Let me ask you a question: How many of you here this morning would like to win the lottery? Sounds good doesn’t it? Just go into the Circle K, buy a ticket, watch the drawing on TV and see all your numbers drawn and then all your problems are gone. Couldn’t get much better, right?
That’s what William “Bud” Post thought, too. He won $16.2 million in the Pennsylvania lottery in 1988 but ended up only a few years later living on his Social Security. "I wish it never happened. It was totally a nightmare," says Post.
A former girlfriend successfully sued him for a share of his winnings. It wasn’t his only lawsuit. A brother was arrested for hiring a hit man to kill him, hoping to inherit a share of the winnings. Other siblings pestered him until he agreed to invest in a car business and a restaurant in Sarasota, Fla., - two ventures that brought no money back and further strained his relationship with his siblings. Post even spent time in jail for firing a gun over the head of a bill collector. Within a year, he was $1 million in debt.
Post admitted he was both careless and foolish, trying to please his family. He eventually declared bankruptcy. He ended up living quietly on $450 a month and food stamps. "I’m tired, I’m over 65 years old, and I just had a serious operation for a heart aneurysm. Lotteries don’t mean (anything) to me," said Post. He died on Jan 15, 2008 of respiratory failure. [MSN Money: “8 lottery winners who lost their millions”]
For Bud Post, and for many other lottery winners, for that matter, the actual experience of winning the lottery certainly didn’t measure up to his expectations. In fact, it was a complete reversal of what he thought it would be.
For Amos’ audience, that same principle applied to the “Day of the Lord”. Certainly the people of Israel were familiar with the concept of the “Day of the Lord” and they were looking forward to it as a time when God would bring judgment on all their enemies. But as we’ve seen already from the sermon in chapters 1 and 2 and the three visions in Chapter 7, Amos wasn’t just bringing a message of God’s judgment on the other nations, but also of judgment on Israel itself. It was a great reversal of what the people were expecting.
Before we get to our passages that we’ll be examining this morning, let me take a moment to make an important observation about the structure of the Book of Amos that is also going to be quite significant when we get to the Book of Revelation.
As we’ll see quite clearly this morning, the Book of Amos is not linear, or chronological. In other words, you can’t just take the book as we have it and neatly arrange all the events on a timeline that corresponds to the order the events are recorded in the book. As we saw last week, the first six chapters of the book record Amos’ sermons to the people and the last three chapters contain five visions that he saw. But there are some clues in the text itself that make it clear that those events didn’t necessarily occur in that order. So we can’t assume that Amos preached a sermon, or a number of sermons, and then when he was finished, God gave him five visions, which were interrupted after the third vision for an encounter with Amaziah.
When the Book of Amos was written, the material was grouped by function, not necessarily recorded in the order in which the events occurred. So all the sermons are grouped in one section and all the visions are grouped in another section. The sermons and the visions are obviously all related, but there is absolutely no way to determine when they occurred. It is only my opinion, and I can’t prove it definitively, but it seems to me that it is likely that Amos received the visions from God first and then developed his sermons based on what God had showed him in the visions.
With that background, we’re going to begin this morning with a passage that really provides us with the box art, or the overall theme of the entire book. In hindsight, perhaps this is where we should have started our look at Amos a couple of weeks ago. Let’s read these three verses out loud together:
Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord!
Why would you have the day of the Lord?
It is darkness, and not light,
as if a man fled from a lion,
and a bear met him,
or went into the house and leaned his hand against the wall,
and a serpent bit him.
Is not the day of the Lord darkness, and not light,
and gloom with no brightness in it?
Amos 5:18-20 (ESV)
MAIN THEME:
• The “Day of the Lord” is a day of reversal
The self-righteous Israelites longed for the “Day of the Lord”, which they erroneously believed would bring blessing and prosperity to them and judgment on their enemies.
But in reality the “Day of the Lord” was going to bring about a great reversal. Certainly their enemies were going to face judgment, but so were they! Instead of it begin a day of light – a picture here of celebration – it was going to be a day of darkness – a picture of mourning.
And Amos paints quite a humorous picture of how the people are going to respond to that great reversal. First, it will be like they encounter a lion, a dangerous situation. But they will escape that only to confront an even more dangerous enemy a bear. But once again they will escape, this time to the safety of their home. Thinking they are safe at last, they relax and lean up against the wall, only to be fatally bitten by a serpent.
