Be Prepared. That’s the motto of the Boy Scouts. "Be prepared for what?" someone once asked Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting, "Why, for any old thing." said Baden-Powell.
Perhaps Amos would have adopted the same motto – be prepared. But not just be prepared for any old thing, as we’ll see.
This morning we’ll wrap up our look at the Book of Amos. As we’ll be doing with most of the Old Testament prophets, we’ve limited our examination of Amos to those passages that reveal something about the “Day of the Lord”, so we haven’t covered the entire book. This morning we’ll be looking at chapter 9, so go ahead and open your Bibles to Amos 9.
Let me put this chapter in context by reviewing briefly what we’ve already covered in Amos. Remember that Amos is from the southern kingdom of Judah, but God calls him to go preach to the northern 10 tribes of Israel. The book itself is divided into two sections. The first six chapters contain a sermon, or more likely a series of sermons. We focused mostly on chapters 1 and 2 and the masterfully crafted sermon where Amos revealed that God was going to bring judgment on the northern 10 tribes of Israel as well as the surrounding nations. Last week, we also looked at Amos 5:18-20 where Amos asked the people why they were looking forward to the “Day of the Lord” since it was going to be a day of darkness and not a day of light as they were expecting.
The second part of the book- chapters 7-9 - contains a series of five visions. We’ve already looked at the first four and this morning we’ll cover the fifth and final one. Rather than read the entire chapter at once, we’ll read each section as we cover it this morning.
This fifth and final vision contains two distinct sections. The first continues with the message of certain judgment on Israel that has been the focus of the first four visions as well. But then Amos ends on a hopeful note as he describes the blessings that will come to the righteous. Overall, this is a pretty straightforward passage, so we’ll just examine it as it’s written.
GOD’S JUDGMENT IS…
• Inevitable (v. 1)
There is some question about exactly which altar the Lord is standing beside, or possibly even on. Although it is not really crucial to helping us understand the meaning of the passage, given the context, it seems likely that Amos is referring here to the places of worship that Israel had established in the northern kingdom that were referred to in the previous verse at the end of Chapter 8.
In any case, what really stands out here is that God is going to completely destroy the places where idolatrous worship is taking place and bring the ruins down on the heads of those who are there. And then any that are left will be killed by the sword.
This vision confirms what we already observed in the third and fourth visions where Amos was unable to intercede on behalf of the people because it was now too late to repent and God’s judgment was inevitable. But there is something ominously different that separates this vision from the two immediately before it. This time Amos has absolutely no interaction with God at all. God doesn’t even ask Amos what he sees this time. He just gives Amos the vision.
The last part of verse 1 also leads us directly to the second aspect of judgment that is revealed here. The judgment is not only inevitable, it is also…
• Inescapable (vv. 2-4)
At the end of verse 1, God makes it clear that no one is going to be able to flee or to escape the coming judgment. And then in verses 2 through 4, he paints a picture to emphasize that point. Amos uses a structure here known as a chiasm. He begins by describing those who attempt to flee by digging deep down into the earth, into Sheol, or the grave. He then takes them upward to the opposite extreme, those who think they can climb their way up to heaven to escape. He then stays up on the heights with those who try to ascend to the top of Mt. Carmel. And he finally returns to the depths – this time the depths of the ocean.
The pictures that are painted here just reinforce the futility of trying to escape God’s judgment. It’s not even possible to dig into Sheol or to climb up to heaven or to survive at the bottom of the sea. And even climbing to the top of Mt. Carmel is not something everyone is capable of doing. The point here is quite clear. God’s judgment is inescapable.
And just to make sure no one misses the point, God even warns against just surrendering to the enemy and going into exile, thinking that somehow God wouldn’t find them there.
Just as we saw last week, there is a great reversal going on here. Amos’s audience would have been familiar with these words of the Psalmist. Perhaps they even sang this as a song in their worship services:
Where shall I go from your Spirit?
Or where shall I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
If I take the wings of the morning
and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me.
Psalm 139:7-10 (ESV)
Notice the similarities between that Psalm and Amos’ words here in this passage. The Psalm is a beautiful picture of God’s presence in our lives – His presence for the purpose of doing good. But as Amos makes clear, there will be a day when God will reverse that and His presence will be for the purpose of bringing judgment instead. And when that occurs, there is nowhere that anyone will be able to go to escape that judgment.
