Amos 11: The Lord's Final Appeal

Needs:

B: Amos 5:18-27

N:

Opening

Good morning to you all! I am Bill Connors, and I would like to welcome everyone here in person and online to our Family Worship Service. Thank you for joining us today, and for being a part of our time together. Mention the Washington Prayer March yesterday.

This morning, as we continue our series on Amos: Prophet of Judgment & Justice by finishing chapter 5 of that prophecy, one fact that I want us to keep in mind is that this passage contains the last kind of “positive appeal” that the Lord makes to His people, Israel, in this book. The book ends with a message of hope, but not for the Northern Kingdom, as we will see. For 4 1/2 chapters, the Sovereign Lord has been roaring out His condemnation on the choices of His people, and His impending judgment for those choices. We saw last week that He appealed to the people of the Northern Kingdom to “seek the Lord,” and to, “pursue good and not evil,” so that they might “live.” That appeal came in the middle of a lament, or a funeral song, for the Northern Kingdom, which the Lord continues in this passage, and then on through chapter 6.

Let’s stand in honor of God’s Word as we read verses 18 through 27 of Amos chapter 5:

Amos 5:18–27 CSB

18 Woe to you who long for the day of the Lord! What will the day of the Lord be for you? It will be darkness and not light. 19 It will be like a man who flees from a lion only to have a bear confront him. He goes home and rests his hand against the wall only to have a snake bite him. 20 Won’t the day of the Lord be darkness rather than light, even gloom without any brightness in it? 21 I hate, I despise, your feasts! I can’t stand the stench of your solemn assemblies. 22 Even if you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; I will have no regard for your fellowship offerings of fattened cattle. 23 Take away from me the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. 24 But let justice flow like water, and righteousness, like an unfailing stream. 25 “House of Israel, was it sacrifices and grain offerings that you presented to me during the forty years in the wilderness? 26 But you have taken up Sakkuth your king and Kaiwan your star god, images you have made for yourselves. 27 So I will send you into exile beyond Damascus.” The Lord, the God of Armies, is his name. He has spoken.

PRAY

I can say that before February, I never imagined what church life would look like in the midst of a pandemic. It never even crossed my mind. Obviously as far as the big picture is concerned, just about everyone in the country and in much of the world are dealing with some form of upset to their lives. Here, we are still instructed to stay at home if we can, to wear masks, to limit group sizes, and all kinds of other restrictions to what we might consider “normal” living.

In the smaller picture of church life, we still aren’t doing much “normal” either. We still have burlap blocking off every other pew. Everyone in here is wearing a mask, even when we sing. We’re trying really hard to keep services to an hour length. We are doing all we can as a church to make sure that our school can keep operating, because that impacts all of those families and the families of the school’s employees. So we’ve spread the school out throughout the building in order to follow occupancy and distancing rules. To better guarantee the safety of our students and teachers, we’re not using the rest of our building as a church body, so we aren’t holding on-site Bible studies and small groups. So many of our groups are meeting online, and many aren’t meeting regularly for the time being.

We’ve made so many changes to things, and “normal” is something that I think a lot of us sort of look back on and go, “man, it would sure be nice to get back to ‘normal’ again.” But maybe there is a critical question for us to ask of ourselves: What if “normal” isn’t where we need to go when the time comes?

I’m not saying that we need to trash programs or meeting times. But what if there was something about “normal” that wasn’t as good as we think it was? What if “normal” was in some ways our “going through the motions” of faith, because it was what we had always done, and it was something that we would continue to do if we hadn’t been shaken up? I’m not saying that it necessarily the case, or even the case for all of us, but is it possible?

Over the last few weeks, as we have considered this message to Israel through Amos, we have come back to the idea of the Lord’s problem with what the Israelites called “worship.” They made it a show and a performance, something that declared how great they were, instead of how great God is. They ignored God when He spoke, and they cared more about special places than about the God whose work and presence made the places special in the lives of His people.

