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Amos |
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| Chapter 2 | Prayer | Devotional | Chapter 7 | Prayer | Devotional | |
| Chapter 3 | Prayer | Devotional | Chapter 8 | Prayer | Devotional | |
| Chapter 4 | Prayer | Devotional | Chapter 9 | Prayer | Devotional | |
| Chapter 5 | Prayer | Devotional |
Prayers
Lord of Hosts, in the midst of this world of trial and woe, You roar through Your prophets. You had a word for the nations of old like Syria and the Philistines. You hated their oppression and anger. Men have always looked for opportunities to have some selfish benefit at the cost of the weak. Ancient peoples like the Edomites and the Ammonites have been soundly condemned for their brutality and greed. Will we be imitators of them, rather than imitators of Your Son? Rescue us from base impulses that would harm us and others, for we are Your people. We have been set apart from the world for a better purpose than the abuse of the helpless.
Lord God, there is a hatred of man against man that goes beyond the customary depravity of the sons of Adam. How long will You allow a nation to stand when it is so wickedly vicious, abusing the living and desecrating the remains of the dead? Surely Your people should be far from such a habit of vigorous evil. Yet we have so often ignored Your Word, and have become imitators of the world. Our lies have led us astray into sinful pattern of life. Will we sell the righteous for silver, engage in gross immorality, and participate in idolatrous worship? You have done so much for us, delivering us out of the slavery of sin, and allowing us to taste of the good things of the age to come. Will we return to the old way of bondage again? May it never be so! We should not presume to fight against You. We will surely lose that battle. Have mercy on us, O God, and call us back home again.
Father, You have a special plan for Your people, therefore You chastise us for our iniquities. You call us Your family. We thank You for Your discipline. Only preserve our lives for Your service, first here, and then above with those who have already gone to be with Your Son. Surely You have reason to correct us. We should listen carefully to You. Though the world would witness our embarrassing correction, You will speak to us as a true Father. Even if only a small remnant survives, not one of Your elect shall be lost. All of our pomp and wealth will perish, but Your people shall live forever.
Glorious Lord, where is the righteous woman who gives herself completely to Your service? Are all given over to base pleasures and lazy living? Thank you for the godly examples that You have given to us. Thank You also for Your correction of us even through suffering. How could we be so insensitive to Your acts of correction? We are very slow to return to You. Will it be necessary for You to remove the lampstand of Your church in many places? You are the Lord of Hosts. You know what is right and good, and You will accomplish Your glorious plan. Save us, O God!
Father God, there is so much sin all around us, and even among us and within us. Why do we seek after idols? Why will we not run to You, O Lord? You put the stars up in the heavens and formed the constellations. You bring water upon the earth, and floods upon the lands according to Your decree. Will we turn aside the needy when they come to us for help? Will we pursue injustice as our fathers did in former days? Do we not recognize that there will be consequences for the iniquity within us? We can only see the Day of the Lord as a day of joy because of what Christ has done for us. Send forth His righteousness among us like a mighty stream, that we might pursue the way of holiness with integrity.
Our Father, we care about Your church. We will not be at ease in the face of so much iniquity in Zion. We look for the pleasures of the life to come, and give up on the pride of our hearts and the passing pleasures of sin among Your people. Grant to us a due regard for the seriousness of disobedience within Your covenant community. Please forgive us, for we have not loved justice and holiness as we should.
Sovereign Lord, You have displayed to us the serious consequences of the rebellion of men. Even within Your church we could never stand the discipline that we rightly deserve as a consequence of our sin. Set Your Son as a plumb line among Your people. He is the standard of all righteousness. Help us to regard Him in all His holy beauty, and to consider the glory of His work as our Substitute. This one great King has given His life for us, and Yet He lives. He has brought the Word of truth to us. He was a most unexpected prophet. Yet His words were the fullest expression of truth ever known among men. Shall we ignore Him, and die as if we were strangers to the covenant of grace? Have mercy, O Lord.
Glorious God, the world all around us is moving forward toward destruction day by day. There is a Day of Judgment coming. Men treat their companions and neighbors as objects with no real dignity. They will surely face Your discipline and wrath. Will we presume upon Your mercy and do the very same things as Your enemies? Father, look upon our weakness and speak to us with clarity and power. Please do not remove Your Word from among us. Make us a people of love and service. Use us as a testimony to all around us, for You love Your people. Rescue us from every peril.
Lord God, there will finally come a Day of Judgment. Just as the Old Covenant eventually came to an end, the current age will one day be completed. No man shall be able to escape from You. Our only hope in that Day will be the great Son of David, the Lord Jesus Christ. Because He lives, You will not make a full end of Your people. Through the resurrection of Christ You have raised up the booth of David. Even the nations who were far off have now come to You through this Messiah. A great day is yet coming for all the Jews and Gentiles who are called by Your name. Peace and prosperity shall be ours forever in You.
