Amos has always seemed to me like a man I could enjoy being around. He was plain spoken, and to the point. He was the kind of guy who appreciated hard work.
Amos was a shepherd. He didn’t shepherd those pretty, fluffy white sheep. Based on the word used, he worked with a really ugly, skinny type of sheep with very fine wool.
When he wasn’t shepherding, Amos also worked as a gatherer of fruit from sycamore fig trees. This particular type of fruit had to be pierced in order to fully ripen, and it took a lot of work. Because the region where he lived was fairly dry and desolate, he would have likely traveled back and forth to the coastal region, depending on the season. But the place he called home was Tekoa, and it was located about 12 miles south of Jerusalem. About the same distance that we are now from downtown Nashville.
Amos was a Southerner, and though he was chosen by God to go and preach, Amos would be quick to tell you, as he did in chapter 7, that he was not a prophet, or the son of a prophet. It wasn’t in his family background, or previous work experience.
But I appreciate Amos in that when God said, I need someone to go for me, Amos was willing to do the job.
Amos had a particularly tough job, because God didn’t ask him just to preach to other Southerners. God wanted to send him to preach against the Northerners. And before he got to them, God had a lot for him to say against many of the foreigners around them.
For the first couple of chapters, Amos follows a fairly set pattern in his preaching.
Chapter 1:3: “Thus says the LORD: For the three transgressions of Damascus and for four I will not revoke the punishment, because...” And the punishment will be that God intends to send a fiery judgment against Damascus.
As you read on, he says the same thing for Gaza. “For three transgressions and for four, I will not revoke the punishment. I will send a fire upon them...”
Next comes Tyre, and then comes Edom, then Ammon, then Moab.
Now you can imagine as a Jew listening to this, it would all sound just fine up until this point. “God drove out all those people to give us our promised land. If he wants to burn their possessions to the ground, that just means more land for us.”
But then God has Amos point the gun at his own people.
In 2:4, it isn’t the foreigners that God will contend with, but Judah; the Southern Kingdom. And next comes Israel; the Northern Kingdom.
Now as passive observers, we haven’t lived in any of these places, and hearing judgment against one place means as much to us as judgment against another.
But I believe a Jew who lived as Amos’ contemporary would have strong objections to this judgment that Amos has proclaimed.
Amos prophesied during the 8th century BC. If your main concern is the economy, then this represents a golden age of Israel. King Jeroboam II was the ruler in the North in Israel, and he had good relations with King Uzziah in the South in Judah. He reigned for about 40 years, mostly without incident. It was a divided Kingdom, but it wasn’t a hostile kingdom. The borders were secure. There was as much wealth as there ever was. There was an extremely active trading culture that meant that people were well plugged in to events happening local and abroad.
If you could go for a walk down the street in Jerusalem during much of the 8th century, you would see traders with plenty of good products. You would see many people who were wealthy and well fed. Amos 4 indicates that a number of them were obese.
A Jew might say in response to Amos, “If we are such bad people, then how come our nation is doing so well?”
In fact, were you to visit on the Sabbath or a holiday, you would see the Jews celebrating it enthusiastically. There was vibrant sounding worship, there were offerings being made.
In Amos 5:21ff, God says, “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; and the peace offerings of your fattened animals, I will not look upon them. Take away from me the noise of your songs; to the melody of your harps I will not listen.”
What would make God say something like that?
The key is in 5:24. “But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an everflowing stream.”
You see, God’s goal for Amos’ community, as well as for our community is wholeness. Justice and righteousness.
Justice means that wherever there is injustice, violence, and oppression, that someone steps up and looks out for the poor and the powerless. Righteousness means that people are committed to keeping things as they should be, with God as the center of our lives.
Israel had money, and many Jews were powerful and comfortable. But they got this way by taking advantage of and overlooking the poor.
I want to spend the rest of my time this morning in Amos 8. God shows Amos a basket of summer fruit. “Fruit” sounds much like the word for “End”. God then explains that the end is near for Israel, and he goes on to describe the problem.
Amos 8:4-7
Those who had power would trample over those who didn’t.
God had commanded that in the fields, the leftover chaff be left behind for the poor. “Why we’re losing money!” They would say. “These are my fields anyway!”
They would celebrate the feasts, but would fail to appreciate what they represented.
“I sure wish we didn’t have to be closed. I could have sold a lot of grain this week.”
Verse 5 is particularly telling. “Let’s make the ephah small and the shekel great.” They’re saying, “Let’s give smaller portions for higher costs.” If one of these guys had a gas station, and you filled up your 15 gallon tank from empty, the pump might tell you that it had actually taken 20 gallons to fill your tank, and they would have been glad to charge you for the extra. Never satisfied.
How much is enough? We could ask them that, but we might do just as well to ask that of ourselves: “How much money is enough money?” “How much stuff is enough stuff?” “What is the price tag for true happiness?”
But the real problem here wasn’t the greed. The greed was a problem, but it was really a symptom of a bigger problem. That is, too much comfort in this life can cause us to become lukewarm towards God.
What does it look like to be lukewarm?
