Sunday, February 4, 2007-AM
Amos: When God's People Aren't Any Better Than the
World
The Demand of Being God's People
Amos 3
Introduction: God's People in the Crosshairs
As we learned last Sunday morning, Amos clearly has God's people
in the crosshairs of his prophetic ministry.
After having described the wickedness and coming punishment of all of
As he continues to prophesy to
Hear
this word that the Lord has spoken against you, O people of
"You only have I known
of all the
families of the earth;
therefore I will
punish you
for all your
iniquities (Amos 3:1-2, ESV).
The construction of Amos' statement in v. 2 is somewhat deceptive. After having said, "You only have I known
of all the families of the earth"—a statement about the unique
relationship God has had with them, you'd expect to hear something like,
"I'll deliver you from all your enemies." However, that is not what Amos says. Instead, he says, "therefore I will
punish you for all your iniquities."
Amos is almost building them up just enough to make the blow he'll
deliver all the more painful.
God's People Have Received
Greater Things
The truth is, the
statement makes some sense. After all,
God's people had received some wonderful things from the hand of God. God, in a marvelous act of grace, delivered them
out the
God's People Are Held to a
Higher Standard
Having received as many good things from the hand of God as they
had received, one would think that they would have had a greater sense of
responsibility toward Him, as well as a great a motivation for being faithful
to Him. Yet, it was not so. They exploited God's grace and used His
wonderful gifts of prosperity for their own selfish gain, and to honor some
idol.
Homer
Hailey, in commenting on this text, wrote, "The greater measure of grace,
the greater the responsibility incurred; therefore, the greater the punishment
for misuse of or contempt of that grace."[1] God's people, in view of the grace they had
received, were held to a higher standard of responsibility, and, a failure to
carry out that responsibility, would lead to a greater condemnation.
This is what has Amos so moved to prophesy. He speaks as if He is as disgusted by this as
God is. In vv. 3-8, Amos gives the
rationale for his prophetic ministry:
"Do two walk together,
unless they
have agreed to meet?
Does a lion roar in the forest,
when he has no
prey?
Does a young lion cry out from his den,
if he has
taken nothing?
Does a bird fall in a snare on the earth,
when there is
no trap for it?
Does a snare spring up from the ground,
when it has
taken nothing?
Is a trumpet blown in a city,
and the people
are not afraid?
Does disaster come to a city,
unless the
Lord has done it?
"For the Lord God does nothing
without
revealing his secret
to his
servants the prophets.
The lion has roared;
who will not
fear?
The Lord God has spoken;
who can but
prophesy?"
Amos didn't come up with this
all by himself. God has been trying to
tell the people something for sometime.
He has sent them warnings. He
allowed them to be hurt by their wicked neighbors in the past, having sounded
the trumpet of alarm within the city. He
has revealed His plans, and Amos is the one God has chosen to speak of these
future plans. Amos seems to understand
it all, and is right with God on this, believing that the people should be
punished. Because of his strong feelings
on the matter, and because God has spoken to him, he can't do anything else but
prophesy to the people what God's gonna do.
God's People Will Now Receive
Their Due Punishment
Just what is God going to do?
Here's what He reveals through Amos:
Proclaim to the strongholds in
and to the
strongholds in the
and say,
"Assemble yourselves on the mountains of
and see the
great tumults within her,
and the
oppressed in her midst."
"They do not know how to do
right," declares the Lord,
"those who store
up violence and robbery in their strongholds."
Therefore thus says the Lord God:
"An adversary shall surround the land
and bring down
your defenses from you,
and your
strongholds shall be plundered."
Thus says the Lord: "As the shepherd
rescues from the mouth of the lion two legs, or a piece of an ear, so shall the
people of
"Hear, and testify against the house
of Jacob,"
declares the Lord God, the God of hosts,
"that on the
day I punish
I will punish the altars of
and the horns of
the altar shall be cut off
and fall to
the ground.
I will strike the winter house along with
the summer house,
and the houses
of ivory shall perish,
and the great
houses shall come to an end,"
declares the Lord (vv. 9-15).
First things first, to make the punishment really interesting and
all the more severe, God will bring
After calling those two to witness the punishment, God will raise
up an adversary that will crush them.
The adversary will turn out to be the Assyrians, and they will lay the
northern kingdom to waste. The destruction
will be so severe that only pieces of them will be left, like the scraps left
behind by a lion after he has devoured a sheep.
The focus of the punishment will be on the places that represent best
the people's wickedness. First, God will
destroy
Conclusion: We Are Called to Be God's People
It is important that we
understand who we are. Burton Coffman
stated it quite concisely: "We are God's, and therefore we are under the
uttermost obligation to love him and obey him."[2] We have received wonderful things from the
hand of God—redemption, reconciliation, salvation, atonement, or as Paul would
put it to the Ephesians, "every spiritual blessing in the heavenly
places" in Christ (Eph. 1:3). We
have received grace beyond measure. How
could we be less than completely committed to living our lives in service to
Him?
To the Romans, Paul wrote of the marvelous and amazing grace that
God has given us, and then he tells us exactly what that grace demands of us:
Now
the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace
abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign
through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still
live in it? Do you not know that all of
us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism
into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory
of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.
For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall
certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with
him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would
no longer be enslaved to sin. For one
who has died has been set free from sin.
Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with
him. We know that Christ being raised
from the dead will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died he died to sin, once
for all, but the life he lives he lives to God.
So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in
Christ Jesus. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal bodies, to make you
obey their passions. Do not present your
members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to
God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God
as instruments for righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law
but under grace (Romans 5:20-6:14).
Grace demands that we live completely and entirely for God. We are His instruments, instruments of
righteousness. We cannot simply revel in
His grace and fail to commit our lives to Him with every ounce of our heart,
soul, mind and strength. We can't simply
act as if His grace means the world to us, and then show Him by the way we
treat Him—with insincere worship or unrighteous and disobedient living—that it
means nothing to us at all. We can't
call ourselves His, and then live as if we belong to sin and self.
We are God's people, and we must live like it. If we don't, there is no reason to expect God
to continue to dispense His grace on us when the judgment comes. After all, Jesus has told us that there are
weeds growing in the kingdom right alongside the wheat, but at the end of the
age, when He and His angels come in judgment, they'll separate the weeds from
the wheat and throw the weeds into the fire of condemnation. If we expect to be rescued from eternal
condemnation, as is awaiting God's people, then we
must be God's people in the way we live.
The words of Thomas A. Jackson are a fitting conclusion:
We are
called to be God's people, Showing by our lives His
grace. One in heart and one in spirit,
Sign of hope for all the race. Let us show how He has changed us, And remade us as His own, Let us share our life together As
we shall around the throne.
We are
called to be God's people, Working in His world today;
Taking His own task upon us, All His sacred words obey. Let us rise, then, to the His summons,
Dedicate to Him our all, That we may be faithful
servants, Quick to answer now His call.
We are
called to be God's prophets, Spokesmen for the truth and right; Standing firm for godly justice, Bringing
evil into light. Let us seek the courage
needed, Our high calling to fulfill, That mankind may
know the blessing Of the doing of God's will.
Let us always be, in every
sense of the phrase, God's people.