Sermon Tone Analysis
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Sermon Outline
Amos Wants to Jolt God’s People Out of Complacency and Turn Us Away from Sin, Back to God’s Law and Promise.
I.
He uses a plumb line to picture how we measure up to God’s perfect, utterly straight Law.
II.
He uses a sword to demonstrate what we deserve for our many sins.
III.
He uses figs to illustrate the two possibilities for the harvest.
Sermon
Seek good, and not evil, that you may live; and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you, as you have said.
Hate evil, and love good, and establish justice in the gate; it may be that the Lord, the God of hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.
(Amos 5:14–15)
After reading through Amos for the second time in a week, I literally sat back in my chair and went, “Whew!”
It reminded me of the sensation I get after popping an Altoid into my mouth.
Altoids have been around in one form or another since 1780.
They’re famous for their motto, “Curiously strong mints.”
They momentarily take your breath away.
[Altoids is a registered trademark of Wm.
Wrigley Jr. Company.]
That’s exactly the impression Amos wants us to have when we finish his book and put it down.
Amos Wants to Jolt God’s People Out of Complacency and Turn Us Away from Sin, Back to God’s Law and Promise.
If we don’t turn, we can expect God’s breathtaking wrath.
Amos did his work in the mid-ninth century BC.
By occupation, he was a shepherd and tender of sycamore-fig trees.
But that doesn’t mean he was ignorant.
He writes some of the finest Hebrew poetry in the Bible.
I’ve tried to find something tangible, something we can organize Amos’s words around.
Three items from everyday life show up in his book that perhaps can help us get a handle on his message.
Here’s what I found: a plumb line, a sword, and figs.
I.
The plumb line shows up in Amos 7:7–8.
It follows two incidents of God sparing Israel from disaster after Amos had fervently prayed for the people.
The first incident is a locust plague, perhaps the same one Joel wrote about.
Amos prayed that God would forgive Israel and spare the nation from the locusts, and he did.
The second incident is a terrible fire that ravaged the land.
Yet again, Amos begged God to spare the people so that they would survive.
And he did.
But despite God’s mercy in stopping locusts and fire, Israel had not turned back to him.
The nation continued in its idolatrous and self-indulgent ways and ignored the needs of the poor.
So, after hundreds of years of Israel disregarding God, his covenant, and his Law, God decides to measure and judge them by that perfect, utterly straight standard, his Law.
This is what [the Lord] showed me: behold, the Lord was standing by a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand.
And the Lord said to me, “Amos, what do you see?”
And I said, “A plumb line.”
Then the Lord said, “Behold, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass by them.”
(Amos 7:7–8)
Measured against the plumb line of God’s Law, Israel was crooked beyond words.
Therefore, God is no longer going to spare Israel in answer to the prayers of Amos.
He is going to bring a sword.
“I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword,” says Yahweh (Amos 7:9).
Which Jeroboam?
The Jeroboam who split off from Judah two hundred years earlier?
Or the current Jeroboam, Jeroboam II? Probably the latter, but it doesn’t really make any difference.
The whole kingdom is rotten, always has been, and has to go.
II.
So the second item that helps us organize and understand the prophecy of Amos is God’s sword.
And my, how he swings it!
The whole first chapter is how the sword of God’s judgment is coming on Israel’s neighbors:
Damascus in the northeast gets the sword because of its brutal invasion of Israel.
Gaza and the ancient Philistine cities in the southwest get the sword for enslaving whole communities and selling the people to Edom.
Tyre (modern-day Lebanon) gets the sword for the same thing, selling Israelite slaves to Edom.
And Edom gets the sword for going to war against their Israelite cousins.
That’s not all.
Ammon gets the sword for brutally ripping open pregnant Israelite women in Gilead.
Then, finally, Moab—that’s where King David’s grandmother Ruth came from—gets the sword for desecrating the tomb of Edom’s king.
Those are just the neighbors of Judah and Israel.
But Judah and Israel have also both departed from the plumb line of God’s Law, so they aren’t spared either.
Judah and the holy city, Jerusalem, get the sword because they have turned to the false gods of their neighbors.
As you can tell, Amos is really animated, really agitated.
Nothing stops him once he gets going.
All I’ve just said about the sword comes from the first two chapters!
The rest of the book, the second half of chapter 2 all the way through most of chapter 9, deals with the swordworthy sins of Amos’s prime target: the Northern Kingdom, Israel.
What’s so wrong with Israel?
Amos provides us a list of their sins:
They sell the righteous for silver.
They trample on the rights of the poor.
They deny justice to the oppressed.
They commit adultery.
They profane God’s holy name.
They get drunk in the house of God.
They make godly people break their vows.
They feast and drink wine on ivory couches while they oppress the poor.
They have winter houses and summer houses while they ignore the needy.
And while they live this way, they continue to practice their feast days and attend their solemn assemblies and bring grain offerings and sing their religious songs.
What does the Lord think about all this?
He despises their feasts, he will not accept their offerings, and he finds their songs to be just noise to his ears.
What does God want instead of all this religious display?
He says, “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24).
Oh, how he wants Israel to be “grieved over the ruin of Joseph” (Amos 6:6), or, in other words, how he wants Israel to repent!
What would that look like?
It would be the opposite of all that Israel is currently doing wrong.
For Israel, repentance would be going back to the plumb line and living according to the spirit of God’s Law.
That would be
being compassionate and generous toward the poor;
being sexually pure;
honoring the name of God in words and behavior;
respecting God’s house;
keeping godly vows and encouraging others to do the same;
living frugally so that there is something to share with the needy;
seeing that others have a decent place to live; and
ridding one’s life of idolatry.
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