Amos: Seven Sins Sealing the Certainty of Wrath

Seven Sins Sealing the Certainty of Wrath

Read Amos 1:1-2

Today we’re going to be looking at the Prophet Amos. Amos prophesied sometime around the 8th century BC; during the reign of Uzziah in the south and Jeroboam II in the north. About “two years before the great earthquake” (v. 1). This earthquake was apparently powerful enough that the prophet Zechariah likened it to the Day of the Lord when the Lord will stand on the Mount of Olives and it will split in half (Zech 14:5). Incidentally, modern geographers have discovered a fault line that runs right though the Mount of Olives.

Amos means the ‘carrier of a load’ or ‘burden bearer’, which is a fitting name for anyone who preaches the Word of God. His hometown is Tekoa which means ‘blown the horn’ or ‘sound the alarm’; it was named that because it was a border town built to fortify Jerusalem from a southern invasion. A fitting name for the hometown of the prophet who was called to sound the alarm of coming judgment.

Amos addresses two primary sets of sins: sins of improper worship and sins of social injustice. I believe that the two are related; improper worship always lends itself to social injustice. God lists some of the sins of social injustice, let’s start with the first one: Read v. 3

1. Sins against the Environment:

The First sin is the sin of poor environmental stewardship. Amos calls it a transgression- meaning a rebellion. It’s a word that is used to describe one nation that rebels against another; such as when the United States rebelled against Great Britain. When it’s used as a verb, it means to cast off ones allegiance.

God by his very nature is the Sovereign over all creation. He appoints kings and establishes nations and he takes the same care with his creation that he does with kingdoms; he not only owns the cattle on a thousand hills, He owns the hills too! In the OT Law, farmers are told not to “put a muzzle on the Ox while it treads the grain” because God cares about the ox.

The health and proper use of the earth matters to God. This is demonstrated by the meticulous care God has given to designing everything from the most complex organism to the smallest strand of DNA. Creation reflects the beauty and wisdom of the artist who made it. And that artist is not happy when his canvass is vandalized.

Damascus is accused of threshing Gilead with iron instruments in a region that did not even belong to them in such a way as to provoke the wrath of God. It may also be that the way they were threshing was resulting in nothing being left for gleaners, much less the farmers who had sown the fields and to whom the yield rightfully belonged. In modern terms, it might be compared to clear cut logging or drag net fishing. I think we can safely assume that God may not be too pleased with these kinds of unnecessarily destructive practices.

It seems to me, that wherever environmental standards are bad, it usually goes hand in hand with the exploitation of people. This happens even today in third world countries where the rich exploit the poor robbing them of the natural resources that have supplied their people for generations leaving them destitute and polluted beyond repair.

2. Racism:
This is tightly connected with the next sin that Amos lists- the sin of Racism: Read V. 6


God was apparently angered by the Philistines for having forcefully expelled the Edomites from Gaza… in 8th century BC! This sounds like it came right of the pages of this mornings news. All around the world today, there are displaced people living in refugee camps. They’ve been displaced by people who love power and use it to hurt, kill and destroy. People are displaced because of their religion, their ethnicity and their political convictions, the colour of their skin, the shape of their eyes, and the twang in their accent.

Even Canada in not free from this charge, Our courts are clogged with cases of First Nations children who (this century) were torn from the arms of their parents and forced to live in residential schools run by churches where they were systematically raped and sodomized and beaten and robbed of their culture and identity. Every time you drive down Hastings Street and see a Native person drunk or passed out; every time you see a First Nations young lady selling her body on the streets, you see the consequence of our nations crimes against humanity- this is an injustice that has yet to be atoned.



3. The Sin of Betrayal: Read v. 9
In v. 9 we learn of another sin; that of Tyre (Lebanon). This is related to the previous sin of racism. Historically, Israel and Lebanon have always enjoyed good relations and have never had war. In the time of David and Solomon, Lebanon supplied craftsmen and materials to build the temple and the Palace. They supplied wives to Israelite kings and their kings married Israelite princesses. Their brotherly relationship makes their betrayal even more malicious; God will judge them because they took their Hebrew brothers captive and sold them into slavery to Edom.

God lists several other sins: in v. 11 it is the sin of violence- Edom persued his brother and showed no compassion for him; his anger tore perpetually and he kept his wrath forever. Last week we saw this kind of tearing wrath play out in the mass shooting at the Jerusalem seminary that killed 8 seminarians who were simply going about their business. The family of the gun man said they were sorry for their son’s actions but not ashamed. And so the violence perpetuates.

V. 13 gives us another sin of social injustice: Abortion. “they ripped open the women with child…” why? “so they could expand their territory.” Even in the 8th century BC, overpopulation was an excuse to kill babies. A few years ago Hillary Clinton was at the UN trying to impose so-called “abortion rights” on third world countries. Her justification was overpopulation. The murder of children is one human practice that God abhors more than anything else.
Its sold to Westerners as a women’s right; but it’s the girl fetus’s that are most often aborted. In China, by 2020 there is going to be a shortage of 18 million girls- because the Chinese people abort female fetuses. God hates it. Today, in Canada, a baby is quietly, efficiently, scientifically, hygienically and brutally aborted aver eight seconds.

