What have we come here to this church service for? There’s a whole world out there – of shopping and leisure and work, of essays to write and chores to complete (all those DIY things in the house that need doing which you think of on a Sunday), books to read and meals to cook, people to care for and TV to watch – so why be in here now? I guess one answer that might cover many of us this morning, Christians and non-Christians alike, is to hear about God. Let’s face it: we’re not going to hear much about Him during the rest of our week, so this hour here together is a good opportunity to hear about God.
And it’s an hour focussed on this last puzzling chapter of this Old Testament prophet, Amos – puzzling because, as you heard it read to us just now, you’re probably aware that the first half of the chapter is pretty familiar if you’ve been with us in any of our studies in the book of Amos up till now. You will recognise the authentic tone of this prophet, Amos. If you haven’t been with us then just listen to some of these verses because they ring true to the rest of the book: “I will fix my eyes upon them for evil and not for good,” says God through His prophet (Amos 9:4). Or at the beginning of verse 8: “Surely the eyes of the Sovereign Lord are on the sinful kingdom. I will destroy it from the face of the earth.” Or verse 10: “All the sinners among my people will die by the sword, all those who say, ‘Disaster will not overtake or meet us.’ ” But what about the last verse of all? ‘ “I will plant Israel in their own land, never again to be uprooted from the land I have given them,” says the Lord your God ’ (v. 15).
The chapter ends on such a variant note that there are scholars who can’t believe that these final verses were written by Amos at all. The end is so positive, so upbeat, compared with what’s gone before. One commentator wrote of this final passage: ‘It may not be written by Amos, but whoever wrote it, he was a cheerful fellow with cheerful optimistic hopes for the future. For myself, I like him.’ Well, I don’t think we need agree with that commentator’s premise in order to agree with his conclusion. It’s a heart-warming end.
So it’s not a neat chapter, tidily summarising what has gone before. And that means that Amos is not a neat book. And that is because God is not a neat God. There are awful things to say about God, dreadful in the literal sense that as we think of them they fill us with dread. But that is not all there is to say about God. So Amos could not tidily package God for his readers, nor for us today. Whenever we try to package God, He breaks the mould. The human mind cannot get Him taped. He is the Creator of the human mind. You may remember the small boy, with his mug of cocoa, chatting to his mum while she did the ironing one Sunday evening: “Mummy, is God everywhere?” “Yes, dear.” “Is he in this room?” “Well, yes.” “Is he in my cocoa?” Mum, a little more hesitant this time as she becomes aware of possible metaphysical pitfalls, “Well, well, yes … I suppose so, dear.” So the small boy claps his hand over the top of the mug and says, “Got ’im!” And how we’d like to, wouldn’t we? – get God taped, sorted, where we could examine Him at our leisure and fit Him into our presuppositions about Him. But the Bible brings us face to face with a God who does not fit within our ordered human systems.
That is exactly why this chapter, Amos 9, is so profitable for us. The two, almost contradictory, halves of this chapter must both be studied (not one at the expense of the other) if we would learn about God and understand a little bit more of His true character – not waste this hour together now by merely revelling in our own presuppositions about God and keeping our own neat theological systems intact and unchallenged.
I have simply called these two parts of the chapter (1) The Judgment of God, and (2) The Salvation of God. Each has its three little sub-headings, and let’s hope they do justice to the chapter as we look at it.
1) The Judgment of God (verses 1-8)
Amos has already told us a good deal about the Judgment of God in the previous 8 chapters of his book. Here he makes three points.
(a) There will be No Religious Immunity from the Judgment of God.
