Be Careful What You Wish For

Introduction

Greeting

Have you ever wanted something so badly and then when you got what you were waiting for it didn’t meet your expectations?

We’re entering in to the Christmas season and all around the world children are starting to anticipate what they’re going to get for Christmas and the joy of that anticipation often times doesn’t match up to the results

Like the package that is so beautifully wrapped, that has a nice bow on it and contains such promise until you open it and find a cat sweater

There’s even a movie that capitalizes on this sense of anticipation

The Christmas Story is the story of Ralphie and for the whole movie all he wants is a red rider bb gun - and for the whole movie he’s warned that if he gets one he’ll shoot his eye out

Well Christmas morning comes and seems to go and there’s no bb gun - until his father pulls one last package out from behind the tree and he gets his red rider bb gun

And he promptly takes it out into the back yard shoots at something and the ricochet hits him right in the eye

All of that anticipation, all of that joy is gone in an instant as he gets what he was not looking for

In Amos day, the Israelites were anticipating something and tonight Amos is going to warn them to be careful what they wish for - because they might just get it and when they do it may not be exactly what they were expecting it to be

The Not-So Great Day

Amos 5:18-20; Joel 2:1-2; Hebrews 10:31;

Alas - you can almost hear the sarcasm in Amos’ voice as he opens this part of the sermon

Almost like an older sibling or a playground bully taunting a younger child - you want it? you really want it?

Alas here is also translated as woe - woe to you

You have no idea what you’re wishing for

Three times during this short paragraph Amos mentions The day of the Lord

This is the first chronological mentioning of the “day of the Lord” in Hebrew scripture

It was a common concept in other pagan religions of the day - each having their own “day of the lord” story where their god would come and deliver them with a mighty military victory and establish them as the rulers of the earth

While the concept of an overarching victory is certainly within the Jewish religion - it is not the military victory that the Jews of Amos’ day, and even those of Jesus day, expected

This is an instance of the synchretistic nature that the Israelites religious practices had taken on

Synchretism is the idea that you can sample a lot of different religious ideas and put them together to form your religion

It still takes place today as you see churches practicing Yoga - a Hindu salvific practice - or mindfulness - nothing more than varnished over Budhism

Now each of these have value - yoga done as a stretching exercise or the deep breathing excercises of mindfulness to calm your body do have good physical value. It is when they are attempted to be applied to the spiritual well being of a person - specifically a Christian that there is an issue

Since it doesn’t look like many of you in this room (including myself) have been practicing yoga some other practices that we’ve brought it that are more common are contemplative prayer or catophatic prayer - these are a blending of our religion with other religious practices that never work out well for the practitioners.

Amos tells the Israelites that the day that they are expecting to be victorious and amazing would be darkness for them

In conjunction with the funeral dirge that Amos had just pronounced over the nation of Israel this would have been shocking to his hearers

The whole point of the day of the Lord - whatever religious system it came out of - was for the people of that deity to win and to be the winners and now Amos is telling them that it is going to be darkness and not light

How could a loving God come and punish His own people

They were serving Him and sacrificing to Him - they were even in the middle of a religious festival as this was being delivered - how could the day be darkness for them and not light

Amos tells them that it’s as if a man were running from a lion only to meet a bear and then having escaped that to get home where he presumed he was safe and to be bitten by a snake

The writer of Hebrews talks of the same concept much more succinctly

Hebrews 10:31

This again speaks to the core problem that the Israelites of Amos day faced - they had forgotten who God was

As they sought for the day of the Lord their theology was right - the day of the Lord will be the day on which God will defeat all of His enemies - they had just gotten their theological expectations wrong - they didn’t realize that they could be among those to be judged and based on their treatment of others and perversion of the Mosaic covenant they would be among those to be judged.

The danger facing the Israelites is one that faces every generation in the church - the threat of allowing culture to influence our view of God and then remolding God into an image that we prefer

And this is infecting the church

In 2015 an English bishop - the right reverend Rachel Treweek said that we should stop using gender-specific pronouns when referring to God as a male “We’re told that God created human beings in God’s likeness…If I am made in the image of God, then God is not to be seen as a male. God is God.”

