Amos: An epilogue.

Eternity!

How we need to grasp this word, this concept! It changes how we view ourselves, how we view other people, how we view this world. Eternity.

Genesis 1:1, the beginning of the Bible says “In the beginning, God”. God is eternal. He was always there and will always be there. His name “Yahweh” (some translations say Jehovah) means I am who I am. When Moses says to God “Whom shall I say has sent me” God replies tell them “I am” sent you. God is eternal.

But we, too, are eternal. We were made in his image, the divine spark of eternal life placed within us. Each of us, from the smallest unborn child to the most wizened and wrinkled old person, is a god or goddess, a glorious creation, a song of praise to the Almighty God on the throne.

C.S. Lewis, in his sermon “The Weight of Glory” says this about us: “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”

Eternity is the backdrop, the big theme, behind Amos’ message. The Lion roars from Zion at his people, his people who are going the wrong way: towards eternal darkness, instead of eternal Light.

Preaching is a strange business, because it is both immensely personal, and very public. You prepare a speech to be given publicly, but as you prepare it you are impacted by it personally. For it is the Living Word of God – and a preacher who is not listening to God himself has no right to get up on Sunday! I was deeply challenged by God’s word through Amos, I personally felt that we needed more time to absorb the lessons, the deep, challenging truths about God.

I wanted to draw out three lessons from Amos as follows:

1. People matter (people are valuable!)

2. The purpose of suffering is to turn us back to God (and away from eternal darkness)

3. Jesus our only Saviour

1. People matter

Amos’ prophecy opens with these thunderous words 1:2 “The Lord’s voice will roar from Zion and thunder from Jerusalem! The lush pastures of the shepherds will dry up; the grass on Mount Carmel will wither and die.”

What is this blast of anger from the throne? Why does God roar? Why does he thunder?

We find out quickly that it’s because of people hurting people.

Injustice, abuse, war, slavery, oppression, theft, corruption – the terrible things that we do to each other. And the Lord sees. And the Lord will judge. People matter. We cannot do whatever we want to other people and not expect any consequences. The Lord sees.

It really hit home reading chapter 1 how highly God values people, all people. People matter to God! We matter because he made us. The anger, the fury which we see unleashed in chapter 1 “The people of xxx have sinned again and again, and I will not let them go unpunished!...  So I will send down fire on xxx, and the fortresses of xxx will be destroyed.” – it’s the kind of anger we see in the movies when the daughter gets kidnapped or killed and the father goes after the baddies in his righteous fury. It’s the kind of anger reserved for those who hurt the ones closest to us. And God has that kind of anger for all people. All of us matter. Isn’t that mind-blowing?

And it’s not just Christians whom he loves – it’s all people! We know how “his people” were behaving themselves – yet he is angry when they are mistreated. He is angered by Moab’s attitude towards Edom – two foreign nations. We are his creation, and he loves us. We are made in his image, and he loves us. We have an innate value, each of us.

You may have experienced something terrible in your life. Maybe you had to flee for your life from people doing evil things. Maybe those who were supposed to love betrayed you. Maybe you have been sexually abused, or imprisoned, or lied about, or cheated out of what was rightfully yours. You may feel like you have no value, that you are worthless.

Amos 1 says “no”. Indeed, Amos 2 says “NO!” when God confronts his people for their abuse of the poor, and the powerless, and their sexual immorality. No, says God, you are valuable to me, and I will punish those who have done evil against you. Like a father coming to rescue his daughter, so is God coming to judge the evildoers.

Let that penetrate. You have value. No matter what you’ve done or experienced. You have value.

But more than that: every person has value. Think now about those people or groups of people who you dismiss, ignore, don’t care about. It may be people far away – it may be people in your own family. Bring them to your mind now. And say “you have value”. God values them. Look them in the eye and say “you are valuable”.

We are all eternal beings, created in the image of God. People matter.

Because God loves us, because we are his, eternal, he will do whatever he must to call us to turn to him. To make us listen.
He will roar from Zion. He will send disaster on the city.

2. The purpose of suffering is to turn us to God

3:6 Does disaster come to a city unless the Lord has planned it? 7 Indeed, the Sovereign Lord never does anything until he reveals his plans to his servants the prophets. 8 The lion has roared— so who isn’t frightened? The Sovereign Lord has spoken— so who can refuse to proclaim his message?

