Mission to Babylon

Summary In this sermon, the preacher explores themes of mercy and legalism through Jesus’ interactions with the Pharisees, particularly regarding the Sabbath healing of a man with a withered hand in Mark 3. Jesus emphasizes that God desires mercy over ritual sacrifice, highlighting the danger of replacing heartfelt compassion with rigid legalism. The Pharisees, watching Jesus’ actions closely, embody this legalism as they seek to accuse him instead of celebrating a miraculous healing. Jesus, despite their hardness of heart, demonstrates righteous anger that drives him to do good. The sermon also contrasts the “fellowship of the grievance,” evident in the alliance between the Pharisees and Herodians against Jesus, with the “fellowship of the Son,” representing the diverse followers united in faith and love for Christ. The preacher underscores that true unity among believers stems from their shared commitment to God’s love rather than mutual hatred, explaining that while love is critical, the object of that love—God—is paramount. Ultimately, the sermon calls for believers to reflect on their hearts and align their lives with God’s desires for mercy and love. Transcription Choose show more to view the transcription. Transcriptions are AI generated and MAY be incorrect. Rely on the spoken word heard in the audio file. show more Jesus teaches in several other places on mercy as well. When the Pharisees asked him why he sat with tax collectors and sinners, Jesus pointed them to a quotation from Hosea. I desire mercy and not sacrifice. I desire mercy and not sacrifice. And again, when he rebukes the Pharisees at the end of Matthew, he says, In both of these situations, Jesus describes a religious formalism that is pitted against a heart of mercy that actually delights God. You can bring your sacrifices to worship God in the temple with all the Levitical regulations perfectly fulfilled, but God would have rather seen you come with empty hands and a heart full of mercy. Or you can pay your tithes with CPA, like scrupulousness, but in doing so you have majored on the insignificant things. It might be surprising to realize that our temptation is to replace mercy with legalism. After all, doesn’t it seem like legalism takes a lot of effort? Wouldn’t we be more inclined to the easier option? But we need to see that mercy is actually a weightier thing of the law. Legalism is giving things. Mercy is giving yourself. Legalism is giving a tenth of your legalism is giving Sunday morning to church. Mercy is giving the whole week to God. Legalism carefully carves out what it thinks is owed to religion and then carefully guards what is left over. But mercy sees the sacrifice that God made for us and realizes that our lives are not our own. Our text this morning is from Mark chapter 3. And he entered the synagogue again and a man was there who had a withered hand. So they watched him closely whether he would heal him on the Sabbath so they might accuse him. Then he said to them is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do evil to save life or to kill? But they kept silent. And when he looked around at them with anger being grieved by the hardness of their hearts he said to the man stretch out your hand. And he stretched out and his hand was restored as whole as the other. Then the Pharisees went out and immediately plotted with the Herodians against him how they might destroy him. But Jesus withdrew with his disciples to the sea and a great multitude from Galilee followed him and from Judea. And those from Tyre and Sidon, a great multitude, when they heard how many things he was doing, came to him. So he told his disciples that a small boat should be kept ready for him because of the multitude lest they should crush him. For he healed many so that as many as had afflictions pressed about him to touch him. And the unclean spirits, whenever they saw him, fell down before him and cried out, saying, You are the Son of God. But he sternly warned them that they should not make him known. And then he appointed twelve, that they might be with him, that he might send them out to preach and have power to heal sicknesses and to cast out demons. Simon, to whom he gave the name Peter. James, the son of Zebedee. And John, the brother of James, to whom he gave the name Boanerges, that is, sons of thunder. Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James, the son of Alphaeus, Thaddeus, Simon the Canaanite, and Judas Iscariot, who also betrayed him. And the multitude came together again so that they could not so much as eat bread. But when his own people heard about this, they went out to lay hold of him, for they said, He’s out of his mind. Then the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, He has Beelzebub, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons. So he called them to himself and said to them in parables, How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. And if a kingdom is divided against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but has an end. No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strong man, and then he will plunder his house. Assuredly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they may utter. But he who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is subject to eternal condemnation, because they said he has an unclean spirit. Let’s pray. And Father, we know that our chief joy is all wrapped up in this, that when we truly glorify you, we will find our greatest joy. We pray that we will learn to seek that supreme joy right here in seeking your face and understanding your word. We praise things in the name of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and amen. Please be seated. It’s a pleasure to be back here and to join you in the middle of this series. And so here we are with Mark 3. And in the text here, Jesus says he enters the synagogue again. Again, I believe he’s referring to back in chapter 1, he was in the synagogue at Capernaum. And so he’s back in that same synagogue again in Capernaum. Now remember that chapter 2, we ended with him defending his disciples, who had been harvesting on the Sabbath. That is just grabbing grain and eating a little bit as they walked. And that was technically called harvesting by the Pharisees. And so he had been defending them, and that’s why I think his enemies now know to confront him on the subject of the Sabbath. They’re coming to hunt him on the Sabbath to see him break that law so they can catch him in something. Look at verse 2. It’s really interesting. They’re watching healing so that they might accuse him. They’re watching closely because they knew it’s a place where he was likely to err. Now, when I say err, obviously I mean according to their first century customs and not according to the actual law of God. But that’s it. They’re there to try to catch him out. Now, you have to think about that for a moment. If you had the chance, imagine yourself in a situation where you have the chance to witness an actual healing. If you had the chance to actually see a miraculous work of the Holy Spirit where a withered hand becomes before your eyes whole again, where you’re going to witness something that is supernatural, you’re about to see that. If I told you you were about to see with your very own eyes this miraculous, undeniably supernatural healing, what kinds of thoughts would be going through your head in anticipation of that moment? Think of the privilege you have of witnessing something like that, the awe that you would be struck by. And yet, here they come with the goal of witnessing a miracle with the main purpose being to find prosecutable evidence against Jesus. Now, we like to think that we’re all highly objective people, that our determinations, that our conclusions we come to are simply the result of our independent logical minds processing facts and coming to natural logical conclusions. We like to think that that’s the way we all operate. The state of our hearts is profoundly influential to the processes of our minds. Where your heart is determines what you’re able to see, comprehend, understand. Where your heart is determines whether you’re able to come to logical conclusions and see what’s right in front of you. Your heart determines what conclusions your mind is allowed to come to. Spurgeon, the great preacher, once said, hardens clay. You can have the same sun shining on something, and the recipient of that sunlight, some will grow hard, brittle, some will grow soft and liquid in front of it. It’s the same one, but in one instance the result is a rock, and in another instance the result is a puddle. And when Jesus performs this miracle, it’s like that sun shining down, and the result of that sunlight is determined by what kind of substance that light is shining on. Is it shining on wax, or is it shining on clay? He performs this miracle. Some hearts see that miracle and are hardened even further, while other hearts saw that miracle and melted before the Savior. What kind of heart you bring to this determines your ability to see what’s actually going on. And the ministry of Jesus, as you read through the Gospels, does this again and again. It gives a clear and consistent testimony. And then that testimony creates repentance and worship in some. And in some others, it creates bitterness and envy. And it’s interesting, I think, this particular scene because it’s profoundly revealing where the wickedness of the human heart is put on such a clear display. The kinds of things that we’re capable of. Because here you have a man who has been impaired with this wither hand for his entire life. So imagine somebody. He’s got a withered hand his whole life. Imagine all the hardship and difficulties that he’s faced as a result of this handicap. And here he is about to have all that taken away, miraculously cured. And a group of men have gathered around simply so that in this moment they can find something prosecutable against Jesus. Because of the hatred that they have in their heart. These scribes are uncommonly evil. This is an uncommon level of wickedness that we’re seeing here. But I think you ought to realize and think about for a moment how utterly common and mundane this is. This is something that all of us do frequently. Where you become a little grievance farmer. What I mean by that is we like to think that hatred is a bad thing. That it’s something that is abhorrent to our heart. If you dive into your own heart very much, you’ll notice how much you’re actually very attracted to hatred. You’re attracted to anger. And there’s something kind of almost a little bit sickeningly delightful about getting angry. Your flesh wants you to be like these Pharisees. It wants to go and find places to be upset. It finds like a twisted delight in this kind of thing. We will make an effort to hunt for things, hunt for offenses that we can be angry about. Think about this in your own marriage. Do you not ever, as a wife, do you ever secretly kind of want him to forget your anniversary so that you can be mad at him? I want to be mad at him, but I need an offense in order. Men, is there something that you’re hoping she forgot the laundry? You’re hoping whatever. It’s not like a conscious thing you’re doing, but if you looked at yourself for a moment, you would find yourself secretly desiring someone to misstep so that you can be mad at them. It’s funny because a lot of times we want to think that our anger is the result of this logical, well, they’ve committed all these wrongs, and that is why all these things have added up, and that’s why I bother with them, or that’s why I’m angry with them. But frequently, we have people in our lives that we just don’t like, and so then we hunt for offenses to explain why we don’t like them, and give us more occasion to dislike them. The flesh hunts for offenses. The flesh is this little offense anger farmer, constantly trying to manufacture occasions for us to be mad, because there’s something sickeningly sweet about that kind of thing. We hunt for offenses. Why else do you doom scroll on X? You’re just scrolling through looking for things that offend you, because there’s this sickening pleasure that we take, and being offended like that. The sin of the Pharisees and the scribes here is not that far off from all of our hearts. We do the same thing. But we know this is a particularly powerful display of wickedness, because look at verse 5. And when he had looked around at them with anger, being grieved by the hardness of their hearts, he said to the man, stretch out your hand. And he stretched it out, and his hand was restored as whole as the other. There’s something really unique about this verse, something that only happens in this verse and nowhere else in the Bible. And that is, this is the only text that we have in all of Scripture where Jesus becomes angry. Or at least where it explicitly says Jesus was angry. You might be able to infer when he goes and flips the tables to cleanse the temple that there was anger there or something, but it doesn’t ever say that. It doesn’t ever call him angry. Jesus is angry is right here when he sees this desire for the Pharisees to find some offense, find him healing on the Sabbath so that they can prosecute him, this evilness in their heart. Now, just as an aside, we can see from this then, we should note then that anger is not in and of itself a sin. The fact that if Jesus can get angry, then there is such a thing as a righteous anger. Paul tells us that in Ephesians 4, he says, be angry and do not sin. There is a kind of anger that is a righteous anger. It’s occasional, it’s not frequent, but we don’t see Jesus do it often, but we do clearly see him do it here. He is angry and he is sinlessly angry. So it’s not wrong for us to be angry with a righteous anger when we see a great evil. So how do you know what’s the difference between a righteous and an unrighteous anger? Well, first of all, look at what happens when Jesus gets angry. What does he do about it? What’s the result of his anger? Well, it says here, he said to the man, stretch out your hand. He stretched it out and his hand was restored as whole as the other. What’s the result of Jesus’ anger? It’s that he heals a man who’s had a withered hand for life. It’s this remarkably constructive expression of anger. When Jesus gets angry, it moves him to do good. It moves him, to heal, to restore. Righteous anger, when you’re overcome by a righteous anger, it moves you to do righteous things. It moves you to do something beautiful, something godly. When Jesus gets angry, it moves him to do good, to heal, to restore. And that’s what righteous anger does. Second, the other thing we should notice about righteous anger, Paul said, he said, be angry, do not sin. And then he says, do not let the sun go down on your wrath. Do not let the sun go down on your wrath. Paul is teaching us that anger is like manna. You can’t hold on to it overnight. Remember manna that you hold on, held on to it through the night. In the next morning, it was stinking and filled with worms. Anger is, godly anger is something that you have for a moment, and then it’s something that you’re capable of setting down. Ungodly anger, you can’t set down because it’s not you holding it, it’s it holding you. Anger gets a hold of you, and you are a puppet on its strings. It controls you. Godly anger is something that you’re actually the Lord of. You’re the master of it, and you can set it down. Righteous anger moves you to swift righteous action, and then you move on. Unrighteous anger becomes a little hookworm in your heart that sits there fueling bitterness and resentment. That’s what unrighteous anger is like. More things to be upset about, more things to be grieved by, more things to be offended by. So when you discover anger in your heart, you can ask yourself, first, what am I going to do with this? I’m angry, so what are you going to do? If you’ve got nothing to do, then drop the anger. It’s not fruitful. If you’re angry, you have to ask yourself, what godly thing am I being prompted to do? And then second of all, you have to ask yourself, can I put this to bed when I go to bed? Am I capable of setting this down and moving on? Or does it have a hold on me? Is it controlling me and steering me? Can you set it down? So with Jesus, this anger drives him to heal a man. What does anger do to those that are opposed to Jesus? Look at verse 6. Then the Pharisees went out and immediately plotted with the Herodians against him, how they might destroy him. You have to remember, to understand this for a moment, remember who the Pharisees are. They were strict and scrupulous Jews. But who were the Herodians? Well, just as a Christian was a follower of Christ, a Herodian is a follower of the line of Herod, beginning with Herod the Great. You actually have a line there of descendants, and there’s a group that believes this line ought to be installed as the new king, restored to the throne of Israel. At the moment, at this current moment, the Herod that would probably be the contender would be Herod Antipas, who we’re going to see Jesus’ encounters later on. Herod Antipas. So they want to see this line of Herodians restored to the throne, and that this will be the new Israelite nation. It’s a political movement that, in any other scenario, would have been the arch nemesis of the Pharisees. And that’s the thing that’s really interesting, is the Herodians and the Pharisees would have been antagonistic and opposed to one another. In any other situation. But according to the logic of that ancient proverb, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, their mutual detestation of Jesus drives them together in this unlikely alliance. They have a mutual detestation that becomes the foundation for this camaraderie, this friendship. This is what we call the fellowship of the grievance. It’s a fellowship that is a friendship built on a mutual grievance. The fellowship of the grievance. A friendship built on a mutual hatred, a mutual grievance. And you’ve seen this happen before. It’s what happens when a mutually shared hatred becomes the bond of commonality between completely unlikely parties. And they’re driven together. The Pharisees and the Herodians, in any other scenario, would have been deathly opposed to one another. But their mutual desire to see Jesus go down becomes the foundation of a very temporary, a very mercenary friendship. A friendship that’s built on a mutual hatred rather than a mutual love. And I think if you just look around you, you can see many instances of that kind of all around us. Where unlikely parties that you would hate each other in any other situation, but because they have a shared enemy, they come and they join together. Think of later when Jesus goes on trial before Pontius Pilate. And then he goes from Pontius Pilate, he’s sent from Pontius Pilate to Herod, Herod Antipas. And he’s tried by both of them. And Herod and Pilate are sending him back and forth to each other with messages to one another. And it says, it’s just a very interesting line in Luke 23, that very day Pilate and Herod became friends with each other. For previously they had been at enmity with each other. These two guys that had hated each other in every situation. Suddenly when Jesus comes along and they have this mutual hatred of him and it drives them together. Mutual hatred becomes a bond of friendship grievance. I was at a conference yesterday when someone was lamenting how unified the left seems to be in their attacks on the right. While they were lamenting the conservative right is very disjointed but the left seems to be completely unified. But this is just the reality that when they all hate the same thing it forms a temporary unity. A fellowship of the grievance. We see this all around. Two people who are ideologically totally opposed to one another yet they’re drawn together by a common hatred. Now in the next several verses we see that Jesus also unites a broad body of people. Look at verse 7. But Jesus withdrew with his disciples to the sea and a great multitude from Galilee followed him and from Judea and Jerusalem and Idumea and beyond the Jordan those from Tyre and Sidon. It goes on. He’s listing all these different places that they’re coming from. It’s a great multitude that’s following him and it’s interesting that just as the Pharisees and the Herodians and all these people are coming together on one side, Jesus is also bringing together a disparate group of people. They come from Galilee and from Judea. That would be from the northern and the southern regions of Israel, meaning from all over Israel. But not just that, we find out that they’re coming from Jerusalem but also from Edom. So these are non-Israelites, Edomites. They come from Edom, from beyond the Jordan, from Tyre and Sidon. So many are coming that in verse 9 he has to ready a boat to be ready for him to escape because they press in on him so intensely. So we have the fellowship of the grievance and then we have this fellowship of the sun. This gathering that’s coming together to the sun. And as this group gathers together there’s a moment where he pulls a select few aside and they go up a mountain. It’s always interesting these moments when they go up the mountain. He chooses out his 12 disciples. Sometimes if you ever notice sometimes we refer to them as disciples and sometimes we refer to them as apostles. Disciple essentially just is a word that refers to someone who’s the student of someone else’s learning. Someone who’s learning from somebody else. So we tend to think of them as disciples during the gospels while the disciples are sitting at the feet of Jesus and learning from him. And then the word apostle specifically refers to someone who has been sent out on some sort of mission. And so we tend to think of them more as apostles when we hit like the book of Acts when after the great commission and they’ve been sent out. So we tend to think of them as disciples now and apostles in the book of Acts. But those words are interchangeable. We’ll see them used in scriptures not super tidy about that and uses both words in either place. Remember that if we’re to think of the church as a building, Jesus will be that cornerstone of the building and the disciples will eventually become the rest of the foundation of that building. These men, these twelve, these men will be charged first with watching and learning from Jesus who he is and what he is saying. And then after his ascension into heaven, they’re going to be charged with communicating that truth to the world. As they convey his message, it’s in that sense that they become the foundation of the church. We are all built on their testimony. What they have shared with us, we are building on that. We’re given a list of twelve men, and I’m just going to go through each of them briefly. We’re given a list of twelve men. Simon, who will be renamed by Jesus to be Peter, which means rock. James and John, who are two brothers. Three, Peter, James, and John make up Jesus’ tightest circle of friends. And though Peter will become the most prominent, John will become the closest to Jesus. Now, there are two James in the New Testament. We said it’s Peter and then John and James, so these two are brothers. There’s two different James in the New Testament, and you want to get them straight. The James that’s named here, that is the brother of John and is in this circle of three, his closest friends. That James is known as James the Greater, I think primarily because he was in such close proximity with Jesus. He’s James the Greater. He’s the brother of John. He’s also the first disciple to be martyred, which is interesting because you have these two brothers, James and John, and James is the first to be martyred, and John is the only disciple that dies of old age, that isn’t martyred. So you have those two