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| > Sermon Archive > Sermons by Author > Rev. Sjirk Bajema > God’s Patience Is Our Virtue! | Previous Next Print |
| Order Of Worship (Liturgy) |
AMOS 7:1-9
(Reading: 2 Peter 3:1-18; Exodus 32:1-14)
God’s Patience Is Our Virtue!
Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ…
Just when you wonder what more Amos could possibly say against Israel, he starts speaking a completely different language altogether!
Using a special way of revealing his will, the Lord God declares more to them.
With this series of visions, Amos still has three chapters to go!
What the Lord is going to show now are vivid pictures!
So clear that it almost seems to be real.
Actually, as visions, that’s how they would have come to Amos!
But, what was it that really struck you in our text?
Which part did you find more than just a little bit strange?
In fact, this unusual thing happens twice in these verses!
Have you guessed it?
In the verses 3 and 6 we read that, “The LORD relented.”
Could this be true?
Has the Sovereign God himself given in?
A more literal translation is even stronger.
Then it would say, “The LORD repented.”
So, what is going on?
Has God here got it wrong?
Did he go too far?
If we were looking for contradictions in the Bible we could say this is a glaring example.
Let’s look at this, however, from his angle.
You see, if this passage is about God’s patience, then his patience can only be a definite quality if it is provoked.
So God does get angry.
In fact, if he can’t be angry with us, how can he then be patient with us?
For example, someone can be said to have courage, but that’s no virtue if he doesn’t ever get scared!
And how can you call someone humble if they don’t have self-respect?
It’s easy for someone with a huge inferiority complex to seem humble.
They don’t have any pride to fight.
In the same way, patience is no virtue unless the one being patient has honestly been provoked.
As one saying goes, “Patience is a bitter plant but it bears sweet fruit.”
Congregation, let’s see this patience of God and what a virtue it is - for us!
And let’s see it through the one who’s right there in the middle - the prophet Amos.
In the words of the first aspect to this text, we consider … THE PICTURING THROUGH THE PROPHET.
Here we look into how disastrous the two disasters in the verses 1 till 6 really are.
The first shocker is those devouring locusts.
In the Middle East, and in many countries of Africa, plagues of locusts are quite common.
They can be terribly devastating.
You see, locusts come down in their millions, and eat up the crops - and nothing’s left whatsoever!
For Amos, a man of the land himself, it was a tragic scene.
For there in that vision, he sees it coming.
And what does he see?
Well, in Palestine the early rains came in October, and then there was the first growth of crops and pastures.
It seems that from this there was a tax imposed which went to the king.
In the N.I.V. it’s called “the king’s share”.
Other translations call it “the king’s mowing”.
So, we could say, this was “his cut”!
Then there were the later rains which normally gave a greater growth.
If this second growth of crops and pastures was all eaten up, there wasn’t any hope of anything until the next December!
Amos sees this in the most realistic technicolour!
Or should I say “colourless”, for there’s no healthy looking green anywhere to be seen!
It’s the farmer’s ultimate nightmare.
Then there is the second vision.
This is a vision of fire.
But this is no small burn-off, this is a vast, raging wall of fire - the fire of God’s judgment.
In Amos’s vision this fire “devoured the great deep”.
That could mean the ocean, or the vast waters under the earth, as we read elsewhere in Scripture.
Like the fire of Elijah on Mount Carmel, it eats through vast amounts of water, and then it consumes!
All the land is swallowed up.
This is a holocaust!
The second vision is much more worse than the first.
The first was only a set-back, devastating as it was.
This now is like a nuclear explosion - nothing’s left from its path!
Congregation, these are not happy pictures.
For the economy of that time it was the most horrific, and it can be no different for us today.
God is very, very angry.
The lesson must be clear.
The people haven’t repented!
But … someone does.
This is where we turn, congregation, to a second aspect in the text.
From THE PICTURING THROUGH THE PROPHET … we come now to … THE PRAYING OF THE PROPHET.
And this is a surprise!
We have heard much about Amos’ words against the people, because he’s the mouthpiece of the Lord.
Yet now, he becomes the voice for the people before the covenant God.
In response to each of these visions of judgment, Amos cries out to the Lord, “O LORD God, please forgive!
“How can Jacob stand?
“He is so small!”
Herman Veldkamp says, “We thought he could do nothing but preach judgment, but now it turns out that he can pray, too.
“It looked as though he could only play one weary tune on his harp, namely the song of Israel’s destruction, but now he uses all the strings in the harp of his soul in a mighty prayer of intercession to Israel’s covenant God.
“It looked as though prophesying doom was easy for him to do, but now we see what a burden it must have been.”
Amos was a great prophet, because he was a great priest!
He was a man of prayer.
He couldn’t go and be God’s mouth without also having his ear.
You see, preaching without prayer is cold and heartless.
Preaching with prayer, though, is preaching with love and concern.
That’s the truth in love!
And much as a minister may seem to be the most biblical and upright man around, unless he’s on his knees before God, he can’t blessed by him.
I mean, how can God use someone who’s not open to being use by him?
How can the Lord live in a heart of stone?
Congregation, this is why God loves it when we pray for others.
Abraham interceded for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 18.
We read about Moses pleading that God would forgive Israel, when they turned to that gold calf.
That’s what Exodus 32 told us about.
And that in the shadow of Mount Sinai itself!
In the New Testament, Paul says in Romans 10, verse 1, “Brothers, my heart’s desire and prayer to God is that they may be saved.”
You see, the Lord doesn’t want anyone to perish.
He loves people coming back in repentance, faith and obedience.
So how much doesn’t he love it when we are open to doing just that!
Because we’re praying for it!
As James ends his letter in chapter 5, verse 20, “Whoever turns a sinner away from his error, will save him from death, and cover over a multitude of sins.”
