“Strangers have devoured his strength, and he knoweth it not: yea, gray hairs are here and there upon him, yet he knoweth not” (Hosea 7:9).

One of the saddest dramas in human experience is the sight of a proud and confident leader who does not realize that his once-vaunted powers have deserted him and he now appears merely weak and foolish. Mighty Samson, with his locks shorn, was a sad example of such tragic ignorance. “And he wist not that the LORD was departed from him” (Judges 16:20), so the Philistines put out his eyes and bound him with chains. So it was with the once-mighty people of Israel in the days of their deep apostasy. Hosea described their distressing condition in the graphic words of our text.

Many years later, God’s chosen people exhibited an even more tragic state of pompous ignorance. Their Messiah had come to them, and they didn’t know Him, even crucifying Him. God’s judgment couldn’t be delayed. “(They) shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee; and they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another; because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation” (Luke 19:44).

But perhaps the most tragic case is the church at Laodicea. This church represents all those outwardly prosperous, evangelical churches that attempt to take a neutral stance on the basic conflicts of the last days. The one who is “the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God” (Revelation 3:14) will pronounce the awful judgment. “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou are wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked” (vv.16,17). How urgently the people of God need to guard against the tragedy of arrogant ignorance! HMM