Devotionals
The prophet Amos brought a very bold message to the northern kingdom in his day. He came to them not so much as a brash prophet from the southern kingdom of Judah, (though he was from the south), but as a humble follower of a great King. He came as a voice from heaven and as a representative of God. His boldness was not in being a natural-born leader, but in being a true disciple of a heavenly Warrior. When Christ came to save, He came with a strong message, and yet He embodied the perfection of humility. These two things, boldness of speech and humility of person, are not incongruous. They are necessary for those who would rightly represent the Lord among His people. His representatives must be followers more than leaders, followers of the great Shepherd of the sheep. Amos does not come as an ambassador of Uzziah, the King of Judah, but as the spokesman for the Lord. The Lord was roaring from His heavenly sanctuary. He could make the earth wither in a moment. Everyone must list to His Word and follow Him.
The prophet begins his message with the Lord’s indictment of the nations. In this first chapter he addresses the nations of Syria, Philistia, Phoenicia, Edom, and Ammon. This will continue into the second chapter with Moab, before turning to the covenant lands of Judah and then Israel. It is this message to Israel that will continue throughout the remaining chapters of this book.
Each indictment in these early verses follows a given pattern. There is the identification of the nation within the formulaic words “For three transgressions, and for four.” There is the announcement of the Lord’s settled determination to bring punishment upon that land. There is a representative infraction that is different for each nation mentioned. Finally there is a statement of the trouble that is coming, in all cases linked to the military victory of the Assyrians that would mean destruction and exile for so many nations in that day.
It is the representative transgression that is most interesting to consider. Of course, all of these nations are guilty of more than three or four sins. What is it that the Lord sees at the head of the list of their offensive ways? The Syrians with their capital of Damascus (not to be confused with Assyrians and their capital of Ninevah), have shown a fierce cruelty against the neighboring tribes of Israel in that part of the land known as Gilead, east of the Jordan river. The Philistines have carried another nation into exile, delivering them to their captors in a third nation. The Phoenicians have done the same thing, but have the added offence that they betrayed another nation in violation of covenant obligations. The Edomites are the ones who bought this exiled people from the Philistines and the Phoenicians, and they did so not to merely profit from them, but to destroy them. They hated the Israelites, though they were brothers, since Jacob the ancestor of the Israelites and Esau the ancestor of the Edomites were twin brothers. The Ammonites are indicted because of their atrocities against pregnant women in this same region of Gilead as a further extension of their desire to displace future generations of the descendants of Jacob from this contested region.
All of these nations have hated God’s people. They have been willing to use their power with no sense of the God of the earth, who is also the God of the people of Gilead. They exhibit no awareness of the limits of their authority. They do not seem to know that the Lord is able to bring the nations of the world into judgment. They have used their military force to accomplish their own brutal desires, but what will they do when a more powerful adversary comes against them? The Assyrians will soon do this very thing, and these other nations will have no one to defend them against that powerful empire. They will be sent off into exile, and will find out what it is like to be a victim who is trapped in the hands of a mighty and ruthless enemy.
As mighty as the Assyrians are, there is One who is far more powerful. The Lord is the most frightening Adversary. He is aware of the sins of the nations. In particular, He keeps His people in His gaze at all times, for we are the apple of His eye. Those who hate the Lord’s people are guilty of an attack against Christ.
The Son of God knows what it is like to have God Himself as an adversary. This is what happened on the cross. An Enemy far more terrifying than the armies of the Assyrians came upon His own beloved son for us. He came as a Lion against the prey. He was like a raging fire against our Christ. He came as a devouring foe against our Messiah. He blew like the worst tempest against the One on the cross who was both the Son of Man and the Son of God. This is what was necessary in order for our sin to be atoned for.
The Lion of the tribe of Judah died for us. Yet He emerged from that Day of Judgment victorious. In His resurrection we have life and hope. Now we are bold to speak as those who are His followers. We do not have to muster up the strength to be natural-born leaders or amazing strongmen. We are followers of One who is very capable of leading. His Word may be rejected by the nations of the world. Many may revile Him and they may brutally mistreat those who love His appearing. Yet He ever lives to save us, and He has all power and authority. It is His to lead His Gilead. It is ours to follow Him.
God has an indictment to bring against the nations. We read about it in both the Old and New Testaments. Often it has something to do with the way that the world has treated the Lord’s covenant community. In Amos 1 it is possible that all of the nations mentioned were involved in the destruction of the Lord’s people in the region of Gilead to the east of the Jordan.
It would be too easy to assume that the whole story is as simple as that. If you abuse the Lord’s people, you should expect the Lord’s wrath. That message is true, and it is reinforced in many passages throughout the Bible, but it is not the only story. The God who sends His rain and sun upon the just and the unjust also expresses His concern for all of humanity. Here at the beginning of Amos 2 a rather striking example of this principle is given.
The Edomites were already condemned by the Lord in the first chapter of this book. They were the receivers of the abused people of the Lord, and they were indicted for their furious wrath against their fellow descendants of Abraham and Isaac. In another book of the Bible, the Lord goes so far as to say, “Jacob (Israel) I loved, but Esau (Edom) I hated.” Yet here the nation of Moab is condemned not because of their treatment of the Israelites, but because of their actions concerning the bones of the king of Edom.