• Inseparable (vv. 5-6)
Amos now turns to a description of the sovereignty of God. We see the sovereignty of God in both His creation and in the destruction that He is going to bring upon that creation when He touches it. At that time it will melt and it will be subject to the same kind of upheaval that the people could observe in the yearly cycles of the rising and sinking of the Nile.
What is pictured here is that the judgment God will bring is really inseparable from His character. Everyone likes to think about how God is love and focus on His attributes of compassion, patience and grace. But God is also a holy and just God and it would be contrary to His own nature if He did not ultimately punish sin.
God clearly revealed both sides of His nature to Moses:
The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty…
Exodus 34:6, 7 (ESV)
Although God is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness and although He delights in forgiving sin, it is also true that He will ultimately judge the guilty.
The problem with the people of Israel was that they just assumed that because they were part of the nation of Israel that they were automatically immune from God’s judgment. But as Amos continues with his vision, we see, as we have already seen repeatedly in both Amos and Joel, that is not the case. In fact, God’s judgment is…
• Indiscriminate – to a point (vv. 7-10)
The Israelites were depending on their heritage to protect them from God’s judgment. But in verse 7, God points out that even though He had brought His people out of bondage in Egypt, there was a sense that Israel was no more special in God’s eyes than even the Cushites. And besides, God had also brought the Philistines and the Syrians out of captivity in the past as well.
And, as Amos has pointed out repeatedly, Israel is a “sinful kingdom” just like all the surrounding nations. In fact, their sin is actually worse than that of the surrounding nations because they should know better due to their covenant relationship with God. So God is going to bring judgment on Israel, just like He will on all the surrounding nations.
But in verse 8, God reveals that there is a difference in the nature of the judgment on Israel compared to the surrounding nations. God will not utterly destroy Israel. For the first time, we find a hint that God is going to preserve a remnant of His people – the same as we saw in Joel and in our Thursday night study on Noah. That’s the good news.
But what is not nearly as pleasant is the process through which God is going to preserve His remnant. In verses 9 and 10, God shows Amos the shaking process that He is going to use to separate the righteous from the unrighteous. In the agricultural society that Amos was speaking to, the people would have been familiar with the process of using a sieve to separate the grain from the chaff. The larger chaff was blown away as the grain was thrown in to the air and it eventually settled to the ground. And the smaller chaff would fall through the sieve to the ground, leaving only the usable part of the grain in the sieve.
That was a picture of the process that Israel was going to experience right along with the surrounding nations. Notice in verse 9 that God says he will “shake the house of Israel among all the nations.” In other words, when the shaking comes, Israel is going to undergo that just like all the other nations.
For the other nations, this shaking and sifting process will be solely for the purpose for judgment, but for God’s people, the shaking serves another purpose. When the shaking takes place, not one pebble will fall to the earth. If you have carefully followed the rest of this chapter, you will note that God’s wrath will be directed against the earth – especially in verse 5 where he touches the earth and it melts. But God will keep every pebble, a word that could also mean a kernel of grain and which is a picture of those who are righteous, from falling to the earth where His wrath is being poured out. The righteous do have to undergo the shaking process, and that certainly will not be pleasant. But God will spare them from the full extent of His wrath.
This is certainly consistent with what we learned in our Thursday night study when we discovered that the purpose of tribulation is to identify the righteous. This shaking will be a time when those who are the righteous in Jesus will be proven to be His true followers by their actions and by how they respond to the time of tribulation.
And Amos is clear that this shaking will result in some of those who claim to be God’s people being identified as sinners. As verse 10 shows, even those who seem to be God’s people, but are revealed as the sinners they are by the shaking process are going to face God’s wrath and die by the sword. What is really interesting is the primary sin that God is judging here. It is the sin of pride and arrogance that claims that we are immune to God’s judgment.
That should be a very sobering thought for those Christians who are looking forward to the return of Jesus because they think they are going to be spared from all the pain and difficulty of the shaking process.
Although it has been hinted at here towards the end of this section that describes God’s judgment, God now reveals the full extent of His planned…
BLESSINGS FOR THE RIGHTEOUS…
The first two promises that we find in these verses are directly related to the previous visions in Chapters 7 and 8 that were also pictures of the inevitable nature of God’s judgment on His people:
• A nation rebuilt (vv. 11-12)
In Chapter 7, we Amos’ vision of God standing in the middle of His people with a plumb line. And because they were so out of plumb compared to his Word, God was going to bring judgment upon them. But for those who would prove to be righteous as a result of God’s shaking and sifting process, God promises that He will rebuild.