As I said, this passage contains the last bit of positive appeal that the Lord makes in this prophecy to His people Israel. But before the Lord makes that positive appeal, He shakes up their idea of what was “normal” by rejecting the trappings of their religious life.

1) The rejection of “fellowship”

First, the Lord rejects their “fellowship.” The reason that I’m using this term, even though the Scripture doesn’t call it this specifically in the verse, is that in our modern church context, this word “fellowship” is kind of a catch-all for anything that believers do together. I’ll explain more after we look at verse 21.

Amos 5:21 CSB

21 I hate, I despise, your feasts! I can’t stand the stench of your solemn assemblies.

The people of God had been given prescribed feast times and celebration times by the Lord. I’m not going to go into detail on those this morning. After the split of the nation of Israel into the Divided Kingdom of Israel in the north and Judah in the south, remember that Jeroboam had done all that he could to keep the Northern Kingdom people from traveling to the Temple in Jerusalem, which was in the Southern Kingdom. Part of this method of preventing that travel was to create feasts or festivals like the ones that Judah celebrated at the Temple:

1 Kings 12:32–33 CSB

32 Jeroboam made a festival in the eighth month on the fifteenth day of the month, like the festival in Judah. He offered sacrifices on the altar; he made this offering in Bethel to sacrifice to the calves he had made. He also stationed the priests in Bethel for the high places he had made. 33 He offered sacrifices on the altar he had set up in Bethel on the fifteenth day of the eighth month. He chose this month on his own. He made a festival for the Israelites, offered sacrifices on the altar, and burned incense.

This festival that Jeroboam created was exactly one month after the prescribed date for the Festival of Shelters or Tabernacles, according to Leviticus 23. Incidentally, according to the Jewish calendar, the Festival of Shelters (called “Sukkot”) is scheduled to begin this coming Friday, because tonight is the start of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

These times of celebration were to be a unifying time for the people of God. They were meant to recall what God had done for the nation at various times in their history, and often included and still include times of joint celebration, where the people entertain guests or visit friends.

This is why I referred to this as a rejection of “fellowship.” We call lots of things “fellowship.” We’re going to eat together: It’s a fellowship. We’re going to worship together: fellowship. We’re going to watch the game or play a sport or go the mountains: fellowship. Now, I’m not saying these things are wrong or bad.

The issue for the Israelites is that God rejected these celebrations because He wasn’t the center of them. They were practiced in ways and at times that had nothing to do with God. They did things during them that God was against. The fact is that God wasn’t actually a part of these celebrations, because they weren’t about Him. They were about themselves.

If we’re going to talk about what it means to be in “fellowship” with each other, there’s a critical component that needs to be kept in the proper place if it’s going to be fellowship: The Lord needs to be at the center. Think about it. The first part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy is called “The Fellowship of the Ring.” What is the centerpoint of their fellowship? The Ring. If we claim to be in fellowship with Christ and thus with each other, Jesus needs to be at the center of our fellowship.

Notice the central reason that John wrote his first epistle (fancy word for “letter”):

1 John 1:1–3 CSB

1 What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have observed and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—2 that life was revealed, and we have seen it and we testify and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us—3 what we have seen and heard we also declare to you, so that you may also have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.

He wrote about Jesus, so that the believers would have true fellowship with each other.

Do you think that God ever rejects what we call “fellowship?” Are there things that we’ve done in the name of “fellowship” in the “normal” times that God probably was almost completely left out of? Think about the things you focus on when you come together with other believers. Is Jesus at the center? That doesn’t mean that everything has to be a small group or a Bible study, but is it something that you would want to invite Jesus to be a part of, and something that Jesus would be glad to attend?

If not, is it really Christian fellowship?

2) The rejection of “sacrifice”

The next thing that the Lord rejects in the worship life of the Israelites is their practice of sacrifice. This again is a question of the heart behind the action, rather than the action itself. Making sacrifices was commanded for the Jewish nation. However, the Northern Kingdom had taken them in a pagan and idolatrous direction that God completely rejected.

Amos 5:22 CSB

22 Even if you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; I will have no regard for your fellowship offerings of fattened cattle.

