Amos 13: Three Visions
Notes
Transcript
Bookmarks & Needs:
Bookmarks & Needs:
B: Amos 7:1-9
N: Plumb bob from Wayne
Opening
Opening
Good morning, and thank you for being here today to worship the Lord together, whether you are online or here in person. If you’re here in person, I’m certain that you noticed the major change to the parking lot since last week. If you’ve only been with us online, it probably looks about the same to you. =o) Thanks to the Properties Ministry for getting this done, and especially to Tim and Joe for being here to help direct the crew.
Just so you all know, there should be some other big changes happening this week, including the installation of awnings over the office and school doors and the beginnings of some painting on the exterior of the building. It’s exciting to see these things moving forward to improve the safety and appearance of our building.
This morning, we enter what is really the home stretch of our study of the book of Amos. Our look at the Prophet of Judgment & Justice has been a heavy one as we have considered that “The Sovereign Lord roars.” The message of Amos is loosely organized in sections. Chapters 1 and 2 make up the first section, beginning with a listing of God’s indictments against the nations around His people, and then against His people themselves. The second section, chapters 3 through 6, are primarily the condemnation against the acts of those in Israel, God’s lament for the coming judgment against them, and His call to repentance. Today we start the last section of this prophetic message for God’s people through Amos.
As we read the first 9 verses of this last section, which is our focal passage today, let’s stand in honor of God’s Word:
1 The Lord God showed me this: He was forming a swarm of locusts at the time the spring crop first began to sprout—after the cutting of the king’s hay. 2 When the locusts finished eating the vegetation of the land, I said, “Lord God, please forgive! How will Jacob survive since he is so small?” 3 The Lord relented concerning this. “It will not happen,” he said. 4 The Lord God showed me this: The Lord God was calling for a judgment by fire. It consumed the great deep and devoured the land. 5 Then I said, “Lord God, please stop! How will Jacob survive since he is so small?” 6 The Lord relented concerning this. “This will not happen either,” said the Lord God. 7 He showed me this: The Lord was standing there by a vertical wall with a plumb line in his hand. 8 The Lord asked me, “What do you see, Amos?” I replied, “A plumb line.” Then the Lord said, “I am setting a plumb line among my people Israel; I will no longer spare them: 9 Isaac’s high places will be deserted, and Israel’s sanctuaries will be in ruins; I will rise up against the house of Jeroboam with a sword.”
PRAY
Amos has just completed going through the set of indictments that the Lord had against His people in the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and has even included the Southern Kingdom of Judah in some of His accusations. He has called them to account for how they have treated their own people, how they have failed to worship the Lord, and how they have ignored His calls to repent. We saw last week that a large part of this was pride, and we saw the certainty of God’s judgment against His people’s pride and how He was raising up a nation to come in and take them into exile.
Now here in chapter 7, the Lord gives Amos the first three of five total visions that make up this last section of the message of Amos. These visions are fairly straight-forward in their imagery, but through them and through the interaction that Amos has with the Lord because of them, we are given the opportunity to see three aspects of God’s character. The first is that God has compassion.
1) God has compassion.
1) God has compassion.
One critical thing to remember as we consider these first two visions, which are basically parallel in both language and outcome, is that Israel was an agricultural society. Therefore, a judgment of God that impacted the nation’s crops would have been particularly devastating. This is exactly what we see in both of these visions, which we will consider one at a time.
1 The Lord God showed me this: He was forming a swarm of locusts at the time the spring crop first began to sprout—after the cutting of the king’s hay. 2 When the locusts finished eating the vegetation of the land, I said, “Lord God, please forgive! How will Jacob survive since he is so small?” 3 The Lord relented concerning this. “It will not happen,” he said.
So the Lord shows Amos that He is first preparing, then releasing, a swarm of locusts on Israel’s crops. If you didn’t know, all locusts are grasshoppers, but not all grasshoppers are locusts. Even when we had those crazy grasshopper clouds here a few years ago, they weren’t locusts… they weren’t out destroying crops (according to the news, at least). Locusts travel in large swarms of millions of individual insects, following the wind and then landing and consuming huge amounts of vegetation at their landing sites. They can destroy crops incredibly quickly.
