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| Order Of Worship (Liturgy) |
AMOS 3:9-4:3
(Reading: Psalm 36; Amos 3:1-4:3)
It’s Just No Good!
Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ…
The prophet now prophesies.
The spokesman of the Lord, having clearly shown his credentials, speaks out for the Lord.
He has too!
It might be surprising, then, what Amos does do.
Because those whom he cries out to, after he has just stated who has given him the words to say, aren’t God’s people at all!
In fact, in verse 9 he calls out to those very ones who are most consistently opposed to the covenant people.
They are none other than the Philistines - shown here by the name of one of their major cities Ashdod - and the Egyptians.
Through all the ages of Israel’s history these two were always there.
The old foes.
And very much often in cohorts with ‘The Old Foe’ - the devil himself.
The Lord’s prophet has a word to them again here.
Though not this time the word of judgment against them - these are words to invite them along!
They were to have the best seats at this big performance.
Assembling themselves on the mountains of Samaria in verse 9 means being on top of those hills around the city of Samaria, and actually looking down on her!
It’s a great view!
You couldn’t get better seats to a production anywhere!
It is a production, though, which at first seems like a party.
To those who were acting it anyway.
But to those watching on it has all the hall marks of a tragedy.
Congregation, that’s why the pagan nations would know that what is happening in Israel is all wrong.
It’s just no good - it doesn’t even have any common good!
This is the reason why the call goes out to the Philistines and the Egyptians.
Because they - evil though they be - would have to agree!
In the words of our first aspect … IT IS THERE FOR ALL TO SEE!
What Israel’s doing goes beyond the pale!
Everyone would say that!
It’s that bad!
No doubt Amos is trying to make his point especially clear by reference to the most obvious enemies of Israel.
And it makes the point.
Imagine any of us being made aware that our most intractable enemy, the one you are convinced has absolutely no morals, is there judging upon your immorality!
Isn’t that what the world holds up against the Church when she is so wrong?
These words of Amos are a terrible indictment.
It really does seem that when God’s people go off the rails they fall into the deep end!
So there are two strands which come from this point.
There is the basic sense of good in every one, which also a pagan nation recognises.
It is a sense of justice.
Nowadays we can see this reflected in the international laws which the United Nations promulgates.
Much as we may disagree with what some of those laws state, they do show a recognised conception of order amongst all nations - whether its background is Christian or animist, Islamic, Hindu or Communist.
Whether all those nations follow those laws they have all signed is a mute point.
But isn’t that a mute point for each of us too?
The second strand concerns the covenant people who are anywhere but in the covenant.
For the Lord’s prophet to say of Israel in verse 10, “They do not know how to do right,” declares the LORD,” is the most telling word.
That’s how deeply depraved they were!
This has gone on for such a long time that they had lost all sense of the right.
And “they” here are the rulers of Israel.
They have hoarded all the riches and exert every ounce of power.
They had become so wrapped up in their own lives they wouldn’t know the truth if it hit them straight in the face!
It is because “they” are beyond that level of understanding now that the Lord’s prophet gives it to them in the world’s way.
That’s why Amos says that their enemies will be so horrified at what’s going on.
You see, congregation, life in Israel has become ultimately self-centred.
Everything is focused on what the people could get out of life right then and there!
In the words of our second point … IT IS ALL ABOUT ME, ME, ME!
How can we tell this is what’s happening?
Well, let’s consider three symptoms to the condition of Israel then - to those who had it all!
We’ll see what happens when a nation with the highest standards doesn’t practice them.
Remember, this is the nation God has saved for himself.
These are the people he has personally spoken to.
They are the chosen covenant community.
They have gone against the Lord their God.
Israel has chosen the way of cursing - the pathway to death.
And three symptoms show how deadly their disease is!
The first symptom indicates that Israel’s ruling classes are hoarding materially.
Amos describes them in verse 10, “They do not know how to do right,” declares the LORD, “those who store up violence and robbery in their strongholds.”
Congregation, haven’t we heard echoes of this same thing happening in our modern day world?
When yet another dictator is overthrown in one of the so-called less developed countries of the world, does it surprise us that he had billions sifted away in some Swiss bank account?
Those people there were being oppressed for years by corruption and harsh taxes - and look where it’s all gone!
It is an oppression created by the powerful and wealthy determined to get more.
They overturn justice by ignoring or putting aside every standard required by it and by basic human sympathy.
They extort, bribe, have unfair business standards, and excessive taxation.
They are guilty of hoarding up plunder and loot in their safe places.
It’s exactly this which was happening in Israel then.
That’s why the ESV translates it, “those who store up violence and robbery in their strongholds.”
This is the literal translation.
But the NIV spells out what that hoarded violence and devastation actually is - it’s the loot!
