Amos 4
Notes
Transcript
Against the women and lack of repentance
Against the women and lack of repentance
I think we just have to jump straight to verse one here.
“Hear this word, you cows of Bashan,
who are on the mountain of Samaria,
who oppress the poor, who crush the needy,
who say to your husbands, ‘Bring, that we may drink!’
Yes, Amos calls out the women - likely the high society women in the King’s court of the Northern Kingdom - as some fat cows who demand to be served likely at the cost of oppressing the poor and needy. There’s also certainly a play on things here with the Northern Kingdom making a bull for idol worship as a substitute to represent YHWH. The bull will have his cows. You can also tell as we move to verse two things have escalated. We aren’t saying thus says the Lord here it’s an oath from God to deal with them.
The Lord God has sworn by his holiness
that, behold, the days are coming upon you,
when they shall take you away with hooks,
even the last of you with fishhooks.
And you shall go out through the breaches,
each one straight ahead;
and you shall be cast out into Harmon,”
declares the Lord.
The hooks aren’t a nice gong show, little bo peep hook to pull you off stage but a way to deal with your corpse. I don’t think this is supposed to leave you with a good feeling about the future here. They will be dragged by meat hooks through the broken walls of their strongholds and be cast to… a place we don’t really know. Harmon isn’t an actual place that we know of, it could be Mount Hermon the northern border which might make sense with the Assyrian conquest coming from the north. It could also be a word for a dung heap… commentaries seem to go all over the place what the word is. Either way the people aren’t going to be properly taken care of.
We end with a finality similar to the finality of Israel’s judgment sequence. Declares the Lord has a certainty in it’s tone. It will not be the last but it will conclude our list of sins… guess how many declares the Lord statements we have in Amos 4? 7
“Come to Bethel, and transgress;
to Gilgal, and multiply transgression;
bring your sacrifices every morning,
your tithes every three days;
offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving of that which is leavened,
and proclaim freewill offerings, publish them;
for so you love to do, O people of Israel!”
declares the Lord God.
Now we take a different tact. Amos uses sarcasm? He gives them an invite to the life of sin they’re already in. Hey go and get to the number one and two sin centers of Israel. He’s listed these things that are prescribed for them to do, but they’re doing it with all the wrong intentions and not doing them to God or to honor him. Instead they honor themselves! Hey did you hear I just gave a bunch of money to the temple? So somewhere in their mind they’re still attempting to look religiously good yet their ostentatiousness is still trampling the poor and needy.
“I gave you cleanness of teeth in all your cities,
and lack of bread in all your places,
yet you did not return to me,”
declares the Lord.
if you have clean teeth it’s not because you were good at brushing your teeth but because you didn’t have anything to eat to get stuck in them. That and the lack of bread are God’s claim as the cause of famine, but they didn’t listen
Declared the Lord
“I also withheld the rain from you
when there were yet three months to the harvest;
I would send rain on one city,
and send no rain on another city;
one field would have rain,
and the field on which it did not rain would wither;
so two or three cities would wander to another city
to drink water, and would not be satisfied;
yet you did not return to me,”
declares the Lord.
Drought can be a major cause for a famine to follow and here God claims these were his act too but they did not return.
Declares the Lord
“I struck you with blight and mildew;
your many gardens and your vineyards,
your fig trees and your olive trees the locust devoured;
yet you did not return to me,”
declares the Lord.
What else causes famine? How about a blight where disease kills the crop? or what about insects eating it al up? But they still didn’t return
Declares the Lord
“I sent among you a pestilence after the manner of Egypt;
I killed your young men with the sword,
and carried away your horses,
and I made the stench of your camp go up into your nostrils;
yet you did not return to me,”
declares the Lord.
Now disease among people starts and gets accompanied by war. This was sent by God too. He reminds them of how this is what God did to Egypt.
“I sent among you a pestilence after the manner of Egypt;
I killed your young men with the sword,
and carried away your horses,
and I made the stench of your camp go up into your nostrils;
yet you did not return to me,”
declares the Lord.
That “yet you did not return to me” is the phrase I think we latch onto. What should the result of all this be for the people of Israel? Or better yet, when adversity, destruction, tragedy strikes in our lives we should probably reflect and go to God asking what result does he want out of this? In whatever situation befalls us do we, as a result of our life following Christ in all things, ask how this might glorify God. Is it repentance? Is it a community coming together showing the Love of God. Is it the witness of obedience or the opportunity of words spoken into other’s lives?
I don’t think Israel was in that place as we see continuing on.
“Therefore thus I will do to you, O Israel;
because I will do this to you,
prepare to meet your God, O Israel!”
Prepare to meet your maker! It’s not really the line you want to hear because I don’t know that I’ve ever heard that in a movie as the intro to a really pleasant time. I certainly didn’t hear it from my Dad right before he led a prayerful Bible study…
There is certainly a more linguistically literal understanding of that phrase here though. For Israel there was a lot of preparation actually involved for meeting God. But I think the context here actually falls to the first way we talked about this. The “Time to meet your maker” phrase that just means you’re about to get a whoopin!
We finish with Amos backing up the phrase with some of God’s credentials and reasons to fear Him.
For behold, he who forms the mountains and creates the wind,
and declares to man what is his thought,
who makes the morning darkness,
and treads on the heights of the earth—
the Lord, the God of hosts, is his name!
Don’t mess around and think you get to walk away.
So while this focus in Amos 4 is about Israel’s judgment and how they should repent and won’t I want to keep that focus, as we’re in the spring storms season, on the response that we have to tough times.
God what do you want to happen from this thing that just occurred? That’s a good reminder of something to ask ourselves in those moments.