God had used locusts as the eighth plague on Egypt back in Exodus, and then even used them to get His own people’s attention, according to what we saw back in verse 9 of chapter 4:
9 I struck you with blight and mildew; the locust devoured your many gardens and vineyards, your fig trees and olive trees, yet you did not return to me. This is the Lord’s declaration.
In this vision, the locust swarm would descend on the Israelite crops “at the time the spring crop first began to sprout, after the [first] cutting of the king’s hay.” This would have been in March or April. These locusts would devour all the vegetation of the land, and this would have been virtually all of their food for the year.
So Amos, in his role as prophet, intercedes for the people by crying out to the Lord: “please forgive!” Note that Amos doesn’t give the Lord a reason why He should forgive, such as that the people are repentant, and thus, the request that Amos makes is a request of pure grace—That God would simply choose to have compassion on His people. He says that Jacob is “so small,” which is the reality in contrast to the fantasy of how the people themselves saw Israel back in Amos 6:1.
In response to Amos’ intercession, God relents of this form of punishment, saying that “It will not happen.” It’s not that He changes His mind to punish His people. He changes His method of doing so. I don’t want to chase a rabbit on the topic of prayer too far this morning, but I want to make sure that we understand that our prayers do not change God’s thinking. Numbers 23:19 says that God is not a man that He should change His mind.
However, in response to our prayers, God may show compassion on us by changing His method. The Hebrew word here for “relented” is a word that means first “to comfort.” We see here that God takes delight in bringing us comfort by changing our circumstances as His response to the prayers of His people in His will. The intent in His thinking does not change—He still intends to bring correction on His people, as we will see in the third vision today.
Let’s look quickly at the second vision:
4 The Lord God showed me this: The Lord God was calling for a judgment by fire. It consumed the great deep and devoured the land. 5 Then I said, “Lord God, please stop! How will Jacob survive since he is so small?” 6 The Lord relented concerning this. “This will not happen either,” said the Lord God.
Here, the Lord shows Amos a judgment brought by a great fire. We saw back in chapter 5 that God warned them to seek Him so that they would live, or He would “spread like fire:”
6 Seek the Lord and live, or he will spread like fire throughout the house of Joseph; it will consume everything with no one at Bethel to extinguish it.
And this vision also shows a severe judgment for an agricultural society. The fire is so fierce that it even “consumed the great deep”, likely meaning the underground sources of water that were so critical to the land. In short, this fire would be so severe that it would affect the water table itself.
Again, Amos intercedes, saying “please stop!” He again gives no reason that God should stop, calling again for an act of pure grace from the Lord. And again, God relents and brings comfort by changing His method of judgment.
So in these first two visions, we see God’s heart of compassion toward His people. As Amos intercedes for Israel, God brings the requested comfort by deciding upon a different method of punishing His people. Amos gives no good reason for a modification of the visions that the Lord has given to him. He can point to no repentance to warrant His mercy, nor any deservedness of the people to receive His mercy. God’s compassion on His people is thus an act of pure grace.
Likewise, we do not deserve the mercy or compassion of God. But because God loves us, He shows us compassion and mercy. Jeremiah wrote in Lamentations 3:
21 Yet I call this to mind, and therefore I have hope: 22 Because of the Lord’s faithful love we do not perish, for his mercies never end. 23 They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness! 24 I say, “The Lord is my portion, therefore I will put my hope in him.”
The Lord is constantly pouring out His faithful love upon us, even in the coming of the new day. Do we appreciate His compassion toward us? Do we acknowledge the love that He shows to us as we follow Him? I suppose a good indicator of that would be how compassionate we are toward others. Are we a vessel for compassion to other people? Are we willing to reach out to others in order to be a blessing to them, because God has blessed us in Christ? We must be. We must not allow our love to grow cold, brothers and sisters.
So God has compassion. The second aspect of God’s character that we see in these first three visions is that God has a standard.
2) God has a standard.
2) God has a standard.
A standard is a measure, a norm, or a model in comparative evaluations.
One standard that is used in construction is a plumb line. Using a tool called a plumb bob, a person can determine whether or not something like a post or a wall is perfectly vertical. By vertical, I don’t mean that it is perpendicular to the ground, because the ground can be uneven or even tilted (such as a hillside). I mean that it stands in a direct line from the center of the planet, so its center of gravity does not lean one way or another.