‘I saw the Lord standing by the altar, and he said: “Strike the tops of the pillars so that the thresholds shake. Bring them down on the heads of all the people; those who are left I will kill with the sword. Not one will get away, none will escape” ’ (v. 1). Notice this is a vision (‘I saw the Lord … ’), but it is a vision that is going to be entirely taken up with what the Lord said: the whole of the rest of the book, except for verses 5 and 6, consists of the words God spoke to Amos. There is nothing at all about how God appeared to Amos. There’s nothing about God’s appearance, except His location: ‘I saw the Lord standing by the altar ….’ He’s in the Temple at the place of sacrifice, the altar, where forgiveness came from. Judgment has come into the sanctuary itself. ‘I saw the Lord standing by the altar, and he said: “Strike the tops of the pillars so that the thresholds shake’ (v. 1a). There will be no religious immunity from the Judgment of God. We must not think that to be religious is the way to secure God’s favour and to avoid His Judgment.
I spent most of last Tuesday in Ely Cathedral, and this passage was in my mind as I gazed at those immense and magnificent Gothic pillars in that wonderful building. If you’ve never been inside it I would strongly encourage you to go soon. But I could not help wondering what Jesus would make of our cathedrals, we who have turned living faith in Him back into a religion so similar in its outward manifestations to all the other religions of the world. We’ve thrown up temples, we’ve created a priesthood, we’ve put them into special clothes, we’ve started to think in those religious terms about a Saviour who never encouraged us to do so. And there is no refuge, no escape from the Judgment of God, in the outward trappings of religion. Nor anywhere else for that matter.
(b) No Possible Escape.
Look how Amos goes on from the end of verse 1: “No one will get away, none will escape. Though they dig down to the depths of the grave [the word he uses more than once for hell], from there my hand will take them. Though they climb up to the heavens, from there I will bring them down. Though they hide themselves on the top of Carmel [the highest mountain in Palestine], there I will hunt them down and seize them. Though they hide from me at the bottom of the sea, there I will command the serpent to bite them. Though they are driven into exile by their enemies, there I will command the sword to slay them. I will fix my eyes upon them for evil and not for good” (vv. 1b-4). The language is metaphorical. Amos’ contemporaries weren’t literally resorting to physical flight in order to avoid God. But for our age Amos might have used psychological rather than spatial images, because there would be many today who would think that because they personally don’t believe in Judgment, they are therefore not subject to it. It’s a strange logic, when you think about it, but it’s there in most of our contemporaries: ‘If you don’t believe it, it can’t happen to you.’ But the moral accountability that undergirds the universe cannot be wished away like that. “I will fix my eyes upon them for evil and not for good,” says God. The eyes of God see into every heart and every soul in His creation.
Many of us who were converted in adult life know exactly what the poet Francis Thompson meant when he wrote his poem, The Hound of Heaven, one of the verses of which goes like this:
‘I fled Him down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him down the arches of the years;
I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
But our experience (if you have that experience) was of being hunted by mercy: God’s gracious pursuit to bring us to His Son Jesus. This, here in Amos, is a nightmare version of that: God’s inexorable hunting down of those who, above all else in this world, do not want to have to face Him. “Though they hide themselves on the top of Carmel, there I will hunt them down and seize them. Though they hide from me at the bottom of the sea, there I will command the serpent to bite them. Though they are driven into exile by their enemies, there I will command the sword to slay them. I will fix my eyes upon them for evil and not for good” (vv. 3-4).
Then we come to the only two verses in the chapter that are not God’s direct speech: ‘The Lord, the Lord Almighty, he who touches the earth and it melts, and all who live in it mourn – the whole land rises like the Nile, then sinks like the river of Egypt – he who builds his lofty palace in the heavens and sets its foundation on the earth, who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out over the face of the land – the Lord is his name’ (vv. 5, 6).
Bible thinking resorts frequently to the nature and majesty of God. Our thinking should do so too. Amos has been thinking about God’s Judgment, and it makes him ponder the greatness of this God who will judge. We should do that, not only when we see a spectacular sunset or a glorious country view (that’s when we’re inclined to think of Him, isn’t it?). It was President Roosevelt during his time as President of the United States who used to have a little after-dinner ritual when the cares of state got really heavy on him. He would go out on to the White House lawn with a friend, last thing at night, and looking up into the night sky he would identify a small hazy patch of light near the lower left-hand corner of the Great Square of Pegasus, and he would say, “There is the spiral galaxy of Andromeda, as large as the Milky Way. It’s one of 100 million galaxies. It is 100 million light years away and it contains 100 million stars, each as large as our sun, or larger.” And then he would add, “Now I think we feel small enough. Let’s turn in.” The greatness of the Creator God puts a different perspective on human life – particularly if we think we can avoid being morally accountable to Him and that we won’t face Judgment. To grasp that we need to keep His greatness in view: ‘The Lord, the Lord Almighty, he who touches the earth and it melts, and all who live in it mourn.’ No religious immunity, no possible escape and …
(c) No Special Privilege.
