Hope Restored

Intro

In Jim Collins book “Good to Great”, Jim writes about about Medal of Honor recipient Admiral Jim Stockdale. Adm. Stockdale was a POW during the Vietnam war. In fact, he was the highest ranking military officer in the infamous Hanoi Hilton POW camp.

Jim was tortured over 20 times during his 8 year imprisonment from 1965-1973.

He had no prisoner’s rights, no release date, and no guarantee that he would ever see his wife and family again.

As an Admiral, Jim did what he could to create conditions for the other prisoners under his command that would increase the likelihood of survival, often to his own detriment.

All while at the same time trying to fight against his captor’s attempts to use the prisoners for propaganda.

In fact, at one point, he had beaten himself with a stool and cut himself with a razor blade in order to intentionally disfigure himself so the enemy could not put him in their propaganda videos of how “well-treated” the prisoners were.

Since he was allowed to exchange letters with his wife back home, he would share secret, encoded intelligence in his letters at great risk to himself.

Had he been caught he would have been tortured even more if not executed.

When writing his book, Jim Collins got to meet Adm. Stockdale prior to his death in 2005. When he did, Adm. Stockdale still walked with a limp because his one leg never fully recovered from the repeated torture he underwent.

Collins asked him how he dealt with the uncertainty of his fate and brutality of his captors when he did not know the end of the story.

Adm. Stockdale said “I never lost faith in the end of the story,' he said. 'I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”

You see, Adm. Stockdale had something that was more powerful than any prison or torture his captor’s used. He had hope. Hope that though his current situation was bleak, that where he found himself in the POW camp wasn’t going to be the end of his story.

Hope is a powerful thing to have.

Review

As you know, for the last month or so we have been going through the book of Amos together.

And this book has not been an easy one to digest. Not because it is difficult to understand, but because of the bleak reality in which its original audience had found themselves.

As you may recall, Amos was a minor prophet of the OT who God had called to prophecy judgment over the northern kingdom of Israel for her many sins.

For the most part, Israel had commited apostacy, or had fallen away from the truth.

They abandoned the word of God and the law of Moses.

They had rejected the Dividic royal line, thus breaking away from the southern Kingdom of Judah.

They were abusing their fellow Israelites and failing to care for the most vulnerable in their society.

They had turned from the one true God and were practicing paganism and idolatry.

They had grown complacent and complicit in the evil and wicked things that the people of Israel were participating in, especially their leaders.

As a result, God was going to bring judgement upon them.

Amos 8:1-3 NLT Then the Sovereign Lord showed me another vision. In it I saw a basket filled with ripe fruit. 2 “What do you see, Amos?” he asked. I replied, “A basket full of ripe fruit.” Then the Lord said, “Like this fruit, Israel is ripe for punishment! I will not delay their punishment again.

3 In that day the singing in the temple will turn to wailing. Dead bodies will be scattered everywhere. They will be carried out of the city in silence. I, the Sovereign Lord, have spoken!”

In roughly 30 years time, Assyria would invade Israel and God would use them to carry out this punishment.

The people who God had called and chosen to be his people, a holy, set apart nation who would be God’s representatives to the entire world, would for the most part be destroyed.

And this destruction wouldn’t just be physical, but spiritual as well.

Amos 8:11-12 NLT “The time is surely coming,” says the Sovereign Lord, “when I will send a famine on the land—not a famine of bread or water but of hearing the words of the Lord. 12 People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from border to border searching for the word of the Lord, but they will not find it.

In their ignorance, Israel’s disobedience would also have an impact on the people’s ability to hear from God.

I can’t help but see some parallel’s to our world today as we see a famine of God’s word, even in our Churches.

Where believers are bouncing from place to place, thinking that what they need is the latest and greatest. The loudest and prettiest. But what they are really looking for is the pure and true preaching of the word of God but they aren’t finding it.

Instead we simply find what our itching ears want to hear, and while that seems great for a little while. Eventually we come to realize that that isn’t going to change our lives for the better.

That isn’t going to help us overcome sin, fix our marriages, help us raise our children, or make us more Christ-like. So we move on, not realizing that what we are looking for in a Churches are all the wrong things.

It is unavoidable

God, through Amos has made it pretty clear that Israel has had their chance to repent, and now the time for repentance is over.

Judgment is coming, and it is unavoidable. God says to Israel that no matter where you go, where you try to hide, who you go to for protection, it will not stop the enemy from finding you and destroying you.

This prophecy is dark, and it is unrelentingly harsh. But, this is reality.

Some have said that the God of the OT is a God of wrath while the God of the NT is a God of love as if they are either two different Gods, or that God somehow changes his nature between the OT and NT.

Those who say this fail to see the comprehensive and even complex nature of God.

God has alway been a God of love. He is the personification of love in it purest sense. But God is also the personification of justice in its purest sense.

It is because of God’s love that he must also be just. He cannot allow Israel’s or anyone’s sin for that matter to go unpunished or he would fail to be just. If God fails to be just, than he also fails to be loving.

What God is about to do to Israel, is because he loves them so much that to continue to allow them to do what they are doing will only cause further destruction later.

So all this time we have been reading and seeing pictures of this horrific judgement and one must reconcile this reality with one question that comes to mind.

What about those in Israel who had remained faithful, even if there are only a few?

