Amos 15: Ripe for Judgment
Notes
Transcript
Bookmarks & Needs:
Bookmarks & Needs:
B: Amos 8
N: None
Opening
Opening
Thank you praise team for leading us in worship each week. Good morning to each of you who is here this morning, it’s good to see the upper half of your faces. If you’re online with us today, welcome as well.
I wanted to give everyone a heads up that we, along with every other “house of worship” in the city (as far as I know) received a notification from the Albuquerque Fire Marshal that either a representative from their office or from the New Mexico State Police would be visiting in the coming weeks (perhaps even this morning) to check on how well we are protecting each other from COVID in our congregation. We have strived to be complaint with all safety measures prescribed by the CDC for houses of worship, and we will continue to be out of love for each other. Therefore, know that this might happen, and we are going to welcome them as we should any other person who is visiting with us: with socially-distant warmth and gratitude that they are here. They are welcome to come and join us as we worship the Lord together, and it will be a great opportunity for them to either worship alongside us if they believe, or to hear the Gospel if they don’t believe yet. OK? And if you are here from the Albuquerque Fire Department or the State Police, we thank you for your service to our community, we’re glad you’re here, and we pray this morning will be a blessing to you.
I’m going to dive right in with our focal passage this morning. We’re looking at the entire 8th chapter of Amos today:
1 The Lord God showed me this: a basket of summer fruit. 2 He asked me, “What do you see, Amos?” I replied, “A basket of summer fruit.” The Lord said to me, “The end has come for my people Israel; I will no longer spare them. 3 In that day the temple songs will become wailing”—this is the Lord God’s declaration. “Many dead bodies, thrown everywhere! Silence!” 4 Hear this, you who trample on the needy and do away with the poor of the land, 5 asking, “When will the New Moon be over so we may sell grain, and the Sabbath, so we may market wheat? We can reduce the measure while increasing the price and cheat with dishonest scales. 6 We can buy the poor with silver and the needy for a pair of sandals and even sell the chaff!” 7 The Lord has sworn by the Pride of Jacob: I will never forget all their deeds. 8 Because of this, won’t the land quake and all who dwell in it mourn? All of it will rise like the Nile; it will surge and then subside like the Nile in Egypt. 9 And in that day— this is the declaration of the Lord God— I will make the sun go down at noon; I will darken the land in the daytime. 10 I will turn your feasts into mourning and all your songs into lamentation; I will cause everyone to wear sackcloth and every head to be shaved. I will make that grief like mourning for an only son and its outcome like a bitter day. 11 Look, the days are coming— this is the declaration of the Lord God— when I will send a famine through the land: not a famine of bread or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. 12 People will stagger from sea to sea and roam from north to east seeking the word of the Lord, but they will not find it. 13 In that day the beautiful young women, the young men also, will faint from thirst. 14 Those who swear by the guilt of Samaria and say, “As your god lives, Dan,” or, “As the way of Beer-sheba lives”— they will fall, never to rise again.
PRAY
After this morning, we have only three more messages from Amos to go before we’re through with the book. Then, we will hold our annual service focused on international missions before we start our study for the Christmas season, The Gifts of Christmas. I’m really excited for that series.
For this morning, though, we’re looking at the message of the prophet of judgment and justice as “The Sovereign Lord roars,” about His condemnation of His people and their coming punishment.
To open, I’d like to ask a question: “How many of you like ripe fruit?” Many people think that I’m strange. I ordinarily like fruit that is unripe. Most of you would probably be bothered by my choice in peaches or nectarines. I want them to be hard and crisp, and crunch like apples. Plums: same thing, just not with the crispy crunch. Bananas? Yellow, maybe with a little bit of green on them. Some of you are already offended at me. Why is this? Well, I grew up in a household with 5 other siblings, and fruit was kind of expensive for our family. When it showed up, you ate what was there when it was there, or you didn’t get any. So I developed a taste for unripe fruit.
The Collegiate Merriam-Webster dictionary that lives on my bookshelf in my office defines “ripe” first of all as: 1) fully grown or developed; specifically ready to be harvested and used for food, as grain or fruit. “Fully grown or developed.” This is how probably most of you like your fruit. Fully grown and developed.
The fruit that we’re talking about in Amos’ vision here in chapter 8 wasn’t unripe. In fact, it may have even been over-ripe. And that vision used the fruit as a picture of the nation of Israel: but not in a good, yummy piece of fruit kind of way. In fact, it wasn’t a good meaning at all. In this vision, God was saying that the time for His judgment had come.