It means that worshiping God just becomes a hindrance that gets in the way of us making more money, or reaching other personal goals.
It means that God becomes a chore, or merely a means to something.
It means that our ears close up when people try to suggest we should be living better lives than we are.
It asks the question, “What is the least that I can do to be considered a friend of God, so that I can spend the rest of the time worrying about myself?”
Over time, these little habits add up, and the sum total of who we are doesn’t look much like the abundant life that God envisions for us individually and as a community.
ILLUS: I want to tell you about a weird thing that used to happen a lot to sailors during the 1600s. Vessels were getting more sea worthy, and adventures were taking people farther and farther from home. You might be on the same ship with the same people, with the same person cooking for you for several weeks without touching ground anywhere.
And after several weeks on the ship, one or several of your people would start to develop a particular set of symptoms.
Constant hunger, even if they ate.
Gums would get sore, teeth would fall out.
Their eyes would kind of sink into their heads.
Their hair would start getting curly.
There would be red blotches under their skin.
Constant fatigue.
If you were going to figure out what was causing this condition, you would check: exposure to outsiders (nope), difference in the food (nope), unusual circumstances in life (nope). Where did the illness come from? All circumstances were the same!
The cure for this condition? Eating an orange.
This condition is called scurvy. It isn’t a disease, it is a deficiency of vitamin C. Eventually, ships started carrying more citrus fruits with them, and as long as people got some citrus fruit in their diet, they didn’t get scurvy.
Deficiencies of substances that you need can hurt you just as badly as outside diseases.
And in fact, this lukewarmness of Israel to God has led to another kind of deficiency.
Amos 8:11-13
God says he will send a famine...and it will be a famine of the Word of God.
What would a famine of the Word of God look like?
ILLUS: You may have seen Jay Leno’s recurring segments where he goes and interviews average people. The point of the humor is to show just how much we don’t know. In one segment, he asked some young people questions about the Bible.
“Can you name one of the Ten Commandments?” “Freedom of Speech?”
“Complete this statement: Let he who is without sin...?” “Have a good time?”
“Who, according to the Bible, was eaten by a whale?” The confident answer was, “Pinocchio.”
But it isn’t just a lack of Bible trivia knowledge that we’re worried about, is it?
God describes to Amos a situation where people are searching diligently for “the answer”, yet they always seem to come up short.
And who among us isn’t guilty of chasing after things that we know aren’t going to make us whole? If we aren’t right with God, it isn’t another relationship that we need. It isn’t more money that we need. It isn’t a solid US economy that we need. We might want these things, but they are all of far lesser importance in the grand scheme of things.
But people chase and chase for the solution to why they feel so empty.
It might explain why the self-help industry is booming. From 1995-2005 there was a 44% increase in the sales of Self-help books, and that number has only gone up.
Presently, the self-help industry, including books, classes, seminars, and other products, is estimated to be a $9.6 billion industry!
There are many of people experiencing this terrible deficiency that can only be filled by a meaningful relationship with God, being fed regularly on the word of God, allowing him to change about us the things that are contrary to him.
Having listened to our friend Amos, I think there are some challenges that each of us should accept.
First, we have got to make up our mind not to be lukewarm. From the moment we wake up, we should begin thinking about how this day, we are going to claim every interaction with our children and our friends, every transaction at the store, every conversation at work...all parts of our life to be reflections of Christ living in us. The only way not to be lukewarm is to be completely sold out for God.
If we relegate God to only the corners of our life, where he is just someone we have to be polite to for our own good, and church becomes a time-clock that we punch in to, we will get to a point that we are miserable, and we may not even know why.
Let us resolve not to be lukewarm.
Secondly, we need to remember that we have the solution to the problem. For those with scurvy, it was as simple as eating an orange. God showed Amos that basket of summer fruit, and just as ripe and juicy and available as an apple might be, God has blessed us with his word in a form that we can own, and read, and learn from.
ILLUS: For those who have not been blessed to live in a nation with such ready access to God through his Word, we hear some humbling stories. I heard one such story about a man from Siberia. Though he is a minister today, he grew up in a communist nation where atheism was the official policy. Likewise, his parents were atheist professors at a local university. They taught him to think for himself. The government had told him there was no god, but he wasn’t so sure. He went to his local library looking for answers. The only books of religion in the library were atheistic, but would sometimes quote Scripture for the sake of trying to refute it.
One day he discovered a set of encyclopedias on atheism that contained a gold mine of Scriptural quotations. His first Bible was one that he wrote by hand, as he would copy down verses from these encyclopedias one at a time, as he could find them. It wasn’t long before he was ready to become a Christian.
We have the solution to our problems, to the world’s problems, and to the biggest questions life poses. “Why are we here?” “What is good and worthwhile in this world?” “What happens beyond this life?” “How can I be a good person?”
Finally, it is our responsibility to share the cure. You may have a good friend who is looking for another self-help book or another hobby or another relationship. But what they need is for a Christian to love them enough to invite them to drink from the living waters that are found in Jesus Christ.
John 6:35, “Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.’”
If you are a person who today hungers and thirsts for something better, we invite you to accept Christ’s invitation.