This really challenged my thinking about God – and I ended up with a much bigger view of God, and a much smaller view of myself! If God’s Word keeps breaking the box you’ve put God in, get rid of the box! This is one of the truths of the Bible that really streeetch our understanding of God.

God loves us, and so he sends disaster on us. Huh? But that makes sense if the ones you love are heading for disaster! If your son is about to take drugs, who’s going to stop him? The drug dealer? He wants him to take drugs. The other addicts? They don’t care about him. But if you were there? Boom! You’d tackle him to the ground to stop him making a decision that could ruin his life. Why did you react and the others not? Because you LOVE him, they did not.

That’s why God allows suffering. It’s him tackling us to the ground, saying “think! Do you know what you’re doing to the rest of your life – eternal life”?

He does this in two ways: he allows sin, and he sends disaster. Those two can be quite strongly linked sometimes.

God allows sin so that we can see the depth of depravity (evil) in our own hearts. When we see men like Gosnell, the baby-killer, or Ariel Castro who kept three women captive for nearly 10 years, or the list of criminals, murders, corrupt officials, and dictators that just goes on and on. This is allowed in order to WAKE US UP to the fact that we have gone astray, that we need help, that we should repent of our sin and turn to God – or in the words of Amos 5 Seek the Lord and live!
Instead we use those stories to feel superior about ourselves “well, I’m fine because at least I’m not like them” and to use it to argue against believing in God “a loving God would never allow suffering”. Actually that’s exactly what a loving God would do. People matter to God, he loves people, and so he will punish, he will warn, he will do anything to turn them back to him.

Disasters like earthquakes, famine, landslides, floods, storms, accidents – all shout out to us that we are not God. That this foolish idea that “I am the captain of my destiny” is a lie. That we need to look up and acknowledge that God is God and we are not. It is God shaking us awake!

You know, our minds are predisposed to like the opinions we already hold. The pleasure centres of our brains actually light up when we hear something confirming what we already know to be “true”. Therefore Christianity is weird. Because we spend our time learning stuff which goes against what we believe or want to believe! That I’m good. That I am like God. Every time we come to the Bible we are shaken, and stretched, and told to believe things we don’t want to believe!

So why do we do it? Because it’s the truth.

Ps 50:22 (NLT) Repent, all of you who forget me, or I will tear you apart, and there will be no one will help you.

We are not free to disregard parts of the Bible we don’t like. Either God is God, or he is not. Either Jesus was raised from the dead, or he was not. If not, this is a sham, fake. If he was, and the evidence is overwhelming that he was, then all this is true, and the Bible is the very words of the Living God – and then we must bow our knees before him and say I don’t understand, but I accept.

I read Isaiah 42 last night (I’m reading through Isaiah with the kids) and at the end of the chapter it says: Is 42:23–25 (NLT) Who will hear these lessons from the past and see the ruin that awaits you in the future? 24 Who allowed Israel to be robbed and hurt? It was the LORD, against whom we sinned, for the people would not walk in his path, nor would they obey his law. 25 Therefore, he poured out his fury on them and destroyed them in battle. They were enveloped in flames, but they still refused to understand. They were consumed by fire, but they did not learn their lesson.

Suffering is for us to learn, to understand. To understand why, although we know we are loved, we don’t feel loved. Instead we feel alone, we feel guilty, we feel condemned. We were designed for intimacy with our God. Instead we have a broken relationship with God.

As Morpheus says to Neo in the Matrix “Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me.”

Disaster strikes! Why? To wake us up to the eternal danger we face. Like being rugby-tackled by your friend just before you jumped off a bridge – the tackle may hurt for a moment, but he saved your life!

As Christians we understand. This world we live in is broken – and its brokenness drives us to Jesus. Pain in our own lives drives us to Jesus, to make us more like him.

Just one final point, in case the devil is in our heads saying “ha, you see, God doesn’t care, he’s evil – just like blasting you with his anger, watching you suffer”. Take the devil to the cross, and watch his argument vanish. God suffered everything we did, and more. He suffered and carried our suffering, so that we can live eternally free from suffering. We may struggle to understand suffering – but we cannot ever say that God is distant and unfeeling. He bore the marks on his body, a love that says “I am with you”.