Here, the Lord declares that He is rejecting the Israelites’ giving of three of the major sacrifices: the burnt offering, the grain offering, and the fellowship offering. Like their festivals and celebrations, they had removed the Lord from the meaning of their sacrifices, as we saw back in chapter 4, verses 4-5:

Amos 4:4–5 CSB

4 Come to Bethel and rebel; rebel even more at Gilgal! Bring your sacrifices every morning, your tenths every three days. 5 Offer leavened bread as a thanksgiving sacrifice, and loudly proclaim your freewill offerings, for that is what you Israelites love to do! This is the declaration of the Lord God.

So these things weren’t sacrifices. They were displays of how great the people were. They were for show. The people themselves weren’t in them, which is ultimately what God really wanted: He wanted His people to see Him as central to everything they did.

Giving is an important part of the Christian life, and we should all be actively giving to the ministry of the Lord through the church. However, that’s not what I’m getting at today. It’s totally possible to give to the church but not have a heart for the Lord in the process. That’s why the most important sacrifice for the Christian isn’t from our pocketbooks or billfolds, but is something much more valuable: Our very selves.

Romans 12:1 CSB

1 Therefore, brothers and sisters, in view of the mercies of God, I urge you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God; this is your true worship.

We are to present not just our wealth, but our whole selves as an act of worship. And it is supposed to be a continual act, a constant giving of ourselves in praise to God:

Hebrews 13:15 CSB

15 Therefore, through him let us continually offer up to God a sacrifice of praise, that is, the fruit of lips that confess his name.

We bear the fruit that God would have us bear when we sacrifice ourselves, and allow everything else about us to follow suit, including our money. We aren’t to give so we can feel better about ourselves, or so that we can make ourselves look good, or so we can humble brag even just inside of our heads. We are to give ourselves completely to God as an act of declaring His “worth-ship,” and that is an offering that He will not reject, according to psalm 51:17

Psalm 51:17 CSB

17 The sacrifice pleasing to God is a broken spirit. You will not despise a broken and humbled heart, God.

The people of Israel were the opposite of this in their giving. How about us?

3) The rejection of “worship”

I’m calling it “worship” because for many of us, what we immediately think of when we use that term is (as far as an action is concerned) is music and singing. And even though they had ceased going to the Temple, the people of the Northern Kingdom still sang songs and played instruments as a part of their religious practice. But God rejected this as well:

Amos 5:23 CSB

23 Take away from me the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps.

We will see a little more about the people of Samaria and their love of music next week in chapter 6. For now, we need to understand that again, their hearts were simply not in the right place for worshiping the Lord.

This is why I asked the band to do “The Heart of Worship” this morning. When we come together to sing, are our hearts in the right place? I’m not saying that you have to sing in order to worship the Lord. I’m asking whether or not He is central to that time, is your heart focused on the Lord when we come together and sing His praises?

Look at how Paul spoke about the church and corporate worship in Colossians 3:

Colossians 3:14–17 CSB

14 Above all, put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity. 15 And let the peace of Christ, to which you were also called in one body, rule your hearts. And be thankful. 16 Let the word of Christ dwell richly among you, in all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another through psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts. 17 And whatever you do, in word or in deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.

When we come here and sing together, do we love each other like Jesus? Do we come with an attitude and desire for the peace of Christ to rule in our hearts individually and corporately? Are we thankful? Do we come ready to not only hear the Word, but to share the Word of the Lord with one another, to be an encouragement to our brothers and sisters? This is musical praise that isn’t even necessarily musical, and praise that God wants to hear.

So God has rejected their fellowship, their sacrifice, and their worship. And it is after these three rejections that God makes His final appeal to His people:

Amos 5:24 CSB

24 But let justice flow like water, and righteousness, like an unfailing stream.

God’s final appeal is basically this: “Live your lives like Me, allowing justice and righteousness to flow out of you.” The word “but” at the beginning of this verse ties it to the previous verses of God’s rejection, so that God is saying to live like Him, so that their fellowship, their sacrifices, and their worship would be acceptable.