‘ “Are not you Israelites the same to me as the Cushites?” declares the Lord. “Did I not bring Israel up from Egypt , the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir?” ’ (v. 7). That would have been a deeply shocking thought to the Jews of Amos’ day. They thought they were God’s specially chosen people, utterly different from the Ethiopians (that’s the Cushites) or the Philistines or the Syrians (the Arameans). But all those nations were also under God’s control. And the Exodus (where God brought His own people up from Egypt) was only one of many national migrations for which God was responsible. God’s choice does not alter God’s character, and so the mark of election (of being chosen by God) has to be moral (obedience to His will) and not racial (belonging to any particular ethnic group). Back in chapter 3, God had said through Amos: “You only have I chosen of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your sins” (3:2). Their election didn’t excuse them from Judgment. So what does He say here? “Surely the eyes of the Sovereign Lord are on the sinful kingdom. I will destroy it from the face of the earth … ” (9:8a). They couldn’t look back at events in their history and claim exemption through those events from the Judgment, from Judgment by the plumb-line of God’s character.
And we can’t look back and think there is any past event that confers automatic salvation on us. At Christmas there’s a song we sometimes sing which has the line: ‘Man shall live for evermore because of Christmas Day.’ But it isn’t true, is it? It’s only those who have come to know the Saviour who was born on Christmas Day who will live for evermore. I can’t look back on my own life to February 7th 1968 (which was the day I first put my trust in Jesus Christ) and think that, because I can date my conversion from that date, I don’t have to hear and obey Jesus today.
We cannot treat lightly the Judgment of God: there will be no religious immunity; there will be no possible escape; there will be no special privilege. We are all accountable.
But then, in the middle of verse 8, the mood changes and Amos begins to look beyond Judgment to Salvation.
2) The Salvation of God (vv. 8b-15)
But it is first:
(a) A Discriminating Salvation
‘ “Surely the eyes of the Sovereign Lord are on the sinful kingdom. I will destroy it from the face of the earth – yet I will not totally destroy the house of Jacob,” declares the Lord. “For I will give the command, and I will shake the house of Israel among all the nations as grain is shaken in a sieve, and not a pebble will reach the ground. All the sinners among my people will die by the sword, all those who say, ‘Disaster will not overtake or meet us.’ ” ’ (vv. 8–10). Now the sieve, like the plumb-line (back in chapter 7), was an instrument of discrimination. You and I find it very hard to divide good from evil infallibly in human life today. So much of our experience is of an unhappy moral compromise. Have you ever watched the collapse of a marriage without being aware of that? Both parties are at fault, aren’t they? It’s only in the movies that the good are totally good and the bad are totally bad. Life is much more puzzling than that. But God does not have that problem for one second. He is not fooled by appearances, nor confused by complexities. No one has ever deceived Him for an instant: “For I will give the command, and I will shake the house of Israel among all the nations as grain is shaken in a sieve, and not a pebble will reach the ground. All the sinners among my people will die by the sword, all those who say, ‘Disaster will not overtake or meet us’ ” (v. 9). Notice it’s not ‘all the sinners’ who will die (or there wouldn’t have been a single Israelite left): it was all those (sinners) who say, “Disaster will not overtake or meet us.” It is one of those strange bits of Bible logic: it’s those who do not fear Judgment who have the most to fear from it. It’s the ones who say, Well, disaster won’t ever overtake us, or meet us. It’s the complacent, those who think that their religion makes them immune to Judgment; or that their disbelief in Judgment will allow them to escape from Judgment; or that some past experience makes them too privileged to be judged. Those are the ones who are in danger. We must all realise that salvation lies on the other side of Judgment; and we all face Judgment as sinners. And if that fact doesn’t distress us, we are in great danger. We will return to this as we finish the sermon, but we must note these other two things about the Salvation of God.
