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| Order Of Worship (Liturgy) |
AMOS 4:4-13
(Reading: Revelation 11:1-14; Amos 4:4-13)
Meet Your God!
Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ…
I am going to read a passage from a book.
A book which is a fictionalised account by a man of the way he was brought up:
When the last hymn ended, two deacons went up and sat at the table below the pulpit.
He knew immediately what was going to happen.
He got up to leave, but his mother … forced him to sit down.
One of the deacons began to call out the names of each family.
With a grand flourish his mother clicked open her fat handbag and started to count the wad of money she had in it.
He bowed his head.
Representatives from each family were going up to the deacons to give their donations.
Each donation was recorded in an exercise book and the amount read out to the congregation.
As yet no family had given more than ten dollars.
Their family’s name was called.
A deep expectant silence fell on the church.
His mother held the thick wad of notes towards him.
He refused to take it.
He even refused to look at her.
Angry, but smiling all the while, she thrust it into his brother’s eager hands.
His brother rose, the splendour of his attire and smile dazzling all the women, and with long military strides marched up to the deacons, laid the money in front of them for everyone to sigh about, wheeled, smiled at the congregation, and floated back to his seat.
A hundred dollars! the tall, lean, hungry-looking deacon announced.
The congregation sighed in wondering amazement.
The pastor beamed in his pulpit.
With this powerful display of wealth, which was in total accord with customary practice, his family had become accepted as a wealthy and God-loving unit of the village.
The move was convincing proof of true aristocratic breeding, high status, and godliness.
(p.182f, “sons for the return home”, A. Wendt)
Congregation, I hope you weren’t completely convinced by this type of Christianity.
I mean, we can admire the way everyone shares in supporting the church.
When it becomes such a show, however, where some are obviously more powerful and so more recognised than others, we do honestly wonder how much then comes from a living faith.
While it may be a tradition, what lies at the heart of it seems to come from pagan tradition and not a biblical one.
In the words of the first point to this passage … YOU MAKE LIKE YOU DO.
This was the situation Amos describes at the beginning of the text.
There is a church alright; a church that worships regularly; and a church which certainly seems to be doing everything a church is meant to be doing - even more!
There’s only one thing, though.
One thing that affects everything.
That thing is the attitude behind all these things.
An attitude which Amos parodies.
You see, he imitates what they are doing.
Using a priest-like chanting, he has a rhyme-like pattern in his words:
Go to Bethel and sin;
go to Gilgal and sin yet more.
Bring your sacrifices every morning,
your tithes every three years.
Burn leavened bread as a thank offering
and brag about your freewill offerings - boast about them, you Israelites,
for this is what you love to do…
It sounds irreverent, almost blasphemous, to use the words and sounds of worship this way.
This is a satirical lampoon.
Then again, if this parodying is what comedy uses to bring out the hypocrisy of a nation’s institutions, how much more shouldn’t Amos do it now!
So, let’s consider Bethel and Gilgal.
They were the Cathedrals of Israelite churches.
The shrines the people flocked to at the festival times.
Bethel was where the ark of the covenant once stayed.
It was where Jeroboam set up an alternative shrine to the Temple in Jerusalem.
And conveniently too - it was right near the border.
Bethel was the shrine which became the Israelite kings’ sanctuary (cf. Amos 7:13).
The Royal family’s church!
That’s where things happened - the wrong kinds of things.
You see, when Amos mentions the burning of the leavened bread as a thank offering, he speaks of something which is extra to the public worship.
Adding the leavened bread is the same.
It’s an attempt to make the offering more worthy in the belief that that way it would be more pleasing to God.
This is something which both the forces of traditionalism and progressivism do in church today.
Progressivism, naturally, because it exalts the latest and greatest.
It claims there are more and even better helps to worship the LORD.
Traditionalism exalts whatever has been handed down from the past - whether it’s biblical or not.
Highly liturgical churches particularly show this, but also the more “low” evangelical and reformed churches too.
When a minister is judged upon his orthodoxy by whether he holds his Bible in one hand or two, as he reads from it, there is most certainly some extra-biblical illumination at hand!
Gilgal was closely associated with Bethel.
It was actually physically connected by a road.
And Gilgal too had a noble history.
It was Gilgal where Joshua set up the twelve commemorative stones after the Hebrews miraculously crossed the Jordan.
It was Gilgal which was the base of operations for the conquest of the Promised Land.
Later on, it was Gilgal where Samuel and Saul parted forever after Saul’s disobedience in the Amalekite war.
And then it was the place the Judeans welcomed back David after Absalom’s revolt had failed.
We can see why it became a shrine.
But then its history became quite ignoble.
And so we have the words of the prophets directed against Gilgal.
Because both contemporaries, Hosea and Amos, agree.
The way they both join Bethel and Gilgal in the same phrase is to double the evil.