Suffering drives us to the One who suffered for us. In eternity, his body will be the only one bearing scars, scars which brought us life.

Which leads me on to my final point, the final “WOW” moment I had from Amos that I would like to share with you:

3. Jesus, our only Saviour

Now that I’ve finished preaching through Amos I feel that I’m ready to preach it (ha!). Because now I understand the structure of Amos. After spending so much time with this book it’s opening before me like a brilliant treasure. And it is brilliant.
Chapters 1-6 paint a dark picture of Israel. It is ramming home the fact that they are just a sinful as the surrounding nations they look down upon. In fact they are as sinful as Egypt was in the days of the Exodus. So corrupt have they become. By the time you hit chapter 6, you should be despairing! That’s what gave Christian such a hard time preaching it: it is the low point of Amos. We should be helpless, hopeless, despairing at our sinfulness, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. Woe to us! There is no hope. Our comfortable lifestyle is built on a lie, and all will come crashing down. That’s Israel in 760BC – and indeed, us in Norway in 2013: rich, comfortable, ignoring God, trampling one another in order to get what we want. And so chapter 7 opens with utter destruction – Israel totally wiped out. Am 7:1–2 (NLT) The Sovereign LORD showed me a vision. I saw him preparing to send a vast swarm of locusts over the land…2 In my vision the locusts ate every green plant in sight. Am 7:4 (NLT) Then the Sovereign LORD showed me another vision. I saw him preparing to punish his people with a great fire. The fire had burned up the depths of the sea and was devouring the entire land.

Sackcloth. Ashes. Darkness. Hopelessness. Israel cannot rescue itself. Norway cannot rescue itself. We are ripe for the judgement of God, turning his rich gifts into praise for ourselves while ignoring him. The shadow of judgement lies heavily across our nation.

But wait! What is this? Verse 3, verse 5 Then I said, “O Sovereign LORD, please forgive us or we will not survive, for Israel is so small.”There is a mediator, one who pleads for Israel! A glimmer of hope! And the Lord relents “I will not do it,” said the Sovereign LORD.

There is still time to come back to the Lord and live (chapter 5)! There is a remnant who will be saved!

And so we enter into the brilliant chapters 8 and 9 where our eternal destinies are contrasted. Either you will remain in your sin, and chapter 8 will be your destiny: utter destruction, cut off from the word of the Lord, a spiritual famine, an eternal spiritual death.

Or chapter 9, you can choose life, follow the King like David, the one who will restore the fortunes of Israel. Take shelter in the King and you will never be uprooted.

It parallels Moses’ final speech in Deut 30 , where he lays before Israel their future: choose death, or choose life.

Amos lays the same choice before Israel, and, indeed, before us: continue in your ways, live it up, ignore God – and you have chosen death, destruction. It will come. 9:10 But all the sinners will die by the sword— all those who say, ‘Nothing bad will happen to us.’

Or take shelter in the King, cry out to the one who can gather his people from every nation, all those whom he has called to be his, and choose LIFE. You will never be uprooted. You will be eternally HOME. Am 9:11–12 (NLT, Greek text) “In that day I will restore the fallen house of David. I will repair its damaged walls. From the ruins I will rebuild it and restore its former glory, 12 so that the rest of humanity, including the Gentiles— all those I have called to be mine—might seek me. The LORD has spoken, and he will do these things.

The way is open, and the future is glorious! All our needs are met in abundance (the grain and grapes will grow faster than they can be harvested and the terraced vineyards on the hills of Israel will drip with sweet wine!) and the King who calls the even the Gentiles will gather his people back from distant lands to live forever, secure, firmly planted, never uprooted: home! Dear fellow foreigners and wanderers from foreign lands – one day we will be in our true home, where we belong. Our restless hearts will be at peace. In Christ. Firmly planted, forever.

O Glorious future!

I will let Moses have the last word:

Dt 30:19 (NLT) “Today I have given you the choice between life and death, between blessings and curses. Now I call on heaven and earth to witness the choice you make. Oh, that you would choose life, so that you and your descendants might live!

Choose life! Eternal life. Place your life in the hands of the King, Jesus, the Christ.