God hates death, though His Son was willing to suffer it in order to bring us eternal life. The Lord is all about life, and He hates it when men go crazy in their pursuit of the death of even their worst enemies. The Lord is in charge of vengeance. Men must not take these matters into their own hands without the Word of God directly instructing them to act as His agent of vengeance. When the King of Moab presumes to be the Lord of vengeance and shows vicious wrath against the bones of another king, he has gone too far.
The Moabites could have reasoned that there would be some limitation upon human wrath. They were guilty of brutality even if they never had one Word of the Scriptures brought to their attention. How much more serious is the problem of Judah, for they have been given the Law of God in written form, and they have not kept it. They are worthy of punishment from God just as all the other nations.
They are not alone in their special guilt. The main focus of this book is the northern nation of Israel and the Lord’s indictment against that nation begins now. Like Phoenicia and the Philistines they are ready to sell people. They do it for such a small price, and they sin against their own kinsmen. They should care for the poor among them, but the trample them in the dust. They should protect their women, but they are engaged in cult prostitution and drunkenness. In all of this they are just as bad as the nations around them.
Their guilt before God is compounded by their exalted position as His covenant people. It was God who gave them everything they have. It was He who rescued them from Egypt and brought them into the Promised Land. Yet they have refused to hear the Lord’s prophetic Word and they have disgraced the Name of God with their defiling religious ordinances. Like Judah, they have despised the Lord’s voice, and like all of the nations around them, they have treated God’s people as objects for their own use, and have been part of the death team that has brought such great destruction upon this fallen earth.
The descendants of Adam are prone to pride. They forget that they are dust, and then they grind others into the dust. They forget that they have been redeemed at great cost, and then they buy and sell the people of God. One might assume that our disobedience would be the end of every story. Yet the Lord would not speak through Amos unless there was some testimony being given to a way of life beyond the burnt remains of an unrighteous king’s bones. Surely there must be some hope for us beyond our own filthy sin. The prophets tell us what we deserve, but they must be talking to us for a reason.
The salvation that we long for will never come through our own strength. God’s judgment is coming, and it is pressing hard against us. It would surely crush us. God is coming fast against us. We could never run so fast that we would get away safely through our great speed. God’s arrows are poised to be released. Each one will be devastating and will reach its mark. Yet there is a Substitute who will take the point of the spear. He will not run from the punishment that we deserve. He will be crushed for our iniquities, and we shall be healed.
In terms of what we deserve, we must admit that Judah and Israel are no better off than the vicious King of Moab. Yet God has lavished His electing love upon us and has paid the amazing price necessary for our salvation in the blood of His own Son. Men came against Jesus, the King of the Jews, with all the hatred that the King of Moab displayed for the King of Edom. Even we would have gladly destroyed the Lord of Glory with our own presumptuous wrath, as if we could have brought some case against Him. Yet by His grace our foolish hearts have been softened. We have been won by the story of the suffering Servant, and we have been captivated by the love of our dying Savior. Like Him and through Him, though we are dead, we yet live. This fact is very pleasing to the God who loves life.
God has a special love for Israel. Therefore He intends to punish her. There is something about that kind of thinking that is very surprising to us. We expect that God would treat a beloved people by overlooking their faults. That certainly is true as well. The Lord is slow to anger. He does not always deal with His people as their sins deserve. Yet it is also the case that love must eventually lead to correction when the beloved is stuck in great transgression and will not repent. We need to accept the fact that judgment begins with the household of God, and receive the Lord’s correction of us as evidence of his special love for us.
There is a reason that disaster is coming upon Israel. God’s providence with His special people is not just a chance encounter of friends along a road. There was a clear understanding based on the Lord’s speech, and now Israel’s sin is about to meet up with the Lord’s judgment by a divine appointment. God is a holy Lion who has found His prey. Israel cannot pretend to be surprised by what is happening here. She is a bird that has stepped into a snare. Are we now thinking that the snare will not spring up from the ground, though it has been set with the purpose of capturing the bird, and the bird has set it off? There is a God who is in charge of the affairs of men and nations. He raises up strong powers, and moves them according to his appointed purposes. The coming of the Assyrians is not a random blowing of the winds of fortune. The Lord has done it.
This has all been revealed through the prophets for many centuries. Israel cannot claim to be uninformed. Even now the Lord has raised up Amos to speak His message. Will the people not fear and repent? The events that are coming should not be thought of as surprising. Nor will they be hidden from the enemies all around Israel. The Lord’s discipline of His people will be accomplished in the full view of the surrounding nations. They have become a people that do not know how to do right, and who are full of violence and robbery. They will face a powerful enemy, and the Egyptians and the Philistines will witness the demise of the northern kingdom.
The trouble that Israel will face will not be small. There is something fatal that Amos refers to hear, like a sheep that has been attacked by a lion so that only small pieces of the body remain. Yet a small number of the people of Israel shall actually be rescued. This is a good thing. There will be a remnant that remains, though the few that live to serve God on the earth may seem to have so little left to them.
God will punish Israel for her transgressions. They had put their hopes in false worship. They would not follow the Lord’s instruction to gather together in Jerusalem to meet with Him. They allowed their conflict with their brothers to the south to be more important to them than the Word of the Lord which commanded them to travel south for the temple worship that God had appointed. Their false altars have not helped them. Nor have their great riches and possessions saved them from the Assyrians. When the Lord determines to discipline His people, no amount of false worship or worldly riches can protect us from His loving chastisement.
