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CHAPTER 13

        BE PREPARED TO STOP ?

PREPARE TO MEET YOUR GOD

Scenes and Sightings from Amos 4-5

A careful consideration of Amos, chiefly in Chs. 4-5, can bring a good sense of perspective both about the lightening and darkening of Israel's history, and through that, as an epitome, of that of the world. It also brings a warning; and an illustration, a caution and a stimulus to good.
 

1. THE MEDLEY OF DENUNCIATIONS AND MERCY Amos 5:1-15

So secure was the judgment about to come to Israel, which smouldered and flared to a climax in 586 B.C. with the destruction of temple and city of Jerusalem, that Amos 5:15-18 proceeds to look at  a lamentation for it, in prospect. Time does not measure God but God measures time, and though many breed wickedness and imagine impunity, in God's book, rather like a century by century and week by week planning guide, much is given, for it is all His written word to  mankind, definitive and declared (Jeremiah 23:28-29, Matthew 5:17-20, I Cor. 2:9-13, II Timothy 3:16), incomparable in majesty, impassable in effect. Accordingly, God works all things after the counsel of His own will (Ephesians 1:11), even till the time comes and the judgment goes out, and the light with it, to all dependent on their own works. The eternal light blesses those found written in the Book of Life, of mercy and grace, atonement and salvation (Rev. 20:15, Acts 4:11-12); while what is left is summoned in the eternal assizes in the end, and to the darkness of dead desire.

There is a word of mercy, for this is part of the plan, and God loves mercy (Micah 7:18-19), parallel to the way some love to kill in the names of various gods or godlets of vainglory, despite all that God has done for man; but the end comes! Like the beginning, life cannot get along without it. SEEK ME AND LIVE (Amos 5:5), God urges, for He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, and death is very naked (Ezekiel 33:11), when guile and godlessness, sneakiness and guilt come to their due end. Indeed in these first 15 verses of Amos 5, it is like light and shade, for there is a medley of both the grisly judgment for insolent, spiritual insolvency, ignoring the way of mercy, and what seizes that mercy as a parched palate water. But there was little found to take this mercy at the time of the prophecy of Amos, and for the days predicted.

2. THE PRELUDE AND THE PRONOUNCEMENT  Amos 4:12-13

Indeed we gave already seen in Amos 4, nearly a score of divine pronouncements, declarations in a fatal series in stringent review of their hideous hiding from the life of God. These are summed up in Amos 4:12:

"Therefore this will I do to you, O Israel:
Because I do this to you,
Prepare to meet your God."

Indeed,  this is followed by the statement about the Speaker, also the Maker of man and his environment. He IDENTIFIES His name in its grandeur and glory, that man who has just been hearing these pronouncements should know the horror of so ignoring the many warnings of His source, and thus that of the statements made:

" For behold,

He who forms mountains,
and creates the wind,

And declares to man what His thought is,

And makes the morning darkness,

Who treads the high places of the earth -

The LORD God of hosts is His name."

It is He who has spoken. Spoken! The very commencement of the prophecy has it more dramatically than that, and entirely in accord with the sharp warning given with such regal glory in 4:13.

" The LORD roars from Zion,
And utters His voice from Jerusalem."

SPEAKING ? He ROARS. In some hamlet or village ? Scarcely. It is in the capital, the site of the temple to be destroyed, in the centre of their history and their life, where the symbols of spirituality are strewn like battalions, and their disregard is like orphan children in the street! The impact is further extended in Amos 3:7, where the character and impact of this roaring, of these declarations, this series of divine declarations, these multiplied and successive attestations of His mind and thought towards this people, both are made clear. He has so intimate a relationship with Israel, in part shown as a divine showcase (Isaiah 43:21), that He makes things clear to them, before coming action, in a degree both astonishing and impossible to deny. He does it according to plan and purpose.

Thus He declares this:

"Surely the Lord GOD does nothing,
Unless He reveals His secret to His servants the prophets.

A lion has roared!
Who will not fear ?
The Lord GOD has spoken!
Who can but prophesy?"

Nations rise and fall at His word, and Israel was given vision through the voice of the prophets, subject to death if they declared and it was not done, that the people might know the way to go, and the things to come, whether mercies or judgments. In the case of Amos 4-5, it is judgments that are the specialty, just as it is so for this present world, the larger Israel, if you will, in the renegacy of the Gentiles, asleep in their lair, as they approach their: "Prepare to meet your God!"  declaration. It has been long prepared, not for Israel only...