1) There is a time for judgment.
1) There is a time for judgment.
While the first meaning of the word “ripe” is about grain or fruit, there are several other definitions of the word “ripe:” 6) ready to do, receive, or undergo something; fully prepared; 7) ready for some operation, treatment, or process.
You could say that, based on these definitions, that the Northern Kingdom of Israel was indeed ripe. Ripe for judgment. Ripe for condemnation. Ripe for punishment.
1 The Lord God showed me this: a basket of summer fruit. 2 He asked me, “What do you see, Amos?” I replied, “A basket of summer fruit.” The Lord said to me, “The end has come for my people Israel; I will no longer spare them.
This vision and the vision of the Plumb Line in chapter 7 have the same basic structure: God shows Amos a common item, and asks Amos what he sees. When Amos responds, God explains to him what the item represents in the vision. Here, Amos sees a “basket” of summer fruit. This fruit must be ripe, because fruit is only in a basket if it has been picked, and for this agricultural society, fruit was only picked when it was ripe.
Something that we miss in our English translation is that this is actually a play on words in the Hebrew. The word for “summer fruit” is qayis (ka-ees), and the word for “end” is qes (kes). They sound similar. By showing Amos the basket of ripe fruit, He is declaring Israel’s end, because they are ripe for judgment.
Some of this message is kind of repeated from earlier parts in Amos, so some commentators believe that Amos had preached some of the earlier parts to other places in Israel, such as the capital city of Samaria, and now this is being preached in perhaps Bethel, like the Plumb Line vision had been. I think that it likely doesn’t really matter why the repetition is there. It is apparent from Amaziah’s response to Amos that we saw last week that the people of Israel just were not getting what Amos was putting in front of them. So the Lord repeats His message condemning them, with some slight expansions:
4 Hear this, you who trample on the needy and do away with the poor of the land, 5 asking, “When will the New Moon be over so we may sell grain, and the Sabbath, so we may market wheat? We can reduce the measure while increasing the price and cheat with dishonest scales. 6 We can buy the poor with silver and the needy for a pair of sandals and even sell the chaff!”
We’ve already heard about how the rich and powerful in Israel were abusing the poor and the needy back in 2:6-7. 4:1. and 5:12. Here, however, the Lord ties together their injustice against their brothers and sisters with their lack of genuine worship of the Lord.
Notice what they say: “When will the New Moon be over so we may sell grain, and the Sabbath, so we may market wheat?” The Hebrew people operated (and still operate) under a lunar calendar. The new moon (when the moon is completely dark) was the beginning of their month. And on that day, they were to celebrate the fact that God had given them another month by making a burnt offering to the Lord, and no commerce was allowed. Put that together with the four Sabbath days that occurred in every month (also no commerce allowed), and the wealthy felt that they were missing out on one-sixth of the days that they could be using to make money.
But they were not just making money: they were stealing money. They would “reduce the measure while increasing the price.” This isn’t just an inflation thing. It literally translates that they would “make small the ephah and make large the shekel.” An ephah was a unit of volume. So they would short the ephah just a little with every sale. However, they would charge more than the going rate for a FULL ephah. They would also cheat their fellow Israelites by making their scales off balance, and since the shekel was a unit of weight of silver, they would make even more money by making their scales lie for them as well. They would even put the sweepings from threshing the grain (the chaff in verse 6) into the bottoms of the bags just to get a little bit more by giving a little bit less. All of these plans would be made while they were supposed to be giving thanks to the Lord for His provision of a new month and a day of rest and worship. They were doing anything but, and they were bitter about having to miss those days.
But not only that, they wanted to be able to “buy the poor...and the needy.” Back in chapter 2, we saw in verse 6 that they “sold” people for silver and for sandals. So here, we see that to the rich and powerful, their poor or needy relatives, other Israelites, were just another commodity to be bought and sold. We’ve addressed how unjust this was in earlier messages.
So they are ripe because of injustice and faked worship in their land. But they are also ripe because of their idolatry.
14 Those who swear by the guilt of Samaria and say, “As your god lives, Dan,” or, “As the way of Beer-sheba lives”— they will fall, never to rise again.