(b) The International Scope of God’s Salvation.
‘ “In that day I will restore David’s fallen tent. I will repair its broken places, restore its ruins, and build it as it used to be, so that they may possess the remnant of Edom and all the nations that bear my name,” declares the Lord, who will do these things’ (vv. 11, 12). In the book of Acts in the New Testament, James, the leader of the Jerusalem church, quoted these two verses from the prophet Amos to confirm that Christianity was not just for Jews: it was for everyone (Acts 15:16, 17). Edom descended from Esau, Jacob’s brother, who had specifically excluded himself from the covenant centuries before (some may remember all that business over a ‘mess of pottage’, back in Genesis). But now, by the grace of God, Esau’s descendants and every other nation on earth are included. So, “In that day … ” (those first three words of verse 11) is referring to our day. It’s the day of the Church, the day of the gospel when men and women are turning to Christ all over this world. There will be people here at St Andrew the Great today who come from countries where Christianity is growing far faster than it is here in the U.K. Christianity isn’t on retreat world-wide, it’s growing very fast in countries in Africa, in the Far East and in South America. And we live in ‘that day’ when the nations are being called in by God, through the gospel, through His Spirit, to respond to His Son.
But there is a still brighter day (or rather ‘days’) coming. This book does end on a most lovely note. ‘ “The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when the reaper will be overtaken by the ploughman and the planter by the one treading grapes. New wine will drip from the mountains and flow from all the hills. I will bring back my exiled people Israel; they will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them. They will plant vineyards and drink their wine; they will make gardens and eat their fruit. I will plant Israel in their own land, never again to be uprooted from the land I have given them,” says the Lord your God’ (vv. 13-15).
(c) Beyond our Wildest Dreams
That heading shows what this language is intended to convey to an agricultural people. The last book of the Bible puts it in slightly more urban terms: ‘Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away” ’ (Revelation 21:1-4).
As he ends his book, the prophet Amos looks forward first to the coming of Jesus Christ, great David’s greater son, and to the gospel offer to people of every nation on earth to come to know their God through His Son, Jesus; and then Amos looks beyond that to heaven, to eternal blessedness and security in those final verses: “I will plant Israel in their own land, never again to be uprooted from the land I have given them.” But it all lies beyond Judgment – the judgment of sinful people by a righteous, holy God.
God’s mercy does not wave Judgment aside, as though God Himself were ashamed of that side of things. God has no problem reconciling the two halves of Amos chapter 9. We’ve had that problem, and as we’ve been battling with it this morning I hope that we’ve not been wasting our time. I hope that we may have come to understand a little more of this un-understandable God: the God who is actually glorified in Judgment. That sounds extraordinary to our ears, doesn’t it? He’s not ashamed of hell. Hell is ‘not some dark skeleton in God’s cupboard, which no one in heaven is allowed to mention’. And we can be sure that no one in heaven takes Judgment lightly, because every one of them passed through Judgment to reach heaven. And every one of them faced that Judgment as a sinner – as you and I must.
Conclusion: A Fearful Hope
But we have what I have called A Fearful Hope, not because it’s a faint hope – it’s a certain hope for believing Christians. But because the awful consequence of our sin fills us with fear as we see what it cost God to deal with that sin.
Nothing is more distressing about our sin than what it cost God to forgive it. Nothing is more wonderful about heaven than what it cost God to get us there. That is the connection between verses 13-15 of Amos chapter 9 and this Communion Service. Jesus’ death is the lens which allows us to see through Judgment to those last verses of Amos 9 – through Judgment to heaven; through our own deaths to eternal life with Him. We understand it through the Cross, through His death in our place – which we are going to remember now.