“You go and sin in Bethel - and then go down the road and do the same in Gilgal!”
Congregation, it’s easy to be distracted by appearances.
One can live in the most churched area in the country, but it doesn’t mean there is any more love for God there.
No amount of neatly pressed white shirts and matching ties will satisfy the Lord we meet if those clothes aren’t reflective of a changed person underneath.
At Christmas time many will talk and even seem to act differently.
There are gifts given - a charitable spirit pervades almost everywhere.
It’s the time of the year which can even change an old scrooge!
It’s over in just a short time, though.
People are soon back into their selfish concerns - if they ever really got out of them, that is!
And isn’t it so surprising how hypocritical we can be?
Once I was involved in what could be regarded as not such a nice thing.
It was an allegation - someone was said to have had a violent reaction.
And the person being accused, as also a number of those others involved said, “And it’s just before Christmas too!”
Despite my Calvinism, because I pointed out that these things happen all the time and we shouldn’t expect any different this time of the year either, they still felt that somehow this shouldn’t be happening now.
It’s hypocrisy, really.
It cannot be like they want it to be.
And it can never be.
The LORD told Israel this, of course.
He told it in the most clearest language possible.
He said to them many times that they couldn’t pretend to be His people.
If they wanted to be His they had to live out His Law in their lives.
There had to be justice and mercy in the land.
But there was only selfishness which ruled.
They didn’t worship the LORD - it was only salving their own consciences before they went out and sinned some more.
Like the churches which have a service on Saturday night so that the people get the Sunday off to do whatever they like!
So what the LORD had graciously done was to punish them in distinct ways.
Moving on from the first point to this text … YOU MAKE LIKE YOU DO … the LORD now says … THAT’S WHY I KEPT PUNISHING YOU.
This is the second aspect to our text.
Congregation, these are ways which they would have known about from their past as sharp warning.
Deuteronomy was quite specific on this as a curse from the LORD.
The verses 6 till 11 strongly follow this line.
Words which they couldn’t ignore.
Words which came from the ultimate “I”.
The “I” and the “Me” which appears at least fifteen times in these six verses.
Verse 6 speaks about famine.
There were years where the food just wasn’t there.
More than a simple down-turn in the economy, this was as if all the food trucks in this country never reached a supermarket.
In the original language it describes this by saying that the people have “cleanness of teeth”.
You see, they have no food to get stuck in them and dirty them up!
The verses 7 and 8 wipe out a whole year.
God withheld the rains during the critical months of the growing season - January or February.
This was the beginning of the growth time.
Without this rain there would be no crops.
Still, there’s no repentance.
The punishment becomes stronger and clearer.
The crop are blighted by blasting them with the unbearable winds from the east.
If you have ever lived on large land-mass with the sea or ocean to the west and the continent to the east, you’ll know about the easterly.
It’s the result of the strong mass of cooling air from the ocean meeting the dry heat of the inland and doesn’t it blow!
Forget sweeping the yard!
You’d be at it for half the day and next day it’s all back again!
Mildew is caused by a combination of heat and dampness.
Just the difference in the weather to ruin the crop.
Like a late frost.
Still, the litany of disasters continues.
It’s another count-down alright.
Because whatever might be left is devastated by the locusts.
And the LORD doesn’t leave room for any possible misunderstanding.
Verse 10 makes it absolutely clear who is doing this: “I sent plagues among you as I did to Egypt.”
Hadn’t He already said this, though, in the previous verse?
They had been some of the plagues which happened in Egypt.
Why repeat Himself now?
It all depends which plagues the LORD is referring to now.
For in the Law of Moses, those five books of the Pentateuch they knew, it is spelled out which plagues are punishing them now.
As verse 10 goes on, “I killed your young men with the sword…”
This punishment is the capital punishment.
Their best died.
And they died in such a number that the smell was terrible.
The place really stank!
Then came the most devastating punishment of all.
This was an act of God they couldn’t ignore!
The earthquake to really shake them up - to definitely make them repent or else totally devastated like Sodom and Gomorrah.
From Revelation 11 we see how much all these acts should have been symbolic to the people.
This was their language.
Why weren’t they getting the message?
To answer this we need to realise what they were open to hearing.
Because they saw no problems spiritually.
Why, Bethel was as busy as ever!
Everyone would have called themselves believers.
Then these disasters could only be unfortunate accidents.
Just one of those things - okay a few of those things!
A bit of bad luck.
El Nino or is it La Nina?
Perhaps, like today, the idea of God punishing seemed a little unloving.
They forget altogether what a good father does.
Then again - haven’t we already seen that the family has kind’ve lost its bearings a bit?
One minister once asked rhetorically of a similar modern church parallel, “How can you tell if a denomination is in demise?”
To which he answered, “When the outside is in and the inside is out.”
Congregation, this is the sad state of play in the Israel of Amos’ time.
