Amos 7-8 God’s gentle guidance to health
A few weeks ago I was visiting my sister and her family in Canberra. She has two boys, ten and eight, Oliver and Allistar. My sister wanted to get the boys outside to get some exercise and get them off the computer, enjoy the fresh air, and wear them out a bit. So I was encouraging them to get outside with a game of soccer. But they needed some encouragement. First Allistar was going to play a bit with me, and then the three of us with their dad were going to have a game. And it took some gentle persuasion but eventually we got into the game and all had a great time outside, got some exercise and survived the bitter cold of Canberra. Sometimes God needs to gently encourage us to accept situations in our life.
Let us take a moment and read Amos 7:1-6.
What is going on here? Amos now tells us some of the visions that God showed him. We don’t know if this was part of his call to become a prophet, or whether or not it happened earlier or later in his time as a prophet. But we know it happened, and we know that somebody ordered Amos’ material in the way that it is, and that is the way that God wanted it for us. And we can learn for that order.
Here we have God showing to Amos the destruction of Israel. In the first vision it is through a plague. God shows Amos this huge plague of locusts, like the plague of locusts that destroyed Egypt, and Amos cries out, in response, in sorry about the terrible destruction, Sovereign Lord, forgive! Don’t let it happen Lord, forgive their sin, don’t let them get what they deserve. How can they deal with this Lord, you are so big and they are so small.
So then God does something huge. He relents. He changes his mind. He doesn’t do what he said he was going to do; he doesn’t allow things to go as they were, because of the intervention, because of the cries for mercy of one person.
Then, to make sure that we get it, to make sure that we know that this is what is going on, God does it again. It is recorded again, something, not quite the same, but very similar.
Now in the OT, if something was to be seen as sure, it needed to have two or three witnesses. Two or three witnesses to something meant that it was sure thing. He we have this ‘story’ repeated. There are two witnesses to the story. Even though things are a bit different, the same core story is the same. This is a sure thing.
This time God shows Amos something different, it is a raging fire. It is a fire that brings judgment. This time the land is dried up completely. However the effect is the same, everything is wiped out, and judgment is total. So again Amos cries out. Sovereign Lord, don’t let this happen. He begs God, don’t let this happen. Your people are so small, and you are so big, have mercy on them.
So again, God changes his mind. This will not happen. Somebody has begged God to stop something, and God has stop.
This isn’t the first time in Scriptures that this has happened. Moses went up the mountain to get the Ten Commandments, and while he was up there, the Israelites made a golden calf and sinned, and worshiped another god. And like here God was so angry that he was going to wipe them out, and start again with Moses as the Patriarch. And what happens? Moses intercedes, he begs for the people and God changes his mind; he doesn’t bring destruction on them.
God does respond to People. He doesn’t necessarily respond in the time and the way we want but he does respond. And he intervenes in people’s lives when his people come to him and pray. Here Amos begs God and God responds.
God wants us to come to him. He wants us to be involved in the way he rules the world. He wants to respond to our requests.
We need to be taking difficult things to him. We need to be looking to him to provide some answers for us. I want God to intervene in my wife Leni’s family in so many different ways. He hasn’t yet, but sometime he will.
I don’t know why he doesn’t always respond, but that doesn’t mean that I give up. It doesn’t mean that I don’t keep asking him. Sometimes it seems like I have everything that I need to get through life, and to be able to control things.
But sometimes I have nothing else. Actually that is way we should really see ourselves, as having nothing else but God to help us in this world. Why don’t we see God intervening more often? I think that it is because we don’t need him to, so we don’t ask him to. In the two thirds world there is so much more of seeing God doing amazing things. With some of the missionaries I keep in contact with, they tell me stories that are unbelievable, and they are like, man come here and see God’s work. But I still want to see God doing some wonderful things in people in, in the community here, in Crows Nest.
But God doesn’t leave Amos in that place. Even though he responds to Amos’ pleas, he doesn’t leave Amos in that place. He subtly moves him forward.
What happens next? Let’s have a look in Amos 7:7-9
God now starts to give Amos some of God’s perspective on things. God tells Amos that he is going to put a plumbline amongst the people of Israel. What is a plumb-line? It is something that builders use to show them that they are building a straight line. When you want to build a wall, you put down a plumb-line to show you if you are building straight up or building something that is leaning one way of the other. It is something that is used to measure up the straightness of the wall. Here it is used by God to measure up the straightness of Israel’s commitment to the covenant. They have had good worship, a great time at church, we can read about it in 5:21-23, but they failed to hold to the covenant in terms of relating to others in their community. And God wanted to Show Amos how they had failed to measure up to his standards.
I will come back to the concept of the plumb line at the end and how it works for us now.
But we can see that the plumb line for Israel wasn’t just about their actions towards the poor. Amos has spoken about that in the past. Now the plumb line relates to the Israelites failure to respond to God’s voice, coming through the prophet of Amos.