IT IS ALL ABOUT ME, ME, ME!
Hoarding materially is a first symptom of their depravity.
The next is their selfish luxury.
In the words of the last part of verse 12, Amos describes those Israelites as “those who dwell in Samaria … with the corner of a couch and part of a bed.”
And in verse 15 there are summer and winter houses, houses adorned with ivory, and houses as big as mansions.
Congregation, isn’t it the case that we can become jealous of the unbelieving powerful and rich?
It seems they have all the breaks.
We feel as the Lord’s people that we could be a little more blessed physically and materially, but it doesn’t seem to happen.
Aren’t those thoughts of the psalmist sometimes ours too?
In the words of Asaph in Psalm 73, verses 3 till 7, “I envied the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
“They have no struggles; their bodies are healthy and strong.
“They are free from the burdens common to man; they are not plagued by human ills.
“Therefore pride is their necklace; they clothe themselves with violence.
“From their callous hearts come iniquity; the evil conceits of their minds know no limits.
And from what we heard earlier from David in Psalm 36 verse 4, “Even on his bed he plots evil, he commits himself to a sinful course and doesn’t reject what’s wrong.”
You see, it’s not just that the wicked are enjoying this luxurious lifestyle for its pleasure - they’re still then planning out more evil!
It’s the same principle as Deuteronomy 6, though for the opposite end.
For there Moses tells the Lord’s people to always be teaching the commands of the Lord wherever we are - including when we lie down and get up.
It’s to be our whole lives!
Here it’s their whole lives too - but not for God’s way!
And that’s what the last part of verse 12 tells us.
This is their whole life.
A life completely dedicated to selfish luxury.
These beds and couches are the very best!
The summer and winter residences, the ivory adorned house, and those big mansions, they are all theirs.
IT IS ALL ABOUT ME, ME, ME!
But there’s still one more symptom of their depravity.
The symptom which we’ll call tyrannical debauchery.
So where is this symptom?
You have a look at the text.
Can you spot anything which could be tyrannical debauchery?
I can see a few of you smiling!
You’ve found the first verse of chapter 4.
There Amos cries out, “Hear this word, you cows of Bashan on the mountain of Samaria, who oppress the poor and crush the needy, and say to your husbands, ‘Bring that we may drink!’”
Here are people with power - girl-power!
Doesn’t this bring to mind John Knox, the Presbyterian Reformer?
He published a pamphlet entitled ‘The First blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women.’
It was a very sharp attack on the extent of political power that women had in his time.
What he would have thought of a woman prime minister and governor-general one dreads to think!
He believed having any women in authority went against the Bible and human nature.
Naturally Elizabeth I, who ascended to the throne that same year, didn’t agree.
She had Knox permanently barred from England as a most undesirable alien.
The words of Amos are equally as strong as Knox’s.
He really rips into the female members of the Israelite aristocracy.
And he does it very sarcastically.
You see, a woman being called a cow then, and especially being called cows of Bashan, could be quite a compliment.
For example, in the Song of Solomon the girlfriend is told by her lover that her teeth are like a flock of sheep just shorn (4:2).
And cows of Bashan were well-fed, fat, cows, in rich pasture!
That’s just it!
For what Amos says in the same breath puts us in doubt that this is another symptom of Israel’s depravity.
These are women oppressing the poor.
These are women wearing the pants.
They’re giving the orders.
They’re in touch with their masculine side - “Bring us some drinks!”
Congregation, things are really upside down.
When a society is reduced to power clique of boozy Jezebels something is terribly wrong.
As Isaiah said in his third chapter, it’s when women rule over God’s people that the severest judgment will come.
While for Israel then IT’S ALL ABOUT ME, ME, ME! … there will come about … THE MOST TERRIBLE FUTURE THERE COULD BE!
This is our third aspect.
You see, for each of those symptoms of their depravity, symptoms which they display so openly, and yet symptoms which show to the world their deadly disease, God has the ultimate cure.
The first of these matches up what they have been hoarding materially with how they will be plundered physically.
Take those fortresses which have been built up by their plunder and which are filled with their ill-gotten loot.
That will be destroyed by the same evil which built it up.
Plunderers will plunder it!
Destroyers will destroy it!
What poetic justice.
Verse 11 says it all in just a few words: “An adversary shall surround the land and bring down your defences from you, and your strongholds shall be plundered.”
And hear how destructive this is!
Verse 12 says, “As the shepherd rescues from the mouth of the lion two legs or a piece of an ear, so shall the people of Israel who dwell in Samaria be rescued…”
Believe me - that’s no salvation!
What that shepherd has brought back is meant to prove that he tried to save the sheep, though it is most certainly dead.
In the same way what the Lord has tried to do through his prophets will result in the same.