God had snatched them out of the most terrible devastation.
It’s the kind of snatching which just saved them.
Oh, they got burned alright!
It shows how they just made it through!
Like the believer Paul describes in 1st Corinthians chapter 3 being barely saved by escaping through the flames.
Unlike that person, however, Israel isn’t believing at all!
They haven’t returned to the LORD.
A statement he repeats five times.
Let’s not think that we have a harsh and unloving God here.
He has time and again warned the Israelites to return to him.
“Yet you have not returned to me” isn’t some fatalistic decree.
This is the desperate appeal of someone who loves His people so much.
He has given his people the choice to follow Him and be free.
And they keep on voting for slavery!
However, it all catches up with you in the end.
This is not just the message of the LORD through Amos; this is the lesson mankind through the ages, all over this world, has failed to learn.
In the words of one cynic, “History repeats because people haven’t been listening the time before!”
What will catch up to Israel in its end isn’t actually specified here.
They should have known the prophecies for the disobedience of the nation from Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
And the word translated “I will do” suggests a judgment yet to come upon Israel.
A judgment so certain and with such devastation that Israel was called to “prepare to meet your God”, which is, in judgment.
IT MEANS I’M COMING TOO, says the LORD.
Here we come to the third aspect to this text.
Whatever will happen, this is the last stop.
It is the final window of opportunity which the LORD God gives to his people.
He says, as John Calvin puts it, “When you have seen that you’ve tried the futile resorting to all kinds of subterfuges, since you’ll never be able escape from the hand of this Judge, realise now that you have to avoid this last destruction hanging over you.”
Though, what about you believer?
In your everyday life are you allowing God’s warning to go unheeded?
Have you been treating those things in your life as misfortune or just plain bad luck?
We can take it all so casually, don’t we?
We who should be looking first of all to seeing what the Lord’s will is through the circumstances of our lives.
Haven’t we so often done that with the passage in James 5 about the elders praying over a sick person?
That’s a special meeting for really sick people, some say.
Or, it’s the oil acting as an ancient type of medicine.
The question should be, however, how do I know if my sickness - or circumstance - is the result of sin, and not just the general sickness of the world?
The godly person who falls sick will ask first - is this a judgment on me?
Being sick should make us look at ourselves.
When you do that, and you find sin - especially unrepented sin - you should pray for forgiveness.
If the sickness was a punishment for sin, James promises that you will healed.
If it isn’t because of a specific sin you may not be healed, but whatever sin was bugging you is forgiven, as you confess it.
You may still be sick, yet you have dealt with the sin, which is much more important.
Congregation, God is coming.
For us, like it was for Israel then, this is the last opportunity we have to get things right with him.
Christ’s second coming will be his last.
Now is the final opportunity to throw ourselves upon the mercy of the saving God in our Lord Jesus.
As the inimitable Charles Spurgeon once described it, “I take a religious newspaper from America, and the last copy I had of it bore on it these words at the end, in good large type, printed in a practical, business-like, American way: ‘If you do not want to have this paper, discontinue it NOW.
“‘If you wish to have it for the year 1875, send your subscription NOW.
“‘If you have any complaint against it, send your complaint NOW.
“‘If you have removed, send a notice of your change of residence NOW.’
“There was a big ‘NOW’ at the end of every sentence.
“Well, thought I, that’s right: and that is common sense.
“If you wish to forsake your sins, forsake them NOW.
“If you would have mercy from God through Jesus Christ, believe on Him NOW.”
Congregation, God is the only One from whom no one can escape.
The words of verse 13 clearly declare this.
The creation of the whole universe was at his command and has always been under his control.
The phrase “reveals his thoughts to man” shows how far His control extends.
This means that the thoughts we have to be able to fully understand ourselves are from him first of all.
Through God’s Word, proclaimed by his prophets, we truly know ourselves, and can be open to the Lord by the confession of our sins.
A more accurate translation would be, “reveals man’s thoughts to man,” also because no man can know God’s thoughts anyway.
Together with his control over what we see and what we think there is also His control over the invisible, over the time, and he’s got no limit to it at all!
His title at the end says it all - “the LORD God Almighty is his name.”
He is the Lord, the God of all the hosts.
He has in Himself every conceivable power to do as he wills.
He is YAHWEH!
He is God the Omnipotent!
He is the all-powerful!
Amen.
PRAYER:
Let’s pray…
O Mighty God,
You want us to be shaped by your Word, because in Your Word You have told us what pleases You.
That way we can walk obediently with you, and not be insecure or doubting.
To do that we must throw ourselves completely on you, submitting to you in everything we do.
And that’s both physically and spiritually.
In the way we do our everyday work, but also in our worship of you, make us glorify your Name.
Then we will be ready for Christ’s second coming, since we have meet him already as the Saviour.
In his precious name 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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