Congregation, God’s patience didn’t overrule his anger, until Amos prayed that it would.
This brings us more questions, of course.
We’ve heard in this text about God relenting, but now we see he’s doing that because of what this man is saying.
Does prayer have that kind of power?
Aren’t we actually being very arrogant to presume on God this way?
Shouldn’t we be like the Muslims who hardly ask at all in their prayers, because that would offend Allah?
Anyway, they say, the will of Allah is unchangeable.
We must accept it fatalistically!
Well, if that’s how it was, we would have to cut a lot out of the Bible.
In fact, we’d have to rip the heart out of it, the part where it’s God’s Son himself crying out upon the cross, in hellish anguish, “Father, Father, forgive them.”
Why … THE PRAYING OF THE PROPHET?
How come Amos turns to doing this now?
Because, congregation, God chooses to use him this way!
He who sent his own Son to this earth did that because he wants to relate to us - personally.
He has chosen us from time immemorial not to be puppets in some huge game, but for us to love him, as he loves us!
God has a heart.
Friend, have you felt that heart?
I don’t mean this as an emotional feeling.
Rather, in a real, guiding way.
Because you do pray!
THE PRAYING OF THE PROPHET was true prayer.
That’s why it was answered.
“The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective,” says James, in chapter 5, verse 16.
You see, Amos wasn’t weeping over a harvest lost to the locusts, or even a land annihilated by fire.
He cried over a people lost in sin.
He foreshadowed the greatest prophet of all, who wept over Jerusalem, because they had ignored the God of the covenant.
It was Amos as a man of prayer who now had to preach.
In the verses 7 till 9, it is crunch time.
That’s why the third aspect to this text is … THE PREACHING OF THE PROPHET.
Congregation, now God says, “Enough!”
Using their most precise instrument for making buildings straight and true, the Lord shows that this building no longer should stand.
The kingdom of Israel had been originally built carefully and checked by the plumb line.
This nation had received the divine law.
It was because this wall had been built straight there was every expectation it should now be still proved straight.
All they had had to do was basic up-keep.
And so the architect returns as the surveyor.
He judges how far his building standards have been followed.
It’s all part of the contract - the covenant - after all!
While God is compassionate and slow to anger, he won’t leave the guilty unpunished.
That’s why Amos can’t appeal this judgment.
These are the words he has to say!
This is why this vision is presented in a different way.
Here is no picture of terrible destruction.
It is almost an everyday scene.
Except that it is a vision, and it’s the Lord himself holding the plumb line.
The words of the Lord are also more personal.
He asks Amos what he sees.
And then he says twice the first person singular - “I am”, and “I will”.
The day is coming when God’s patience runs out.
When he says to his own covenant people “I will never again pass by them” that to the Hebrew means the end.
For what did the Lord’s passing-over mean, except that he had always treated Israel special?
They would think instantly of the Lord’s passing over them in Egypt, when judgment came on that country.
Every ‘Passover’ festival they remembered that.
Soon no more would their covenant God pass by.
They had rejected his law.
And when they had so-called worshipped him, in their “high places” and “sanctuaries”, it wasn’t worship from their hearts at all.
They only did what they wanted to do.
He had bent over backwards for them, reviving them time and again.
He sent the prophets.
He raised up godly kings.
But now the line of their kings was at an end.
The sword was drawn out against Jeroboam’s house.
Congregation, this cut at the very heart of what they were.
No more National Memorial days; the House of Windsor has gone!
The very things which should have reminded them of him were to be destroyed forevermore!
Enough is enough!
The Lord didn’t need to go on anymore to know that none of this was going to change.
This is the sin that cannot be forgiven.
In the words of 1st John 5, verse 16, “There is a sin that leads to death.”
And the apostle says we shouldn’t pray about that.
When he saw his two earlier visions, Amos prayed for his people and God answered his prayer.
Now it’s different.
He cannot pray for them anymore.
It is like what was said to the prophet Jeremiah in Judah some one hundred and fifty years later.
The Lord told him in chapter 7, verse 16, “Do not pray for this people, nor offer any plea of petition for them; don’t plead with me, for I won’t listen to you.” (cf. 11:14; 14:11)
Friends, there is no prayer to save them here.
Amos cannot throw himself on God’s mercy now.
This is the unpardonable sin.
This is the sin against the Holy Spirit.
The Israelites won’t get the message, but they will hear THE PREACHING OF THE PROPHET.
You see, the words of Amos now are the words of Christ’s second coming, not his first.
Here the LORD is not the Saviour - he’s the Judge!
Congregation, he is the same God today, too.
The Word he declares hasn’t changed.
I must zealously and lovingly bring you a warning!
In the words Israel knew from Psalm 2, the verses 11 and 12, “Serve the LORD with fear and rejoice with trembling.
“Kiss the Son, lest he be angry and you be destroyed in your way, for his wrath can flare up in a moment.
“Blessed are all who take refuge in him.”
And wasn’t this what we heard from Peter’s second letter?
There verse 9 of chapter 3 declares, “The Lord … is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”
Friend, you can reject God’s mercy.
You can put off turning to him until it’s too late!
Then you can’t turn to God!
Don’t think that God has forgotten about you.
He’s not two thousand years behind, and not likely to catch up in a hurry!
He’s holding out his line.
If you don’t see that, you won’t see him at all.
Then you don’t even have a prayer!
Amen.
PRAYER:
Let’s pray…
O Lord God,
We are in a completely different place and time than those Amos preached to.
He knew they wouldn’t change.
But you know many of us have changed, and we know that we must keep on changing, to be like you.
Please stir us so that we are always truly repentant.
That means we do pray.
And then you have your way!
In the Name of the One who is the Truth, the Life and the Way, even Jesus Christ, our 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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