Unfortunately, the people of Israel in Amos’ day had a lot in common with many who claim to be Christians today. Warren Wiersbe wrote these insightful words to describe these people:
They were like some Christians today who want Jesus to come so they can escape painful situations and not because they “love His appearing.”
As the “Day of the Lord” nears its culmination, there are going to be a great number of those who call themselves Christians who are going to be caught off guard by the great reversal that they will be facing. Those of you who were here a week ago Thursday night when Pastor Dana described “tribulation” remember that God uses tribulation as a time of testing to identify the righteous in Jesus. And God’s people are not immune to that tribulation.
Although this idea of the “Day of the Lord” being a day of reversal is at least in the background throughout the entire Book of Amos, it is not until we get to Chapter 8 until Amos refers to the “Day of the Lord” again directly. So go ahead and turn to Chapter 8 and follow along as I read that chapter.
Once again, we obviously don’t have the time to examine this entire passage in detail, so let me share a few principles that we find here and then, as we do each week, we’ll wrap up with some practical principles that we can all apply in our lives.
PRINCIPLES:
1. There will come a point at which God’s judgment is inevitable
We’ve seen this principle over and over again, both in our study of the Old Testament prophets and in the Thursday night class on Jonah, Noah and Jesus, so I won’t belabor it.
In verses 1 and 2, there is a very interesting play on words in the Hebrew that just doesn’t carry through in our English translations. The Hebrew word for “summer fruit” is very similar to the Hebrew word for “end”. The words sound alike and they even come from the same root word.
When I read this reference to “summer fruit” I immediately thought of the orchard up in Catalina where some of us go to pick peaches and apples each summer. And although the time varies slightly from year to year, there is a specific time when each variety of fruit ripens and it has to be picked at just the right time in order for the fruit to be at its peak flavor. But that same fruit also has to be eaten rather quickly because once it ripens, it will also rot quickly. That would have especially been true in Amos’ day when there was no refrigeration.
The picture here is unmistakable. In fact, this vision is really a parallel with the third vision we saw in Chapter 7 where God measured His people with a plumb line ad declared, just as he does her in verse2, that He “will never again pass by” Israel. The time is ripe for judgment and God is going to delay it no longer.
2. Israel had reversed God’s Word through “empty religiosity” (vv. 4-6, 14)
When God gave the Law to His people on Mt. Sinai through Moses, that Law dealt with two relationships – the relationship between God and His people and the relationships among God’s people. This is certainly evident in what we know as the Ten Commandments. The first four primarily deal with our relationship with God and the last six deal with our relationship with others. That’s why Jesus summed up the entire Law like this:
And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
Matthew 22:37-40 (ESV)
It was God’s intent that His Law would provide the framework for the proper worship of God, which not only meant treating God right, but also treating other people right. As Jesus clearly showed us, in God’s mind those two aspects of God’s Law were inseparable – they were two sides of the same coin.
But the people of Israel had divorced these two aspects of the Law. They thought they could go worship God on the Sabbath and then mistreat their brothers and sisters the rest of the week.
As I’ve mentioned before, the main sin that Amos deals with in his prophecy is the way that the more affluent and well-to-do were treating the poor and needy. We see that once again in verses 4-6. Amos summarizes here some of the deceitful practices that these people were using in order to cheat the poor and needy in order to satisfy their own greed.
But here is the worse part. These greedy people were so consumed with getting more for themselves that when they were supposed to be worshipping God on the Sabbath or during one of the other feasts, they couldn’t wait to get out of there and get back to their commerce. On the outside, they appeared to be worshipping God. They sang the songs and listened to the Word of God begin proclaimed. But on the inside, they were plotting how to increase their wealth at the expense of others.
Amos’ confirms this sin of empty religiosity in verse 14. I really struggled with what to do with this verse. At first, I thought maybe the “Guilt of Samaria” and the reference to Dan were related to the golden calves that were erected in Bethel, which is near Samaria, and in Dan, when the commonwealth of Israel was divided after the reign of King Solomon. Since the northern kingdom of Israel no longer had access to the Temple in Jerusalem they had established their own places of worship.
But the “Way of Beersheba” was more difficult to identify clearly. Beersheba is actually to the south of Judah and it is possible that this is a reference to spiritual pilgrimages that the Israelites may have made to worship there.