Another sin of social injustice: 2:1 the Desecration of the Dead –Read 2:1. Apparently vengeance doesn’t stop at death for Moab; they wanted to remove the King of Edom from history.

2:4 records the Apostasy. Not only have they despised the Law, they have replaced the commandments of God with man made laws- lies to replace the truth of God. And really this is the basis for all the other sins. When God’s truth goes out the window, so do human rights, the rights of the unborn, the rights of women and minorities and in comes the exploitation of the weak and the poor and the powerless.

So far had Israel fallen, that it was not much for God to simply hand them over to their useless and vain thinking. He says in 8:11 that He will send a famine of the hearing of the Word of God. In other words, he will blind them to the truth of His Word. The New Testament says that the God of this world has blinded their eyes so that there is veil over them when the Law is read. Not hearing the Word is a judgment. If you want people to understand the gospel, pray for God to remove the veil. It may not be too late. But as a whole, I believe our nation will suffer the same fate, if it has not already. Fortunately, people are still getting saved.

The consequence of apostasy is clearly demonstrated in 2:6: the Exploitation of the Poor- Read 2:6-8. The righteous were being sold for silver and the poor were being traded for sandals- this means bribery, injustice and slavery.

Look at verse 12 (Read). They didn’t want their consciences tweaked by their injustice and so they enticed the Nazarenes into breaking their vows and made laws preventing preachers of the word from preaching.

Notice God says He will not repent from the judgment He has vowed. When it says, “for three transgressions of Gaza and for four”, God is using a poetic device to say that their sin is full. The poetic device uses the numbers three and four because 3 plus 4 equals 7. Seven in the Bible is always the number of fullness: there seven days, seven plagues, seven sacrifices, and so on. The sin of these people is full and so God says he will not repent.

Does this mean it is possible for God to repent? Does it mean God changes His mind? J.I. Packer[1] says,
…God is immutable. This means that he is totally consistent: because he is necessarily perfect, he cannot change either for the better or for the worse; and because he is not in time he is not subject to change as creatures are[2]

That’s powerful; it’s extremely difficult… for us finite creatures to wrap our minds around an unchanging God in a universe where the one constancy is change. It really makes God wholly separate from creation. He says it himself in Numbers 23:19, “God is not a man, that He should lie, nor a son of man, that He should repent. Has He said, and will He not do?”

But what about places where it says God regrets decisions that He made; like where he regretted making Saul King, or Genesis 6, where it says that God was sorry and grieved that He made mankind because they had become so sinful? Didn’t God change His mind in those cases? And what about Ninevah? Jonah said “forty days and Ninevah will be destroyed”; but after Ninevah repented, God relented and did not send the judgment He had planned- He changed His mind.

Actually, in all those cases, God never changed- people did. When God is said to repent, or to turn, it is not in human terms. My Hebrew professor said it like this, “God does not change His will, He wills to change.” When people behave uprightly and justly, God is pleased; but when they disobey Him, He is grieved. God does not repent- because God cannot sin. But He does relent of His judgment (in most cases) when we repent of our sin.

But there comes a time when the sins of a nation or a person become too much and the LORD resolutely pronounces judgment upon them. He says he will not turn from that judgment as He promised the nations through the prophet Amos.

The thing that strikes us that we are no better than them. In fact, if God does not judge us, it would be unjust. Because, if anything, we are at least as bad as those nations, if not worse.
This ought to cause great fear and distress for us, especially if we have children. How many want our kids to suffer the punishment we have brought upon them? Fire and Famine and Captivity.

But maybe God will relent. Maybe there is still time for our country. But the solution isn’t in protests and sign waving and blockades. The solution is found in Amos 9. Read vv. 11-15.

Conclusion:

The Tabernacle of David is Jesus. The Bible says, if he is lifted up, he will draw all men to himself. God says that there is a day when the remnant will return to Him and that day is today. The cross means that God’s grief, the sorrow that He had for the sins of humanity has been poured out. It’s been appeased (we call this propitiation). Jesus was the man of sorrows who bore our grieve and God was pleased to bruise him, so that we would not have to suffer. Perfect love has been made available. When we repent- when we turn from our sins; when we believe the gospel and put our trust in Jesus Christ to save us from the wrath of His Father- then God relents; He repents of the justice he has stored up for us because that Justice has been satisfied at Calvary.

And maybe it’s not too late just for us, but also for our nation. But there’s only one way- we are all called to be Amos’s- to carry the burden of our nation and grieve over their sin and to sound the alarm of coming judgment and to tell them that there is still hope if only they too would repent and believe the good news. Maybe its not too late for Canada.

NOTES:
[1] Packer is paying a price for his conviction that God does not change. Currently the forces within Anglicanism who are pushing for the inclusion of Gay marriage are trying to force Packer out of the church for his resolute stance upon the authority of scripture.
[2]Packer, J. I. Concise theology : A guide to historic Christian beliefs. Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House.