brothers. Philip, Bartholomew, and Matthew. This is the Matthew that’s going to write the book of Matthew. He was a tax collector, and sometimes goes by Levi. In some of the Gospels, you’ll hear him named Levi, but he goes by Matthew when he writes the Gospels, so that’s how we think of him. Then you have Thomas, and James the son of Alphaeus. So this is the second James. I mentioned there’s two James. James the greater, who was John’s brother. This is James the son of Alphaeus. He’s James the lesser. This James is also the younger brother of Jesus, and he’s the author of the book of James. He’s the younger brother of Jesus and the author of the book of James. Then we have Thaddeus. Thaddeus is sometimes called Jude. He is another little brother of Jesus, just like James the lesser, and he’s the author of the epistle of Jude. So this James and this Jude, that’s the author of James and the author of Jude. Then we have Simon the Canaanite, also sometimes called Simon the zealot. And last, we have Judas Iscariot, the one who will eventually betray Jesus. And these are the 12 disciples. After choosing the disciples, the crowd gathers once more, and everyone is overwhelmed by what a sensation Jesus is causing. His own family and friends are beginning to worry for Jesus. In verse 21, they start getting worried for him. But the scribes of Jerusalem attempt to start a rumor that the reason Jesus is gaining so much attention is that he’s been actually possessed by Beelzebub, the prince of, it’s a Philistine pagan god, but known as the prince of all the demons. And that they say that he’s using demonic powers to cast out demons. I think the scribes of Jerusalem are basically the Candace Owens of the first century. He’s possessed by Beelzebub, and that’s how he’s doing all this. Jesus uses this accusation to explain something about the way that the spiritual world works. Verse 24 and 25. Opposition forces can be fractured. The fellowship of the grievance, it works when you are uniting to topple some ruling power. But a ruling power can’t be divided. A ruling power has to be unified. If Satan is working against Satan, then Satan cannot stand. The one true king, when he rules, will do so from a unified position. When Christ rules, he will not do so from a throne that he shares with competing powers. Listen to verse 27. That’s why Revelation 20 promises that Satan will be bound at the beginning of Christ’s kingdom. Satan will be bound at the beginning of Christ’s kingdom. It’s not a kingdom that Christ will establish in cooperation with competing forces. And I think this is really interesting because in this passage we learn something important about the spiritual battle that we’re in. Our enemy’s army can be large. And it can be made up of a wide variety of factions. They can appear very united. But it’s a unity that is created by a shared hatred. The fellowship of the grievance, right? That’s what the enemy’s forces look like. They’re brought together by this fellowship of the grievance. However, this unity can only hold when they are attacking their mutual enemy. But as Jesus says, this is a force that is divided against itself. Ultimately, it’s divided against itself and it cannot stand. It will always crumble. It rises up to the top for a time, but it will always be a temporary ascendancy because it is actually fractured at the foundation. So it cannot stand. But as Jesus says, this is a force that is divided against itself. It cannot stand. Whenever they come into power, they will always devour their own because their union is always temporary and conditional. But the kingdom of Christ is made up of incredibly diverse groups. We had men from Jerusalem mixed with men from Edom, Tyre, and Sidon. So this is a coalition that is brought together as well. They’re incredibly diverse. It unites things like tax collectors like Matthew teaming up with zealots like Simon. Just in the 12 disciples, we see this variety of people that would normally be at odds with one another. They’re diverse. And yet they’re united not by a mutual hatred, but by a mutual love. The love of the Lord Jesus Christ and a faith in his life, death, and resurrection. That brings about a completely united foundation. That is something that actually holds together. So the enemy’s unity is temporary and illusory. It is a unity of convenience made possible by a shared hatred. But the unity of God’s people is deep and abiding because in Christ we have found a cause that transcends all of our petty grievances. That’s the thing that you need to see, that in Christ we see something, we’ve found something, all of our petty grievances. Because when you’re an enemy of Christ, when you’re outside of faith, when you’re outside of the gospel, when you’re outside of God, when you’re outside of all of that, the only thing that you are really for is ultimately yourself. In the end, the only thing you’re ultimately for is yourself. So every ally that you can find is a temporary ally of convenience, but not an ultimate actual ally in the end is a competition for that thing that you love most yourself. So every ally is a temporary ally of convenience, a useful stepping stone to help you to get where you want to go. But in the end, they’re all still competition. They’re all still adversaries. But when you were in Christ, united to his death, burial, and resurrection by a living faith, well, then your ultimate end is Christ himself. That is the thing that everything is about. Your ultimate end is Christ himself. It’s an ultimate end that is capable of being shared by all of your brothers and sisters, and in the glory of God, it’s a thing that we can share, and it’s not diminished by the sharing. The fact that you have Christ, and then a neighbor comes and has Christ, doesn’t mean now you only get half of Christ. You don’t continue to chop him up. Because of his infinite nature, he is capable of being all of that for each of us. And so we have this thing that draws us all together, nothing that we need to compete with one another over. We have this unity that we have in Christ, and it’s far more profound or real than any other alliance that the world has to offer. That’s why these worlds are so completely different. This unity that we have in Christ is real, and it transcends all other divisions. It’s why in the next few verses, when Mary and his brothers try to call him outside, verse 32, They try to call him outside, but Jesus says, No, no, I’m not going, because if you’re here with me, you are my closest family member. Whoever does the will of God is my brother and my sister and my mother. You can’t get closer to Jesus than what you are with him in the gospel. Of course, we know that two of those brothers, James and Jude, were in with Jesus at this time. But it would appear that the rest of the family, including Mary, was concerned that Jesus was going too far. Yet Jesus makes this radical assertion that true Christians form a family, true Christians form a family that is more real and more profoundly unified than their blood connections. 28 through 30, which covered Jesus’ comments about a sin that is unforgivable. Let me just backtrack and hit that really quick. Verses 28 and 29. Jesus says that all sins are forgivable, including blasphemy. Blasphemy is a forgivable sin. But when someone sees the immediate miraculous work of the Holy Spirit and attributes that work to Satan, rather than acknowledges what is obvious, that this is the work of the Holy Spirit, then they betray a hardness of heart that is terminal. To sit and see that kind of revelation and to say, I believe that is Satan, that betrays a hardness of heart that is terminal. Miraculous signs carried with them a great authority. That was the purpose of a miraculous sign. Miraculous signs were used to confirm the testimony of the apostles and authorize, basically give us, confidence that the New Testament was divinely inspired. Miracles and miraculous acts carried this special weight to them. They were used to confirm the identity and authority both of Jesus and the apostles. Our New Testament exists because the testimony of the apostles was profoundly demonstrated by the miracles that accompanied and confirmed their teaching. But those miraculous signs also carried a greater weight for those that rejected them. They were incredibly powerful in that they gave this special authority. And to reject that came at a great cost. To stand there while Jesus himself healed the sick and raised the dead, and to say, nah, that’s Satan’s power. To do that, that kind of hard-heartedness carried with it a greater consequence. And with that said, I don’t think, and this is now I’m going to do what I said every pastor does, where I’m going to tell you, I don’t think you’ve committed this. And you have to do that because there is a certain kind of conscience, and not all Christians have it. Some Christians have, like the super, you just have to hit them on the head with a hammer again and again to get them to feel guilty for anything. And then some people kind of run around and feel guilty for sins committed by somebody hundreds of miles away, but they think somehow maybe it got on them. Their conscience is just like super, super sensitive. And so you have to say something about this because there are some people who read that text, and then they go away constantly asking themselves, have I committed the unpardonable sin? Let me just say, I don’t think this is a circumstance that most of us find ourselves in. People who get worried that they are possibly guilty of the unforgivable sin are suffering from spiritual hypochondria, and they just need to be told to knock it off. If you’re worried that you’re guilty of committing the unforgivable sin, just please stop. There’s a host of reasons that I don’t think it’s possible, but the biggest reason is this. People who have committed the unforgivable sin are not worried about it. They’ve committed the sin because they don’t care. They really don’t care. It’s a hardened conscience that is in that situation. And so if your conscience is tender and you’re constantly worried, did I do this? That’s testimony to you that no, you didn’t. You’re not that kind of person. If you worry that you committed the unforgivable sin, then stop. Say that you’re sorry to God for momentarily doubting Him and His grace and just go back to being a believing Christian. I’ll conclude by going back to that division between the fellowship of the grievance and the fellowship of the Son. And I just want to clarify one point a little bit more. I’ve described the fellowship of the grievance as those that are brought together by a mutual hatred of a mutual enemy. And then I’ve contrasted them with those that are brought together by the love of the Son. Fellowship of the grievance, fellowship of the Son. Fellowship brought together by mutual shared hatred. Fellowship brought together by a mutual shared love. And once you start to do that, it starts to become simply love versus hatred that is contrasted. And while I think that it’s partly true, there’s something to that. I don’t like saying it that way because in our current age, we’ve come up with this bad habit of maximizing the verb. And minimizing the object of the verb. What I mean is we make a big deal out of love. Love is good. Love is everything. God is love. So love is love. And we make a big deal of the verb. And then we act as if the object, the direct object of that verb, is something that can swap in and out. It doesn’t matter what you love. It just matters that you love. As if love by itself is this spectacular virtue. You need is love. Love wins. Love is love. But when we tend to minimize the object of the love, then it no longer matters who or what you love as long as you just love. And that’s a game that our culture is playing right now. And that’s not how scripture speaks of love. When we think biblically, we discover that actually it does matter the object of your love. The direct object of the verb determines whether love is a virtue. Do you love life or do you love death? Do you love wisdom or do you love foolishness? Do you love evil? Do you love your wife or do you love someone else’s wife? It turns out it’s not enough just to love. You have to love the right thing. Most of all, what is the greatest commandment? You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. The direct object matters. Love is good when it’s godly love, when it’s informed love. When it’s loving like God loves, when it loves the things that God loves. It’s also not true that those who love God are only united by our loves. We’re also united by the things that we hate. We share a hatred of evil. We saw in our text today our Lord Jesus Christ consumed by anger. We saw that there are things that God hates and it’s right for us to share that hatred. So we’re not just pitting love versus hatred. It’s a biblically informed love and a biblically informed hatred and it’s those that pervert those categories that become our enemies. All those that were united by a love of the one true God should have gotten angry with Jesus when they saw what he saw. We love and we also hate. We are not defined simply by love. We’re defined by the object of our love, the Lord Jesus Christ who loved us and gave himself for us. show less

Summary In this Easter Sunday sermon, the speaker emphasizes the significance of understanding death to appreciate the resurrection of Jesus. Drawing from Acts 2 and Psalm 16, he outlines two fundamental truths: all people seek happiness, and all fear death. He explains death as a separation—from God, from each other, and between soul and body—highlighting its painful nature through personal anecdotes. The sermon details what happens after death, distinguishing between the states of the righteous and the wicked in Sheol and Hades, ultimately leading to the resurrection of Christ, who liberates souls from these places. The sermon underscores that because of Jesus’ victory over death, believers can overcome their fear of it and find true, lasting joy in God’s presence, celebrating Easter as a reminder of this promise of future happiness and reunion. Transcription Choose show more to view the transcription. Transcriptions are AI generated and MAY be incorrect. Rely on the spoken word heard in the audio file. show more Scripture reading for this morning’s message comes from the book of Acts chapter 2. These are the words of God. He is at my right hand that I may not be shaken. Our Father in God, we thank you for this word. We thank you for the resurrection. We ask that you would strengthen our hearts with it this morning and that you would do it in the strong name of Jesus. And amen. You may be seated. I think it was pretty clear that Nate was having way too much fun with the piano right there. And so the tech demons had to get him with that last song. And I don’t know, one of the things, you didn’t know how grateful you were for air conditioning until this moment, like right now. You were like, air conditioning is the greatest invention in the history of the world. And you didn’t know until now. This is what God wanted to give you this morning. Happy Easter. Nothing like getting together with 200 of your closest friends and sweating. This is Easter Sunday. And on this Easter Sunday, we’re going to talk about death. We’re going to talk about death. What is death? What happens when you die? And it might be odd on Easter Sunday, Resurrection Sunday, to talk about death. But it’s the same reason that earlier in the service, we wanted to talk about sin. We want to talk about sin because we want to talk about forgiveness. We want to talk about death because we want to talk about the resurrection. The resurrection stands out more if we have a deeper understanding of death. And so as we do this, I want to begin the Easter message with two basic claims that I think are true of all people. This is true of not just Christians, not just Americans, not just men or women. Every person on planet earth who has ever lived, I think these two statements are true. Statement number one, all men seek happiness. All men seek happiness. And everything we do, no matter what it is that we do, we seek happiness. You want to be happy. You wake up in the morning and you want to have a good day. You drive to work and you want to be happy in that work. Now, you may not always be happy. That’s not the claim. It’s not that all men are happy. That’s certainly not true. But you want to be happy and you want to be happy all the time. Like even things that maybe aren’t happy in the moment, like your job, you do because you think that’s a means to greater happiness. I’m doing this because on the far side, I will be happier. Blaise Pascal, a famous philosopher, once said that the pursuit of happiness is the motive of every action of every man, even those that hang themselves. Even those that hang themselves. Even the person who commits suicide believes in that moment, death will make me happier than the pain and anguish of this life. So that’s my first statement. Everyone here, about all of you, is that you want to be happy. Deep down, what animates you, what motivates you, is a desire for deep, and not just deep happiness, lasting happiness. We don’t want just happiness to be there for a minute. We want it to last. You want it to stick around. That’s statement number one. Second statement. All men seek happiness. All men fear death. All men fear death. Every human being will die. We will be cut off from the land of the living. We see it on the news. We see it in our families. We see it in our future. All men fear death. So all men seek happiness. All men fear death. Now the passage we just read in the book of Acts addresses both of these. But before we can look at it specifically, I want to take a step back and I want us to think about death. And I have three questions. So what is death? What happens after we die? And then what happened after Jesus died? So this is the question. Yesterday was Holy Saturday. Good Friday. Maundy Thursday. And everybody goes, Monday, Thursday? Is it Monday? No. Maundy Thursday. Night of Last Supper. Good Friday. Holy Saturday. And now Easter Sunday. Where was Jesus on Saturday? What was he doing? So first question, what is death? Death, according to the Bible, death is fundamentally a separation. It’s a dividing of things that ought to be united. And I want us to think in terms of three particular separations. Death is separation from God. Death is separation from God. This is what Paul says in Ephesians 2. You guys, we just preached through this, the whole book. So call back to Ephesians chapter 2. Now, that’s an odd passage because it doesn’t track with what we normally think about death. So man by nature walks, lives in the passions of the flesh, following the course of this world, following Satan, who is at work in our disobedience. So we’re alive, we live in sinful passions, and so we’re walking, following, living, working, carrying out, and yet Paul says, you’re dead. We’re dead in trespasses and sin. So what kind of death can this be? It can’t be physical death. Death in this passage is separation from God. It’s enslavement to sin. It’s to be under God’s wrath. This is a hostility, an alienation from the living God. Because we were made to know and enjoy Him, to be in fellowship with Him, to be together with Him, and our rebellion against Him, our disobedience to Him, has separated us from Him. So, first and foremost, death is separation from God, spiritual death. But death is not just separation from God, it’s separation from each other. So, one of the deepest pains we know in this world is the loss of those that we love. So, about 12 years ago, my father died. After a seven-year fight with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, it’s hard to believe it’s 12 years ago, honestly. And in dying, he was separated from me and from my mom and from my brothers and from his family. And we all know, like, you’ve experienced that separation. That separation really hurts. It’s very painful. We think it’s not supposed to be this way. Like, I think about that every year. So, right now, we’re just starting up baseball season. My boys play baseball. We just started up baseball season. I think about this every, usually just a moment at some point during the baseball season. My dad was a big baseball guy. We’re a big baseball family. I think about it when we’re on the baseball field. I think, man, it would be really great if he got to see a game. At one level, I think, well, he’s in heaven, so maybe he’s watching them from there, but it would be nice if I could see him see the game. That would be really enjoyable for me. I wish he could sit in the stands and cheer as Sam pitches or as Peter bats. I actually, it’s a weird thing. I don’t know if you’ve lost a close loved one. You can still hear certain phrases that they said frequently. I can still hear in his voice. You got to go. You got to go. I can hear his voice saying that. It’s like the main thing I can actually, rounding third base. You got to go. This is the idea. We’re supposed to be together, united. That would be how it’s supposed to be. And yet we’re not. That’s not going to happen in this life. And so it’s a horrible thing. We look at that, we look at the tearing apart, the ripping apart of families, friends, and we say, it’s not supposed to be this way. It’s a separation. So death is separation from God. It’s separation from each other. And then finally, death is the separation of the soul from the body. So you have a soul and you have a body. And the book of James tells us the body without the spirit is dead. The body without the spirit is dead. At death, our very nature as human beings is ripped in half. And death just tears them apart. And so this is what happens. Death is not just, so you think it’s a separation, but it’s more than that. It’s actually a scattering. Like it’s taking pieces that all are supposed to be united together. Us with God, us with each other, us as a unity. We’re all supposed to be together. And then death is just like, just tears it all up and just scatters the pieces in every direction. I remember, so I used to mention my dad, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. And I remember, as it neared the end and you would see his scattered thoughts, his mind was just falling apart. It’s awful. It’s a horrible way to go. And I just remember, I remember looking at like the jumbled words and the loss of cognitive function and think that fragmenting, splintering, crumbling, that’s death. I’m looking at death and it’s awful. So that’s what death is. It’s separation from God, separation from each other, separation of the soul and body. So second question, then what happens when we die? So after that, where do the pieces go? Well, in the Bible, you have to bring some different passages together to get a clear picture, but I’m going to try to offer an account of it. So I want to think about those two parts of the human person, the body and the soul. So in the passage we read, Psalm 16, so Peter quotes in Acts 2 that I read, he quotes Psalm 16, which we read earlier in the service. And this is what it says, you will not abandon my soul to Sheol or let your Holy One see corruption. So I think that passage, gives us a normal account of what happened when a human being died before the resurrection of Jesus. So here’s what happened. When someone died in the Old Testament, any person, the soul went to Sheol, was abandoned to Sheol, and the body decayed or saw corruption. But Peter says, David, right, foresaw the resurrection of Christ. He was not abandoned to Sheol. His soul wasn’t. And his flesh, Peter says, did not see corruption. At death, souls went to Sheol and bodies decayed in tombs, in graves. Now, that second half, the body decaying in a tomb, that makes sense to us. But what’s this whole thing about Sheol? What is that? Here’s