Amos 9:8-10 NLT 8 “I, the Sovereign Lord, am watching this sinful nation of Israel. I will destroy it from the face of the earth. But I will never completely destroy the family of Israel,” says the Lord.

9 “For I will give the command and will shake Israel along with the other nations as grain is shaken in a sieve, yet not one true kernel will be lost. 10 But all the sinners will die by the sword—all those who say, ‘Nothing bad will happen to us.’

For the first time in Amos’s prophecy, as it draws near to its final verses we get a glimpse of hope.

That somehow, even though judgment is unavoidable, even though the nation itself will be destroyed, that somehow the Israelite people will survive. Somehow, the faithful remnant will make it through.

Promised Restoration

Not only does God give them hope to survive, but that one day he will actually restore what Assyria is going to take away.

Amos 9:11-15 NLT 11 “In that day I will restore the fallen house of David. I will repair its damaged walls. From the ruins I will rebuild it and restore its former glory. 12 And Israel will possess what is left of Edom and all the nations I have called to be mine.” The Lord has spoken, and he will do these things.

13 “The time will come,” says the Lord, “when the grain and grapes will grow faster than they can be harvested. Then the terraced vineyards on the hills of Israel will drip with sweet wine! 14 I will bring my exiled people of Israel back from distant lands, and they will rebuild their ruined cities and live in them again. They will plant vineyards and gardens; they will eat their crops and drink their wine.

15 I will firmly plant them there in their own land. They will never again be uprooted from the land I have given them,” says the Lord your God.

Here God promises Israel that one day, even though they are about to be exiled and destroyed, that one day he will gather them together once again to their own land, never to be uprooted again.

We know historically speaking, that when Israel, and a few hundred years later, Judah were exiled, they were never again left to be a sovereign nation.

Even when the exiles were allowed to return to Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile, they weren’t given sovereign autonomy as a nation.

Israel never again had a legitimate King and ruler. Rather Israel lived as conquered subjects of various foreign nations for generations until its final destruction by Rome in 70 AD.

Yet God promised that eventually, this would change. And it started with Jesus. The fallen house of David was restored in the Messiah. The one true King in the line of David was Jesus and from there God would set in motion events that would eventually restore the nation of Israel.

In fact, in 70 AD, when Rome destroyed the temple once and for all and scattered the Jewish people, It would have seemed as if God’s promise in Amos would never be fulfilled.

But then something that had never happened before happened in 1948. That after 2,000 years a people were once again made a sovereign nation.

Israel was re-established and God gathered his people from distant lands all across the Earth, and just as God had promised, Isreal was re-born.

It happened overnight. One day Israel wasn’t a nation, and the next day it was. In fact it happened exactly as Isaiah prophesied that it would.

Isaiah 66:8 NLT 8 Who has ever seen anything as strange as this? Who ever heard of such a thing? Has a nation ever been born in a single day? Has a country ever come forth in a mere moment? But by the time Jerusalem’s birth pains begin, her children will be born.

Even look at what Amos says about the land when God restores Israel.

Amos 9:13 NLT 13 “The time will come,” says the Lord, “when the grain and grapes will grow faster than they can be harvested. Then the terraced vineyards on the hills of Israel will drip with sweet wine!

You may not know this, but when Israel was re-established in 1948, the Jews came home to a desert wasteland.

The land was good for nothing. Yet, today, Israel is full of lush farmland. In fact they are one of the world’s largest exporters of fruit.

Now, understand something. I do not believe that that the re-establishment of Israel in 1948 is the complete fulfillment of these prophecies.

I think they are foreshadows or partial fulfillments that are pointing to the complete fulfillment in the millennial reign of Christ when Jesus returns at his second coming.

Application/Closing

So why read them. Because it shows us that when God promises to do something, he will do it.

Like Admiral Stockdale who had faith that his current situation wasn’t how his story would end, we too need to understand that not only is the world we live in and the hardships we face not the end of our story, unlike Admiral Stockdale, we actually know the end of our story.

Like Israel, we know that judgement is coming. We know that sin will increase and violence, wars, natural disasters, and a rejection of God’s word are symptoms of this increase.

We know that Judgment will come and destroy everything that is opposed to God.

But we also know that that we have a blessed hope.

A hope that one day, like Jesus who was the first to be resurrected and given a transformed body, all who have chosen to follow Christ in this life will also be resurrected and given transformed bodies that will not longer be corrupted by sin and therefore never again be subject to death.

1 Corinthians 15:51-55 NLT 51 But let me reveal to you a wonderful secret. We will not all die, but we will all be transformed! 52 It will happen in a moment, in the blink of an eye, when the last trumpet is blown. For when the trumpet sounds, those who have died will be raised to live forever. And we who are living will also be transformed.

53 For our dying bodies must be transformed into bodies that will never die; our mortal bodies must be transformed into immortal bodies.

54 Then, when our dying bodies have been transformed into bodies that will never die, this Scripture will be fulfilled: “Death is swallowed up in victory. 55 O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?”

If you take anything from this series and this OT book, let be that God will not allow sin to go undealt with.

But, he is also a God of grace and mercy. That his judgment of sin was already poured out on his son Jesus and if you and I are willing to repent and receive Christ, we know that our story doesn’t have to end in judgement, but in hope.