The problem here is that there is just enough truth to be dangerous. God is God - He is a spirit and not a physical manifestation of a man. However when the Spirit inspired the writers of the Word of God to describe God the pronoun chosen was male. And of course if God created all these genders but is genderless Himself then it opens up the concept that we could be genderless

Bethel pastor Kris Vallotton is teaching this about God - “Wealth is not just a condition, it’s a power. God is the one who gives people the power to make wealth, which is the magnetic attraction to prosperity. His celestial mission was to make us wealthy....”

And of course there is the favorite teaching that God wont condemn anyone because they are all just seeking Him in their own way

So we have made God out to be a genderless, financial advising, universalist

And the biggest problem is that there are millions of so-called self-identified Christians who go to church every Sunday and maybe another time during the week and worship this god that we have created in our own image

When we allow culture to determine the image of God that we worship our worship is tainted and unacceptable to Him and the day of the Lord will not be something to look forward to

The Not-So Great Religion

Amos 5:21-24; Isaiah 1:11-16; Exodus 29:18; Leviticus 1:9;

Normally the prophets would lay out the charge against their listeners first and then tell them the results but in this instance Amos has done it in reverse

He’s told the Israelites to fear the day of the Lord instead of looking forward to it and now he’s going to tell them why this should be the case

I hate? The God of this section of the passage is the direct antithesis of everything that the modern church has come to expect Him to be

I hate, I reject, I do not delight, I will not accept, I wont even look....

This isn’t the God that we’ve been taught who is warm and cuddly and looks at us with doey blue eyes from under long luxurious locks of sandy brown hair

God hates? Yes

This is an aspect of God’s personality that is often overlooked in our modern day church

Why - because we so often equate hate with sin

And this is because when we hate something it is sin because we hate it out of our own impure or selfish motives

But God cannot sin and therefore his hatred is pure

God’s hatred has to do with the improper worship or reverence that is offered to His holy name

Isaiah 1:11-16

This parallel passage to our own passage illuminates a little more for us how God hates and what He hates -

He hates external worship that has no internal impact

He says that He does not delight in their solemn assemblies or their festivals

The verb here can be translated as either delight or also “cannot stand” and in it’s true tense when there is no negation of it, it carries with it the sense of literally to smell or enjoy the smell of something

The noun form of the word can be found in passages such as Exodus 29:18 or Leviticus 1:9 where is is translated as a pleasing aroma or an aroma pleasing to the Lord

But here it says that God is repulsed by the aroma that rises from the Israelites worship, that He does not delight in the worship of His people

False worship arising from sinful lives is worse than unacceptable to Him.

The offerings referred to were all for the purpose of restoring a right relationship between God and the people - they were individual offerings

The burnt offering was to be a male from the flock, it was to be unblemished and was to be completely burned up on the altar

But this was not what was being brought - Malachi 1:7-8

The grain offering was to be unleavened and a portion was to be burnt with a portion reserved for the priest

But the Israelites were offering leavened grain for their offerings - Amos 4:5

The fellowship offering was to symbolize communion between the worshipper and God as a part of the offering was consumed on the altar and the remaining parts eaten by the worshipper - but these offerings God refused to even look at

God is not impressed or pleased with their worship

The missing ingredient in their worship was authenticity manifested in a lifestyle of obedience

He tells them to take away their songs - that it is simply noise

And then He makes an interesting statement - let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever flowing stream

This is interesting because of the characterization of justice and righteousness that he has already given - Amos 5:7

This is such a contrast in the purity of the justice and righteousness of God and the perversity of the justice and righteousness of man

With God justice and righteousness can flow like a stream cleaning out the sin and impurities whereas the justice and righteousness of man is like wormwood that corrupts whatever it touches

This is where the rubber meets the road for us - each of these sacrifices were individual sacrifices between the worshipper and God

Amos keeps insisting on calling each of us back to account for our heart and intentions when we come in to worship

Is it merely an external act or is it an internal reality that demonstrates a real relationship with Christ?