We can see this plumb line, this standard being played out in Amos 7:10-17
In this passage we read the story of Amos being thrown out of the country. He is seemingly prophesying at Bethel, the religious centre of Israel and then the chief priest, Amaziah sends word to the king to get rid of him. He then comes up to him and tells him not to prophesy, thus fulfilling, or at least showing, the condemnation in 2:12. Now Amos can see that they have not only rejected the covenant in their lifestyle, but they have rejected the voice of God calling them back into the covenant.
When ears are closed to hearing God’s voice, there is no hope for reconciliation.
It is like that in any relationship. If one person is treating another poorly, and the poorly treated person wants to deal with it, if the other won’t, there is nothing you can do about it. Recently I have seen people going through a divorce. The one wants to talk about how they can reconcile, the other doesn’t. There is no chance of reconciliation in that case. These people are now certain for divorce. Because if the hears are closed, there can be no relationship. Closed ears = no relationship.
So we too, today we need to have our ears open to God calling us back to relationship with him. Maybe we are close, maybe we aren’t. God will be gently calling us back to him, wanting us to be spending time with him. This might be through people at church, through a movie, through a song on the radio; God can use any of these things to call somebody back to himself.
My calling to Bible College was through the movie, ‘the man without a face’. It has nothing to do with the minister. But God spoke to me clearly through that movie.
But maybe God isn’t just calling you into relationship with him. Maybe God is gently leading you on, like he was gently leading Amos on. Amos was being taken to the place of understanding why God could destroy Israel. For us, God is gently leading us to be more like the image of him. Maybe for us it is challenging us on the way we use alcohol, or on our language, or maybe it is on some other aspect of our lives, the way we do our taxes, or our generosity towards others. God wants us to grow in all these areas of our lives, so that we will be more like him to other people.
As we come back to the story of Amos, we can see how Amos responds to seeing the failure of Israel’s leadership. He joins in the condemnation once again. And this time there is no cry of forgiveness for the Israelites, because Amos understands they are beyond hope, they no longer want to respond to God’s grace, so there is no grace for them.
We see this in Amos chapter 8.
Here Amos gets another vision. This time it is a basket of ripe fruit. Now the time is ripe, now Amos understands that the time is ripe, now there is no hope and Amos understands that there is no hope. God says ‘I will spare them no longer’. Not only that, but now Amos once again starts launching into the judgment oracles that we had earlier in the book. Now there will be famine (v11) not only of food, but of God’s words, they will (v14) fall but not again rise
Amos has moved from feeling like, God you can’t possibly do that, do a place of accepting and knowing why God is acting like he is.
C.S. Lewis’ movie / book ‘Shadow lands’ is about his lady friend contracting cancer, and he marrying her, and then when she is in the process of dying C.S. Lewis is spending time at church praying. Somebody comes up to him and asks him if he is trying to change God. He replies that pray doesn’t change God, it changes us. He is right in some ways, and wrong in some ways. God does respond to our cries, but not always. He sometimes responds by changing us. What C.S. Lewis is talking about is moving from a position of not understanding, ‘God why did you allow that to happen?’ – maybe like those young Aussies who died in NZ recently – to a place of knowing and accepting that God has used the bad to bring about good.
And with us, God will be moving us forward, in our knowledge of him, in our knowledge of events in our lives. Why did God allow this? Why did that happen? Some things in my life I still don’t really understand why they happened like they did, but I know that God can and has brought good out of them.
When my parents divorced, it was a very hard time for me, as a six year old, not knowing, why I’d suddenly lost my dad. But I know that God brought good out of it. In many ways he used it for good. It many ways it was necessary to protect me. It still hurt, and even now it still hurts, but God is moving me towards a place of knowledge and acceptance, and closer relationship with through that.
And part of that growth that God wants to bring to our lives, is through having a plumb line next to our lives. Sometimes God needs to gently show us our sins, and how he wants us to move on from that to being the people he wants us to be.
In a way Jesus came as a divine plumb line. He came as the standard to which we must measure up our lives. In the sermon on the Mount of Matt 5 -7, he gives a standard so high and only he could ever live up to. That is the plumb line. And in a way it isn’t just that passage, but it is the whole of the Bible. While I was at YWAM, and spending some time studying and just reading and reading and reading the Bible. One of my friends got up and said, and holding the Bible and letting it fall down as a plumb line he said, he reading this is like having a plumb line next to me. He could see the standard God has for people, and how he failed to live up to it.
But that doesn’t mean that we use that to condemn ourselves or others. There are two images I want to use to describe it.
The image it isn’t like is a parent or a teacher, standing yelling over a child, and saying, ‘see you don’t measure up’. That isn’t the way we need to hear it, or use it when dealing with others.
The image that it is like is two people trying to climb a mountain. You can see the top, maybe it’s a false peak, but you together, look up and see the top and see the standard to which we want to be like and encourage each other, come on, one more step up the mountain, let’s take another step towards that standard God has for us. Let me help you take that next step, let us both together, and strive towards reaching the peak. And when you do get to get to a peak, you can see that it might be a false peak, but you can climbed, you have moved forward and you can see the next thing that needs to be worked on, and you can once more help each other, come on let’s take another step up the mountain.