I have a plumb bob with me this morning that I borrowed from Wayne Tedford. Thanks, Wayne. It’s simple. It’s a weight at the end of a string. So if you wanted to see if a wall was truly vertical, or plumb, you would tack this up at the top and allow it to hang and center itself. You can then use a tape measure to see how the wall compares to the standard, because if a wall is not plumb, then it will lean, and eventually cause problems, or even collapse.
In the third vision given to Amos, the Lord shows him that He has a standard that He has called His people to live up to and to compare their lives against:
7 He showed me this: The Lord was standing there by a vertical wall with a plumb line in his hand. 8 The Lord asked me, “What do you see, Amos?” I replied, “A plumb line.” Then the Lord said, “I am setting a plumb line among my people Israel; I will no longer spare them:
I watched a video this week that said, “Plumb bobs don’t lie.” They set a true standard. To ignore the standard is to court disaster. This is what Israel had done. They had ignored the standard that God had given to them. As a result, Israel is out of plumb. They are not vertical. They are not upright. In a way, they are the living example of Proverbs 21:8:
8 A guilty one’s conduct is crooked, but the behavior of the innocent is upright.
The innocent are upright in their behavior because they hold to a particular standard. And that standard is what God was going to use to measure His people. That standard comes from a particular place: God’s own holy character. This is the standard that we are all called to live up to.
14 As obedient children, do not be conformed to the desires of your former ignorance. 15 But as the one who called you is holy, you also are to be holy in all your conduct; 16 for it is written, Be holy, because I am holy.
This standard means that we are to be set apart for God’s use and glory. We are to be spotless, pure, undefiled. We were made to love the Lord. That’s what plumb is in this case. Unfortunately, we don’t live up to that standard. We reflect on our own choices normally in the best light, and think that we’re generally doing okay. Or we try to compare ourselves to someone else, and we might feel that we’re doing pretty well, because we tend to compare ourselves with those who do worse ethically than we do. “It’s not like I killed someone or anything!” That’s a pretty severe comparison. So we rate ourselves pretty high on the rightness scale.
But comparing ourselves to another imperfect person is like building a wall using the ground, or a tree, or another wall as your standard. Or even worse than comparing ourselves to someone else is to set the standard ourselves on the basis of our own feelings in the moment. That’s like eyeballing whether a wall is plumb. No, God Himself is our standard, Christians, and He has revealed Himself in His Word and in the Person of Jesus Christ. We’re not called to live up to any other image. Sure, there are examples that we can look to, but even Paul said, “Imitate me as I imitate Christ.” (1 Cor. 11:1). The character of God as revealed in the Person of Jesus Christ is the standard. That’s our plumb line. That’s how we’re called to live out our relationship with God in this world.
But not only is that the standard for Christians—the righteousness of God is the plumb line for everyone.
So when God shows up with His plumb line, we discover that all of us are crooked. We’re all guilty. None of us lives up to God’s holy and righteous standard. But there is One man who did and does live up to that standard: Jesus. He walked in perfect holiness because He knew that we can’t. He pleased God in everything He did because He knew that we couldn’t. He died in our place so that God’s standard could be met on our behalf, and He defeated death because He knew we wouldn’t. The sacrifice of Jesus saves us. Nothing else can. Nothing we can do will ever get us back to the standard of God’s holiness… we can’t make ourselves plumb. We need someone else to get us there.
That’s what Jesus did. And so we need to stop trying to get there ourselves. It’s a free gift, according to Scripture. We don’t earn it or deserve it. It’s salvation offered without our achievement: so just like God’s compassion, His offer of salvation is pure grace. And it is offered freely to you this morning. Salvation isn’t about getting to “plumb,” correcting our behavior, and then we’re saved. It’s more like acknowledging that we can’t fix ourselves, so we need Jesus to knock us down and build us again according to the true standard of His character. Jesus gives us a new start.
In His grace, God had called on His people to pursue good and not evil, to turn from their wickedness and back toward His standard, so that they may live, but the Israelites didn’t want to do that. They wanted what they wanted. So God says, “I will no longer spare them.” His just judgment must come.
3) God is just in His judgment.