We do not get to choose the Lord’s plans for our lives or for His church. We might imagine another way of relating with Him. This is not ours to invent. The Israelites thought that they could worship God their way, and they imagined that they could serve Him though they ignored His statutes. The assault of the Assyrian empire against them stood as a powerful answer from God concerning these false theories of life. The people of Israel ran into the unchanging fact of the living sovereign God. He will not change Himself to accommodate our ideas of what ought to be. We must take His Word seriously and listen to His servants while there is yet time.
The plan of God for our rescue has been well established in the Scriptures. We are not without a clear testimony to us in the written Word. All around the world the words of the Bible are being translated into every known tongue. There are those who are dedicating their lives to seeing that this great special revelation is known by everyone everywhere. It has always been the case that man is without excuse. Surely those who have heard the Lord’s Word are especially without excuse.
The Lord has made a provision for us that is our only way out of eternal condemnation in the life and death of His Son Jesus Christ. If disaster comes upon us now or in the age to come, can we blame God for it? We know the way of faith as the only pathway of life. We know about the cross and the resurrection. We know about the life of love that we are called to live. If we choose instead our own ways of self-salvation and amusement, why would we think that everything is alright with God?
We need much grace, and the Lord will supply it. The devastating and public atonement for us has come in the cross so many years ago. How will we stand if we ignore such a great salvation? If Israel had no excuse to ignore the Word of the Lord, surely we have no excuse when God has spoken so plainly and wonderfully for us through the gift of His Son. If we need to be disciplined through the events of our lives in order for us to see these things more clearly, that is surely an expression of God’s loving-kindness toward His beloved people.
Amos has much to say to the northern kingdom of Israel. In the fourth chapter he begins by speaking to some of the leading women of the nation. God looked for them to have a concern for the poor and a dedication to true worship and holiness. Instead, Amos calls this group “cows of Bashan.” They clamor for drinks and oppress the needy. They will soon find out what it means to be under the authority of cruel masters when they are dragged away by the Assyrians.
It is not that the people were irreligious. They had holy places where they thought that they were worshiping a host of gods, perhaps even thinking that Jehovah, the god of their fathers, would look favorably upon their ceremonies. God tells those involved in these endeavors that they go to their special spots only to multiply their transgressions, no matter how much they imagine that they are serving Him. They love to have all kinds of offerings, sacrifices, and tithes for God or gods, but that cannot change the fact that they have abandoned the true Word of the Lord.
If any system of devotion is to work with God it must be done in accord with His will and it must have some ground of real obedience that makes it efficacious. Israel had problems on both of these points. They were not following God’s way of worship, which at this point in the history of revelation would have required them to travel to the temple in Jerusalem for the festivals and to bring their sacrifices and tithes to that place. More importantly they had no appreciation for the obedience of a coming Messiah, through whom they could have peace with the Lord. The knowledge of that kind of deep peace grounded in the perfect obedience of a substitute leads men and women to repentance, and there was no sense of that change of heart and life among the worshipers in the north.
They certainly should have known that something was deeply wrong. The Lord had already sent them many extraordinary signs of his displeasure. None of these seemed to move them in the proper direction. They lived under a particular time in the covenant life of God’s people when the words of Moses concerning blessings and curses in the land should have been particularly operative. If there were problems with food or rain in one place or another, these were things that should have caused them to wonder. If their crops were destroyed by pests and their fruit trees damaged through some agent of harm, if there was sickness or trouble in battle, they should have humbled themselves before God, and sought to turn away from sin. If one town or another faced some unexpected disaster, someone somewhere should have been moved to return to God, but they did not seem to do this.
What the Lord required of His people should not have been a mystery. Amos was not the first prophet among them. Others had expounded the Word of the Lord over several generations. Many of the things that people do against the Lord and His people do not even require any special Word from God in order to be exposed as sin. Our souls know what is wrong. The kinds of truth that are summarized in the Ten Commandments are written upon our hearts, and are known well to all who will be honest about it. Yet people continue to sin against God though they know they are fighting the glorious Creator and Sustainer of their lives.
Therefore, action would have to be taken. No more scattered hints and nudges sent to one town or another over many generations. Now the time had come for a visit from the Lord of the covenant in a sweeping judgment against these northern tribes. Now the Assyrians would be used by God to bring about a curse upon His people.
God created the mountains, the wind, and the waves of the sea. God is the author of light and darkness. He is the authority over heaven and earth and He has a great host of men and angels at His disposal to be used for His purposes. How could any of us stand in His presence were He to come in judgment against us for our sins? We would be the ones hiding in the mountains hoping for the rocks to fall upon us so that our misery would be over. The problem is that the challenges that we would face on account of our sin would not only be for our lives here on earth. How could we stand against almighty God if our souls were to encounter Him in His holiness beyond the grave? How can we live in the coming age of resurrection if the Lord is angry against us because of our sin?