But a more careful reading shows that what God is condemning is not the places themselves, or even the idolatrous worship that is going on there. You’ll notice that Amos never claims that God is going to destroy Samaria, Dan or Beersheba. He doesn’t condemn, or even mention, the religious practices which were occurring there. Instead He focuses on the worshippers themselves. The ones who will fall and never rise again are the ones who “swear by” or “say”.
These are the very same people who are sitting in the worship service on the Sabbath who just can’t wait for the day to be over so they can go back to their cheating ways. And then their excuse is “I went to the worship service yesterday.” In effect that is what they are doing when they swear by the “Guilt of Samaria”, or say “the Way of Beersheba lives.” Those terms, by the way, were probably sarcastic terms of derision that the people of Judah used to describe worship outside of Jerusalem. You’ll notice that these people no longer can swear by God, since they no longer have a relationship with Him. So they have to rely on their religious activity to excuse their behavior.
There is obviously a great lesson for all of us here today and I’ll come back to that in just a moment when we get to our applications.
3. In response, the “day of the Lord” will bring a series of reversals:
Since the people have reversed God’s Word through their actions, God is now going to bring a series of reversals upon the people as part of the “Day of the Lord.” Everything that the people know and experience is going to be turned completely upside down. We’ll look at these just briefly:
• Celebration → mourning (vv.3, 10)
The feasts and the worship songs that had been a great source of celebration and joy are going to be turned into laments and times of mourning. The people will put on sackcloth and shave their heads. They will mourn as if they have just lost an only son. Zechariah describes what that mourning will be like in more detail:
And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that, when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn.
Zechariah 12:10 (ESV)
We’ll look at that passage in more detail when we get to the Book of Zechariah. But for now, we can just note that at least part of what the people of Israel will mourn over is their part in the crucifixion of the Messiah, Jesus.
• Shouts → silence (v. 3)
At first there are shouts of joy, but they will quickly turn to shouts of horror at God’s judgment. But there will eventually come a point at which the devastation becomes so great that the people will be so overwhelmed that they can’t say anything else and there will be silence.
That reminds us of Revelation 8, where when the seventh seal is opened, there is silence in heaven for half an hour.
• Light → darkness (v. 9)
This is perhaps the starkest reversal of all. It is one that we have already seen referred to in Joel as well as in the passage in Amos 5 that we looked at earlier this morning.
Although in the Bible, light and darkness are often pictures of good and evil, here they are used more literally to describe how God is going to reverse the established cycles that he put into place in His creation. This reversal also plays a major part in the events in the Book of Revelation.
4. There will be a famine of God’s Word (vv. 11-13)
It was not unusual for God to send a famine of food or water as a means of judgment or discipline, but during the “Day of the Lord” He is going to send a far more devastating famine – a famine of His Word. There are several things about this famine that are relevant to us:
• It is a famine of hearing and obeying, not one of revelation
Amos describes the famine as a famine of “hearing the words of the Lord.” In other words, the problem isn’t a lack of revelation, but a lack of hearing that revelation. When we first looked at this verse on Tuesday morning during our Men’s Bible study, we thought maybe it was referring to a time when we would no longer have access to God’s Word in written form. While we may certainly see that happen here in this country in much the same way that it is occurring in other places in the world even today, I don’t think that is what Amos is getting at here.
The problem here is with the person receiving the word, not with the process of transmitting or having access to God’s Word to the hearer. And the Hebrew word translated “hearing” means more than just hearing the words. It also implies understanding and obeying those words. James provides us with a great commentary on what Amos means by “hearing”:
But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks intently at his natural face in a mirror. For he looks at himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like. But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.
James 1:22-25 (ESV)
• A haphazard approach to God’s Word is ineffective
In verse 12, there are a couple of interesting phrases that give us some insight as to why the people who are seeking the words of the Lord cannot find them. The people are “wandering” and “running to and fro”. In other words there is a very haphazard approach to God’s Word. And as a result, they cannot find God’s word.
I find that a lot of people use that same approach today. They pick up their Bibles whenever they feel like it and then they don’t have any kind of plan or process for studying God’s Word. They just randomly open the Bible and expect that God will have some word for them.
And we’ve even fostered that kind of haphazard approach to God’s Word in the church. We ask people to go to Sunday School and church on Sunday, sometimes even two services on Sunday, and then to attend a Bible study during the week and then we encourage them to be part of a small group, and then if they are really spiritual, they even go to another non-denominational Bible study some other time during the week. And they also listen to their favorite pastor on the radio or watch him on TV. And they somehow squeeze in their own devotional with the Daily Bread.