Thus when we come to Amos 4:13, this  divine roaring, that sums up generations of degeneration, few revivals and many disgraces, when the very texture is like that of rotted cloth (as shown so dramatically in Jeremiah 13, in the prophet's excursion to the river to bury his garment, and find it good for nothing upon return), then these many directives and divine declarations are summed up by the double confrontation: Prepare to meet your God and with that, to find that the One concerned is the Creator of the Universe! It is none other than He who declares to man what His thought is.

If you have an elder brother, who in follies of pride and greed does horrid things, but is praised by man, and then another who strays differently, you might be said to have been warned, as you see the rot set in, riches among ruin of heart. Israel had many examples to  watch, both of return and mercy, and dereliction and ruin. This was now the sum and summit of it; and the word of the Lord, roaring, declaring, issuing incisive reviews thrusting in Amos 5 to staccato commands, has one ending. Prepare to meet your God, and to see the word of the Creator: when WORDS become WORKS, and He who created brings ruin to hypocrisy, indifference, false passions and wayward wilfulness, free as if the God of mankind had not SPOKEN and ACTED so often in so much, leaving no excuse (cf. Romans 1:17ff.).
 

3. THE CLOTHING OF MERCY  Amos 5:4-6,8,14

Amid this, there are elements of mercy, despite the fact of  their unrealistic romancing with idols of the heart and fustian follies of the mind, gross selfishness and inequity of behaviour; and these appear in Amos 5:4-6,8,14.

Despite the war on the realities of God, real if undeclared as in Australia, where false gods and naturalistic fantasies are an indulgence of the wayward mind and the fantasising thrusts of desire, there is the drum beat to seek mercy. "Seek Me and live!" but "Do not seek Bethel!" that  idolatrous centre of the wayward North, then called "Israel" while the South was Judah. Judah however hardens its heart and so does not escape, but hardens its heart as in  Amos 2:11-13, 4:11, and 7:12-13, the end is ruinous: "I will send a fire upon Judah, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem."

It is FROM that city (Amos 1:2) that the cry comes! even the ROARING against their accumulated pollution!  God HAS SPOKEN and great was the army which distributed His word; and great is the infamy and apostasy with which the world now as if on a crusade, seeks to destroy that nation. Just as Israel killed Christ before He scorned death in resurrection, so now they seek to kill Israel. Yet there is an end, both in judgment and in calamity, where mercy is loftily patronised or power is usurped: but what power has puny man when God acts! (cf. Isaiah 40)! Like a herd of thundering cattle, so the words of God, declaration after declaration, scorch on until this dread summary declares the end of it: Prepare to meet your God. Scheduled is not only a fire in Jerusalem (the coming fate at that time), but soon now for the world itself, bent on ignoring Israel's case, and even seeking to rub out not only the commandments of God, but Israel itself, serving as a study, as a nation, and a reminder (II Peter 3:5ff.).

That, however, is not the worst of it. BEFORE that day, there is judgment on those who inhabit the earth (II Thessalonians 1, 2), and the earth does not go before that is carried out (Revelation 20:12 - 21:3). This world is replaced with a new heavens and a new earth as there shown; but those forsaking their own mercy, in Christ, have no renewal, nor is there any relief from the consequences of their casuistry, corruption and pride (Mark 9). Truth is; mercy is the only way out of its damning indictments, made the worse by saying, 'I am innocent!' ... of what ? Of knowing God, of embracing knowledge ? of wisdom! In Jeremiah 2:35, it is because this lurk is tried, that the condemnation is the greater. Wilful ignoring of sin only  underlines the gravity of the graceless evacuations from, prevarications about and substitutions for God.
 

4. ANALYSIS OF THE CASE

i) Perverse Pollution Amos 4:4-5

Here we have a divine mockery and confrontation about the behaviour of many. Let's go and have fun at the Calf Idols! say they. Here is even man's mockery of the exodus from Egypt, by playing with symbols from that time, of Bethel, that seat of formal idolatry. There is almost a picnic feeling, a tad of religious fun, where truth does not matter. Let's make offerings to the idols! This they did, just as Australian education in ways that cannot hope to remain free from divine censure at the very enormity of it, FORCES children to sit through and be examined in nature myths, never shown in ONE item to account for the information in creation (as in the DNA), not in one experiment, not in one piece of actually operative equipment, not in one ground or logic, as nothing (or something or other, quite literally) becomes the ludicrous and irrational source of everything.