We need to perform true ceremonies of worship and the duties of holy living with an honest heart of devotion to God, but we especially need some solid ground to stand on in any of our religious acts of devotion or service. We need the Rock of the sinless Messiah who can be counted for us as acceptable in the sight of His Father. We need that obedience and suffering credited to our account, so that we can move out of the bondage of our overwhelming disobedience and into the liberty of a new and growing sanctification. This is what Christ has provided for us. Let us worship Him today and always with gladness of heart and the sincerity of humble repentance and service.
When we hear a prophet say that a nation is fallen to rise no more, we are expecting that this is one of the Lord’s oracles against some foreign power. Surely the Lord is speaking about Babylon, Moab, or Edom. It is so deeply disappointing to hear those words of judgment spoken against Israel. Yet even though the northern kingdom would never rise again as a geo-political power, and even though there would be great loss of life, the opening verses of this difficult chapter have another side to them. 100 would survive out of a city of 1000. The hope for Israel in the day of Amos is a remnant hope.
The way out of this difficult day is to seek the Lord. It is amazing to consider how straight-forward the way of blessing is for us. God says, “Seek Me and live!” If we are to seek Him in truth then we have to turn away from seeking false gods or seeking the true God in false ways. If we seek Him today, it does not mean that we will not suffer trouble, but to seek Him in truth is always the right way to go.
God expects His people who are called by His Name to be examples of righteousness and to lead others in the way of real justice. When they do not do this, they go against a powerful divine adversary. He formed the constellations. He made the boundaries of the oceans and the dry land. No fortress can stand if He determines to destroy it. His people, of all those on the face of the earth, should be first in obeying His commandments.
But this was not the case for Israel. Those who spoke for righteousness and justice were rejected, because the people hated the truth. They pursued their own self-interest and seemed to be doing well. The Lord reminds them that their prosperity can be taken away in a moment. It is one thing to build a beautiful house. It is another to live peacefully in it to the end of your days. When powerful people in any society are so obvious in their corruption, smart individuals learn to keep their mouths shut, lest they lose their heads. That may work for some time, but eventually that kind of injustice catches up with a society, even if it may take a few generations.
There is always another way in obedience to the Lord, but when a whole land moves toward corruption it is very hard to turn that kind of disaster around. Yet courageous people need to stand up and do what is right if there is to be any change. God is in charge, but has He ever turned around a people without first turning around a person? Someone needs to do the simple obvious things. Seek good. Hate evil. Establish justice. Maybe the Lord will use our small steps to do what only He can do.
People think that they would like the Lord to visit and to be close, but will His nearness be a safe thing for us? When you live in a society that seems overcome with evil and corruption, even those who want to do the right thing find themselves in a web of evil that makes it difficult to do anything but go down a drain of divine judgment from which there would appear to be almost no hope of escape.
People may think that if they can keep on worshipping, and privately and quietly attempting to live in a way that is a little more faithful than the average person, at least they will be safe. After all, look how bad some of those other people are? But what happens when God says to His worshipers as a whole, “I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.” What is needed is a waterfall of newly-discovered justice and righteous; something that would flow from heaven like an eternal stream of blessedness. Where is the spring from which waters like that will flow? Will it come from the people who were worshipping false gods even when the Lord was supplying bread from heaven to feed them?
Several hundred years after Amos, a child was born. That one righteous answer to the deluge of human sin and societal corruption has made all the difference for Israel and for the church throughout the world and throughout the centuries that followed. What can one man do? Generally one person within a dirty society is simply swamped by everything around Him. But Jesus did not come just as one man in a society. He came as the new Man, the God-Man of an entirely new resurrection kingdom. Yet He did His work here below within the environment of the Old Covenant order, though the northern kingdom was long gone. He grew up in Nazareth and ministered around the shores of Galilee. It was there among the passing kingdoms of this world that a new world of life was first proclaimed and believed.
We have come to embrace the message that He preached. When God visited the cross of Christ in judgment so long ago, something most amazing and unexpected took place. The King of a very powerful Kingdom gave us something to stand up for. Through the death of Christ we turn against sin in ourselves and others and say, “Enough!” Through the miracle of an empty tomb we have real and powerful hope. It is amazing that we would still be enticed by some lesser hope that would point us to some other Messiah, or some other way to beat the decay of death all around us. Jesus is the answer. By Him alone we can face the darkest days of societal disintegration with the confidence that the way of corruption is on the way out, and the way of righteousness and heavenly justice will soon be established. The remnant hope has become a most glorious and victorious eternal kingdom through the life and death of one Man.
Nations may be full of fear concerning imagined dangers, and soon find their concerns evaporate into nothing. On the other hand, there are times when people in one place or another have thought of themselves as so strong and well-positioned that they supposed themselves to be beyond danger, only to be defeated by a force that they should have better anticipated and prepared for. The northern kingdom was at ease in the time of Amos, and they considered themselves safe and secure. Amos instructs the notable men of Israel to look at other nations around them and to learn the lessons that could be gathered from their situations.