That is the question that Amos keeps thrusting at us and that we must answer because as he points out next it’s really more about relationship than the outward trappings of religious actions

Before I move on notice that theres a difference there - I didn’t say that it’s not about religion or theology but the outward trappings of religious actions

In our church we love to say it’s about a relationship not a religion - but the religion is the relationship. We cannot have a correct relationship with Christ without the religion or the theology that supports it.

What gets in the way of that relationship is when we so often misconstrue the religious actions as containing saving power rather than being an evidence of the relationship that is taking place inside of us

Baptism would be a good example - the act of baptism is not what saves you, it is the physical representation to the world of the change and the saving that has already taken place inside of you through the power of the Holy Spirit

The Israelites, and so often we do the same, had fallen into the misconception that the religious trappings were greater than the relationship

Then as now, God’s acceptance or rejection of human expressions of worship (religious trappings) is based on His assessment of the motives of the heart

The Not-So Great Relationship

Amos 5:25-27; Jeremiah 2:2-8; Isaiah 40:18-20; Psalm 115:4-8

Amos seeks to correct their understanding in the next few verses

He has consistently reached back to the Exodus to contrast the experience of the people then with God and their current experience with Him

He asks a rhetorical question - did you present sacrifices and grain offerings in the wilderness for forty years? The answer to this question is no - and the point of the question is not really about sacrifices. The Israelites could not have a regular sacrificial program in the wilderness - yet they never ceased to be God’s covenant people.

Their assumption that their sacrifices were what kept them covenantally within God’s grace was mistaken.

The he hits them in their synchronistic blending of religious practices again - pointing to the idols that they probably carried during one of the festivals

Jeremiah 2:2-8 also contrasts the orthodoxy of the wilderness era versus the idolatry of Amos day

Amos contemporaries probably thought they were pretty sophisticated compared to the wilderness generation with their hewn homes and ivory couches.

Yet they worshipped things made from their own hands.

Isaiah 40:18-20

Psalm 115:4-8

What arrogance - to think that they were more sophisticated than those who had gone before.

Yet we feel the same way with respect to the men and women who have gone before us in the faith - we think we know better what music to play or sing to, we know better what topics to teach to a modern generation, we think we know better what the Bible actually meant by what it said - even better in some cases than the actual person who wrote it. Whenever I preach a text I always think in my mind if Amos were sitting right there in the front row would he be nodding with what I’m preaching or would he have a confused look on his face because he didn’t realize he’d written that.

For the Israelites their punishment would be to go in to exile beyond Damascus some 40 years after this sermon was preached - for us the consequences are much greater and longer lasting

See there’s no where that we can be exiled to - it’s not likely that we’re going to be exiled to North Korea or Russia for two reasons - first because it’s North Korea and second because we aren’t Israel or living in the age that Israel lived in. We live in the church age and our exile will be to one place - Hell. If we miss out and don’t have our relationship with Christ right when our day comes then our exile wont have an end to it.

Conclusion - There is still hope

But with all that being said there is still hope

While Amos is the first mention of the day of the Lord - it is not the last

Throughout the Old Testament there are references to the day of the Lord and almost without fail they provide a doom and gloom view

Joel 2:1-2

Isaiah 2:12

Malachi 4:1

But then the New Testament comes and while there is still the promise of the day of the Lord, the emphasis shifts

1 Thessalonians 4:16 - 1 Thessalonians 5:6

You see we have the hope of Christ - our protection for the day of the Lord is secure in Him

If we have been crucified with Him then we have been raised with Him as well and our lives are hid with Christ in God.

So we who are in Christ have nothing to fear from the great day of the Lord. We can look forward to the gathering of sheep and goats and know that we will be on the right side. But we should always be wary testing ourselves to make sure we are in the faith - what is our heart condition? Are we worshipping in spirit and truth or has it just become rote ritual that we’re just going through the motions.

Tonight if you aren’t in Christ - I will issue the call again. Repent, trust in Him. It will come on you like a thief in the night when we least expect it.

Be one who can look forward to the day of Christ with exultant expectation not one who arrives there with dread and regret.