He is going to repair the breaches and raise up the ruins and restore Israel as it was in the days of old. In other words, Israel will be returned to the perfect state that existed at the time God first created it in complete harmony with His purposes, plans and ways.
Amos uses an interesting picture in verse 11 when he says that God will raise up the booth of David that is fallen. The word for “booth” there describes the temporary shelters that the people would erect during the celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles, which, by the way, we’ll be looking at in quite some detail in just a couple of weeks. The reference here is to the kingdom of David that had once been strong, more like a permanent dwelling than a temporary booth. But since the split of the Commonwealth of Israel into the northern and southern kingdoms at the end of the reign of Solomon, the kingdom had become very weak, and it was now more like a temporary booth.
This entire section, beginning in verse 11 is quite obviously a Messianic prophecy which finds its fulfillment in Jesus, who is from the line of David. The prophecy was partially fulfilled at his first coming. In fact, James, Jesus’ half-brother, quotes Amos 9:11-12 during the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15:16-17) to support his contention that people did not need to convert to Judaism before they could become Christians. Since the Lord declared here in verse 12 that “all nations” would be called by His name, there was no need for them to first become Jews before committing their lives to Jesus.
But certainly the final fulfillment of this prophecy in which the remnant of Edom will be ruled over by Israel has not yet come to pass and it will be fulfilled at a future time when Jesus returns to this earth and establishes His eternal reign.
• Fruitfulness restored (vv. 13-15)
In Chapter 8, the vision began with a basket of ripe fruit – a picture of the fact that Israel was ripe for judgment. But one day God will restore the fruitfulness to His people. In fact the harvest from the land will be so great that those who are planting the new crop already be out doing their work while the old crop is still being harvested. The land will provide abundantly for its people once again.
As you might expect, there have been many attempts to merely allegorize or spiritualize this last section that describes the blessings that God has promised to the remnant that He will preserve. Others have claimed that the church has now replaced Israel and that these blessings are for the church and not Israel. There is absolutely nothing in the text itself or elsewhere in the Bible that would justify such an approach.
There is simply nothing in the text that would allow us to make any other conclusion than that God is literally going to restore and rebuild Israel and make it a fruitful land that provides abundantly for His people. And that lead us to one last and very important aspect of God’s blessings for the righteous.
• A permanent land for Israel
God promised that there would be a time when He would permanently plant Israel back into the land that He had given them. Although many commentators take the position that this occurred in 1948 when the nation of Israel was established once again, it is quite clear that there are many aspects of Amos’ prophecy that have yet to be fulfilled:
o The most obvious is that Israel does not occupy anywhere near all the land that God had given them:
Every place that the sole of your foot will tread upon I have given to you, just as I promised to Moses. From the wilderness and this Lebanon as far as the great river, the river Euphrates, all the land of the Hittites to the Great Sea toward the going down of the sun shall be your territory.
Joshua 1:3, 4 (ESV)
o Secondly, the booth of David has not been restored. There is no king from the line of David who rules over the land.
o The land of Israel is certainly not a land of agricultural abundance
So while it is possible that 1948 began a period of time in which God began to fulfill these prophecies, it is clear that the final fulfillment has not yet occurred.
Beginning next week, we’re going to take a four week break from our study of the Old Testament prophets in order to observe the Lord’s Supper together and to focus on the Jewish fall feasts. So I thought it might be good idea to take just a moment to recap some of the important principles that we’ve gleaned so far from the passages that we’ve looked at in Joel and Amos.
Recap of Joel and Amos
1. The “Day of the Lord” is a cycle that began with the initiation of the Church Age on the day of Pentecost:
• God revealing man’s sin,
• A means of salvation,
• An opportunity for repentance,
• Judgment,
• Restoration
Our study of Amos has only helped us to cement this definition even further. In Amos, we have observed this very same cycle from a different perspective. Although Joel prophesied to Judah and Amos to Israel, there is a striking consistency in how they paint the picture of the “Day of the Lord.”
2. God brings tribulation as an opportunity to repent and be identified as the righteous in Jesus
On this side of the cross, we can see this picture much more clearly than either Joel or Amos. Although Joel and Amos both picture the “Day of the Lord” and the associated tribulation as a time of shaking and sifting in order to identify the righteous, what they couldn’t fully understand is that God’s plan from the beginning of time was to make people righteous not through their own works, but through His Son, Jesus.