What KIND of a something or other creates universes and the mind and spirit of man, and trains the one for the other, so that by reason he may find its laws! How laugh at causality as a necessary basis of results, when it is an inevitable function or basis of all thought: things can be characterised BECAUSE they have characteristics, and defined because they are true to type. Shoot logic and you kill any power to argue about anything, including creation or the nature myth of Darwin and worse if possible, of Darwinists. Follow logic and you need what it takes, always, since from nothing there are no results, and we ourselves ARE results, decidedly diverse from nothing. .

Teaching children to mouth these things, like Communist or Muslim chants, as with the girls kidnapped, is among the most  appalling horrors on earth;  and it is not left to such as those, for amid our own are didactic nature-myth chants,  far from enchanting (cf.  The Way of Truth and the Way of Error Ch. 8, esp. as marked). It is precisely like putting the children through the fires in some of the enchantments with folly, which made idolatrous Israel yet worse,  rigidly and ruinously set to reach its devastation at that time (II Chronicles 28:3-5).
 

ii) Intolerance of Correction  Amos 4:11

In Amos 4:11 we find this:  "I overthrew some you, yet you have not returned to Me." This is found in a series of divine jolts intended to awaken the gay and feisty Israel from its sins, but the more God sought to awaken them, the more they slept, till their calamity itself spoke, and they awoke (as in the book of Lamentations).

iii) Hatred of Righteous Challengers  Amos 5:10

In Amos 5:10 we further read: "They hate the one who rebukes in the gate, and they abhor the one who speaks uprightly." Christ, in a later generation, just before the grand exile that was to last no less than 2000 years, as we have seen, before their restoration in mercy, as we have also seen. was Himself utterly abhorred (Isaiah 49:7), as predicted. This was as part of the divine program of mercy to make free salvation available to those who accepted HIS death as a sacrifice for their sin, and His resurrection as a testimony of His truth! God is very deep and many will weep for ignoring it.

iv) Unruly Reliance on Ceremonies  Amos 5:21-23

In Amos 5:21-23, we read of the MANY ritualistic ceremonies, in which they tended to delight, evidently as a substitute for what they represented (like worshipping an engagement ring and being a brutal husband), and of the Lord's view of this sort of frank hypocrisy.  Let's see the fruit of righteousness in equity and justice, and not the abuse of it in ceremonies made meaningless by their divorce from their point! summarises a salient message. The Lord  makes that clear, as even more, in Matthew 23! and our own times are not missing (II Timothy 3:1-9, 4:1-5, Matthew 24:24)!

5. THE END  Amos 4:11-12 and 9:13-15

There are two ends, depending on the case. One is as in Amos 4:11-12, and the other as in Amos 9:13-15. The one is devastation and the other construction, whether it be in Israel's history, or in that of the world. Israel has a reconstruction, now in progress, and shortly many will be saved (Question and Answer Ch. 5). Salvation is selective; but none there is who will ever be able to say that God did not want to have him or her, and so excluded from the outset!

Such an idea is flatly contradicted in Colossians 1:19ff., I Timothy 2:1ff., Ezekiel 33:11, John 3:15-19, where His purpose in coming to the climacteric work of salvation on the cross, was NOT to condemn the world, for this was EXCLUDED as the point at issue in this action. It WAS that the world might be saved, even each one believing in Him, and all who are so foreknown are His (I Corinthians 2:7-8, II Timothy 2:19); for what God predestined is what He foreknew. The Lord has yearned for the salvation of ALL (as in Colossians 1:19ff.). Responsibility is matched by opportunity (as in John 15:22ff., 9:4), in a feat of staggering mercy, while departure from the Lord, or non-seeking is also not an out, except for this, that it is beyond the barrier. It is a personal outage (John 3:19).

In all these things, Israel is an example: both in vulnerability as now (and predicted in Zech. 12:1-13:1), and in current restoration (as foretold in Ezekiel 36-39 for example). It is a very picture  of the principles and  opportunities for the rest of the world. That perhaps is the main reason why it is hated so irrationally and wildly by so many, even if its final day of mercy, though near, has not yet come. The word of God will not disappear; the world will; the land of Israel stays till the world goes, as go that world will; and judgment stays till it is done, an ultra-Nuremburg to come, the finale itself.

There is salvation which will never go (Isaiah 51:6), but which will not remove the ruin of those who reject it. Be thankful it is not necessary; but Christ is, if you desire the God of your creation, and the Lord of salvation, not ruin (Acts 4:11-12). He is as necessary as just, the Just One (Acts 3:14-15), denied though it is He who is the Deliverer, in whom alone is the matrix of mercyf.