what Sheol is. In the Old Testament, you see this word a lot in your Old Testament, Sheol is the place of the souls of the dead. And in the Old Testament, it’s the place both of the saints, like forgiven sinners, like Jacob. Jacob says, I will go down to Sheol morning, and when he thinks Joseph is dead. So the saint Samuel, the prophet, is down in Sheol, we see, in 1 Samuel 28. But it’s also the place of the wicked. Psalm 31, 17 says, the wicked go down to Sheol. Now, in the New Testament, Sheol is just a Hebrew word. We just bring it over from Hebrew. We don’t even translate it. It’s just a place, like Scarsdale, just a place. So Sheol, in the New Testament, is translated as Hades. Hades. You’ve probably heard of Hades, maybe from Greek mythology or something like that. And the picture in the Bible is actually similar in some ways to that Hades of Greek mythology. It’s under the earth. In Numbers chapter 16, the sons of Korah, when they rebel against Moses, are swallowed up. They go down into Sheol alive, is what the Bible says. They go down into Sheol alive and the ground covers them up. So it’s down, it’s under the earth. It’s like a city with gates. So King Hezekiah says, It’s like a prison. It’s a land of darkness. It’s a land where the shades, the shadowy souls of men dwell in Isaiah 14 verse 9. We’re told it’s a land of forgetfulness where no work is done, where no wisdom exists. That’s Ecclesiastes 9.10. And it’s a place where no one praises God, interestingly. It’s in multiple passages. That’s Isaiah 38.18. So that’s what Sheol is in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, Jesus actually gives us a greater window into this. So in the parable, Luke 16.19-31, there’s this story that Jesus tells. And it’s a story about a selfish, greedy, rich guy who never took thought for others. And he dies without seeking God’s forgiveness. And then there’s this poor man named Lazarus who is ignored by the rich man in life, but apparently was a worshiper of the true God and he sought mercy from God. And so here’s what Jesus said. They both died at the same time. The poor man died and he was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. And in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and he saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side. And he called out, Father Abraham, have mercy on me. Send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue. I’m in anguish in this flame. But Abraham said, child, remember you in your lifetime received your good things and Lazarus bad things. But now he is comforted here and you are in anguish. And besides this, between us and you, there’s a great chasm that has been fixed in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able and none may cross from there to us. So here, get that picture? The geography of it, okay? So the Hades, just like the Hades of Greek mythology, the biblical Hades, the biblical Sheol has two compartments. There’s Hades proper, that’s where the rich man is sent, and then Abraham’s side where the angels take Lazarus. That one side is a place of torment. Fire causes anguish to the souls imprisoned there. This is where sins are punished by those who have rebelled against God. But Abraham’s side, on the other hand, it’s within shouting distance and there’s a big chasm separating it, but it’s a place of comfort and rest. So we don’t know much about it, but it begins to take shape, right? So all souls before Christ, all souls go down to Sheol or to Hades, but it’s divided into two compartments. Those who turned from their sins and believed God’s promises, they’re in comfort. And then those who clung to their sins and refused to repent, they’re in their side, okay? And they’re cut off from the land of the living. The souls, even the saints are cut off from land of living. So they don’t have the worship of Yahweh. They can’t go to the temple like they used to on earth. But they’re not tormented there like the wicked. So that’s the picture. Now, here’s the question then, okay? Now, all of that background, here’s the question. Okay, what happened to Jesus, right? Where did Jesus go, okay? Well, Jesus in Luke 23, when he’s dying on the cross, one of his statements from the cross, remember the thief who turns from his sins? He says, remember me when you come into your kingdom, right? And Jesus says to him, today you will be with me in paradise. Today you’ll be with me in paradise. And so some Christians believe that after death, Jesus, he went to heaven to be in the presence of the father with the thief. But Luke 23 doesn’t say that Jesus would be in the presence of God. It says he would be in the presence of the thief, right? Today you’ll be with me. We’ll be together. Where was he going to go? Well, he’s just repented of his sins. So where were the angels going to take him? Answer, they were going to take him to where Abraham is, right? So this place that’s called paradise by Jesus is that place of comfort and rest for the forgiven souls of the dead. The thief’s going there and Jesus says, today we’re going to be there together. So on Good Friday, when Jesus died on the cross, he endured our first death, that separation from God. Okay, so remember the three separations. He was separated from God. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The cross was Jesus saying, I am joining my people. I’m being separated from you on their behalf. And so he expresses the horror of that separation from a holy God because of sin. But that separation was completed before he died. That’s why a few minutes later, maybe hours later, he says, it is finished. Okay, so why have you forsaken me? He endures the wrath of God and then gets done and says, it’s finished. That part is over. Death absorbed. Penalty paid. Sin done with. Then what happens? Jesus dies and his soul and his body, his human soul, yet a human soul, yet a human body, they’re separated and Jesus’ body goes into a tomb. Joseph of Arimathea goes into a tomb. Where does his soul go? His soul goes down to Hades, to the city of death. But he goes down there to rip the gate off its hinges. It’s a big jailbreak. He’s getting everybody out. He liberates Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David, John the Baptist, all the rest of the Old Testament faithful. They’ve been down there. And Jesus goes down in the Old Testament in the Psalms. You have this question, Psalm 49, Psalm 86, Psalm 89. Over and over again, there’s this question. Who can ransom me from the power of Sheol? Who can ransom me from the power of Sheol? And the answer then is nobody. Like there’s no way out. Like death’s coming. Get ready for it. You’re going to Sheol. You’re going to Sheol. So they’re there in prison. It’s a place of comfort, but it’s still not where you want to be ultimately. And Jesus goes down and says, I can ransom people from the power of Sheol. I can do that. I can rip these. They had been waiting a long time, cut off from the land of the living. They hadn’t received what was promised. Jesus says, what you were hoping in, it’s go time. Come on, everybody. We’re getting out of here. Jesus is raised and then he ascends to heaven. And we’re told in the New Testament that he takes the ransomed saints with him when he ascends. Their souls now go to heaven to be with God, which is why Paul later in 2 Corinthians, Paul says, I know a man who was caught up to paradise. And he says, it’s up. It’s in the heavens. Well, I said paradise was down. Well, now it’s up. Paradise is up. Why? Because Jesus emptied it. He just grabbed paradise where Abraham was. And he says, well, I’m taking it with me and we’re going up there. And now, so this is what happens now. I’ve been describing what happened then, but now. Now, those who trust in Christ, when you die, you’re not carried by angels to Abraham’s side. You depart to be with Christ, which is better. That’s what Paul says. I desire to depart and be with Christ. That’s better. It’s better than it was in the Old Testament. It’s better than living in sin on earth. Those who reject the mercy of Christ, where are they? They’re still in Hades in torment. And they wait there until the final judgment. The book of Revelation shows us this. It says that at the final judgment when Christ returns, Hades gives up the dead who are in it, and they’re judged according to their deeds. And then it says death and Hades are thrown into hell. Death and Hades are thrown into hell. How is death and Hades thrown into hell? Well, you don’t need them anymore. They were holding tanks, right? And now no reason to hold them. Judgment time. And you have the permit, the lake of fire in the book of Revelation. So that’s the picture. So what does that mean for us? What does it mean? Okay, this is back to our first two questions, our first two statements. You remember? Way back when, 20 minutes ago. All men seek happiness. All men fear death. What does it mean for our fear of death, our desire for happiness? Well, the first thing is this. Peter recognizes that Jesus is like us, but he’s also different from us. So he’s like us because he endures death for us. All of the separations, separation from God, separation from his mother and his friends, separation of soul from the body. So you have to think on Holy Saturday, Jesus, he’s God man. So as God, he’s in heaven filling everything. He’s still God. But then he has a human soul and a human body. His human body is in a tomb and his human soul is in Sheol. So he’s filling heavens and earth. He’s everywhere. So what death scattered for Jesus, God gathered back up. What death scattered, God gathered. Christ was reunited in soul and body. Soul and body back together. He was reunited with his mother and his disciples. And ultimately, he ascends back to the Father forever to dwell with him. So what death had scattered, God gathered back up in raising Jesus. And so, because of what Jesus has done, we don’t have to fear death. Like, it’s still an enemy. Paul’s clear. Death is an enemy. It’s still awful. But Jesus triumphed over sin and over death, and therefore he can deliver us from our deepest fear. You can stare death in the face, and you can know in your bones Jesus defeated you, and that in God’s world, faithful death always leads to resurrection. In God’s world. Faithful death. You’re faithful in death, trusting Christ. God’s faithful to raise you. So when my dad, I was watching him die. I was like, this isn’t the end. This is awful. It’s horrible. Don’t wish it on anybody. But God’s going to put my dad back together. And he’s going to put us back together. And he’s going to put all of us back together. And the words won’t be jumbled. He’ll probably tell his old stupid jokes again. I hope. I’ve tried to carry on that tradition as every father does of the stupid jokes. And we’re going to embrace and we’re going to rejoice. We’ll probably get to play catch. It’s going to be amazing. We’re going to laugh and the mountains will ring with it. It’s going to be very good. And that brings us to that second thing. All men seek happiness. Well, Psalm 16, which Peter quotes, it doesn’t just deliver us from the fear of death. It points us to full and lasting happiness. Did you hear it? You will make me full of gladness with your presence. Your presence is fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forevermore. So there it is. Full joy, everlasting pleasures. So that ache for happiness that every human being feels, that’s what it’s pointed at. The longing for joy that haunts you, that’s the answer to it. And Jesus says, this is a gift. You can just have it for free. All you have to do is ask. So Peter in the Psalm said, this is mainly about Jesus. So Jesus goes to the Father. And the Father gives to his Son the joy of his presence. Well done, good and faithful servant. You’re my beloved Son. I’m pleased with you. You did it. You finished the mission. You showed him the way back. You are the way back. There’s no other name by which men can be saved from sin and death. Now here, Jesus, the Father says, here, have all of my joy. All of my joy. And then what Jesus does, as soon as he gets the joy, Jesus is like, I’m going to share this with everybody. And he pours it out on his people. This is why we love Easter. Because on Easter Sunday, like we do every Sunday, we say to God, we receive it. We receive that gift. Christ is risen from the dead. He’s triumphed. He’s turned us from our sin. He’s delivered us from the fear of death in this life, the torment of Hades in the next life. And he’s invited us in. So now you have full and lasting joy at God’s right hand. And you have it in so many different ways. You have it in the forgiveness of your sins. You don’t have to live in guilt and shame. That’s great. You have it in the fellowship of the saints, the family of God. You have it in the future when your bad back and poor eyesight and sore throat will not be an issue. God is going to do away with all of that with a resurrection body. With that great family reunion that the Lord is planning for us in the future, barbecue is going to be great. Be a party for the ages and it will never end. And then you have this new inheritance, the new creation, no pain or sorrow or death forever. Let’s pray. Our Father in God, that’s true. It’s true every day. It’s especially true on Resurrection Sunday. We celebrate the resurrection of Christ because you deliver us from the fear of death and you give us everlasting joy. I pray that every one of us receives it and keeps it. We ask for this. We ask for you to give us that gift in our hearts and we do so in the words that Jesus taught us to pray. show less

Summary In the sermon on Mark 1:1-45, Pastor Craw emphasizes the significance of baptism, particularly that it initiates a spiritual battle. He highlights how John the Baptist prepared the way for Jesus, who, after being baptized, is empowered to confront Satan and launch his ministry in Galilee. Key moments include Jesus’ calling of his first disciples, Simon Peter and Andrew, and the demonstration of his authority through teaching and miracles, such as healing Simon’s mother-in-law and casting out demons. The sermon draws parallels between Jesus’ mission and the Old Testament’s themes of exodus and deliverance, urging the congregation to recognize their own baptisms as a call to engage in spiritual warfare against worldly and spiritual challenges. The narrative concludes with a reminder that baptism equips believers to propagate the kingdom of God. Transcription Choose show more to view the transcription. Transcriptions are AI generated and MAY be incorrect. Rely on the spoken word heard in the audio file. show more What does baptism do? Now our text this morning is going to be the entire chapter, first chapter of Mark. It’s humongous. If any of you know the book of Mark, it moves quickly and rapidly from one section to the next. But we’re going to be looking at Mark chapter 1 verses 1 through 45. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we ask your blessing upon us this morning. We pray that you would bless the preaching of your word and we pray that you would cause us to hear your word, for we pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen. When you live in Los Angeles, you run into celebrities all the time. You guys remember that old show, the original one, the American Gladiators? Well, one of the gladiators, Thunder, used to come to our little tiny Calvary Chapel church. And years later, my wife regularly played pickleball with Nitro. They were TV warriors, not real warriors in real battles. When Jesus was baptized, He was set apart for His vocation as a warrior, priest, and king. This morning in Mark chapter 1, we’ll see that baptism begins battle. Baptism begins battle. Go ahead and open up your Bibles to Mark chapter 1. Three consecutive battles. So the first battle here, beginning in verse 1. It says the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Mark, as he is wont to do, is brief, concise. He likes to use the word immediately, and things come about suddenly. You’ll notice here in his gospel, he doesn’t have the genealogy that you find in the other ones. And it says here, the beginning of the gospel. The beginning of the gospel. I want to remind you once again that the implication of the gospel is how we get saved, but the gospel itself is the announcement of the reign and rule of the Lord Jesus Christ. Next up, we’ve got his name here, Jesus Christ. Literally, Jesus the Christ. And remember, Jesus is the Greek version of the Hebrew name Joshua. So Joshua, the anointed one, the Christ, the chosen one, the greater Joshua and Christ who is. We you say you that is the son of God, the great metaphysical God man. Going on to verse two, as it is written in Isaiah, the prophet, behold, I will send my messenger before your face who will prepare your way. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. John appeared baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. These words are drawn from Isaiah chapter four. These are things that were spoken by the prophet Isaiah about events that would happen 700 years into the future. That is hearing the voice of the messenger in the wilderness. And the wilderness is an exile experience for the people of God. And when they heard these words, they should have been reminded of the great exiles that they had been through as the people of God and look forward to full deliverance from the current exile. Now, Israel has traditionally been exiled to, reformed in and emerged from the wilderness. Remember, they wandered in the wilderness for 40 years after they came out of Egypt. And then they were brought out of exile into the land of Canaan in the days of who? Joshua. And in the days of the judges, we see that the people of God came into the land and they didn’t complete the conquest. And it ends with the exile finishing off with the coming of the kings. But the people of God disobeyed him, did not listen to his word, did not obey his laws, and so he sent them once again into exile in Babylon. And in some sense, they’re still in exile here in the days of Jesus. They’re ruled over by Gentile powers. They’re waiting for a king to come and deliver them. They’re waiting for return from exile. Going on to verse 5. All the country of Judea and all Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair and wore a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and wild honey. And he preached, saying, After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandal I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I have baptized you with water. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit. Judea and Jerusalem are going out to be baptized in the Jordan River. They’re going out to the wilderness to be baptized in the Jordan River. And why is it important that they’re going out to be baptized in the Jordan River? And what’s going on here? Well John’s at the exact spot where the first Joshua came to the Jordan River and saw it parted just like the Red Sea was parted. We know this is true from Psalm 114 verse 3. It says the sea looked and fled. So we’re talking about the Red Sea parting, right? And then it’s got a comma and then it says, So here we’ve got the Jordan River parting, the people passing through it just like the Red Sea. We’ve got two baptisms and we’ve got a third baptism here because John has arrived at the Jordan River at the exact spot where Joshua came into the land and he’s baptizing the people, preparing them for the coming of the king. And John is dressed like Elijah. He’s wearing a hair shirt. He’s got a leather belt around his waist, just like Elijah did. Now think about this for a minute because the story gets deeper. You may remember Elijah at the end of his ministry. He comes with his sidekick, Elisha, who’s going to be rising up as the new prophet in Israel. He comes to the Jordan River. He’s standing in the land at a time when God’s judging hand is about to fall upon Israel. Elijah takes off his cloak, strikes the water of the Jordan River, and what does it do? Just like the Red Sea. Just like the Jordan did in the days of the first Joshua. And he goes out symbolically because God is bringing judgment and exile upon the people of God. And on the far shore, outside the land of Canaan, the chariot of fire came and took him away. So he was out of the land. And where does this new Elijah turn up? Outside the land. Joshua to come. The Jordan trajectory is Joshua and then coming into the land. Elijah going out of the land. The new Elijah coming to the river and preparing for the new Joshua who’s going to bring his people into the land of peace. Going on to verse 9. Jesus’ baptism is among other things. An anointing. Your baptism is an anointing. In fact, I believe the proper way to do it is pouring or sprinkling from above. Because it’s like the oil that comes down on the priest’s head. Or the oil that’s poured out on the king’s head. It takes a person and sets them into a new vocation. A new way of life. And Jesus is being anointed here as a holy warrior to make battle. Verse 12. The spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness 40 days being tempted by Satan. And he was with the wild animals and the angels were ministering to him. The father was well pleased. But maybe you think the same thing I do. God’s well pleased with his son. But then what happens? The third person of the triune God drives Jesus into the wilderness. The spirit in Greek, ekbalo, kicked him into the wilderness. And immediately it’s on. He’s been set apart for battle. And he makes battle with Satan. And he overcomes Satan in the first battle. So we’ve got battle one. Let’s go on to battle two. Verse 14. Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God and saying the time is fulfilled. And the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel. Jesus has been baptized. He’s returned triumphantly from the wilderness. He defeated Satan there. And now he’s begun his ministry. John’s been arrested by Herod. And now we see that Jesus pulls up John’s ministry into his own. John’s ministry was about announcing the way of the coming of the Christ. To his own ministry, Jesus fulfills the ministry of John, and he begins to preach, repent, and believe the gospel. Verse 16, passing alongside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew, the brother of Simon, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. Now this is the hard part about chapter 1 of Mark, and you’re going to probably find this with all your other preachers here. There’s like five humongous sermons in each chapter here. They’re talking about fishers of men. Now Jesus was attending to some affairs, and now he seeks out his first followers at Capernaum, a city on the side of the seashore of Galilee that becomes his headquarters. They may have been fishing from their boats from shore, casting out nets for tilapia and small fish. They know who Jesus is. These are men who are disciples of John the Baptist. They’ve met Jesus before. They’re waiting for Jesus to return and begin his ministry. Going on to verse 17. And Jesus said to them, Follow me and I will make you become fishers of men. And immediately they left their nets and followed him. And going on a little farther, he saw James, the son of Zebedee, and John, his brother, who were in their boat mending their nets. And immediately he called them and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and followed him. Fishers of men. Have you ever looked at the whole concept of fishers of men in the Old Testament? It’s something that somebody in the first century would have understood. When exile comes to an end, when God brings his people back into the land, when God shows his favor to his people again, he sends out fishers of men. Jeremiah says this in Jeremiah 16 verse 16. Fishers of men to bring his people back into his favor. And when the temple is sending out refreshing waters in Ezekiel chapter 47, a little trickle is coming down from the Holy of Holies. It comes down through the middle of the temple. It becomes a large stream flowing out to the east, goes down into the Jordan River, and turns the Jordan River into a huge raging torrent of water. What kind of water? Fresh, living water. No fish live, even today. And it makes the Dead Sea fresh, and it brings forth all kinds of fish. And we read these words in Ezekiel 47, in verse 10. Fishermen will stand beside the sea. From En Gedi to Englaim will be a place for the spreading of nets. The fish will be of many kinds, like the fish of the great sea. Is this about catching fish? Is this about, hey, we got some sardines, and got some nice tilapia fish. Hey, look, there’s some weird fish here from the great sea. In the Old Testament, the idea of the sea is always about the turbulent nations out to the east. The fish here are of many kinds. The fish in reality represent humans, people, the nations that need to be brought in. Ezekiel’s talking about the days that kick off and the days of the apostles and spread forth through the centuries to you. We’re fishers of men. We’re going out and casting the gospel net and bringing the nations in. Now, they’ve been with John, too. They met with Jesus at the Jordan. They’re in their boat, mending their nets, waiting for Jesus to come, verse 21. And they went into Capernaum, and immediately on the Sabbath, he entered the synagogue and was teaching. And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority and not as one of the scribes. Now, Jesus is called his fishers of men, and he immediately enters the synagogue and begins teaching. Andrew and Peter went. In fact, I think they might have found it. Some of you follow archaeology know that they found this synagogue in Capernaum. They’re down to the floor now, somewhere at the level of the Byzantine Empire. It may be this exact synagogue. This would have been the synagogue of these apostles here. They would have been served by rabbis and scribes. The typical service would have consisted of dry lectures on small points of the law, but Jesus, the rabbi, teaches with astonishment. Admonishing power and authority. Jesus owns the text because the text is about him, and it came from him. Verse 23, And immediately there was in the synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God. But Jesus rebuked him, saying, Be silent. Come out of him. Immediately, there’s in the middle of them, a demon-possessed man. And in the Greek here, it says, He shouted aloud. Imagine that, kids. You come into church, and some guy suddenly stands up and starts screaming in a voice that’s unearthly. Everybody sits in silence. What shall we do with this strange situation? The synagogue had clergy that served him, and yet here’s a demon-possessed man among them crying out in an unearthly, scary voice. Maybe this man went to that very synagogue, and yet whoever served them as rabbis was either unaware that this man had a spiritual problem, or they weren’t able to do anything about it. And the demon says something shocking, something that in Mark has only been acknowledged by John the Baptist and God at his baptism. This is the Holy One of God who has the power to destroy demons. So Jesus, says here, be silent, come out of him. Now imagine the scene. The man’s gotten up, screaming out, pointing at Jesus and saying, this is the Holy One of God. Don’t destroy me. Everybody’s sitting around looking at this strange scenario and then Jesus cries out, be silent, come out of him. What will happen? Can Jesus overcome the demon? Going on to verse 26, and the unclean spirit convulsing him and crying out with a loud voice came out of him and they were all amazed and they questioned among themselves saying, what is this? A new teaching with authority. He commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him and at once his fame spread everywhere throughout all the surrounding region of Galilee. The crowd is shocked and silent. The man’s limbs are clacking on the floor. And at the command of Jesus, the demon casts a man down violently, but it came out without harming him. How do we know this? From Luke’s Gospel. Luke 4, 35. And when the demon had thrown him to the ground in the midst of the people, he came out of him without doing him any harm. The demon battled mightily against Jesus and clung to the host, but it came right out and Jesus won the battle. With the arrival of Jesus, it seems like there’s demons everywhere, doesn’t it? If you look at the Old Testament, can you think of any examples of demons? Maybe you see Satan every once in a while, right? You don’t see a lot of demons going around possessing people, though. But when Jesus comes, it’s like Satan calls in all the reinforcements, all the demons from everywhere. They’re in Israel. They’re fighting hard to hold onto their territory, but Jesus is way bigger than demons. He has his own authority, and he commands the demons. And the disciples here are being trained to fear who to fear and who to follow and how to do battle. And so we finished off our second battle. Let’s go on to our final battle here, verse 29. Having taught with authority, having cast a demon out in the synagogue. These are all kingdom acts and signs, by the way. By the way, Jesus doesn’t do anything by accident. Everything Jesus does is confirming who he is and it’s fulfilling prophecy. But having taught with authority and casting out the demon in the synagogue, Jesus immediately leaves with his disciples and goes to the house of Simon and Andrew, where Simon’s mother, his mother-in-law lays sick with a fever. And Jesus is so powerful that he needs only to raise her up. He doesn’t have to speak over her. And the mere act of raising her up, she’s healed. Verse 32, that evening at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or oppressed with demons. And the whole city gathered together at the door. And he healed many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons. Demons to speak because they knew him. Word had gotten out. Jesus can cast out demons. Jesus can heal sickness. The sun’s going down on the Sabbath. The sun’s going down on the Sabbath. Kids, do you remember what day it is now? If the sun’s going down on the Sabbath and the Sabbath’s from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday and the sun’s going down on the Sabbath, what day is it? It’s Sunday. It’s resurrection day. What’s happening here now? The whole city’s gathered at the door because it’s a doorway to the true temple and the great high priest is within. The doorway of the house is where battle now breaks out and Jesus exercises the authority of an all-powerful king. He silences demons, something no earthly king can do and has authority and power to do because the demons knew him. And he silenced them. Why? Because he’s got a ministry to carry out. He’s got several years of ministry. He needs to come at the exact right moment, at the exact right Passover to come and die. He doesn’t need extra publicity at this point in time. Verse 35, And he went throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons. He arises early in the morning on the Lord’s day after cleansing the people. And when they arose, the disciples are distressed. Everyone’s looking for you, Jesus. But the battle is breaking out of Simon and Andrew’s house. The battle’s breaking out of Capernaum. Going on to verse 40, Now, we’ve got a little switch here in the story. Things kind of change gear here. We’ve got this upward trajectory of battle. Jesus winning these battles. People following along after Jesus. Excited. The kings come. The kingdoms arise. The leper doesn’t question Jesus’ power. Only his will. And Jesus can. And Jesus does heal the man. Verse 43. Spread the news. So that Jesus could no longer openly enter a town. But was out in desolate places. And the people were coming to him from every quarter. Now we see that authority meets resistance. Not from demons. But from the disobedience of one who was healed. The battle which started with baptism in the wilderness. Moved on to Capernaum. And then out to all Galilee. And now it comes back to Jesus in the wilderness. Because he has to be in the wilderness now. His fame has gotten too large. It’s going to disrupt the purposes of God. So what’s my point on all this this morning? Baptism begins battle. You’re the baptized. You’re the baptized. Even you kids out here that are baptized. You’ve been called to battle. You’ve been called to battle against the world, the flesh, and the devil. Don’t disobey the call. And fight for the king. Can I hear an amen to that? Amen. My Uncle Ralph seemed an ordinary man in a family of engineers and artists. He appeared nearly subnormal. A small Japanese man working blue-collar jobs in a blue-collar neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio. When he died without children, my parents received a small box of his effects. A burial flag, combat decorations, and a purple heart. They revealed that he had fought in numerous ferocious battles in World War II. With the all-Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most decorated unit in American history. When Jesus came to be baptized by John at the Jordan, he seemed so ordinary, so normal, so human. Yet Jesus in the flesh was the tip of a vast iceberg. As he rose from the water, the God-man and Savior of the world was revealed, in a battle against Satan, sin, and death. And so are you. Your baptism calls you to battle against the world, the flesh, and the devil. In Mark chapter 1, we’ve seen baptism begins battle. Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for your power. We thank you for the resurrection in the Lord Jesus Christ and that you save us and call us and fill us with your spirit the purpose of spreading your kingdom. Bless us and strengthen us in our time and place to spread your kingdom and to bring glory to your name. For we pray these things in Jesus’ name. Amen. show less

Summary In this sermon, covering Amos chapter 8 and its concluding themes, the speaker, Ben Zornes, highlights God’s impending judgment on Israel due to their indifference towards His commands and exploitation of the poor. Amos, a shepherd from Tekoa, reveals that Israel will experience a famine—not of food but of God’s word, leading to despair and a drastic reversal of their joyful celebrations into mourning. God declares He will bring destruction akin to a flood, demonstrating His sovereignty and the inevitability of judgment. However, the sermon concludes with a prophetic hope: God will restore the tabernacle of David, encompassing all nations, and establish a time of unparalleled abundance and joy, contrasting the earlier themes of devastation. The speaker emphasizes that true worship, purified by Christ’s sacrifice, is central to God’s plan for renewal and the ultimate fulfillment of Amos’s vision, bringing together diverse peoples in praise of Him. Transcription Choose show more to view the transcription. Transcriptions are AI generated and MAY be incorrect. Rely on the spoken word heard in the audio file. show more Text this morning is Amos chapter 8 starting in verse 4 and continuing through the rest of the book. These are the words of God. And it shall be cast out and drowned as by the flood of Egypt. And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord God, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day. And I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation. And I will bring up sackcloth upon all loins, and baldness upon every head. And I will make it as the excellency of Jacob. And the end thereof as a bitter day. Behold, the day has come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land. Not a famine of bread, nor thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east. They shall run to and fro, and seek the word of the Lord, and shall not find it. In that day shall the fair virgins and the young men faint for thirst. They that swear by the sin of Samaria, and say, Thy God, O Dan, liveth, and the manner of Beersheba liveth, even they shall fall and never rise up again. I saw the Lord standing upon the altar, and he said, Smite the lintel of the door, that the post may shake, and cut them in the head, all of them, and I will slay the last of them with the sword. He that fleeth of them shall not flee away, and he that escapeth of them shall not be delivered. Though they dig into hell, thence shall mine hand take them. Though they climb up to heaven, and though they hide themselves in the top of Carmel, I will search, and I take them out thence. And though they be hid from my sight in the bottom of the sea, thence will I command the serpent, and he shall bite them. And though they go into captivity before their enemies, thence will I command the sword, and it shall slay them. And I will set mine eyes upon them for evil and not for good. And the Lord God of hosts is he that toucheth the land, and it shall melt, and all that dwell therein shall mourn, and it shall rise up as by the flood of Egypt. It is he that buildeth his stories in the heaven and hath founded his troop in the earth, he that calleth for the waters of the earth and poureth them out upon the face of the earth. The Lord is his name. Are ye not as the children of the Ethiopians unto me? O children of Israel, saith the Lord, have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt and the Philistines from Kaphtor and the Syrians from Ker? Behold, the eyes of the Lord God are upon the sinful kingdom, and I will destroy it from off the face of the earth, saving that I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob, saith the Lord. For lo, I will command, and I will sift the house of Israel among all nations like as corn is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the least grain fall upon the earth. All the sinners of my people shall die by the sword, which say the evil shall not overtake nor prevent us. In that day will I raise up the tabernacle of David that has fallen, and close up the breaches thereof, and I will raise up his ruins, and I will build it as in the days of old, that they may possess the remnant of Edom, and of all the heathen which are called by my name, saith the Lord, that doeth this. Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that the plowman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes, him that soweth seed, and the mountains shall drop sweet wine, and all the hills shall melt. And I will bring again the Israel, and they shall build the waste cities, and inhabit them, and they shall plant vineyards, and drink the wine thereof. They shall also make gardens, and eat the fruit of them. And I will plant them upon their land, and they shall no more be pulled up out of their land, which I have given them, saith the Lord thy God. Let’s pray. Our God and Father, we pray now that by the work of your Spirit, by the power of your Spirit, you would cause us to see marvelous things out of your words. We pray that you would shock us and surprise us with the glory that is found in this text, the glory of a new tabernacle of David. We thank you for this, your word, and we pray now you would do the miracle of preaching, speak to us, soften our hearts that we might hear clearly what your Spirit says to the church. We pray all of this in the mighty name of Jesus, and amen. You may be seated. Surprises are the best. Surprises also happen to be the worst. There’s nothing worse than going to your favorite restaurant, ordering your favorite dish, and when it’s delivered to you, and the waiter brings it to you, and you take a bite of it, the eggs were addled, tastes like mold, something was wrong with it. That is an unpleasant surprise. That’s not the sort of surprise you want. Like putting on an old pair of jeans, reaching in the pocket and finding, hey, there’s a $20 bill in here. Surprises are the best, and surprises are the worst. It really does depend, though, on the nature of what the surprise is. What the unexpected turn of events is. Whether the surprise is a delightful one or a despairing one. Whether the surprise is one that you give thanks for or one that causes you great misery. You’ve waited for many years to have a child. And the news comes that your wife has fallen pregnant. That’s how my wife, she’s from South Africa, that’s how she would say it. Fallen pregnant. That’s a very British way to say it. And you wait unexpectedly for this gift and along it comes. That’s a wonderful surprise. But there’s nothing like a diagnosis of cancer. Or an unexpected bill in the mail. Or your boss emailing you at 4 p.m. on Friday saying, can I see you in my office? Surprises are the best and surprises are the worst. The farm boy from Tekoa, Amos, comes to the conclusion of his prophetic word for the prosperous and proud Israelites. Redneck from southern Judah. As surprising as it is, this hick from southern Judah would come up and rebuke the elite of northern Israel, the prosperous tribes of northern Israel, which were living in great luxury and prosperity. This southern farm boy has come up to northern Israel to rebuke them. As surprising as that is, this book, these prophetic words of Amos come to a conclusion here. The prophetic words for Israel. Now, my usual manner of working through a book is to go one chapter at a time. So imagine my surprise when Rigney emailed me and said, all right, you’re going to do basically chapter eight and nine of Amos. And I said, both chapters? So admittedly, this is going to be 30,000 foot view. And if you have issue with that, you can emotionally sabotage Rigney the next time he’s here. But from what I understand, he’s impervious to it. So again, this is much more 30,000 foot level looking at these two chapters as the conclusion of Amos’ prophecy to northern Israel, to the northern tribes of Israel. And Amos has some particular surprises in store for us here. So let’s look at these two chapters, again, from a 30,000 foot view. And then we’ll go into a few areas of application of these truths. As you’ve been working through the book of Amos, I hope you’ve come away with seeing some of the particular sins that the Israelites had given themselves over to. One in particular that’s highlighted here is that the Israelites had come to view the festivals and Sabbath feasts as a burden. They’re in verse 5. They’re saying, when can we get the new moons and the Sabbaths over so we can get back to, they wanted to get them over with, so they could get back to their sins, to their exploitation of the poor, and the trampling of the needy, there in verse 4 and 6. So they had come to view the new moons, the Sabbaths, the festivals that God had given them through Moses as a burden and something to yawn at and get past so they can get back to business as usual, which happened to be, as we’ve seen in Amos, happened to be running roughshod over the poor, the needy, the weak. It’s like, if you view these feasts as burdensome, here’s what’s coming for you, lights out, judgment, devastation. The jubilant feast which God had blessed them with, think of the Feast of Tabernacles, the Feast of Booths, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Passover, the Day of Atonement, all these wonderful feasts and celebrations and holy days that God had given them to remind them of his covenant relationship with them. They just wanted to get past them. The offering that the Israelites would give was a feast between the worshiper and God. God had filled the calendar with feasting. And here we learn that God is saying, I’m going to turn that around and it’s going to go from feasting to funerals. There in verse 10, you see, I will turn your feasts into mourning, into a funeral, your songs into lamentation. I’ll bring up sackcloth upon all loins, as the King James puts it wonderfully and memorably. Moreover, the feasts and the Sabbaths, which they had begrudged, were to be replaced by a famine, and we’re told of a particular kind of famine. It’s a famine of not hearing the word of the Lord. Verse 11. Now think about the most important passage in the Old Testament for the Jews. Was what? Deuteronomy 6.4, the Shema, right? The covenant word is what? Hear, O Israel. God is one Lord. The covenant word here would be heard no more. Though it would be sought for, it wouldn’t be found there in verse 12. And this is a weighty implication. Famine instead of feasts. Roaming instead of rest. God is annulling the covenant promises of Deuteronomy. You can also look at Deuteronomy 4.29, which spell out these promises. In verse 13 of chapter 8, we see that the young men and fair virgins would be weak and faint, which is precisely the opposite of the attendant blessings which were to be poured out upon faithful Israel. If you want to, turn over to Psalm 144. And we have one of those wonderful psalms describing the fruitfulness and blessing that God had intended for Israel. Psalm 144, verses 12 and 13. This is the description for what God’s blessing resting upon Israel was to look like. That our sons may be as plants grown up in their youth. And that our daughters may be as cornerstones polished after the similitude of a palace. That our garners, our barns may be full, affording all manner of store. That our sheep may bring forth thousands and ten thousands in our streets. Amos is saying that psalm is turned inside out. Your young men, your fair virgins are going to be weak and faint. Withered vines. The blessings of God’s feast will be turned inside out. Scattering instead of gathering. Deafness instead of hearing. Infertility instead of children upon children. Famine instead of feast. Now, we learn in verse 14 that it’s idolatry that’s really at the root of their indifference and their injustice. Notice in verse 14 of chapter 8, they swear by the sin of Samaria. Thy God, O Dan, that verse there is describing the two golden calves that Jeroboam had put up when the kingdom split. And they’re swearing by these golden calves now. God, of course, had sworn to Israel. God, of course, had made promises to Israel to not forget the covenant he had made with Israel’s fathers. But now Israel has sworn by the gods of the nations, by her false gods. And worship the two golden calves in Dan and Bethel. You can read about that in 1 Kings 12, 28-29. So then, as we turn to chapter 9, we see God standing upon the altar. And remember how the book of Amos opens. It’s just wonderfully, like all the little boys in the room should love Amos 1-1. Because God shows up, Amos comes into northern Israel, and has a message from God for you. God is like a lion roaring. Right? That’s a little boy’s life verse right there. God is a roaring lion. We see here in chapter 9, he picks back up on this theme of God as the hunter on the prowl. He has a roaring lion. When God begins the hunt, his prey will be unable to escape. Verses 1-4 of chapter 9. I hope you noticed that vivid imagery. If they dig into hell, or if they climb up to heaven, or if they go into the sea, or wherever they try to hide, the hunter will find his prey. The once verdant land, the promised land flowing with milk and honey, will melt into a devastating flood, like the imagery here is that of Noah’s flood, the overwhelming catastrophe and destruction and cleansing of the corruption in Noah’s day. And there in verse five, we see this language of the promised land that ought to have been the dwelling place for God’s people to rest under the blessings of God. Suddenly it’s turned into the imagery of Noah’s flood deluging the earth, wiping away all corruption. The hills are going to melt. The land is going to turn into a sea. It’s quite vivid imagery that Amos gives us. And there in verse six through ten, we’re left with no question that God Almighty is behind all this judgment upon the sinful nation. None would escape. Now all that’s pretty severe. All that is a little bit like, a little hot