3) God is just in His judgment.
Even with God being a compassionate God, since He has a standard, He will not let sin go unpunished or uncorrected forever. As we saw at the end of verse 8, God has declared that He’s done with Israel’s sin—He has set His plumb line against them, and He has found them wanting.
9 Isaac’s high places will be deserted, and Israel’s sanctuaries will be in ruins; I will rise up against the house of Jeroboam with a sword.”
God will judge the things that Israel trusts in that are not upright: their worship (high places and sanctuaries) and their government (the house of Jeroboam). And God is completely just in doing this, because they have not lived up to His righteous standard.
But didn’t we just a moment ago say that God has compassion? How then can He be just in bringing judgment?
One of the things that we need to not be afraid to consider, believers, is the idea of tension in Scripture. Things in Scripture that we struggle to understand because they feel like they could be contradictory, but that Scripture itself hold up as both being true. God’s sovereignty and omniscience vs. mankind’s free decision-making ability. Jesus being both 100% God AND 100% man. The Trinity being Three AND One. These concepts create tension in our minds because we wrestle in our finitude to completely reconcile them to one another. But the tension doesn’t make any of these things untrue, even if we can’t fully grasp them. There is a tension here in this passage between God’s compassion and His requirement for His people to live up to a particular standard, which He must judge us against in order to be truly just.
The problem is that we tend to struggle to keep tensions in balance. I heard an illustration once about tension and guitar strings. Too much pull one way, and the string will break. Not enough pull, and the string won’t play properly. It’s only when the string has proper tension that music can be made. This is why we must realize that God’s judgment and His compassion are held in a beautiful balance. Focus too much on either side, and you wreck the music.
We declare that God is a God of compassionate love, which is totally true. God shows His love in His long-suffering, in the blessing that He pours out on the good and the evil, and especially in the giving of His Son on the cross to pay for our sins. But if we focus too much on this aspect of God’s Person, we start to think that He’ll never demand anything of us. He won’t correct us. He’ll just let us all do our thing, even if it’s wrong. Even if it goes against everything else that He is. He’s no longer Judge. He’s no longer Father. He’s no longer Lord. We have a view of God that isn’t true anymore. This is wrong. Love acts. Love stands up for what is loved. Love wants what is best for the beloved, even if it means NOT giving the beloved what he or she may want in the moment, or correcting errant action, thought, or direction for the beloved’s own good. What if I only focused on the “love” part as a parent?
On the other side, we declare, as I have here, that God is a God of justice, which is again totally true. He proves that as He judges nations for their sin and unbelief, as He corrects His people for their sin, and especially (again) in the giving of His Son on the cross to pay for our sins. But if we focus too much on this aspect of God’s Person, we start to think that He’s just sitting back with a scowl on His face, waiting to squish us the moment we fail to toe the line. And all those people out there who don’t love God? He’s just waiting until the time when He can drop-kick all of them into hell because they’re all just a bunch of heathens. And if we think that way about God, as His children, I think that we might start to act that way as well. This is wrong as well. God is at work in our lives to make us more like Christ because He loves us and wants what is best for us. And He loves those that He has made in His image, and desires to have a relationship with them. Again, what if I only focused on the “justice” part as a parent?
It’s okay for both to be true. God is a god of compassion. And God is a god of justice. And God is absolutely just when He judges sin. And if we think He’s not, it’s because while we say we want justice, we don’t actually know what we’re asking for. We create our own standards of what justice looks like, and then we declare that God is somehow unjust if He doesn’t hold up OUR standard as THE standard. Hear this: If God really gave out total justice to us based on how we have lived in comparison to His righteous standard, we all go to hell. Every last one of us.
And because of this, we might say that the only Person that God is ever unjust to is Himself. That’s the beauty of the Gospel. According to Romans 1:18-21, all of mankind is without excuse, and each of us justly deserves His judgment. So instead of making each of us pay that price, He paid it Himself in Christ. That’s why the sacrifice of Jesus is the “especially” in our consideration of the tension a moment ago. Jesus, the only One who didn’t deserve to suffer the wrath of God, DID suffer the wrath of God, for those who don’t deserve God’s compassion, but receive it because of Jesus:
18 For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit,
I earlier said that salvation is a free gift offered to you out of God’s pure grace. Yes, it is free to you, but it cost God immensely. In Christ, He took all of the world’s sin on Himself. And He took the wrath that we deserve because of that sin on Himself. And Jesus is the ONLY One who didn’t deserve any of it.