Each of these three ways of making an oath would have been swearing by a false god. Swearing by the “guilt of Samaria” was swearing by the false god who made Samaria guilty before the Lord. Dan was where King Jeroboam had set up one of the golden calves for Israel to bow down to in worship. Beersheba was a place where they revered the place itself, but not the God who had done great things at that place. Their false worship would fail, and they would fall, never to rise again. They were ripe for God’s judgment. It was time. The Lord has had enough of their injustice and their false worship, and so He declares:
7 The Lord has sworn by the Pride of Jacob: I will never forget all their deeds.
Yahweh should be their pride, so He swears by Himself again (as He did in 4:2 and 6:8), and determines that He will never forget their wicked deeds. The time for punishment has come. And God declares that He will punish in two general ways: physically and spiritually.
2) God can punish physically.
2) God can punish physically.
And these physical punishments are terrible, for sure. Consider the things that the Lord says about the coming punishment:
3 In that day the temple songs will become wailing”—this is the Lord God’s declaration. “Many dead bodies, thrown everywhere! Silence!”
This pictures the invading army. There will be many dead, and that “Silence!” might be a warning, or it might be the result. A warning to remain silent or the invading army will find you, or a result: since so many are dead, there is nothing but silence. Either way, it’s not good. But there’s the punishment through natural phenomenon as well:
8 Because of this, won’t the land quake and all who dwell in it mourn? All of it will rise like the Nile; it will surge and then subside like the Nile in Egypt. 9 And in that day— this is the declaration of the Lord God— I will make the sun go down at noon; I will darken the land in the daytime. 10 I will turn your feasts into mourning and all your songs into lamentation; I will cause everyone to wear sackcloth and every head to be shaved. I will make that grief like mourning for an only son and its outcome like a bitter day.
Some commentators say that this is symbolic. I disagree. I think it was a prediction of the earthquake that was referenced back in chapter 1 verse 1:
1 The words of Amos, who was one of the sheep breeders from Tekoa—what he saw regarding Israel in the days of King Uzziah of Judah and Jeroboam son of Jehoash, king of Israel, two years before the earthquake.
The land flowing like a river is an apt picture of an earthquake. “It will rise…surge…then subside...” sounds like an earthquake to me.
Remember that this prophecy was given between 767 and 762 BC. There was actually a near total solar eclipse that occurred on what we would now call June 15, 763 BC. It is referenced in Assyrian records of the time. Could this have been the sign of the darkening of the land in daytime?
The picture here is one of darkness falling on the brightest part of the day, just as Israel would fall during what many within felt was one of their brightest moments. While the economy was good and the army was strong, disaster and darkness would descend suddenly.
We’ve already addressed in this series that the Lord Almighty is on the throne, and He can judge and punish His creation as He sees fit. Remember what we saw back in chapter 3:
6 If a ram’s horn is blown in a city, aren’t people afraid? If a disaster occurs in a city, hasn’t the Lord done it?
He has been patient with His people, but because of their false worship against Him, and because of their constant injustice against their own brothers and sisters, God has had enough, and He is going to bring punishment. And that punishment will make the day bitter, bringing everyone to a place of severe mourning (songs to laments, clothing to sackcloth, heads to be shaved). The Lord says that it will be a day of mourning as one would mourn for an only son: the loss of an only son would be a tremendous blow to a family. They lose a child, they lose their heir, they lose the one who will carry on the family name, and they lose the one who would have the responsibility of taking care of them in their old age.
This is punishment is something that the Lord Himself has experienced: the loss of an only Son. According to Scripture, God gave His one and only Son to be punished for us so that we could be saved. Jesus said this in John 3:
14 “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15 so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. 16 For God loved the world in this way: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18 Anyone who believes in him is not condemned, but anyone who does not believe is already condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the one and only Son of God.
And He did gave His Son in order to display His grace, His glory, and His love for us, even though we so often ignore Him. Paul said in Romans 8:
31 What, then, are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? 32 He did not even spare his own Son but gave him up for us all. How will he not also with him grant us everything?
On the cross, Jesus took the physical punishment that we deserve. Because God loves us, Jesus died in our place to pay with His body the penalty we owe for our sins. He then defeated death so that if we trust Him for our forgiveness and salvation, surrendering to Him in faith, then we also are given victory over death and receive eternal life with Him. God knows what it’s like to lose His only Son. And He did it anyway, so we could be forgiven and adopted as His children by faith. What a glorious message the Gospel is, even in the midst of a message of judgment!