under the collar there, Amos. That’s some intense stuff there. But the prophecies of Amos come to a close with an inconceivably glorious surprise at the end of the chapter. We’ll pick that up at the end. Now I want to make one particular application of this to begin with. It is a dangerous financial strategy to get a low balance notification. Your phone dings with a low balance notification. And then to keep spending like nothing is wrong. If you get a low balance notification, you probably should cover your bases and make sure you’ve got funds available before you go out on your next shopping spree. A low balance notification, you shouldn’t keep spending like nothing is wrong. But enough about Congress trying to pass a spending bill. So likewise, it’s foolish to notice the check engine on your dashboard and keep driving. If the oil low light is flashing at you, digging at you, you should stop. You shouldn’t keep driving. If the low oil light is flashing, if the alarms are going off on your car, stop. Don’t do what I did when I was fresh out of high school and thought, oh, the low oil light is sort of like the low gas thing and you can keep going from Denver to Fort Collins. That was a very expensive mistake, I’ll let you know. If there’s warning signs, you should stop and heed them and listen to them and correct course. But the gravest danger you can ever be in is to deliberately ignore your own sin and think that you can hide it away in some sealed compartment of your heart without it infecting your whole man. It won’t affect the rest of you. It’s only my pinky toe that I’m injecting venom into. Surely that won’t harm the rest of me. No, if there’s a warning sign, you should stop and hear the warning. Amos, along with the other prophets of his time, he was a contemporary with Isaiah and Hosea, and so they’re giving their warnings. And then, of course, later on, one of my favorite prophetic, Ezekiel has this wonderful line. He says, have I not hewn them by the prophets? If you remember from chapter 7, they even told him, they told Amos what? Go away. Move along now. Go back to the south. Go back to the farm, little farm boy. We don’t want to hear it. We’re done. Stop it. Move along. The prick of conviction you feel when you sin in some way while uncomfortable is not a sign that something is wrong. So when the preacher is talking about gossip or envy or lust or covetousness and he gets really particular, husbands, don’t be harsh with your wives. Wives, submit to your husbands. Don’t obey your parents. When the preacher is preaching up a storm and he hits that nerve and you go, oh yeah, that’s me. I did that. I said that. Shouldn’t have done that. That prick of conviction isn’t a sign that something has gone wrong. It’s a sign that your ears are still open to hear what the Spirit says to the church. However, what Amos is warning Israel about here is a warning that we all must pause for a moment and think on. He’s warning them that if they keep stopping their ears, God will make sure they stop hearing. In Romans 1, Paul talks about a judicial blindness falling upon those who know God but suppress the truth in unbelief. There is a judicial blindness that God sends as a judgment upon an individual or people, or in this text we would describe it as a judicial deafness, a deafness to hearing the word of the Lord, which is a sign of God’s judgment. The most frightful thing would be to coast along dutifully attending church each week and convincing yourself that none of this applies to you. That sermon about envy doesn’t apply to you. You are not envious. That sermon about not coveting, that doesn’t apply to you. That sermon about husbands loving your wives like Christ loved the church, that doesn’t apply to you. You don’t need to humble yourself. You don’t need to confess anything. You don’t need to make restitution for theft. You don’t need to change anything. You’re swell just the way you are. This is a sign we learn elsewhere in scripture of a sign of God’s judgment when someone has hardened their heart and won’t hear anymore. Lewis says there are two sorts of people. There are two sorts of people. Those who say to God, thy will be done. I want to serve you, I want to honor you, I want to follow you. And those to whom God says, thy will be done. He gives them over to their lust, as Romans 1 talks about. A good example of this is the argument over abortion. If you’ve ever done evangelism or any sort of pro-life advocacy, you’ll know that you can have the arguments with people and make all the cases for why a child in the womb is made in the image of God and therefore is deserving of equal protection under the law, should be preserved and guarded, should not be aborted. You can describe all of that and they’ll say, well, yeah, it’s just a fetus. And you say, well, what is, all you Latin scholars out there, what is fetus Latin for? Baby, right? You can make the whole argument, you can have the compelling case, you can describe it all, and yet at the end of the day, I had this happen just a week ago, described it all, made the case, gave all the scientific evidence, and at the end of the day, this gal I was talking with insisted, no, it’s fine to kill the baby up to birth. And maybe even after. What is that other than judicial deafness? The cotton swabs of pride in your ear and saying, I’m not going to listen anymore. Their conscience is seared. In other words, there is something worse than the embarrassment and discomfort of humbly confessing your sin and making things right with those you wronged. Now, none of us like the fact that when we realize we did something wrong and we need to make it right, none of us like the humiliation of going and making it right to the person we wronged. That’s uncomfortable. But there’s something worse than that. God can give you over to delusion. He can send, according to Amos, he can send a famine of hearing his word. He can leave you in your little make-believe world where you think you can ignore all his warning signs, that you’re heading for a cataclysmic crash, and you think you can still pull out of your tailspin before going splat into the ground. In other words, it is a fearful thing when the alarms stop going off. In other words, hear the warning. When you feel that prick of conviction, act upon it. Don’t sit on your hands. Don’t ignore it. Don’t push it to the corners. Don’t think that you can push that sin to a spot of your heart where it won’t infect other parts of you. No, confess it right away. Amos gives us here in this text a few surprises here at the end. In the first part of Amos, if you recall from a couple weeks ago, Amos began with some oracles of judgment against the nations. He kind of does this scattershot of the different nations. He begins with Israel’s neighbors, Damascus, Gaza, and Tyre. And he kind of runs through, here’s what they’re doing wrong. And you can imagine the Israelites hearing this message going, yeah, that’s right. They are the worst. That’s right. We don’t like what they’re doing. Yeah. Amos, let them have it. And then Amos moves on to the sins of Israel’s ancient relatives, the Edomites, the Ammonites, the Moabites. And you can imagine the Israelites nodding along saying, yeah, give it to them. Give it to them hot. Preach about their sins. We’ve all kind of done it when we’ve sharpened our elbow and jab our spouse or the pastors preaching on children not squabbling with one another, siblings not fighting with one another. And you can see the mom sort of giving the wag of her finger. You’re listening, right, honey? We’ve all thought, oh, so-and-so really should be here to hear this sermon today. Right? I wish those people out there could hear this sermon. And we do wish they could hear this sermon. So Amos goes to Israel’s neighbors, berates their sins, moves on to Israel’s relatives, the Edomites, Ammonites, Moabites, and then he tells the sins of her sister, the southern kingdom, Judah. And you can imagine, yeah, get them. And then the surprise at the beginning of the book. Amos lumps Israel in with the heathens. Not special, not the covenant people, but you’re like the heathens. He lumps them in with the heathens. That’s the first surprise that Amos gives us. The second surprise is found here in chapter 8. The verdant blessings of a restored Eden, which was, when you read the description of Moses as he’s approaching the promised land, the imagery there is depicting a restored Eden. It was to be the defining feature of the promised land. But we find here, I hope you picked up on it, it’s de-creation language. It’s all falling apart. It’s going nasty. It’s going sideways. The sun is going black. The moon, the earth is turning into a flood. The Deuteronomic blessings will decompose into the Deuteronomic curses. The shire will become Mordor. The water will turn dry. The sun will cease to shine. The Lord, who once fought for them as a man of war to deliver them from Egypt, will fight against them, treating them as a new Egypt. Amos’ message is not one initial. Those are the two surprises that Israel has now lumped in with the heathen. She’s not been a people separate. She’s not been acting like a chosen people. A people belonging to God, singing forth the praises of him who has called her out of darkness into his marvelous light. That’s the first surprise. The second surprise is that this promised land, this new Eden, is being decreated. Lights out on it. It’s being turned upside down and inside out. That’s shocking and surprising. And yet they don’t hear it. They don’t heed it. They stubbornly continue. And of course, with the Assyrian conquest, this all comes to pass. It’s surprising and shocking, but rather than drawing the curtains closed on a tragedy, a tragic scene of utter sorrow and devastation, the book of Amos closes as a comedy. Amos has two more stunning reversals, two more stunning surprises. Like a phoenix from the ashes, Amos surprises us with reversals of those first two surprises. The first reversal is that God would rebuild Israel by restoring the tabernacle of David. And the surprise here is that Edom and all the heathen, there in verse 12, would join Israel in that restoration. Look at verse 12. So remember the first surprise was Israel was lumped in with the heathen. But here, at this turning of the tide, as the curtains of tragedy, we think are closed. It turns to a comedy and glory. And joy begins to shine forth, for the heathen are brought into this new tabernacle of David, along with Israel. They would join Israel in that restoration. That’s the first glorious surprise, reversing the first devastating one. The second surprise reversal is that by means of this restored Davidic tabernacle, look at how the book ends. By means of this restored Davidic tabernacle, the earth would burst with a fruitfulness of grain and wine. The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Look at the language at the end of this book. He says there’s going to be grain on Mount Everest, as it were, and the harvesters are going to catch up with the sowers. The harvesters are going to catch them because the growth is happening so rapidly. And the valleys are going to be full of wine and songs will rise and the people will be planted in the land. And this reverses the decreation language of earlier. The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. But one last surprise is here. Now that’s a bit surprising. Now the tabernacle of David, when David became king in Jerusalem, remember the Ark of Covenant had its sojourns. The Philistines had taken it off and it was in a house off in a different village. And when David brings it back into Jerusalem, the tabernacle was in Shiloh at that time. Moses’ tabernacle was in Shiloh. So what David did when the Ark of Covenant came back into Jerusalem, he built a tabernacle wherein the Ark of Covenant rested in the middle and he set up choirs to sing praise to God day and night without ceasing. These Levitical choirs would sing and the glory of the Lord was there. The tabernacle of David was a house not filled with the smoke of burnt sacrifices, but with the songs of prayer. James, the apostle James, presiding at the Jerusalem council in Acts 15, declared that the ingathering of the Gentiles because of Paul and Peter’s ministry, James tells us that’s a fulfillment of Amos’ prophecy, that the tabernacle of David was being restored. This tabernacle of, not of smoke and sacrifice, but of song, was being restored as the Gentiles were being brought in to join the covenant people of God in praise to Jehovah. This is the great surprise of the new covenant. Our worship, our worship here, the worship of the church of Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of Amos’ vision. By Christ’s death and resurrection, this glorious reversal is made possible. Christ is that tabernacle of David. And this means that the church is that house composed of all nations, tribes, and tongues, made clean by the blood of the everlasting covenant which Christ established. Here in our worship, as we worship God rightly, as our hearts are made clean through the blood of Christ, as we’ve trusted in him, we’ve heard his assurance of the forgiveness of our sins. As we come to him saying, we want to worship you according to your word. And that means we need to humble ourselves and say, it’s not of good that I’ve done. As we worship God rightly, as we worship God by the blood of Christ, as we confess our sins and turn to him in true evangelical faith, repenting and forsaking our sins, and as we join with God’s people to give God glory and praise in our songs, in sitting under the word, in partaking of the supper together, here in our worship, this is how God is renewing and remaking the world out there. Our worship, then, is not some quaint, quiet, polite, politically correct thing to do. It’s not just a box to check off. Our worship here is a potent thing. Our service to God here in the courts of our King by the Spirit is made potent out there. So then, as you work on spreadsheets or try to fold fitted sheets, whether you apply yourself to the homework or to housework, it is undergirded by the covenant word proclaimed, praised, and partaken of here. This is the great surprise. This is the glorious surprise. This is the best surprise. That God is taking over the world in the most unexpected way. By this. By bread and wine. By gathered saints. Look at us. We’re all different. We’re all from many nations, tribes, and tongues. Across the world right now, there are saints worshiping God according to Scripture, through the blood of Christ, by the power of the Spirit, and God says, That’s how I’m going to recreate the world. This is the great surprise, that God is overtaking the world in the most unexpected way. A house, the house of David, the tabernacle of David, a house filled with songs, a house where the living word is heard with open ears, a house whose door is cleansing water, a house which hosts a banquet of bread and wine. Let’s pray. Our good and gracious Father, we thank you that by the worship of the living God, by the blood of the covenant, by the blood of the everlasting covenant, because you sent your Son to lay down his life in our stead and that you’ve regenerated us by the renewing grace of your Holy Spirit, we now come to you to offer our prayers and our praises to sit under your word and we trust and we know that in this worship you are truly turning over the world, you are recreating the world, you are renewing us and therefore that one day the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as waters cover the sea. I pray that you would give us, your saints, grace to worship in this way, to humbly serve you both here in our corporate worship and in our private daily lives that we would offer up our worship to you. show less

Summary In this sermon, Pastor Brito emphasizes the importance of sincere confession of sin as a transformative act that brings believers closer to God’s mercy. Citing the prophet Amos, the sermon explores God’s judgment imagery through symbols like locusts, fire, and a plumb line, representing the covenantal standards by which God measures His people. The speaker warns against the complacency of faith, urging congregants to recognize the gravity of their spiritual state and make true confessions rather than performative ones. The call is to engage authentically with God’s word and symbols, highlighting the role of individual responsibility within the community, while encouraging perseverance in faith and repentance during the Lenten season. By examining their hearts against God’s standards, believers can seek renewal and avoid the pitfalls of hypocrisy. Transcription Choose show more to view the transcription. Transcriptions are AI generated and MAY be incorrect. Rely on the spoken word heard in the audio file. show more Brothers and sisters, confession of sin is not a mere formality. It is an act of truth in the sacred scriptures. When we say that we have sinned in thought, word, and deed, we are refusing to hide behind our excuses or appearances. We admit not only what we have done, but what we have left undone. We acknowledge that our love for our triune God has been partial, and that our love for our neighbor has been inconsistent. And so confession humbles our pride. It interrupts our feeble attempts at self-justification, and it reorders our hearts towards the mercy of Almighty God. It is how we step back into the reality before the God who made the heavens and the earth. We do not confess to wallow in guilt, but to receive grace. And so honest confession clears the ground so that forgiveness may take root of His name. Our sermon text on Thursday is from the prophet Amos, beginning in chapter 7. This is what the Lord told me. He is so small. And the Lord relented concerning it. It shall not be, says the Lord. This is what the Lord God showed me. Behold, the Lord God was calling for a judgment by fire. And it devoured the great deep and was eating up the land. And I said, O Lord God, please cease. How can Jacob stand? He is so small. And the Lord relented concerning this. This also shall not be, said the Lord God. This is what He showed me. And behold, the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in His hand. And the Lord said unto me, Amos, what do you see? And I said, A plumb line. And the Lord said, Behold, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel. I will never again pass by them. The high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste. And I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword. And Amaziah said to Amos, But never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom. And your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword, and your land shall be divided up with a measuring line. You yourselves shall die in an unclean land, and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land. This is what the Lord God showed me. Behold, a basket of summer fruit. And he said, Amos, what do you see? And I said, a basket of summer fruit. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight. Amen. Please be seated. Grace, mercy, and peace be with you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. I have very much looked forward to being with you all and sharing of the famous hospitality in Christ Church, D.C. A delight to be with you representing the CREC on this Lord’s Day. People of God, evangelicals have a very conflicting relationship with symbols. Do they not? We love our pumpkin pie. We love our 4th of July. And here we stand in D.C. whose very presence in the political landscape is one big titanic symbolic force. Monuments, road signs, buildings, the White House, all these things, they portray a certain power and gravitas, elegance, beauty, splendor, and on and on. But the Bible is, from the beginning to the end, a very symbolic book because God is a lover of language and He is also a lover of symbols. The entire Bible is filled with them. And the purpose of biblical symbols is to whet our appetite or to build a certain literary appetite for literalness. Symbols prepare us for literalness. Symbols are not opposed to history, but rather symbols strengthen our reading of history, of literal history. And if you happen to be somewhat allergic to symbols this morning, you’ll have an enormously difficult time reading through the prophetic literature of the Old Covenant Scriptures. They have for quite some time divorced themselves from the sacred liturgy of the Old World. They have abandoned His covenant promise. Their worship is divorced from justice, but yet God, amidst all these things, promises a hope for a people. And He promises unto them through the great Davidic renewal that is sure to come in the life of Israel, specifically through David’s Lord, Messiah Jesus. How does the prophet Amos communicate this grandiose message to the people of Israel living in this world, divorced from the worship of God, acting as if they are truly understanding and acting upon the liturgy, but in the reality are being rather hypocritical in their exercise of the liturgy of God. Which symbolic language for the people of God? In chapter 7, as we read, he uses quite a bit of symbolism here, and he begins with a very famous symbolic note. He uses a host of locusts, and this becomes, not only in Amos, but in other prophetic books, one of the earliest and most striking prophetic images. Locusts in Egypt, of course, they were the great eighth plague in Egypt, and it was a plague literally. Here, Amos is not merely speaking of locusts as agricultural pests. No, here, for Amos, locusts function as a sign of God’s covenantal and judicial warning to the people of Israel. Locusts function as God’s perfectly designed covenant symbol. And here in our passage, as you heard from our lesson this morning, you can already see that Amos is functioning very much like a mediator on behalf of the people of Israel. He is what theologians call a covenant prosecutor. He is mediating on behalf of the people. He is pleading before God on behalf of the people of Israel. He is a protection of God Himself. And if the people do not turn back to Yahweh God, judgment will come. They will be symbolically devoured by the judgment of God, which leads us to conclude that a nation or a people who fail to turn from their evil ways to the great God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will indeed receive God’s locusts. They receive the blessings of God. They receive the renewal of God’s mercy upon them. And we saw in that first set of imageries that Amos’ petition is answered. And we see here in our text that God relents of the disaster He would bring to the people. But then the prophet continues and he uses another rich symbol in verses 4 through 6. This, of course, is a much more common image to our Western eyes. The image of a fire. The fire here, of course, will destroy the crop at a symbolic level. It is going to signal drought. It is literally going to destroy everything they have produced. But at a symbolic level, it signals that the people of Israel are dry. There is no flourishing. There is no joy. There is no delight in their worship. And all these symbols, as they are hearing from the lips of the prophets, function, as a kind of apocalyptic sign. If the people depend on the land to produce and to flourish, these images are precisely the kinds of images that they would never wish to hear from the lips of the prophet. And now we begin to see that the locust and the fire that Amos is building, what we might call a prophetic case against the people. And the symbols are just piling up. God, of course, as we know through the Scriptures, in Hebrews in particular, He is a consuming fire. And so for us, the lesson is we don’t want to be on the side of His wrathful display. And so how does Amos pray? There is a kind of liturgical, prophetic repetition taking place. The same language is