Israel will be destroyed, with just those parts of her to show that she is indeed dead!
For as much as the rich and powerful plundered the poor and powerless, so that will be all which is left of ruling classes themselves when the Lord is finished with them.
They are truly plundered physically.
But there is also God’s answer to the second symptom.
Israel’s selfish luxury will be answered by their destruction spiritually and materially.
You see, when you live selfishly everything is a “right”.
Everything which you have access to is naturally yours.
Including the spiritual side.
Because they still paid lip-service to the Lord.
And if national or natural disaster threatened, you would find them in church praying for God’s help.
Not much different to what happened during the Second World War with all those packed churches - is it?
But the Lord cuts this out from under them.
In verse 14 he declares, “…on the day I punish Israel for his transgressions, I will punish the altars of Bethel, and the horns of the altar shall be cut off and fall to the ground.”
The Bethel shrine, their special place of asylum, will be gone.
The horns of the altar which one could run to and grab hold of to claim the Lord’s protection, will have disappeared!
Because that’s all those things were worth to them anyway - absolutely nothing!
Bethel’s shrine was never legitimate.
And what they laid on there was only to distract the people away from where the worship should have been - at the temple in Jerusalem!
God is as tired of their religious hypocrisy as he was of her social injustice.
This is it!
This is their destruction spiritually!
But then to where it really hurt.
The Lord also declares in verse 15, “I will strike the winter house along with the summer house, and the houses of ivory shall perish, and the great houses shall come to an end.”
Now God will hit Israel where it hurts - right in her economy!
Those things which so much symbolise her wealth, will be levelled to the ground.
They’ll be demolished in a far more total way than the best controlled blast!
This is it!
No more!
Enough is enough!
And so we come to the third symptom.
This is the tyrannical debauchery of their women.
Here the social order has been tipped right upside down.
Pride is in power.
So, what could be the cure to this apart from the only cure for this - nothing else but utter humility!
Listen to the verses 2 and 3 of chapter 4, “The LORD God has sworn by his holiness that, behold, the days are coming upon you, when they shall take you away with hooks, even the last of you with fishhooks.
“And you shall go out through the breaches, each one straight ahead; and you shall be cast out into Harmon,” declares the LORD.”
The disgust of the Lord God against Israel has come to such a point that it provokes him to an oath!
So disgusted is he by what these women are doing that he hits them with utter humility.
They’ve behaved like cows - they will be treated like cows!
Their carefully fattened carcasses would be dragged outside the broken walls of what they had thought would keep them safe.
They’ll just be animal offal.
That’s how strong this language is.
They will be good for absolutely nothing!
C.F. Keil points out that this imagery of being dragged out isn’t describing animals who have rings in their noses and who are pulled along by those rings; not is it large fishes which are let into the water by nose hooks.
He says that this is about the catching of fish as you would do your fishing.
You pull them out with hooks.
You tear them out of their environment, to a place where they will soon die.
In the same way, those women will be taken out of their tyrannical debauchery.
Their natural element will be denied them.
They will die.
Congregation, it can be easy to focus on these rather self-indulgent women.
They only existed because the covenant people weren’t in the covenant anymore.
In fact, they hadn’t been for a long time.
That’s why Israel had forgotten and deliberately ignored their responsibility for others.
It was a way of life based on injustice.
To see the resources of this earth as something you can do with as you like is to be as far as possible from the Lord.
That shows we don’t know his good.
And then we cannot do good!
In fact, there’s just no good, for Jesus Christ isn’t here the Saviour - he can only be the Judge!
Isn’t that what this text tells us about the Israel Amos prophesied to?
It was clear to the world around them how bad they were.
They weren’t true witnesses to the Lord God.
The danger is that we could be the same.
By constantly turning our back to God’s Word and going our own way, we not only fail to serve our neighbour, we especially disgrace the name of the great Saviour God.
And he’s always looking on!
Forget the hills around Samaria.
His is the ultimate “eye in the sky!”
So, dear friend, are you looking up?
Is your life wrapped up, not in the things on earth below, but in the One who’s up above?
Amen.
PRAYER:
Let’s pray…
Almighty God, we know that there’s no good in us.
We can only confess our sinfulness totally.
As you remind us we ought to do when you punish us.
And yet, O Lord, you have given us the hope of your mercy.
The love which you have promised in your Son to those who honestly from their hearts do repent and call on you as their Father.
In that love help us to live.
Because that is good - your good.
In the Name of the One who showed us the perfect way of good, Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour, we pray, Amen.
* As a matter of courtesy please advise Rev. Sjirk Bajema, if you plan to use this sermon in a worship service. Thank-you.
The source for this sermon was: www.rcnz.org.nz
(c) Copyright, Rev. Sjirk Bajema
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