So the fact that God is completely just to judge us, and the fact that He has completely judged our sin and found it worthy of the fullness of His wrath, and the fact that He has completely poured out that wrath on Jesus, not giving us what we actually deserve, is an act of wonderful, incredible, pure grace.
Closing
Closing
Do we understand the beautiful tension between the compassion of God and His justice according to His holy standard? He loves us, so He desires to show compassion. It is Himself—His very person and character—that sets the standard for holiness and perfection, so He must also bring judgment. But rather than simply ignoring our sin in the name of compassion, which would go against His perfect and holy character; and rather than going against His love for us by simply consigning us all to what we deserve, which is eternal punishment in hell, He resolves the tension Himself in Christ. In this, He violates neither His love for those who bear His image nor His perfectly holy and just character.
He provides us a means of escape from the punishment we deserve, while completely pouring out His wrath against our sin on Jesus. But He does not force us to come under His covering in Christ. No, He allows us to stand on our own if we’d like to, demanding that our lives be held up against His standard, and receiving either the reward or punishment that that comparison deserves. But before you think that that’s the path you’d like to take, He’s also made it clear that none of us—NONE of us—makes the grade. And there are only two options: straight or not. Plumb or not. True or not. There’s no middle ground, no “kinda sorta,” no “better than the next guy.”
This morning, each of us has a choice: surrender our lives to Christ, or trust ourselves and our own righteousness. For those who have already trusted Jesus, this isn’t a salvation question: that’s already been established. But it is a living question. Will we align ourselves with the standard that God has given us—the standard of His character and will for our lives, walking by faith as His hands and His feet in this broken world—or will we try to go our own way, expecting that God will bless us just because we are His children? We must repent of our faith in our own wisdom and holiness, and return again to Jesus.
For those who have never surrendered to the lordship of Jesus, this question is the most important question you will ever have to answer, because for you, it’s the difference between heaven and hell. You can trust in yourself and your own righteousness, or you can trust in the righteousness of Jesus by giving up and surrendering to Him. God must judge your sin by His perfect standard, and He will either judge your uprightness, or Jesus’ uprightness in your place. Which do you want Him to judge your life on?
In a moment, Donna is going to play and allow us some time to reflect on the message this morning. How is God speaking to you this morning? If you believe that God is calling you to get on your face before Him in repentance, you are welcome to come and pray at the steps.
If you believe that God is calling you to surrender your life to Him, then that is something you can take care of right where you are in prayer. Confess your need for His saving grace and surrender your life to Him. If this is you and you’re online this morning, please reach out to us on YouTube or Facebook, on our website, or by email, so we can celebrate with you and walk you through the first steps in your new life. If you’re in the room and are surrendering your life to Jesus this morning, just stay where you are when we dismiss, so I can come by and talk with you and pray with you as you begin this journey.
If you believe that God is calling you to join this church family in formal membership, we also invite you to stay in your seats as everyone is dismissed, and we will come and set up a time to talk about that this week.
Listen to the Spirit of God as He leads you this morning, and respond in faith.
PRAY
Closing Remarks
Closing Remarks
One additional announcement that I want to make this morning is that Family Life Radio is hosting a Route 66 Prayer Parade this coming Saturday, October 17, from 11 am to 1 pm. The idea is driving a path together through town, beginning at Believer’s Center and ending at Hoffmantown Church, while praying for our city. They will be hosting this live on Facebook Live, and you can join in prayer, even if you aren’t driving it. You can get more information on their website, or by using the QR code on the screen. We will share their Facebook Live link on our website and our Facebook page once it is available.
Just so everyone knows, Adults on Mission for this month is canceled. It would have been this evening. The next one will be on November 8.
Bible reading reminder. We will finish Romans on Tuesday, and then start Ezra, followed by Nehemiah. I pray reading the Bible together has been a blessing for you. It has been for me.
Instructions on dismissal. Reminder to stay if you need to talk about church membership or salvation.
Have a blessed week!