used. He says, And what happens again for the second time? The Bible says that Yahweh relents. God’s relenting, by the way, is always in the context of His covenant with His people. It is conditioned upon the people’s response unto Him. God makes promises conditioned on the people’s obedience. If they obey, He relents. He removes the locust. He removes the fire that He has promised to come upon the people. And then comes the final image, a very unique ancient one, the plumb line. And the plumb line, of course, it’s a builder’s tool that is used to measure whether a building stands perfectly straight, whether a wall stands perfectly straight, or whether there are flaws in the measurement. And here, what the plumb line signifies as this great prophetic imagery, it signifies the standard by which God judges the people. Objective covenant standard. This is how God measures His people and determines how far off they are from His covenant promises. When God measures Israel, what does He see? What does He conclude? When He measures Israel against that standard, He finds her absolutely crooked in justice, crooked in worship, crooked in all her ways. And now He announces judgment. Rather than further delay, rather than offering more apocalyptic images, God now announces judgment. And by this third symbol, again, third is kind of a new creation here. He is this third symbol here. The judgment has reached its apex, its cumulative effect. And by the third symbol of judgment, God’s long-suffering is coming to an end. There is a finality to His judgment signs and symbols. And you will note that by the third symbol, the prophet Amos no longer intercedes here. Israel has warned God long enough. I’ve had the joy of traveling to a host of CREC churches in my term as presiding minister. And I know for a fact, whether here in D.C. or in Tokyo, Japan, or in Pichilemo, Chile, or doing an exceptional work among our CREC congregations. But brothers and sisters, do not squander God’s kindness. Do not. We must not think that we are too great to fall. We may believe, even this morning, we may believe sincerely that we possess every spiritual privilege, but when the Lord lovingly applies His plumb line and measures whether we are straight or crooked, when He applies the plumb line to the culture of this congregation, what will the Lord of glory, what will He find among you, brothers and sisters? What will He find? What will it reveal among you? Will it reveal a culture of confession? Will it reveal that our confession is real? Or will it reveal that we have been kneeling in vain? Will it reveal that our confession is merely spoken but not lived out? We are in covenant union with Jesus Christ. And this is part of His family program for our congregations, not only the CRC, but in every other denomination out there. But this is part of His family program to our congregations. The Lord is testing, and His testing is not His intrusion. When Jesus Christ tests His people, it is because we belong unto Him. He only tests those whom He loves. He only enters into union with Him. He turns the hearts of those whom He loves and cherishes and has placed His covenant affection upon. What God is doing among us, even here today in D.C., is a gracious examination, aligning His people with truth. Because He is a gracious God, He aligns you with truth rather than leaving you to your self-deception. And this is a fitting message for us during this Lenten season as we examine not only our own hearts, but the life of our congregation as you joyously await the arrival of your new pastor in a few months. And amidst all these images, as Amos has developed this remarkable covenantal argument, amidst all these images we have a very unique interlude in our passage. And what we see in Amos 7, we see now an exchange between Amos and Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, a very unique one here. And the reason this exchange, we might say this political exchange takes place, is because as you may have noticed, Amos has just announced something very hard for religious leaders to accept. He has announced that they are under the judgment of God and that those symbols are a preparatory judgment for the literal judgment that is to come. And he has said something hard. God himself has measured the nation. He has measured its ecclesia, its church, and he has found them crooked. And it is very true that nothing is harder for a devout people to hear than that their very religion has become offensive to God. Instead of hearing those delightful words, well done, my good and faithful servant, here Israel receives these words, I am offended by your crooked service. And Amaziah wants Amos out of his way, as you have heard, read. Amos is kind of a pre-John the baptizer, and wherever he goes, he causes havoc among the religious hypocrites. He is kind of a pre-John the baptizer. And this is what Amos tells to the priestly office of Bethel. Amos, in response to the priestly offense towards Amos, he says, Go, you seer! Flee to the land of Judah. This is what sell. There eat bread, and there prophesy, but never again prophesy at Bethel. This is what they’re saying to Amos. For, he says, it is the king’s sanctuary. It is the royal residence. Don’t you see, Amos? You have violated holy ground with your message. Who do you think you are to proclaim all these covenant symbols against us? We are God’s holy people. How dare you act as if you are a discerner of the hearts of men, especially holy men? Now, what does Amos do here? How does Amos respond? What does he say? He doesn’t retreat, I can assure you of that. What does he do? He stands on the authority of his vocation, on the authority of his calling. Because for Amos, it doesn’t matter how many degrees the bishops of Bethel have. It doesn’t matter how many scrolls these priests of Bethel have written for the New York Times. Amos has no interest in a seat at the table of the priestly elite. None whatsoever. Because Amos knows his calling. He was called by God for his assignment. And he certainly does not need the approval of the ecclesial establishment of the ancient world. He even says, I was not a son of a prophet. Look at my calling. I was a sheep breeder. I was a tender of sycamore. I was just minding my own business. And then I received a direct mandate from God in verse 15. Go prophesy to my people, God said to me. You see, a true prophet fears God more than earthly institutions. He fears God more than institutions. His credibility comes from God. His credibility does not rest in credentials granted by the sanctuary, but it rests in obedience granted by him. Heaven. Granted by heaven. And here Amos’ speech moves the plumb line closer. You oppose me, Amos says, then I will move God’s discernment even closer. He is going to look even deeper. He is going to take his heavenly magnifying glass and look even closer at your transgressions. It no longer measures only thrones and temples. Now it measures men. The issue is now no longer is Israel upright, but the issue is, as Amos declares, are you upright? We have declared that corporately you have been led astray, but now are you upright? And you see the plumb line never changes its principle. It’s applied again and again in the same measure. God’s standard is no respecter of persons. God’s standard measures kings and priests and pulpits and pews and churches and consciences alike. Prophecy always lands not in abstraction but in the life of a man before the face of God. Or as my old professor John Frame would say, theology is the application of the Word of God to all areas of life. Theology does not remain in the world of abstraction, brothers and sisters. No, it enters and dwells and abides directly with you. It reads your heart. It reads your frames. For He is the Creator of all things. And now the spotlight shifts to Amos himself, revealing the anatomy of what it means to be a true servant of Yahweh. And Amos defends to the accusations placed against him are four words. Not I, the Lord. Not I, the Lord. In our passage, he denies any kind of natural qualification that would have made him worthy to address the people through these symbolic riches. He denies career ambition. He denies self-appointment. He was no professional prophet. He was no guild member. He was no seminary graduate of prophetic schools. He was a shepherd. He was a farmer. He was a man who was content with ordinary labors. And then God interrupted his labors and he says, the Lord took me. He was seized from the pasture. He was apprehended by heaven. He was drafted into service. This is an authority from outside his life. He rearranged his life and rearranged his calling. He became what he never planned to be and would never have chosen. And this is why, saints of Christ’s church, this is why Amos does not bend when he is pressured. This is why you ought not to bend when you are pressured. When human authority calls you and commands you to be silenced, the man and the woman remembers, I did not put myself here. I was placed here. I have a vocation from God to obey. I have a word from God to speak. I have a work from God to do. And the man of God, the woman of God, the child of God stands firm because he stands where God has put him. And now the prophet shows us why the plumb line matters. God measures. Yes, he does indeed measure. But God is also, he waits. He also waits. And over time, indeed, what we love becomes what we are. And in chapter 8, Israel came with baskets of fruits celebrating blessing, prosperity, and identity as God’s covenant people. Their songs were right. Their liturgy was intact. They spoke the right words from the outside. And so hear me carefully. Hear me carefully, brothers and sisters. God’s delays are cultivation. Let me phrase it this way. Don’t waste God’s patience. Don’t waste God’s long-suffering towards you. Today, Amos says, it’s still spring. The line is still correcting. The line is still adjusting. The line is still discerning your heart, discerning the hearts of this congregation. The fruit is still forming. None. Here we are in this place. D.C. is filled with monuments. All of them are meant to be symbols of permanence, are they not? But yet none are immune. None of them, none of the walls of this city are immune to the plumb line of God. You are not immune to God’s discerning ways. And I know God is doing a great work here, but do not, I urge you, do not grow weary in well-doing. Do not become complacent while God gives us symbol after symbol and we look over them. Do not treat God’s symbols, His images as unimportant. Be delighted when God refines you. Rejoice together that He is forming something new in your midst. So how shall we then live? We must love God’s symbols rightly. Love His symbols rightly. When God gives us His Word, when God gives us His Word, we honor it. When the Lord Jesus gives His body and blood, we eat and drink by faith. When the Lord Jesus forms this community of love and joy and peace here, treat the household of faith as the place of hospitality, as the place of festivity. Press on out living the culture of heaven in the midst of this congregation. Love God’s symbols. Receive them. Sing them. Love them. Cherish them. Absorb them. Make them yours. But then we must welcome the plumb line into our own lives. Let us spend from this day until that glorious Easter Sunday when the champagne bottles burst open. Let us spend the remainder of this Lenten season contemplating who we are, contemplating our weaknesses, contemplating our needs, contemplating our hunger for self-importance. And to nail these things, the cross of Jesus. Because only our Lord Jesus Christ can raise us from our sense of self-worth and give us His worth. Welcome God’s plumb line. But finally, we must also refuse the kind of performative religion that in many ways permeated the religious culture of Israel throughout the prophetic writings. Your calling to worship the triumphant God on this day is far greater than anything that happens in this town. It is far greater than anything that happens in this town. We stand where God has placed us. We sing loudly on Sunday because we will sing forever. But we surely cannot sing loudly on Sunday and live crookedly on Monday. We cannot offer. This performance, because we are not performers. We are participants in God’s sacred song. And for us, that means fathers, stand where God put you. Mothers, stand where God put you. Pastors, ministers of the gospel, stand where God has put you. Magistrates, stand where God has placed you. Because when the plumb line drops, only what stands by divine commission will endure. So live straight under the plumb line. Soft under the warnings, quick to repent, bold in your calling, joyful in true worship. Because the Lord of the harvest will gather what has been grown and blessed are all those who are ripened unto God’s righteousness. Let us pray together. Our Father and our God, we pray, O Lord, that you would hear us. That our voices would join the voices of angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. We pray that you would hear us, that you would smile upon us, and that you would bless us for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. show less

Summary Pastor Potteiger draws a parallel between an incident of raw sewage polluting the Potomac River and the spiritual corruption within the church, emphasizing that without genuine repentance, worship becomes hypocritical and unpleasing to God. Referencing the Book of Amos, particularly chapters 5 and 6, the sermon highlights Israel’s false sense of security amidst their rituals, cautioning that the day of the Lord, which they anticipated, would instead bring judgment upon them. The speaker outlines four movements within the text: 1) the misguided desire for the day of the Lord, 2) the need for repentance over ritualistic worship, 3) the complacency of leaders ignoring spiritual decay, and 4) the inevitable ruin facing the nation due to pride and injustice. He underscores the church’s role in addressing the nation’s spiritual maladies, arguing that true righteousness can only emerge through faith in Christ, who not only forgives but transforms. The call to action emphasizes lifting high the name of Jesus to foster streams of righteousness that can revitalize the entire nation. Transcription Choose show more to view the transcription. Transcriptions are AI generated and MAY be incorrect. Rely on the spoken word heard in the audio file. show more I have been told that several weeks ago there was, shall we say, an unwelcomed contribution added to the Potomac River with millions of gallons of raw sewage. And this is a shame, not just because it’s gag reflex nasty, but because it’s a corruption for a time of what was intended to be a life-giving blessing, a river of refreshment flowing through the city. As we continue on in Amos today, what happened to the Potomac is a picture of what happens to the worship and the witness of the church when there is no true repentance. What should be a life-giving source of righteous refreshment becomes putrid, becomes offensive when tainted by hypocrisy and mere religious formality with no reformation of our hearts and our deeds. To cleanse the Potomac, as it were. To remove corruptions that have seeped into our souls this past week. Have you proudly thought yourself holier than your brother? Have you been impatient and harsh towards your children or your spouse without following up with earnest repentance? Have you relished in the downfall of a rival? Have you tweeted about an enemy but never paused to pray for them first? Of course you have. This or some other sin. And so repentance is the rhythm where the Lord does his dredging and his cleansing work of his people so that our worship and our witness may be a potent blessing in the land. Well, before I read the text today, which is a lengthy hunk of prophetic meat, I want to remind us how the book begins. The first words of Amos in the book are, This is the creator and the covenant king of the church, not offering his humble opinion on the state of things, not looking to have a round table conversation on the truly regrettable effects of idolatry in the land. This is the Lord roaring through a prophetic megaphone to the nation and to his people. He roars that he may rouse a complacent nation who has placed themselves in his cross hairs. So the question ought not be, as the text is read, how do I feel about this text? Rather, it should be, what is so urgent that would cause the Lord to roar? What is so urgent that would cause the Lord to roar? Quick intro before I read the text. Amos is a shepherd prophet whom the Lord had called out of the southern kingdom to pronounce a scathing rebuke upon the northern kingdom, a kingdom who had experienced a season of remarkable physical blessing, land expansion, but who had not received the blessing so that they could be a blessing. It was exactly the opposite. They had grown fat in their comfort, idolatrous in their appetites, and hypocritical in their religion, utterly self-deceived now about their standing before God. That is the context. With that, I will read our text for today. We’ll begin in Amos 5, chapter 5, verse 18, and I will go all the way through 6, 14. Amos 5, beginning in verse 18. I hate, I despise your feasts. I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and your grain offerings, I will not accept them. And the peace offerings of your fattened animals, I will not look upon them. Take away from me this noise of your songs to the melody of your harps. I will not listen, but let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Did you bring to me sacrifices and offerings during the 40 years in the wilderness, O house of Israel? And I, I will send you into exile beyond Damascus, says the Lord, whose name is the God of hosts. Woe to those who are at ease in Zion and to those who feel so secure on the mountain of Samaria. The notable men of the first of the nations to whom the house of Israel comes, pass over to Kalna and see. And from there, go to Hamath, the great. Then go down to Gath of the Philistines. Are you better than these kingdoms? Or is their territory greater than your territory? Oh, you who put far away the day of disaster, but bring near the seat of violence. Woe to those who lie in beds of ivory, who stretch themselves out on their couches. They eat lambs from the flocks and calves from the midst of the stall. Sing idle songs to the sound of the harp. And like David, they invent for themselves instruments of music, who drink wine in bowls and anoint themselves with the finest oils. But they are not grieved. They are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph. Therefore, they shall now be the first of those who go into exile. And the revelry of those who stretch themselves out shall pass away. God has sworn by himself, declares the Lord, the God of hosts, I abhor the pride of Jacob. I hate his strongholds. I will deliver up this city and all that is in it. If ten men remain in one house, they’ll die. And when one’s relative, the one who anoints him for burial, shall take him up to bring the bones out of the house, and shall say to him who is in the innermost parts of the house, Is there still anyone with you? He will say, No. And he shall say, Silence! We must not mention the name of the Lord now. For behold, the Lord commands, and the great house shall be struck down into fragments, and the little house into bits. Do horses run on rocks? Does one plow where there is oxen? But you have turned justice into poison, and the fruit of righteousness into wormwood. Have we not by our own strength captured carnium for ourselves? For behold, I will raise up against you a nation, O house of Israel, declares the Lord, the God of hosts, and they shall oppress you from Labo Hamath to the brook of the Ereba. The word of the Lord. For Lord and our God, we pray that you would apply this where it needs to go. I pray that you would humble the proud, I pray that you would comfort the humble. And the people of God said, and amen. Well, today to wrap our arms around this hefty text, rather than getting into the granular of it, which space does not allow, I want to consider it like a section of this roaring symphony. Amos is a roaring symphony. I want to consider four key movements from our text and then land with two key takeaways for us today in 2026. In Washington, D.C. So with that, let’s dive in to this roaring symphony. Movement number one, we might call it, you desire the day that you should dread. You desire the day you should dread. This is verses 18 through 20. It begins with, woe to you who desire the day of the Lord. And the day of the Lord in scripture is a day of divine visitation. It is a day, if you think of tombstone, of a reckoning, of judgment. And so Israel, the house of Israel, was hastening the day of the Lord. Essentially saying, it’ll be fantastic when the day of the Lord comes. Bring it on. Let judgment roll down from heaven to earth. Bring it on. We desire that day. We would like to see that day come. But here’s the disconnect. Here’s the delusion that Israel was under. They were the ones in the center of the bullseye when judgment would come. When the hammer fell from heaven, it would land on them first. If they were in their right mind, the day of the Lord, barring repentance, would be a dread, not a desire. And so Amos says, you think that you’ve outrun a lion. Not realizing you’ve sprinted into a bear’s den. You think you’ve reached a safe house, not realizing that there are serpents crawling behind the sheetrock. They think the day of the Lord will be a sunrise for them, not realizing it will in fact be a tsunami that will crash upon them if they will remain in their stupor. The Lord is roaring to awaken them to this, that they might repent before they come to ruin. Second movement, verses 21 through 27, which we might call, right worship begins with repentance, not with rituals. Right worship begins with repentance, not rituals. The reason Israel had a false sense of security, believing that they were in fact the Lord’s favorites, that he was for them and against everyone else, is because they had such a pristine liturgy. Their religious paint-by-numbers worksheet was flawless. They did the feasts on the right days. They did the sacrifices in the right orders. Their harmonies were on point. Their amens were the heartiest in the land. How could God not be pleased with them? It was all by the book. The Lord had to be happy. But the Lord says, through Amos, I despise your feasts. Do not delight me. They disgust me. They make me gag. You thought you were lighting sweet perfume by your culture, by your worship, but it smells like a dank morgue to me. I’m not impressed. I am provoked by your songs. They are so much noise and static. Then verses 26 through 27, he reveals that even their worship, which they thought was so pristine, wasn’t actually pure. They had pet idols. They had presumptuous sins that no longer panged their conscience that they had made peace with. And so Amos hints, yes, you’re still in the land. That has a shelf life. Exile is coming. Worse than anything you’ve known, that’s what he means by beyond Damascus. But in verse 24, we find a very important word. A word on what repentance and reformation will look like. What’s the photonegative of a culture marked by hypocrisy and idolatry? Amos calls it justice. Rolling down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Again, draw out that pleasant Potomac metaphor. The Lord is saying, you want to convert the river of your worship and culture from festering sludge to clean, clear, life-giving water that is a blessing to the land? Then you must repent. Remove the sewage of hypocrisy, of idolatry, of lip service worship, and prime the well with true righteousness and true justice and let that clean water flow. We’ll come back to verse 24 