And after they’ve been exposed to a large number of often unrelated Bible passages and possibly even heard conflicting teaching about what those passages mean, they are now supposed to make enough sense out of all of that to somehow make an application of the Bible to their lives?
Once again, the problem is not that we don’t have enough revelation of God’s Word in our lives. The problem is that we don’t have the proper framework to put all these various sources in their proper context so that we can deal with them in a consistent, systematic way that will allow us to actually apply the Bible to our lives. That leads us directly to the last aspect of the famine of God’s Word…
• If we ignore God’s Word long enough, our hearts will be hardened
I’m amazed at how many times I’ve had people come to me in the midst of some crisis, many times the loss of a loved one, and want me to help them find Scripture that will help them through their difficulty. But in many cases, the problem is that these very same people have ignored God’s Word for so long that they have hardened their hearts to the point where God’s Word can no longer help them out. The writer of Hebrews warned about hardening our hearts to God’s Word:
Since therefore it remains for some to enter it, and those who formerly received the good news failed to enter because of disobedience, again he appoints a certain day, “Today,” saying through David so long afterward, in the words already quoted, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.”
Hebrews 4:6, 7 (ESV)
If we consistently fail to hear God’s Word and apply it on our lives, there comes a point where our hearts will get so hardened that it will no longer be possible to even hear God any more.
APPLICATION
As always, there are many applications that we could take away from this passage, but I’m going to focus on only two this morning:
1. Don’t compartmentalize our lives into the “secular” and the “sacred”
The root cause of the sin of many of the people in Israel was that they mistakenly thought they could somehow compartmentalize their lives into the secular and the sacred. So in their minds it was no problem to go to church one day and then turn around and return to their unethical business practices the next day.
And frankly, things haven’t changed all that much in over 2,700 years. There is still a natural tendency for those of us who are followers of Jesus to separate our church life from the rest of our life. I think some of this has actually been fostered by the church itself. How many of us have been taught in the church to create some kind of hierarchy of priorities in our lives? The lists may vary somewhat, but generally they would go something like this, beginning with the highest priority first:
• God
• Spouse
• Children
• Church
• Work
• Community
Obviously all the lists begin with God having the highest priority first, and then the exact order and the composition of the rest of the list will vary, depending on who is teaching. But the problem is that by creating the list in the first place, we’ve already separated God from the rest of our lives.
The truth is that real worship means giving God reign in every area of our lives, 24 hours a day, seven days a week and not just while we’re at church on Sunday.
I’ve found that the Message paraphrase of Romans 12:1 has been really helpful to me in grasping this principle:
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life - your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life - and place it before God as an offering.
Romans 12:1 (Message)
That’s pretty clear isn’t it? God want us to take every area of our lives and place it before Him as an offering. And we can’t do that if we try to compartmentalize our lives and separate the secular from the sacred.
2. Study the Bible in a consistent and systematic manner
In Paul’s second letter to the young pastor Timothy, he gives us some insight into what is required for God’s Word to be effective in our lives:
But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.
2 Timothy 3:14-17 (ESV)
Three things stand out immediately in that passage. The first is the importance of reading and studying the entire Bible since all Scripture is profitable. That’s one of the reasons that I’m committed to preaching from both the Old and New Testaments and teaching on whole books and large sections of Scripture rather than just preaching topically and pulling in a few verses here and there.
The second thing that jumps out is that for Timothy, learning the Scriptures has been a life-long process that began very early in his life and which is still ongoing. And during that process Timothy’s family and other teachers have been instrumental in helping him to understand the Bible.
The third thing we see here is that the purpose of Bible study is to equip us for every good work. In other words, the main purpose of Bible study is not information, but application. That’s why we have structured our Sunday morning “Connections” Bible study time to have some time to further discuss how to take these applications from the message and really make them work in our day-to-day lives. And if you’ve noticed, even our Thursday night classes are also related to what we are studying on Sunday mornings.
As the “Day of the Lord” unfolds, there is going to be a great reversal from what much of the world is expecting. But we don’t need to be like Bud Post and a whole lot of other lottery winners who were caught off guard by their great reversal. As we diligently, consistently and systematically study God’s Word and apply it in our lives, we can make sure that we are prepared for whatever we may face.