Trent Butler in his commentary on Amos wrote about this verse:

“True worship on the Lord’s Day depends on true righteousness lived out during the other days of the week.”

There is a preparation aspect to worship that I’m not sure we think about. So we need to ask ourselves who we are in the marketplace, in our homes, at our jobs, in our neighborhoods, on our phones, and on our social media accounts.

Does justice flow like water from us? Is there an endless stream of righteousness that points people to Jesus? There should be, because it’s what God has called us to in Christ. Sure, He called us to salvation, but He then called us to serve as His ambassadors in this world—ambassadors who let the justice and righteousness of God flow like a torrent:

2 Corinthians 5:19–20 CSB

19 That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and he has committed the message of reconciliation to us. 20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us. We plead on Christ’s behalf, “Be reconciled to God.”

We are called as ambassadors for Christ, and God is making His final appeal to this world through us. Are we being faithful to that?

So, as an ambassador for Christ, I want to plead with those of you who are hearing this right now, on Christ’s behalf, “be reconciled to God!” You may not realize that God loves you and wants to be close to you, but all the ways that you reject His will and His plan keep you separate from Him, because He is just and He is righteous, and He will not just accept our sin. It must be punished. So He gave His only Son, Jesus Christ, to take that punishment in our place. If we trust in what Jesus has done, and surrender our lives to Him, we are rescued and have eternal life.

As a representative of the Kingdom of God, I beg you to trust Jesus and be saved from wrath today. I beg you because of the things in this passage that we haven’t covered yet. Why is this God’s final appeal?

Because of the reality of judgment.

4) The reality of judgment

Very quickly, for the Israelites, God was making a promise about what was coming—that He wasn’t going to stand for their sin anymore, and punishment was on the way.

Amos 5:25–27 CSB

25 “House of Israel, was it sacrifices and grain offerings that you presented to me during the forty years in the wilderness? 26 But you have taken up Sakkuth your king and Kaiwan your star god, images you have made for yourselves. 27 So I will send you into exile beyond Damascus.” The Lord, the God of Armies, is his name. He has spoken.

God says that it wasn’t the sacrifices and offerings that they made in the wilderness that kept them close to Him. It was His work, and their responding to that work by faith. But they had taken on some of the pagan gods that were worshiped by the nations around them, and so God promises to send them into exile “beyond Damascus,” which would be Assyria—an enemy that Israel didn’t even fully understand yet. The Lord has spoken, which means, “Oh, it’s happening.”

This is because of this thing that He spoke of in verses 18-20: the Day of the Lord. This is the earliest reference to this concept of “the Day of the Lord” in Scripture:

Amos 5:18–20 CSB

18 Woe to you who long for the day of the Lord! What will the day of the Lord be for you? It will be darkness and not light. 19 It will be like a man who flees from a lion only to have a bear confront him. He goes home and rests his hand against the wall only to have a snake bite him. 20 Won’t the day of the Lord be darkness rather than light, even gloom without any brightness in it?

It is clear here that the concept of The Day of the Lord was already clear to the people that Amos is speaking to, because he doesn’t need to explain it. The Israelites thought it would be a time when God would come in person, deal with all the other nations of the world, and set Israel up as being the greatest. It was salvation and deliverance for them, and judgment and destruction for everyone else.

But they don’t get it. Yes, it’s a day of judgment. Theirs.

This would not be a happy time, like when the Lord said, “Prepare to meet your God” in chapter 4. It would be exactly the opposite. No light. No escape (lion-bear-snake). Total gloom, because they are being judged as we just saw in verses 26-27.

But there is an additional aspect of The Day of the Lord. This second aspect is that the ultimate Day of the Lord is still to come. It’s the time when God will bring judgment on the whole world, when Christ will come and call His own to Himself. At that point, He will set the whole world right, but not everyone will be saved. Those who have trusted Christ by faith and followed Him, they will be saved. Those who have rejected His invitation to trust Him will have made their final choice: eternal punishment in a very real place called hell.