at the end, so we’ll set that aside for now. Go on to movement three in this symphony. So you’re desiring the day that you should dread, right? Worship begins with repentance, not with rituals. Movement three, your leader’s physical comforts have blinded them to the nation’s spiritual calamity. Your leader’s physical comforts have blinded them to the nation’s spiritual calamity. We see this in chapter six, first six verses. So again, this was a season of great material blessing in the northern kingdom. Not surprisingly, its leaders hoarded the best portions for themselves. And so Amos comes roaring with a great woe, especially to complacent leaders. He says in the first three verses, those who are at ease in Zion, who are secure amongst the notable men of the first of the nations. And then he lists some nations, nations notably, who were now examples of divine judgment. Then verses four through six, he paints a picture of the opulence and the luxury that they enjoyed. They stretched out on ivory beds, ate lamb while they listened to harps, drank whole bowls of wine while getting manicures. And hear me here, this is very important. Blessings are wrong. That is one of the ditches the church can tend towards. No, Timothy says, all things are to be enjoyed, appreciated when received with thanksgiving and gratitude. But the outrage of it all in this context is found at the end of verse six. They lived in such decadence, but they were not grieved over the ruin of Joseph. That’s the issue. They enjoyed such decadence, but were not grieved at the spiritual calamity that had descended upon their once blessed land. And remember, Joseph is a name that God has given for the nation of Israel. They idolized their comforts while the whole nation had fallen into spiritual calamity. And this spiritual calamity, Amos says, will now lead to physical calamity as well. This brings us to the final movement in our text today. Amos declares, your revelry will soon turn to ruin. Your revelry will soon turn to ruin. We see this in verses 7 through 14. Therefore, pronouncement, therefore, this is what’s going to happen. Because of your calloused comfort, your pride-hardened hearts, he says the party is about to have an abrupt stop. The revelry will come to an end. And Amos envisions Israel as a great house that is about to be thoroughly struck down, blown apart, and leveled. And there’s a haunting irony in verse 10, where previously they desired the day of the Lord, they wanted the day of the Lord. When it finally arrives, Amos says, if you even speak the name of the Lord, you will be rebuked. Don’t even speak the name of the Lord now because of what our sin has brought upon us. And again, Amos names the chief offenses of the nation, and its leaders that they let out in. Pride, injustice, unrighteousness. And today ends with one last irony. Namely, Israel will go from boasting about how they with their own strength had subdued nations. Instead, the Lord is going to raise up another nation to oppress them and to humiliate them and then to finally send them into exile. Puritan Matthew Henry commenting on this text said, those who are not reformed by the judgments of God will be pursued by them. Those who are not reformed by the warnings and the judgments of God will be pursued by them then. And we know historically that in the 8th century BC, the Lord used Assyria as an instrument in his hands to judge the northern kingdom of Israel and to send them into exile. It happened in time and space. So that’s our text for today. The warning and woes for the nation that had turned her back on the Lord, who grew fat on his gifts while rejecting the giver and neglecting the most vulnerable. Now for us, what do we do with this text? How do we plug this text in as we go forward this week? There’s two key things that I want to help us understand. That I really want to drill down on for just a moment. First, it helps us understand the state of our nation. Second, it helps us understand our call as the church. First, understanding the state of our nation. A narrative that is often set forth in our time is the idea that nations are not, cannot be moral agents. Interestingly, those same folks will say America never had a Christian nation, but look at all the sins of her past, right? Which reveals that, yes, we actually do understand how God built the world, that nations are moral agents, and that’s because they are. And as such, nations can receive blessings for faithfulness or judgments for a lack of faithfulness. The book of Amos makes it abundantly clear. God deals with us, yes, as individuals, but also as nations as well. Verse 8 of chapter 6, he says, I abhor the pride of Jacob. And he doesn’t mean the man Jacob. He died over a thousand years ago. He means the pride of the nation, the pride of Jacob. He’ll judge them as a nation by raising up another nation to punish them. Even back in chapter 1, Amos does a checklist of nations, nations that have come to ruin, including pagan nations, because of their rebellion. Or recall the king of Nineveh repenting at Jonah’s warnings and then calling for realm-wide repentance as a result of his repentance. Examples could be multiplied. All over the scriptures. Proverbs 14, 32. Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to the people. And the reason this is vital to grasp in light of the warnings from Amos today is because it helps us understand our situation as a nation generally. We know blessings from the hand of God like the world had never seen. And at our founding, we knew it. We believed it. We believed it so much that we printed in God we trust on our currency. We believed it so much that we baked into our pledge one nation under God. It was so foundational that even those like Franklin who were by no means Orthodox or Evangelicals still acknowledged it. He said, And yet, how far we have fallen. Our ancient text today is a very present rebuke to our land now. We have grown fat on God’s gifts while rejecting the giver. We have perverted justice and protection to the most vulnerable, namely to the children in our land. We have subsidized the destruction of the family unit under the name of welfare, which often de-incentivizes marriage and dismisses the essential role of fatherly responsibility. We even have language like the marriage penalty when we talk about taxes. Think about that for a second. Our government prints money that says, in God we trust, and then it seizes that money from the citizens through excessive taxation to funnel some to Planned Parenthood, and to the indoctrination of our nation’s children, and to godless propaganda and sexual perversion. Our leaders cover and refuse to prosecute unconscionable evil in the name of political expedience. We’ve taken the loveliest and most historic church buildings in our land, and have converted them as centers of rebellion and resistance to the living God, bantering them in trans flags, revealing a visceral hostility, a visceral hostility to the creator and his image in the world, the one who made them male and female and all quite good. Like in Amos, we’ve literally put a bullseye of judgment on the cathedrals in our land. To put it frankly, America has apostatized. We have rejected the God we claim that we trusted in, claim we trust in every time we spend a dollar, and we have replaced it with worship of idols like the nations did in Amos. The idol of self, the idol of autonomy, the idol of lust, the idol of easy comforts that have numbed us to our spiritual calamity. And as a result, in many ways, we are a nation actively under judgment. But praise be to God, the story is still being written. And though we may have turned our back on the Lord, the Lord has not yet turned his back on us. And there are glimmers of hope, rumblings of reformation and revival, of awakening from spiritual slumber in our land. This is evidence of it, even what’s happening right now. And this is the second application of our text. Yes, we must understand the state of our nation, but secondly, we must understand what our call is then as the church, because we are the ones that possess the answer to the woes in this land. And though we are in our nation’s capital, a place that churns with political solutions, what is most needed in DC is fundamentally not something political or not something partisan. Sure, we can celebrate that there’s been encouraging movements, some legislation that has moved the needle closer to sanity over the last year. But we as Christians must understand DC’s fundamental problem is not an issue she can legislate herself out of. It is not an issue she can lobby her way out of. She can’t executive order her way out of it. She can’t bribe her way out of it. She cannot PR spin her way out of it because her fundamental problem is not a political problem. Our fundamental problem is a spiritual problem. It will not come through any self-righteousness that we can gin up in ourselves. It will not come through any resolutions that we cleverly craft through ChatGPT. If righteousness will be established in our land, it will come in one way, in one way only, by turning back again to the righteous one. To the Lord Jesus Christ in repentance and true faith. Because Christ and Christ alone is the hope of Washington, D.C. Christ and Christ alone is the hope for our land. Christ and Christ alone can dredge the Potomac of our souls and remove our sin and our shame. Only his blood can cleanse us of our religious hypocrisy, of our flagrant idolatry. We want Christians there and we want them to do a heck of a job to the glory of Christ with integrity and courage. But what D.C. needs at the fundamental level is not a new political consultant. She needs propitiation for her sins and the imputed righteousness of another. 1 John 2, 1-2 John 3, 1 John 3, 1-2 is a well deep enough to cover every sin in our city and in our land. And Christ’s spirit is powerful enough to bring life and resurrection to anyone. If he can do it for you, if he can do it for me, he can do it for everyone. Every time you look in the mirror, you should just feel a fresh wind of hope break over you, thinking that clearly nothing is so lost that Christ can’t find. Clearly nothing is so clean. Clearly no one is so rebellious that Christ can’t make righteous. And so the call for the church is simple. Yes, be faithful in whatever sphere of influence the Lord has gifted you. But the call for the church is simple. Let us lift high the righteous one. Let us lift high the Lord Jesus Christ. Let us do it with courage. Let us do it with faith. Faith in the one who said, when I am lifted up, I will draw all men to myself. You don’t need to draw people to Christ. You don’t need to convert people to Christ. In fact, you cannot do either of those things. That’s his work. But you can lift high the name of Christ in your workplace, in your worship, in your family, in any part of the sphere of influence the Lord has given to you. And Jesus said, when I am lifted up, I will draw men to myself. And when he does, something really remarkable happens. Jesus doesn’t just forgive people. He remakes them. He doesn’t just forgive people. It’s like, okay, get out of hell free card now. That’s not the gospel. That’s part of the gospel. That’s good news, not going to hell. But that’s not the entirety of the gospel. He doesn’t just forgive people. He remakes them. He changes their affections. So that they become increasingly repulsed by what is putrid and drawn to what is righteous. And as the spirit works, converting both pagans and politicians and maturing saints, a thousand tiny streams of true Christ-wrought righteousness start to flow and gather together so that the river begins to grow and starts to spread throughout the city, spread throughout the land. And so it may it be. May it be in this place, in this time, and may it be for the glory of Christ and for the salvation of our city and for the joy of our great-grandchildren. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Our Lord and our God, we know we don’t deserve it, but we do ask of it. We pray that your face would shine upon us. We pray that though we deserve judgment good and hard, you have been so gracious to us. We thank you for the glimmers of hopes, pray, Lord, that we would not be enchanted by political solutions, that we would lift high the name of Christ, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, and he would cause righteousness to flow once again like a river. And the people of God said, and amen, amen. show less

Summary In this sermon, Pastor Doug Wilson emphasizes the profound nature of worship as a divine gathering with God, transcending mere theological discussions. Drawing on the text from Amos 5:1-17, he highlights a spiritual connection where believers worldwide unite in worship before God’s throne. The theme centers on the transformation of humanity from a fallen state (Humanity 1.0) to a renewed version through Jesus Christ (Humanity 2.0). The speaker urges repentance, asserting that seeking God and living righteously is essential for spiritual survival, while warning against idolatry and injustices, particularly in societal leadership. He explains the literary structure of Amos’ message and stresses the importance of aligning both internal faith and external actions in true worship. Ultimately, the call is to actively seek the living God, publicly confess one’s faith, and embrace justice, mercy, and repentance to foster personal and societal transformation. Transcription Choose show more to view the transcription. Transcriptions are AI generated and MAY be incorrect. Rely on the spoken word heard in the audio file. show more The worship of God in the name of Jesus Christ is not a weekly meeting of people who are interested in theological issues. It is a time when we gather together with our God. He meets with his people. When the words of the call to worship are uttered, we believe that something spiritual happens. Something actually happens. And in the spiritual realm, the roof retracts. The Holy Spirit gathers us up and takes us, escorts us into the heavenly places in order to worship God before the throne. And that means that we’re not a little sectarian band worshiping God in a closed room. We’re worshiping God together with all the saints all over the world because the same thing is happening in every believing Christian church. The roof retracts and we all gather before the throne on the Lord’s day in order to worship Him together. And so consequently, we don’t believe that this is simply a special interest group. We believe that this is the body of Christ. This is something that God is doing in the world. Has established in Christ humanity 2.0. Humanity 1.0 had some bugs. You and I are one of them. Humanity 1.0 was given to us in the garden. We rebelled against God and crashed. And the theologians call it the fall. I prefer to call it the crash. And God, in His great mercy, when the time was fully right, sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law. And what’s happening in our worship, what’s happening in our Christian lives together, is that God is transforming us. He’s making us into something. And what He’s making us into, what He’s fashioning us into, is human beings. And He is using the material of wreckage of human being. So the wreckage of human being that was the result of the crash is now being formed and shaped into a new humanity, humanity 2.0. And the template for that is the Lord Jesus Christ. And every worship service, additional progress is made toward that end. And so consequently, that is what we are doing here this morning. The text this morning is from Amos, chapter 5, verses 1 through 17. These are the words of God. There is none to raise her up. And they calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth. The Lord is His name. That strengtheneth the spoiled against the strong, so that the spoiled shall come against the fortress. They hate Him that rebuketh in the gate, and they abhor Him that speaketh uprightly. For as much, therefore, as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat, ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them. Ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them. For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins. They afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right. Therefore the prudent shall keep silence in that time, for it is an evil time. The Lord of hosts shall be with you as you have spoken. Hate the evil and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate. It may be that the Lord God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph. Therefore the Lord, the God of hosts, the Lord saith thus, Wailing shall be in all the streets, and they shall say in all the highways, Alas, alas, that they shall call the husbandmen to mourning, and such as are skillful of lamentation to wailing. And in all the vineyards shall be wailing, for I will pass through them, saith the Lord. Father and gracious God, we thank you for your word, we thank you for the spirit that inspired it, and for that same spirit present here with us today. I pray that your Holy Spirit would take these words and apply to our hearts and lives exactly what we need to hear. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen. First, it’s wonderful to be here with you all. It’s a great blessing to me, and it’s a great blessing to the saints in Moscow. Your sisters and brothers in Moscow. It’s just a privilege to be here. God is doing a wonderful thing, and don’t ever stop thanking him for it. In this passage, we’re going to have to follow the way that Amos arranged the unit, which, though it starts at verse 1 in a nice and tidy way, it does not match the chapter divisions. The way Amos divided this up, this section only goes through verse 17. This particular section that I read, is a chiasm, which I’ll explain in a minute, for those of you who have not heard of that before. It’s a chiasm, and it’s a literary unit that marks off what Amos is up to. So given what Amos does elsewhere in this book, it’s not surprising that it’s a seven-fold breakout. So let’s look at this. The structure of the text. How do we know? What is a chiasm, and how do we know? If you took an English comp class, you know that you were taught to put your thesis statement, early on, and then you unpack and develop the thesis statement. We say what we are wanting the main point to be right at the front end, and then we develop that. That’s how we think in the West. In the ancient Near East, for example, in the book of Habakkuk, the way you identified the most important element, the thesis statement, is you put it at the hinge of a chiasm. So imagine folding a piece of paper in two, and then the first three points go down to the fold in the paper, and right on the fold of the paper is the most important point, and then you back out again, so it’s A, B, C, and then D on the fold, and then C, B, A on the other side of the paper. That’s a chiasm. And this section of Amos is a chiasm, which I’ll explain in just a moment, but it’s really interesting. So for example, in the book of Habakkuk, the whole book of Habakkuk is a chiasm, and the hinge of the chiasm is the just shall live by faith, and that’s the hinge of the chiasm in Habakkuk. And then in the book of Romans, Paul does it in our way, in the first chapter of Romans, he quotes Habakkuk, and he states the just shall live by faith in the first chapter, and then he develops that whole theme throughout the rest of the book of Romans. So it’s just simply different ways of organizing a text, and different ways of pointing to what is the most important thing. So here, in this section, we have, and he’s done this before, in 3.1 and 4.1, begins the same way, begins with the same word that he has done previously. And this is a word that the rebellious house of Israel needs to hear. So in verses 1 through 3, it’s a lamentation over the fall of Israel. It’s a lamentation over the fall of Israel. And I’m going to make this simpler by jumping down to verses 16 and 17, which is a coming lamentation over Israel. 16 and 17. So 1 through 3, a lamentation over Israel, 16 and 17, a lamentation over Israel. B would be a call for repentance. That’s verses 4 through the first half of 6. Amos tells Israel to seek and to live. And he uses seven verbs in that exhortation. Amos likes the number 7. He uses seven verbs in that exhortation, seek and live. Seek and live. So that’s the call to repentance in verses 4 through the first part of 6. In verses 14 and 15, surprise, Amos tells Israel to seek and to live. And again, he uses seven verbs. He uses seven verbs in 4 through 6, and he uses seven verbs in 14 and 15, and the message is the same. Seek the Lord, seek Yahweh, and live. And then the third section, the third point, is condemnation of injustice. That’s the second part of verse 6 into verse 7. And then matching that would be, again, surprise, condemnation of injustice, condemnation of injustice. Another way of thinking this, it would be not sound rhymes, like modern poets would, well, actually, classical poets, modern poets don’t do anything, but in classical poets, the poetry would scan, and oftentimes it would rhyme. What a chiasm does is thought rhymes. It’s a concept rhyme. So condemnation of injustice, condemnation of injustice. And then we get to the hinge of the section, which is praise to Yahweh. Yahweh, Jehovah, is his name. And then on either side of this statement is a hymn to God’s power, verses 8 and 9. A hymn to God’s power. Yahweh is supreme. Yahweh is his name. And then more of a hymn to God’s power. So that’s the chiasm. That’s the literary unit. That’s the modern chapter and verse markings, however helpful they are, and they are helpful, are a modern development. It was after the age of printing, basically. At least one reformed guy, an early printer, did the versification while on horseback, fleeing from persecution. And sometimes it shows. They divided here. Well, that doesn’t mean that there were no principles of organizing the text prior to chapter and verse markings. And this is a good example. So let’s summarize the text. So the center of this word is the nature and character of God. Hear the lamentation, O Israel, verse 1. The virgin Israel is fallen, verse 2. Their fate would be terrible, a reverse decimation, verse 3. So, after a battle in the ancient world, if you executed a tenth of their army, executed a tenth of the prisoners, that would be a decimation. You took out one tenth. This is a reverse decimation, meaning you leave one tenth. So, their fate would be terrible, a reverse decimation, verse 3. So, judgment is coming on Israel. God’s appeal to Israel, and Israel here is the northern king, Amos is prophesying after the division of the kingdom. So, ancient Israel under Saul and David and Solomon was a unit, and then when Israel had their civil strife and split into two, there’s the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. This is a prophecy against the northern kingdom of Israel. So, God’s appeal to Israel is very simple. Seek God and live. Seek God and live. Avoid God, run away from God and die. Seek God and live. Verse 4. The corollary also follows. If Israel seeks God, then they will not seek Bethel, Gilgal, or Beersheba. Verse 5. These were idolatrous centers where idols were established. So, seeking God means forsaking idols. You can’t do it all. You can’t just worship everybody. You have to be exclusive in your devotion to the true and living God. A condemning fire is coming, verse 6, and is going to fall on those who pervert justice in the courts, verse 7. In the Ten Commandments, where it says you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor, the principal meaning of that it has to do with perjury. It has to do with corrupting the courts. Of course, it extends out to day-to-day living. We’re not to lie to each