The day of disaster is nearer than they recognize. The biggest danger for the covenant people is not their ignorance of the power of those human forces that may soon be arrayed against them. The biggest danger comes to them when they forget about the God who brought them together and made them out of nothing. Israel was at ease, though the discipline of God would soon come. Heedless of earlier warnings, her leaders were resting their heads on downy pillows, eating and drinking, enjoying their music and their comforts. The Lord is not an ascetic philosopher. Good things in the created order are gifts of God to be enjoyed. Then what was the problem in Israel? They should have been mourning over the spiritual and moral depravity of the Lord’s people. The leaders of the nation refused to lead the people in true repentance, but instead lived as those who were full of the blessings of the Lord as if they had not a care in the world. They would be the first to be led into exile. The party would be over soon and their life of luxury would be gone.
God does not make false threats. Though He is slow to anger, He will do the things that He has promised, and His warnings should be taken very seriously. When He swears by Himself, it is because there is nothing greater than Him by which He can take a solemn oath. He accommodates Himself to this custom among men to swear by something great in order to reinforce the fact that He is very serious about His intentions. In this case He swears by Himself in order for us to consider how determined He is about the destruction He is bringing upon His people after these many centuries of patience. He hates the pride of His people and the strongholds of Israel, and He will turn the nation over to her enemies.
What will it feel like when trouble finally comes? Rather than the environment of ease and celebration that might seem to prevail at present, they would soon be overcome by the kind of fear that is palpable in a land that is facing an overwhelming adversary. There would be dead people everywhere, and even close relatives would not want to acknowledge the remains of the slain. People would be afraid to even mention the Name of the Lord.
How did things ever get this bad? The people of God should have had the Name of the Lord on their tongues in songs of worship and praise. They should have been acknowledging among the nations of the world the fact that they were blessed by such a great God who had done so many great things for them. They should have rejoiced in Him and in His great Law, and considered it to be a wonderful privilege to pay careful attention to His Word.
Instead they turned the justice and righteousness commanded by God into poison and bitter decay everywhere. There was no fruitful yield of holiness in the land. What they had would soon be destroyed. Their prosperity and small military victories would soon be songs of derision in the mouths of those who hated them, and they would be an oppressed people, they who had chosen to oppress their own brothers and sisters among the covenant people of God.
The strength and pomp of men can be so very impressive. We are easily stirred by public displays of what appears to be overwhelming power and wealth. When this happens in our own hearts it is because we have lost track of the big picture of God’s plan which is so clearly revealed to us in God’s Word. From the time of the fall of mankind in Adam’s transgression we have known that we are all on the wrong side of God’s settled determination that those who disobeyed in Adam would die. We are all in that group.
We have also known from the beginning that God by His grace would provide a way of life somehow through one called the Seed of the woman. The creation of Israel was an important step of preparation for the ultimate revealing of this one Seed who would solve our problem with sin and defeat the devil. When the people of God forget that big story, they can quickly become drunk in their own pride, forgetting to mourn the fact that we who have disobeyed deserve to die.
Israel had forgotten her reason for being. She had become such a poor display of the truth. God had not forgotten, nor had He given up on His plan to bring the fullness of life to those who were called by His Name. While this requires a winnowing process of separating the wheat from the chaff even today, no matter how weak the church may seem, the Lord will be true to His Word. Life has come to us through the Seed of the woman, and especially through His sacrificial death on the cross. God will be glorified in a marvelous display of the fullest salvation, though many who thought of themselves as first will in fact be last.
Whatever the suffering may be that any one person, family, church, or nation may face here on earth, it is not as bad as we deserve. When we understand that every violation of God’s Law is an offense against our infinite and perfect divine Judge, then we can easily acknowledge that we all deserve the Lord’s eternal wrath and curse. The worst troubles of this earth, as significant as they may be, are far less than the hell that would be ours by the Lord’s justice.
In fact there are many disasters that could come to us now, but God refuses to bring them to us, because He knows that they are too much for us to bear. In Amos 6 the prophet is given two visions of what Israel deserves that fit into this category. The first is a locust infestation at the most critical time for the development of harvest. The second is a judgment by fire so hot that it would not only destroy the land, but also would dry up the sea. In both cases Amos appeals to God, asking the Lord to forgive Israel. He asks for mercy because Israel is small, and would be utterly destroyed by these kinds of devastating judgments. In both cases the Lord announces that these visions shall not come to pass.
Then comes a third vision. This one seems far more tame. It is simply a plumb line used in the construction of a building to make sure that the walls being built upon a foundation are going up straight, so that the building will be structurally sound. God is building His kingdom. He will set a plumb line in the midst of Israel and check to see if what has been built there is in line with good order. God’s Law is a plumb line for the Old Covenant community. Measured against that standard, all the walls of Israel will be found to be crooked and about to fall. What will be left is the Lord’s own foundation in the Word of His prophets. Upon this good and solid footing, a new kingdom might yet be built.
We all think that we want God to visit, and we do not want Him to pass by without embracing us. When the Lord will judge us according to the plumb line of His Law; when He comes as an engineer who will order the demolition of unsound walls, we might instead hope that He will pass by us without coming too close. An embrace from Him might mean our destruction. God announces through Amos that He is finished with passing by Israel. He is coming to judge. He will make a visit that will be painful. The ruling families of the north and their religious sanctuaries will be destroyed.