To bring it back around, while these physical punishments sound really terrible, there is one punishment that He speaks of that is even worse, which God also has experienced in Jesus:
3) God will punish spiritually.
3) God will punish spiritually.
This is more where I want us to land as far as our focus is concerned this morning.
The Lord declares through Amos that the worst kind of punishment is going to be a famine. Now, He said that He had used physical famine before to get His people’s attention, back in 4:6-8. In this passage, the famine will actually be a famine of a spiritual nature:
11 Look, the days are coming— this is the declaration of the Lord God— when I will send a famine through the land: not a famine of bread or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. 12 People will stagger from sea to sea and roam from north to east seeking the word of the Lord, but they will not find it. 13 In that day the beautiful young women, the young men also, will faint from thirst.
So the Lord is going to bring about a famine of His Word, and even though they might reach the point where they would desperately long for a message from the Lord, He will not give it, because they have rejected Him over and over again. God is actually giving them what they claimed that they wanted in this:
The nation had asked for this back in chapter 2:
12 But you made the Nazirites drink wine and commanded the prophets, “Do not prophesy.”
and then Amaziah commanded the same thing of Amos himself back in chapter 7, which we looked at last week:
12 Then Amaziah said to Amos, “Go away, you seer! Flee to the land of Judah. Earn your living and give your prophecies there, 13 but don’t ever prophesy at Bethel again, for it is the king’s sanctuary and a royal temple.”
This is one of those cases of being careful what you wish for, because you might get it.
The people of Israel were taking the Word of God for granted. They were only listening to messages that they wanted to hear, messages that made them comfortable, message that made them feel good about themselves. So when Amos came on the scene with his message of judgment and justice, they wanted him out. They didn’t want that kind of message. Between that message and no message at all, they wanted none. So God was going to give them what they asked for: a time when they would not hear the Word of the Lord.
And this famine is worse than the physical ones. The world would likely disagree with me on this point. How could not hearing the Word of the Lord be worse than dead bodies? Worse than an earthquake? Because an absence of the Word of the Lord is akin to an absence of the presence of the Lord Himself. They would experience that awful silence, that terrible absence, when they went into exile away from the Promised Land.
Again, this is something that God Himself would experience in Christ. As Jesus hung on the cross taking all of our sins on Himself, the Father turned His face away from His Son:
46 About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “Elí, Elí, lemá sabachtháni?” that is, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”
He turned His presence away from His Son as He took our sin, so that we could be in His presence forever. For Jesus, this was worse than the physical torture of the beatings, the floggings, the carrying of the cross, and the crucifixion, because in all of eternity past, God the Father and God the Son had never been out of perfect fellowship in the Godhead. Never. The loss of God’s presence is the worst thing that could be experienced, and we are promised to experience that loss forever if we do not belong to God through faith in Jesus Christ. Even the staunchest atheist among us will long for the presence of the Lord when all is said and done, but as we saw earlier in John, they will stand condemned because of their refusal to trust in Jesus.
The people of Israel refused to change their ways as well, even in the face of the famine of the Word: verse 12 says that they will stagger from sea to sea: the Mediterranean to the Sea of Galilee. They will roam from north to east, everywhere but the south, where Jerusalem and the Temple of the Lord were. And this famine of the Word will be so severe, that even those who were the youngest, the strongest in the land, the young men and women—those who would have the best chance of weathering a physical drought or famine—would faint from thirst from lack of the Word of the Lord as well. It would inflict everyone. It would affect everyone.
Application
Application
Today, I’ve preached through the passage, but I haven’t made much application to us, other than to point out the connection to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. If this morning, the Spirit of the Lord has gotten your attention as you’ve heard the Gospel, revealing to you that you are separated from God because of your sin and that you need to be saved, you can enter into that new life with God through faith in Christ right now, where you are, whether here in person or online. Acknowledge your sin to God, trust in the sacrifice of Jesus to save you, and surrender your life to Him in faith as Lord right now, right where you are.
As far as the remaining discussion of application, this will be for those who already belong to Jesus, those who claim to follow Him, the church: As I prayed through and reflected upon this passage, the obvious question to consider in application is whether or not we ourselves, the church, and our nation, the U.S., are ripe for the judgment and punishment of God. Do we show some of the same characteristics—such as idolatry and injustice—that filled Israel? Do we do that as the church? Do we do that as a nation? Do we take the Word of the Lord, or the presence of the Lord, for granted?