And this day will come on suddenly, and brothers and sisters, we are aware that it is coming, and as a result, we are ready for it:

1 Thessalonians 5:2–10 CSB

2 For you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come just like a thief in the night. 3 When they say, “Peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them, like labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. 4 But you, brothers and sisters, are not in the dark, for this day to surprise you like a thief. 5 For you are all children of light and children of the day. We do not belong to the night or the darkness. 6 So then, let us not sleep, like the rest, but let us stay awake and be self-controlled. 7 For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, get drunk at night. 8 But since we belong to the day, let us be self-controlled and put on the armor of faith and love, and a helmet of the hope of salvation. 9 For God did not appoint us to wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, 10 who died for us, so that whether we are awake or asleep, we may live together with him.

Who do we know who isn’t ready for it? Who are we just going through life in “normal” mode, not speaking about Jesus to our lost and dying friends and family? Who do we need to tell about the coming Day of the Lord?

Closing

The people of Israel had been doing “normal” for nearly 200 years by the time Amos came on the scene with this message. And “normal” wasn’t what God was looking for in His people. He was looking for a people whose lives matched what they claimed to be when they came together to worship Him. And they weren’t. So He rejected their feasts and fellowship. He rejected their sacrifices. He rejected their songs and music. And declared the reality of His coming judgment on them because their “normal” was really just a set of hoops that they jumped through in order to try to win points with God.

Church, is this what we’re doing this morning? Are we here trying to win points with God by saying, “Look, God, I showed up!” While “showing up” isn’t a bad thing, doing that for the bare minimum in order to somehow obligate God to bless us doesn’t work. This is something the Pharisees were condemned for:

Matthew 23:23–24 CSB

23 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You pay a tenth of mint, dill, and cumin, and yet you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy, and faithfulness. These things should have been done without neglecting the others. 24 Blind guides! You strain out a gnat, but gulp down a camel!

We, like the Israelites, are called to people of righteousness and people of justice. Maybe we need to not have “normal” for now, so that we can forge ahead with the Lord into a new “normal” that includes us being more active outside of the walls of this building, serving those who need us, being beacons of hope and light and life in a world that we’ve just seen is marked for despair, darkness, and destruction.

Who are you telling about what God has done for us—about how He sent the only One who is truly righteous and allowed Him to die in our places, so we could be right with God? That in Christ, God underwent the worst of injustices so that we could stand together for those in need of help?

Church, we need to repent of our selfishness! We need to repent of our superiority! We need to repent of our going through the motions! That’s when we will see the torrents of justice and righteousness flow from this place. That’s when people will see and understand that we are the people of God.

And for anyone watching or hearing right now who hasn’t believed the Gospel: the day of the Lord that you face is mostly the same as the one the Israelites faced. It’s a day of darkness, not light. It’s a day of gloom with no brightness in it. That day is coming. Repent of your sin and turn to Christ for your salvation. Trust Him to deliver you from the wrath of God, because He has already taken the punishment that your sins deserve on Himself. Surrender in faith, and quit trying to save yourself.

If you need to come and pray, you can do that at the steps this morning.

If you have trusted in Jesus Christ to save you this morning, we want to celebrate that with you. Please stay seated when everyone is dismissed, so one of us can come and talk with you and help you in your first steps as a follower of Jesus. If you’re online, please let us know on Youtube, Facebook, or through ehbc.org.

If you believe that God is calling you to join this family in formal membership, same thing—stay in your seats as everyone is dismissed, and we will come to you and set up a time to talk more about that.

As Donna comes this morning, let’s pray.

PRAY

Closing Remarks

Bible reading: finishing or did finish Matthew today. Congrats! Tomorrow, we will start the book of Romans. You can get a reading plan for the month on our What’s Happening Page on our website, or by zapping this QR Code here. I’ll have the guys leave that up for a bit. We’ll also be posting daily reading reminders on the church’s social media accounts.

If you are in charge of a ministry that has a budget item, please pick up your budget request forms from the table in the foyer as you leave today.

Dismissal instructions.