Amos (2)
Major Messages from the Minor Prophets • Sermon • Submitted
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· 9 viewsAn overview of the book of Amos and how his message applies to us today
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Well if you were with us last week you know that we have begun a new summer series called Major Messages from the Minor Prophets
Over the course of the next few months we will take a chronological look at each of the 12 books known as the minor prophets and consider what they have to say to us
Last week we looked at Jonah, the prophet who always seemed down in the mouth!
Today we are going to take a look at the book based on one of my all time favourite prophets, Amos
First let’s take a look at the man
Amos lived in the 8th century B.C. right around the same time as Jonah but unlike Jonah Amos was not what you would call a “typical” prophet
According to chapter 1 verse 1 he was actually a shepherd from the town of Tekoa, a small farming village about 12 miles south of Jerusalem, the capital of the southern kingdom known as Judah
And in chapter 7, which we will come back to shortly,
Amos answered Amaziah, “I was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I was a shepherd, and I also took care of sycamore-fig trees.
Amos 7:
Amos answered Amaziah, “I was neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I was a shepherd, and I also took care of sycamore-fig trees.
He wasn’t raised as a prophet, he didn’t go to prophet school, he didn’t hang around with other prophet kids learning prophet things, he was a shepherd taking care of smelly noisy sheep out in the hot, hot desert and when he wasn’t doing that he had the hard job of looking after sycamore figs which have to be pierced while still on the tree in order to ripen
Why am I telling you this? Why does it matter?
Because I want you to know that God does call the qualified, He qualifies those that He calls!
He made an old man who had no children to be the Father of many nations, He used a stuttering murderer with anger issues to bring His people to the promised land, He made a king out of a shepherd boy named David, He took a fruit picker and used him as His voice
He even took a bunch of uneducated, smelly fishermen and used them to change the world for His Son
But the biggest challenge for Amos wasn’t being called to be a prophet, the biggest challenge was that God was calling from out of the southern kingdom to bring a message of repentance to the nothern kingdom
Again we learn in the first few verses that God’s call on him came at a time when Uzziah was king of the southern kingdom and Jereboam was king of the northern kingdom
What we know about that time of history is that the two kingdoms enjoyed a prosperous, albeit, fragile peace
There were good relations between the two kingdoms but make no mistake that they were two kingdoms and to have someone from the south come to the north and bring a message of all that was wrong with them would not go over well
Maybe, and I’m just speculating here, but maybe that was why God called a fig-picking shepherd because maybe he was the only one that God could find who was willing to speak an unpopular message
Maybe that is one of the most important lessons that we can learn from the book of Amos, that God is looking for those who are willing to take a stand for His Word even when it isn’t comfortable or easy, and that you don’t have to be qualified to do it
So now that we have met the man, let’s move on to the message
As I mentioned the message that Amos was bringing wasn’t a very popular one even though it started out okay
In chapter 1 Amos begins by declaring that the Lord is about to roar, a declaration that His wrath has been awakened
He then begins by proclaiming God’s wrath on the Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, and Moab
So far so good because these were all enemies of Israel no matter what side of the border you lived on and so up until this point his listeners had no problem yelling “Amen!”
At this point Amos turns his condemnation towards the southern kingdom of Judah and even with this I’m sure that none of his northern listeners have too many problems with his sermon
But then in chapter 2:6 Amos turns his attention towards the northern kingdom of Israel and the atmosphere quickly changes as over the next several verses he systematically lays out God’s charges against these people
The charges are summarized by these 4 sins:
The perversion of justice - contrary to the laws of God “justice” was reserved for those who could pay for it even to the point of selling other Jews into slavery
The poor were being oppressed - denied the care afforded them by God’s law
Purity had been traded for the fulfilling of the desires of the flesh
Prosperity had caused the people to become arrogant and narcissistic having no regard for what God had done for them or what He required of them
The strange thing about these charges is that you would expect the society that Amos was talking about to be the most secular and Godless society imaginable, but actually quite the opposite was true of their condition
In the midst of their degradation, Israel was actually very religious
In fact they were probably even more religious than when they were following God
The problem with that was that they had traded their righteous behaviour for extravagant religious enthusiasm and that’s not what God was looking for and so through the prophet God laid out His consequences
Amos 5:21-23
“I hate, I despise your religious festivals;
your assemblies are a stench to me.
Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them.
Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,
I will have no regard for them.
Away with the noise of your songs!
I will not listen to the music of your harps.
Amos 7:
This is what he showed me: The Lord was standing by a wall that had been built true to plumb, with a plumb line in his hand. And the Lord asked me, “What do you see, Amos?”
“A plumb line,” I replied.
Then the Lord said, “Look, I am setting a plumb line among my people Israel; I will spare them no longer.
“The high places of Isaac will be destroyed
and the sanctuaries of Israel will be ruined;
with my sword I will rise against the house of Jeroboam.”
“The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign Lord,
“when I will send a famine through the land—
not a famine of food or a thirst for water,
but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord.
People will stagger from sea to sea
and wander from north to east,
searching for the word of the Lord,
but they will not find it.
Amos 8
The consequences of their choices meant that God would reject them, that God would judge them based on His Word which is straight and true like a plumb line and that God would bring a spiritual famine upon the land
I think that we can all agree that we are glad that we are not in their shoes
Or are we?
We’ve already looked at the man and the message so now let’s take a look at the meaning
While it is true that the Bible is consistently being proven by modern day sciences as historically accurate, I can’t imagine that God would go to all that work just so you and I could have an accurate historical account
In fact Paul makes a very bold statement in his first letter to the Corinthians as to why the Old Testament was written
These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the culmination of the ages has come.
1 Corinthians 10:11
The Old Testament, including these minor prophets, are not just good stories, they were written down so that we might head the warnings not to fall into the same problems and traps that these people did
The Bible is not supposed to be a source of information but is supposed to be a source of transformation!
Having said that, let me read for you Paul’s warning to Timothy about what the end times was going to be like
2 Timothy
For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are living that very scenario right now
Let me read for you once again the charges against Israel and tell me if this doesn’t sound like our nation of Canada
The perversion of justice so that only those that could pay for it would find the favour of the courts
The poor were oppressed while the rich continued to get richer at the expense of those who could least afford it
Purity was a thing of the past and so people lived to please their own fleshly desires without concern for others
Their was a great prosperity that led to a luke-warm spiritual condition
Even in the church, we have, like Israel in the days of Amos, traded righteousness for extravagant worship, we’ve traded greed and extravagant buildings for the care of the poor and marginalized, we’ve traded worship of self to dying to self
And unless we head the warning that is God’s punishment on 8th century Israel we too are going to find that His patience has run out with us
In fact I would submit to you that we are already witnessing a famine in our land
At least when we compare Canada to what is happening in other places around the world where the Spirit is being poured out, God is moving, and the church is exploding
God’s Word is straight and true and He is going to judge us based on this plumb line and unless we measure up He WILL reject us
For it is time for judgment to begin with God’s household; and if it begins with us, what will the outcome be for those who do not obey the gospel of God?
1 Peter4:17
Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
Now I know that I am not telling you anything that you have not heard before or that you do not already know, but the same could be said of the audience to whom Amos was preaching his message
The question is will we not only hear the message but will we listen to it?
Will we repent of our short comings and turn our lives so that they once again line up with the plumb line?
Let me summarize the book of Amos for you in one verse
In other words if there was only one verse of this book that you could and should remember, it would be this one
Right near the very center of the book just after declaring God’s disdain for Israel’s religious noise, the prophet proclaims God’s desired plan of action for Israel and for us
It’s chapter 5 verse 24 if you want to circle it and highlight it and dog-ear the page
But let justice roll on like a river,
righteousness like a never-failing stream!
Amos 5:24
What exactly that means for each of us and how it will take shape in our lives I’m not exactly sure but this one thing I do know, that we better make sure it does or we are going to have a very big problem
Let’s pray
I Surrender