It is often the case that the one who comes speaking the truth that could bring life is mistaken by others as an enemy of the public good and an adversary of the powers that seem to hold the country together. A prophet can be ignored by an unrighteous nation if he can be kept in a corner and if he does not go too far in offending the powers that be. Amos had apparently crossed the line. One of the priests with close ties to the royal family in the north gave the prophet an ultimatum. He told Amos that it was time for him to return to Judah.
Amos responds with the kind of defense that Paul gives so many centuries later in writing to the Galatians. He says that his words have not come from men, but from God. To reject the message of Amos is to defy the Lord. Perhaps now it is the words of the Lord’s prophet, in accord with God’s Law, that are the precise plumb line for Israel. To kill or intimidate Amos will not change the fact of the Lord’s visitation to judge. In fact, the priest who tried to threaten Amos has a Word that comes just for him; a devastating personal curse for his own rejection of the Lord’s plumb line. Furthermore, Israel will surely go into exile away from its land.
When God sent His Son into the world, He sent Him to save, and not to judge. Yet the coming of the Holy One of Israel is also, of necessity, a plumb line for the Lord’s kingdom. This is because the Lord’s Anointed Messiah comes as the obedient Servant of God, and we look like a tottering wall compared with His perfections.
If Jesus had come first to judge, no one could have been saved. All that could have happened in that kind of visitation would have been a rousing condemnation of the entirety of Adam’s race and especially of those who had access to the Law and the Prophets but had still continued in their rebellion against the Lord. This function of condemnation had already been ably accomplished through Adam’s sin and then most clearly through the Law of Moses by which all of Israel and Judah could be rightly condemned. Jesus did not need to come in order to condemn mankind. Mankind was already justly condemned by the Law before the Christ was born.
Jesus came to save. Though He alone could stand as the true plumb line, He took our place as a tottering whitewashed wall that was about to fall. He did this on the cross, and He was crushed there for our iniquities. Nonetheless, His perfect strength and integrity was displayed through that greatest moment of His weakness, and He has provided for the Lord’s new temple the perfect cornerstone in His death and resurrection. Now the foundation of apostles and prophets stands in perfect alignment with this great cornerstone, and we are being built up on that good foundation as a holy temple in the Lord Jesus Christ.
In the previous chapter the Lord had given Amos three visions. Two of these were of punishments that, though deserved by Israel, would not come to pass. The third, the vision of the plumb line, that righteous standard in the Law and the Prophets by which the nation would be condemned, would come quickly. The eighth chapter now begins with one more vision that reinforces this message that the judgment of God is overdue. This basket of summer fruit is more than ripe. Israel should have had the fruit of righteousness as an offering to the Lord and a display to the world of the greatness of Jacob’s God. Instead they have unrighteous fruit and the season for fresh fruit is over. The end has come upon this people.
God gave His people a great variety of psalms for their worship. Many of these can be best understood as songs that reveal the culmination of the Lord’s plans for heaven on earth. Others speak of the depth of woe among God’s people as they live in a fallen world, yet trusting in the Lord’s promise to overturn the evil all around them one day. What will Israel sing when the Lord comes in judgment against them? They will wail in that day. They will be overwhelmed by the death around them. Many will consider it best to have no words or sound in their time of horror. They will call for silence rather than songs of any kind.
Though that day had not yet arrived, it would be coming very soon. For the moment there were still many people trampling all over the poor, longing for the Sabbath to be over so that they could cheat others and effectively sell their own people in their lust for their own wealth or comfort. When we remember the Lord’s indictment against the surrounding nations from the beginning of this book, we are reminded that they treated the covenant people as objects, and sold off those in the land of Gilead to their enemies. Even then we noticed that Israel was guilty of the very same thing. What point is there to preserving Israel when they treat one another with the same kind of hatred as their enemies regarded the descendants of Jacob? The Lord announces here that He will not forget any of their deeds.
When a flood of divine judgment comes over the land, will anyone be able to ignore what is happening. It will be as obvious as the final Day of Judgment that the Lord will one day bring upon the earth. The imagery of that final Day of the Lord is borrowed by Amos in order to describe the trouble that will soon come upon Israel. It will be accompanied by the deepest kind of mourning that people can experience.
When armies attack, when people are led away as captives, when there is death everywhere, no one needs to instruct those who are suffering that something very bad is happening. When there is a famine in the land and people do not have food for their children, the problem is obvious, and all who suffer are aware of it. But God’s people will soon suffer a famine of the Word of God. Will anyone care? Amos seems to indicate that many people will go from place to place in order to seek God’s Word. Yet will they still be looking in all the wrong places? Is the nation so ignorant after centuries of willful disobedience that they will still be seeking the false places of worship and swearing by gods that are no gods at all?
The people of God need to seek the real God. But after centuries of rejecting the true temple of the Lord in Jerusalem and turning away from the growing testimony of the Law and the Prophets, could the northern kingdom be absolved of their guilt simply by pleading ignorance? If they were full of zeal, would it still be the case that they simply would not know where to turn in order to find the truth and to do what was right?