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
2 Corinthians 5:21 (ESV)
While Joel and Amos both look forward to the Messiah, God had not yet revealed fully the nature of the Messiah and His two separate comings – the first time as the “Suffering Servant” who would die on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins and the second time as Judge and King.
But what is clear in both Joel and Amos is that God brings tribulation for the purpose of allowing people the opportunity to repent and turn to Him and be identified as His true children. At the same time, it is also clear that there will come a time when God gets fed up and repentance is no longer possible and judgment is inevitable.
3. Although God’s people are not immune to judgment, God preserves the righteous as a remnant to whom He will bring restoration.
By now, it should be obvious to us that God’s people are not immune to His judgment. But the good news is that during these times of tribulation, we find a consistent pattern of God preserving a remnant for Himself. And when God does that, He also provides a time of restoration. And for those who persevere, that restored state is always far greater than that which had been experienced previously.
APPLICATION
There is one essential application that we can take from this morning’s passage, and really from everything we have learned so far in Joel, Amos and in our Thursday night study on Jonah, Noah and Jesus:
1. Be prepared, but not scared
The words of Jesus provide us with the instruction we need to respond appropriately to all that we have learned so far. We’ve looked at this passage frequently before and I’m sure we’ll return to it again frequently, but that won’t hurt at all since these words are so important:
I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world.
John 16:33 (ESV)
You’ll notice that Jesus shared these words with His followers because he wanted them to have peace in their lives. And that peace would result from two things:
First, we have to be prepared by recognizing that we will have tribulation as long as we remain in this world. Jesus wanted His followers to be aware of that reality so that they could be prepared for it.
Secondly, even though we will face tribulation, there is no need to fear because Jesus has already overcome the world. And therefore if we have truly trusted our lives to Him and become God’s children, even though the process may be difficult and painful, the end result is assured.
Those are both important concepts, but how do we work those out in a practical way in our day-to-day lives? There are obviously a number of things that are important, but let’s just focus on just one this morning.
• Saturate my life with God’s Word
If you look carefully at this verse in John, you’ll find that Jesus gives us the key to being prepared and not scared. It is His words: “I have said these things to you…” It is the words of Jesus, living in us that prepare us for the times of tribulation we are certain to face and it is his words that will prevent us from begin afraid in those situations.
And where do we find the words of Jesus? In the Bible. And where in the Bible do we find the words of Jesus? Be careful before you answer that question. Some of you may be tempted to answer “the red letters.” Perhaps many of you have a Bible like mine that purports to have the words of Jesus printed in red.
And there is actually even an entire movement that has developed know as the “Red Letter Christians” who claim to base their beliefs and actions strictly on the spoken words of Jesus as recorded in the red letters in the Bible. In reality, they are primarily using that approach to justify their political agenda. But whether or not I agree with their political positions is not the real issue here. The problem is that they have to ignore this familiar passage in order to justify their position:
All Scripture is breathed out by God…
2 Timothy 3:16 (ESV)
Is Jesus God? Then if that is the case, how much of the Bible contains the words of Jesus? That’s right – all of it! That’s why personally I actually prefer a Bible without the red letters because those red letters subtly imply that somehow those words carry more weight than the rest of Jesus’ words throughout the rest of the Bible.
But notice that I didn’t just say “read God’s Word”, or even “study God’s Word”. While that’s obviously a good start, that’s not enough. Paul gives us some good insight into what is required if we are going to be prepared and not scared:
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.
Colossians 3:16 (ESV)
Notice that Paul commanded us to let the word of Christ dwell in us richly. We’ve looked at that passage before and perhaps you’ll remember that the word “dwell” there is a word that means to “take up permanent residence.” And that will never occur in our lives if the only attention we give to God’s Word is an hour or two on Sunday morning or even supplementing that with a brief devotional in the Bible each morning.
The only way God’s Word will richly dwell in us is if we saturate our lives with God’s Word. That means reading it, studying it, discussing it with others, but most of all it means applying it in our lives. When tribulation comes, and it will, those who will be proven to be the righteous in Jesus will be those who have consistently and diligently saturated their lives with God’s Word.
The primary reason that Pastor Dana and I have felt compelled to embark on this study of Revelation and the related Old Testament passages is that we have a great burden to do everything that we can to help you be prepared for whatever may lie ahead, but at the same time have great confidence that God will be faithful to carry out the promise that he has made to His followers:
And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.
Philippians 1:6 (ESV)
