little satisfaction in life. He had spent himself on work he believed was useful, and by his own account he arrived at the end of it hollow.

This is why people with everything come to the end of their years and say, I accumulated it all, and I am still empty.

Here is what I think is happening, and I got it from Paul and I cannot shake it. The works of the flesh are not primarily about wickedness. They are about emptiness. Free and faithful love is motivated by the joy of sharing the fullness we have in Christ. But the works of the flesh are motivated by the desire to fill an emptiness.

And that is why the appetite never closes. You cannot fill a hole with the wrong substance. You can only keep pouring.

For some of us it is religion, and we use the law itself to do it. We serve, we attend, we perform, and we are as empty as anybody at the bar. For others it is the obvious things, the booze, the screen, the relationship that brings no honor to Christ. It does not matter which. Paul says it is enslaved to one desire after another in its effort to fill an emptiness which only Christ can fill.

Oswald Chambers wrote that the springs of love are in God, not in us.

Not in us. That is the whole diagnosis in four words.

So the question is not why you are still hungry.

The question is what you have been eating.