Most of this series, we have focused on the church herself. This is because most of the message of Amos was to God’s people in Israel. But this morning, I’d like to consider for a moment the precarious position that our nation finds herself in. If God were still to use this method of judgment today, then it is not that the U.S. is going to come under His judgment. It shows that we are already experiencing it. I can say that in my 30 years of walking with the Lord, I have never found such a harsh resistance to and rejection of the message of Christ as we have today. There’s even an underlying assumption for many that if you follow Jesus, then you’re a judgmental, hypocritical, hateful person.
Notice that the famine that God would bring upon the nation was the punishment itself, not the reason He was punishing them. That famine showed that they had rejected the Lord, and as a result of their rejecting Him for so long, God was now rejecting them by removing from them His presence, in the form of His Word through His prophets. So are we already, as a nation, being punished for our collective rejection of the Word of God? I believe that we are.
And church, we are not immune! But we have the Word in our hands—are we actively proclaiming that Word to those around us who are lost, bound for an eternity separated from God? In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus declared that we are the salt of the earth, the light of the world, the city on a hill, and a lamp on a stand. Then He said:
16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.
In 2019, we baptized 10 new believers. That’s great! 10 new believers. This year, we’ve baptized 4 (COVID has had a lot to do with that). My question is this: why not more? I’m not trying to hype us up for some evangelistic push or program, and it’s not about having good numbers or anything. But number data can be an indication that something else is off.
Is it possible that we are Amos in this picture, but that instead of standing up to Amaziah like Amos did, we’ve retreated back to where it’s safe and comfortable? Are we telling people about what Jesus has done in our lives? About what Jesus can do in their lives? Or are we taking the Word of God and the presence of God by His Holy Spirit for granted, taking in and taking in, but never sharing the love of God with those who need to hear?
If we never allow the love of God to flow out of us, we’re like the Dead Sea. It’s dead because while the Jordan river flows into it, nothing flows out of it. It’s completely landlocked. The love of God should flow through us as we tell others about what Jesus has done.
We need to ask ourselves this question: “How many Gospel conversations have I had with people who are lost, or who I thought at the time might be lost, in the last month?” Not as a means of showing off or keeping track, but as an indicator that we might be taking God’s Word and His commands for granted.
You see, the people are staggering, looking for truth, but often without even realizing that truth is what they’re looking for. And when they find something that they think they can get behind, they latch onto it because they think it’s the truth. But over and over, they will find that the movements or ideas that they grab onto and the people who lead them are broken and flawed just like everything and everyone else. They’re looking in all the wrong places.
And we have the Word of the Lord. But we refuse to give it to them. We refuse to share it with them. We refuse to offer it to them. Why? We must become that salt, that light, that city, that lamp, and tell others about Jesus. If not, are we ripe for the judgment of God?
Closing
Closing
I’m going to make my invitation very short this morning. If you need to repent of your own sin this morning, you are welcome to come and pray at the steps if that would be a help for you.
If this morning, you have heard and responded to the message of the Gospel, we want to celebrate that with you and help you as your take your first steps with Jesus. If you’re here in the building, stay where you are as we dismiss, and I’ll come and find you after others have left. If you’re online, please send me an email to bill@ehbc.org letting me know that you have trusted in Jesus today, so we can connect with you to celebrate and help you on those first steps of your new faith.
God may be leading you to join this church family in formal membership today. I also ask for you to stay in your seats when we dismiss, so that we can come find you and set a time to sit down and talk in the next few days, to get to know one another and to answer any questions that you might have about the church.
As Donna plays our reflection song, you can use this time to worship through giving online, and you can also give by placing your offerings in the plates by the doors as you leave when we dismiss.
PRAY
Closing Remarks
Closing Remarks
Just wanted everyone to know that next Sunday, 11/1, we plan to have our proposed church budget for 2021 available for you to pick up and review. We will hold a time of budget discussion following the morning service the week after that, on 11/8. And we will have our regular bi-monthly business meeting at 5:30 pm on 11/15, where we will vote on the budget with no planned additional discussion. Plan to be at that business meeting, so we can take care of business as a church that night. We will be sanitizing the sanctuary between the morning service and the business meeting. The business meeting will also not be streamed.
If you’re reading along with the church in our reading plan, we finished Ezra on Friday, and we started Nehemiah yesterday. Nehemiah will take us into November. Remember to read one chapter a day. Nehemiah 2 today.
Have a blessed week, and talk to someone about Jesus!