We need to remind ourselves of the plain truth that the Apostle Paul speaks of in the early chapters of his letter to the Romans. Everyone is without excuse. We are represented accurately by Adam’s sin and stand justly condemned. Furthermore, God has not been silent. By the things that He has made, He has clearly demonstrated His eternal power and divine nature. Beyond this, God has given His written Word to His people since the days of Moses, and even now, Israel had the spoken Word of Amos. They could not credibly claim to be innocent in their rejection of God and His ways.
Yet the Lord was not content to leave us with only these witnesses to His truth. At just the right time He sent His Son as the incarnate Word. In the revelation of Jesus Christ, we are met by One who is the perfectly accurate image of the invisible God. We can see in Him what that love is which is the fulfillment of the Law. We are called to follow Him who gave His life for our salvation.
God is not content to leave us in our desperation and sin. He is not willing for people to perish in their self-deceit and willful ignorance. He has given to His church the task of exposing darkness with the light of Christ. Every day, until He returns bodily with His promised resurrection kingdom, the Lord will be opening the eyes of the spiritually blind in places all over the earth, and claiming by His grace Jews and Gentiles who meet the Word of God in Christ and find fresh new food for their souls. There is no need for any soul anywhere to suffer a famine of the Word of God today. The Son of God is with His people and sends us forward to speak. God will feed the nations with the Bread of Life.
When the Lord has been warning His people for many centuries regarding the consequences for covenant disobedience, eventually the end must come. When anything of great consequence happens among the affairs of nations, some leader with authority must give the go-ahead word that sets things in motion in such a way that they cannot be turned back. Here that Word finally comes from the Lord. By His command the very capitals that hold up the structure of His building Israel shall be brought down, and judgment shall fall on the heads of His people.
When the Lord speaks that Word, there is no way for Israel to escape. There is no place to hide, no safety, no refuge, for God is determined to bring upon them the evil that they deserve. Who is it that has turned against them? It is the One who has sovereign power over the earth and over all its inhabitants. It is not simply Assyria with all her great armies. It is the One who rules the waters of the sea, the One who bears the great Name of “I am.”
What is Israel to this God when such a word of death is uttered? On one hand, she would seem to be like just one among many nations of the earth. He speaks of her as He speaks of the Philistines and the Syrians. Yet we find in the closing verses of this book that such an assessment is only for a moment. Even as the word of destruction is uttered by the Lord, we hear this mercy on His lips, “I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob.” Many will die by the sword, many who have proudly insisted that they would not face disaster, yet that disaster will not be the end of the story of God’s eternal love for His people.
God speaks of another day coming in the future, a day that he simply calls “that day.” In that day He will raise up the booth of David. These words are quoted many centuries later by the half-brother of Jesus and a leader of the church in Jerusalem, James. In Acts 15 at a very critical juncture in the life of the New Testament church, James turns to the Old Testament Scriptures to show how Amos had written about the inclusion of Gentiles in the people of God.
A royal descendant of David, Jesus, the true King of the Jews, had fallen in death, but God had raised Him up to immortality, that He might be the fulfillment of the Lord’s promises to David, and therefore to all the Israel of God. It would not be enough for Him to bring salvation to the Lord’s chosen remnant from Israel and Judah. He would also possess a remnant from all the nations called by the Name of God. It would not even be necessary for those Gentiles to become Jews through circumcision in order to be numbered among the people of resurrection life. They would remain uncircumcised, and thus fulfill the prophecy of Amos 9:12 that they would yet by Gentiles, people of the nations, rather than converts to Judaism marked by circumcision.
This Jesus would bring in a whole new order in His day. He would be the firstfruits of a resurrection age. That age would be glorious. It would be a day of such bounty that the harvest of good things from the renewed land would be continually breaking forth, as if the farmer bringing in the crops would overtake those sowing the seed for the next harvest. The mountains of that transformed earth would drip wine, and would fulfill the longings of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and all Israel for a land flowing with milk and honey.
The Lord would bring into being a new Israel, an Israel so different from the people of the northern kingdom in the days of Amos, an Israel composed of Jews and Gentiles gathered in the Name of the resurrected Son of David, and saved by the blood of that Passover Lamb. They would be given a better land than Canaan of old, and that better land would never be taken from them, nor would they be uprooted by any foreign power ever again.
This is how the book of Amos closes. There is no changing the fact that the Assyrians would come. They would bring with them the devastating judgment of God against the people of the northern tribes. Sin must be punished. The loss of the nation of Israel would not be nearly enough to satisfy the justice of God. The capitals of God’s righteous wrath would come down upon our Savior on the cross for our salvation. Descendants of the Israelites who rejected Amos would yet come to Christ in a future day, and they would be joined together with Gentiles into a new Israel that would be a great worldwide reality. The world that would eventually be their home would be as new and fresh as their own resurrection bodies, made after the likeness of their Messiah King.
We still have the hope of this prophetic Word today, a Word that has proven to be most sure through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The reality of the final promise of this book is grounded in the fact of the resurrection of our Lord. We feed our souls today with the news of the coming kingdom, and we turn to God in our day of trouble and opportunity, asking the Lord for the complete fulfillment of this good promise from the close of this book every time we pray, “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”