other in day-to-day living either, but the centerpiece is protect the courts. You want integrity in the halls of justice, which Israel did not have, and this is why the condemnation is coming. It’s going to fall on those who pervert justice in the courts, verse 7. So the first part of the hymn, we’re coming up to the hinge of the chiasm. And it mentions the Pleiades and Orion. And God is the God of creation. God is the God of creation, verse 8. Yahweh is His name. That’s the second part of 8. That’s the cash payout there. Yahweh is His name. And then the second part of the hymn is to the God who strengthens the victim, verse 9. So God is the creator God. Yahweh is His name. And God stands up for the victim, for the downtrodden, for the widow, for the orphan, for the people who are abused by the corruption of the courts. When the courts are corrupted, then the fat cats start getting away on everything. And they don’t care about anybody. They don’t care who they walk on. And so Yahweh is His name. He is the God of creation. And He is the God of the downtrodden. So Amos then condemns the injustices of those justices who hate the prophet and the preacher. Because they want to sin with a free hand. Verse 10. People don’t like it when sin is rebuked. When sin is confronted. Everybody says that they like a church without hypocrites in it. You’ve probably heard this from many non-believers. I can’t go to church. There’s too many hypocrites there. Well, the problem is if there’s a hypocrite between you and God, then the hypocrite is closer to God than you are. That’s the first problem. If there’s a hypocrite between you and God, you have to ask yourself some basic questions. Does God approve of these hypocrites? No. All the way through the Bible. One of Jesus’ favorite sayings is, woe unto you, Pharisees, scribes, hypocrites. Woe unto you. So hypocrisy is not something that God tolerates, and it makes no sense at all to reject real money because you don’t like counterfeit money. That’s simply joining up with the counterfeiters. So you can tell when people say the church is full of hypocrites, but then what do people say about churches that discipline hypocrites? Judgmental Pharisees think they’re better than everybody else. So you can’t win for losing. But it doesn’t matter because if you obey the Bible, if you do what God says, what is that? Seek God and live. This is the way of life. This is the way to go. So these people hate the prophet and the preacher because they want to sin with a free hand. Verse 10, they walk all over the poor, but God sees it. Verse 11, they walk all over the poor, but God sees it and there will be justice. They rip off the poor in court, but God knows it. Verse 12, and because they don’t like being rebuked, they charge the prudent with hate and they charge the prudent with thought crimes if they say anything about it. Verse 13, so if you rebuke someone who is abusing the poor, they’ve already abandoned the path of justice and truth and righteousness. So nothing is preventing them from trying to flip the script and say that you’re the problem. So if you say, really, you ought not to be treating the poor this way, they’re going to say that you’re the one who’s actually abusing the poor. You’re guilty of hate crimes because you rebuked me. That doesn’t follow. So Amos returns to his call for repentance. Seek good and live. This is the theme throughout the passage. Seek good and live. Verse 14, hate evil. And love good. Hate evil and love good. I was just talking at breakfast. My grandma was the mother of six boys. My father was the number two of six boys. And one of my grandma’s sayings that her kids put on a calendar once was, be good. Don’t be like other boys. Be good. That’s right. Hate evil and love what is good. Verse 15, establish justice in the gate, and perhaps God will relent with his coming judgment. Verse 15, establish justice in the gate, and perhaps God is going to relent. But that’s not going to happen, Amos knows, and so lamentation is coming. Verses 16 and 17, he laments at the beginning for the current conditions, and then he laments for the fact that he knows, despite the urging of repentance, despite the fact that he’s calling for repentance, he knows that they’re not going to repent, and so he says lamentation is coming. So the theme of Amos is not necessarily oppression of the poor by the rich in modern categories. In other words, this is not a Marxist analysis. This is not a class warfare thing where the rich are automatically evil and the poor are automatically good. All the oppressed in Samaria, which is the capital city of the northern kingdom of Israel, all the oppressed in Samaria who are being mistreated by these fat cat scoundrels are also going to be destroyed by the Assyrians. The theme of this book is not the oppression of the poor by the rich. It is the oppression of the poor by the fat cat false worshippers, fat cat idolaters, people who say that they serve Yahweh but who do not. The two Hebrew words for exile both have G and L at their root, just like Gilgal. So the word for exile, the two words for exile have G and L as their root and Gilgal does. So Amos is punning on their judgment. Amos is punning on their judgment. Now I know it’s commonplace among sophisticated Americans and Englishmen to say that they think punning is the lowest form of humor. They despise punning. And for people who are scripturally astute, that’s really unfortunate. Because the Bible puns all the time. And this is an example. So he’s punning on their judgment. And Bethel, the house of God, is rejected as Beth-Avon, house of worthless idolatry. So the issue is, who are you going to worship? Who is your God? Is your God the living God? Or is your God a construct? Now you can tell easily that if you’re worshiping a construct, if you carve it out of stone or if you carve it out of wood and you bow down to a thing. That’s gross idolatry. But constructs can be made out of mental activity. You can invent a God more to your liking. You can invent a God who is the God of pussy willows and the God of fluffy clouds and unicorns and invent a God and bow down to that God. But it’s an idol, just the same. And so the seek God and live, it happens all the way through this passage, is seek the true God. Seek the actual God. Seek the God who is the living triune God, not the God that we would have preferred to have. We are a sinful people. We’re a mess. And the God that we would create would be a God after our own image. We would create a God who is unholy like we are, who budgets for our unholiness. The true God forgives our unholiness, which is a very different thing. He’s not a God of let boys be boys. He’s not a God of sloppy tolerance. He’s a God of grace and forgiveness. Now, we come back to this theme of seek and live. Seek and live. God invites Israel to seek Him and live. You’ve heard that a number of times. Verse 4, seek and live. The flip side of this is found in the next verse. Seek idols and die. Seek God and live or seek idols and die. like what you worship. You become like what you worship. In Psalm 115, it says the idols, idolaters, worship gods that have eyes but see not, ears but they hear not, noses but they smell not. And then he says, those that worship them become like unto them. You become like what you worship. If you worship deaf, dumb, and blind idols, you become deaf, dumb, and blind. If you worship cruel idols, you become cruel. If you worship idols of lust and lasciviousness, you become more and more lustful. You become like what you worship. And the same thing is true about true worship of the true God. You become like what you worship. We’re told in John that when we finally see Him, when the Lord comes, and we finally see Him, we will become like Him because we will see Him as He is. That’s at the second coming. But we’re also told in Corinthians that we seek the Lord continually, week to week, with unveiled face as we worship the Lord. We are being transformed from one degree of glory to another. So if we worship the God of glory, we are becoming like what we worship. We’re being transformed into the likeness of Jesus Christ. If you worship idols, you become more and more like those idols. If you worship the true and living God, you become more and more like a human being. So worship idols, seek idols and die. Seek the right God. Now here’s a tricksy thing. If you seek the right God, under the wrong golden and calf-like forms, you’re also going to die. There are people who say, I’m worshiping the true God. Like when Aaron was manipulated into making the golden calf at the base of the mountain, he proclaimed a festival to Yahweh. But there was this golden calf, which Moses disapproved of. When Moses came down, Moses was furious. But Aaron thought you could sort of split the difference. We can worship Jehovah, we can worship Yahweh, but still have the golden calf. No, no. If you worship the true God under His right name, but everything about it is wrong, everything about it is idolatrous, then you die as well. So the exhortation is repeated again. Seek the Lord and live. Seek the Lord and live. Verse 6. This is also emphasized by the chiasm. Seek good, not evil, that you might live in verse 14. Now let’s apply this to America. Apply this to where we live. We’re not in Israel. We’re not in Judah. We’re not in the time of Amos. But these issues are not irrelevant to us. We are in a time where this applies straight across. If America is to be pulled back from our idolatrous slow motion disaster that we are currently in, it’s like watching a helicopter land sideways in slow motion. That’s the situation we’re currently in. If we want God’s mercy to be extended to us, then we need to seek Him so that we might live. That’s the message. Seek God. Seek God. Turn to Him. And you see this pattern throughout all Scripture. The Jews fell away from the Lord. He sends Moabites or Amalekites or Philistines to afflict them. And they finally get to the point where they have enough of that. And then it says, and they cried out to the Lord. So this is what it means to seek the Lord. We seek the Lord by crying out to Him, saying, Lord, we cannot extricate ourselves from the jam that we got ourselves in. We cannot recover all the things that we threw away. We cannot rebuild all the things that we tore down. We are not able to save ourselves. We can’t save ourselves. And that’s the first step. That’s not how it works. So we need to seek Him out. We need to seek the Lord, cry out to the Lord in order that we might live. And it will not be sufficient if all Americans seek the Lord in the cubby holes of their own hearts while refusing to admit publicly what they are doing. We have to be public Christians. We need to be public. Now, what do I, this is, there’s an important angle on this. The secularists don’t like us being Christians in public. They disapprove of that. And we would say that Jesus was crucified where? In public. He was crucified in public. They put a sign over him on the cross in three different languages. Because all the people passing by needed to read that sign. Crucifixions were performed in public. Jesus died for your sins and for mine in public. Jesus died for all of our sins in public. He was then buried and then he rose again from the dead in public. Paul tells Agrippa a number of years later when Paul is giving his testimony to Agrippa, he said, Agrippa, you know about these things. I know you do. These things were not done in a corner, he says. Jesus appeared to over 500 people after his resurrection. Jesus appeared to people for almost a month and a half after his resurrection. Jesus rose from the dead, in other words, in public. He rose from the dead in public. God, in his great mercy, arranged for the rulers of this age, Paul says, if the rulers of this age had known what they were doing, they would not have crucified. They wouldn’t have done it if they’d known what was going to happen. What was going to happen is their kingdom, their realm, all the things that they were doing were going to be torn down and torn down by their own action of crucifying Jesus in public. And so consequently, if they don’t want us testifying to Christ in public, singing psalms to him in public, witnessing to him in public, they should have thought of that before they crucified him there. Adherence of a mystery religion. This is not something that we treasure behind our eyes and between our ears. And if we keep it there, everybody will leave us alone. They’ll say that they’ll leave us alone. They’ll say, keep it private and we’ll leave you alone. Well, we’re private in this room. Are they leaving us alone? No, no. It is not tolerable for them, for us to be doing what we’re doing. We have to, not because we’re hardened and cruel, but in the Holy Spirit, we have to simply not care. Simply not care. Why? Because we’re seeking God that we might live. Not only that, but we’re seeking God so that they might live. The repentance that God wants to grant to this country is a repentance that’s going to be a blessing to people who are currently on the other side. It will touch those who are currently in opposition, and that is up to God. So, hate and love. That’s another theme in this. The perverted justices that govern our court system hate any kind of challenge in the gate. That’s verse 10. And so the prudent are threatened and kept in check. Verse 13. If you want to testify against them, then the screws are brought to bear. I can testify directly that there are different court cases and different challenges and different situations where people were going to testify, they were going to go to court, and pressure points were brought to bear. No, you’re not. Personal threats. We are a corrupt people. We’re not squeaky clean and nice. We need to acknowledge that we are a sinful people and we have corrupted the courts of justice. The prudent really are threatened. Some of them lose their lives. This is described as an evil time. And so the prudent are stirred up. Don’t let them dictate to you what you can say. Seek good, not evil. Verse 14. And if you do, then God will be with you. God will be with you. That means there’s nothing to fear, not even a Canadian Human Rights Commission. Whoa, you’re kind of up there. When God is with you, you are charged to hate evil and love the good, and to do so outside the recesses of your heart. You are to be a Christian in public. That doesn’t mean you’re to be obnoxious in public, obnoxious with your faith in public, but you’re to simply be a Christian in public. We are charged to hate evil in the court system and to love good in the court system. In the gate, that’s verse 15. So ancient courts were held behind the city gates and in rooms and alcoves in the region of the gate. That was the seat of government. So when it says in Proverbs that the Proverbs 31, her family praises her in the gates. Her name comes up at city council meetings. Her name comes up. Man, that’s quite a woman. So here’s the hinge. Yahweh is his name. Yahweh is his name. Although Amos is concerned with the false witness established in the northern kingdom, scripture elsewhere addresses the issue of iniquity trying to coexist with true worship. So the problem of Bethel and Dan, which is where golden calves were erected, is not solved simply by heading south to Jerusalem. Remember the Lord Jesus fiercely denounced the worship that was occurring there at the true temple. So sinners can corrupt anything. Sinners can corrupt orthodoxy. They can corrupt true words. They can corrupt false words, making them even falser. Sinners can really get their fingerprints on anything. Reformation is not accomplished in that way. True worship, true reformation, true revival is what occurs when we come to worship God with all the externals established in true obedience and all the internals lined up to match. It’s not just having the externals right, and it’s not about having the internals right. It’s having the externals and the internals lined up. So we just had a baptism this morning. What does baptism point to? Baptism points to Jesus. Baptism doesn’t point to the heart of the person being baptized. It points to Jesus. Christian baptism always points to Christ. And so when the baptism points to Christ objectively, that places a covenantal obligation on the one baptized to have their life, and heart, and mind point the same direction that their baptism does, away from themselves, away from me. So this is liberation from me. The gospel is liberation from the essential problem of the world, which would be me. There was an essay contest back in Chesterton’s career. There was an essay collection that was being gathered by one of the newspaper or periodical, to submit an essay, and they asked a bunch of different writers, to submit an essay on what was wrong with the world. That was the topic, the assigned topic. What is wrong with the world? And Chesterton submitted a two-word essay. He said, I am. What’s wrong with the world? I am. Well, what happens in real revival is that we don’t ask God to come down and fix the other guy. Effectively, we know that there are problems out there. But I’m mindful there’s one of my favorite books written by a cheery old unbeliever, cheery old reprobate, Ambrose Pierce, The Devil’s Dictionary. In The Devil’s Dictionary, he has a definition, kind of an exquisite definition of a Christian. He said, Christian, noun, someone who believes the New Testament is a divinely inspired book, admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. And we have to simply be done with that, done with that. Lord, change me. Lord, change me first. That’s true worship, true reformation. So if you, in the part of the service where you kneel and confess your sins, you should be confessing your own sins, not other people’s sins. You can confess other people’s sins all day, and your joy doesn’t return. You confess your own sins. And this is what happens when reformation takes root. We deal with our own issues first. So all the internals line up with the externals. Clean the inside of the cup, the Lord said. But he did not say that the outside was irrelevant. Jesus said, hypocrites, clean the outside of the cup and leave the inside corrupt. Jesus said, clean the inside. And he doesn’t say clean the inside and let the outside be dirty. He says, clean the inside and then the outside will be clean also. And so the thing that you want is a coherence, between the inside of the cup and the outside of the cup and what your baptism says and what the preacher said. We want everything to point the same direction, which is to the Lord Jesus Christ. So, who is the Lord that we may worship Him? He is not to be trifled with. The God of the Bible, as one writer said, is no buttercup. The God of the Bible is the God of thunder. He’s the God of justice. He’s the God of holiness. But He’s also the God of mercy. There’s more grace in God than there is sin in you. There’s more grace in God than there is sin in you. And the only thing that must happen is you must apply to Him for it. You must look to Him for it. I know you can say, Lord, I heard the preacher say there’s more grace in you than there is sin in me, and I’ve got a lot of sin, and I’m looking to you to deal with my sin. And so, the God of the Bible is not to be trifled with, and he can’t be bribed, he can’t be flattered, he can’t none of that, and he can’t be tied up with worthless interpretations of the First Amendment, or bottom line profit and loss statements, or progressive tax policies. He is the Lord. He spoke the seven stars of the Pleiades into existence, and he holds Orion in the palm of his hand, and out there in the galaxies, they’ve never even heard of Justice Jackson. These things fill up our horizon. We think, oh, that’s an important person. Everybody that we think is important breathes through their nose. We are all midges in a sunbeam. God is the God of the heavens. He is the God of all, and God has no problems. Have you thought about that? And so, we worship the God of galaxies. We worship the God of day and night. We worship the God of oceans and rain. And we worship the God who rises up to defend the downcast. And we worship the God who comes into individual lives to scrub all the sin away. That’s the God we worship. That’s the whole point of the Christian faith, is basically new hearts, new lives, and lawless deeds I will remember no more. Father in God, we thank you for your goodness to us. We thank you for this word. We thank you for the privilege that we have of gathering around this word. I pray that as we meditate on these things, as we think about them, as we look for places and ways to apply them, I pray that your Holy Spirit would guide our thoughts, guide our meditations, guide our hand as we would seek to do this right. And we know that we can’t do it right your grace. So we appeal to that grace now. show less

Summary Dr. Ben Merkle preaches on Amos chapter 4. This includes his confession exhortation. Transcription Choose show more to view the transcription. Transcriptions are AI generated and MAY be incorrect. Rely on the spoken word heard in the audio file. show more [00:00:00.000 –> 00:00:06.840] In the second commandment, we are prohibited from making a carved image or a likeness of any sort to be used in the worship of God.[00:00:06.840 –> 00:00:10.000] The church has always had a hard time being faithful to this command.[00:00:10.000 –> 00:00:15.760] What is it about the human heart that is inexplicably pulled towards wanting to draw God?[00:00:15.760 –> 00:00:21.200] Or consider from the other side, why is it so important to ensure that we not draw God?[00:00:21.200 –> 00:00:26.220] I believe that the problem is that the use of images in worship is a way of trying to tame God.[00:00:26.640 –> 00:00:30.200] It’s a way of making Him serve our own proclivities by portraying God.[00:00:30.200 –> 00:00:33.400] Not so much as He is, but rather as we want Him to behave.[00:00:33.400 –> 00:00:39.480] When we use images in worship, our vices are indulged and set up as a picture of the God that we want to worship.[00:00:39.480 –> 00:00:44.800] Syrupy, sweet sentimentality, machismo run amok, ethnic chauvinism.[00:00:44.800 –> 00:00:48.500] We paint those things that we see in ourselves that we want to indulge.[00:00:48.500 –> 00:00:55.760] And though it’s set up supposedly to help in worship, it’s actually a huge distraction to worshiping the true triune God.[00:00:56.120 –> 00:00:59.480] Rather than setting up a picture of God, we set up mirrors of ourselves.[00:00:59.480 –> 00:01:01.500] But God is not tameable.[00:01:01.500 –> 00:01:06.320] He is the God who spoke into existence heaven, earth, and the waters under the earth.[00:01:06.320 –> 00:01:09.580] And He will not be tamed or contained by our drawings.[00:01:09.580 –> 00:01:14.300] But if we think about this for a moment, we’ll see that we are prone to fall into the same sin[00:01:14.300 –> 00:01:17.700] even without picking up a pencil, paintbrush, or a chisel.[00:01:17.700 –> 00:01:22.160] We are still prone to trying to tame God, trying to remake Him after our own image.[00:01:22.580 –> 00:01:26.680] We do this when we come to Scripture in order to find proof text for what we already believe[00:01:26.680 –> 00:01:30.700] rather than coming with an open heart, ready to be corrected, humbled, and taught.[00:01:30.700 –> 00:01:34.980] We do this when we decide for God what His blessings in our life need to look like[00:01:34.980 –> 00:01:38.380] when we try to script for Him how and when He will move.[00:01:38.380 –> 00:01:41.680] Then when we feel suddenly as if He has wronged us[00:01:41.680 –> 00:01:45.140] because He didn’t follow the script that we so carefully wrote for Him.[00:01:45.140 –> 00:01:49.940] And we remake God in our own image when we imagine that the sins we don’t really struggle with[00:01:49.940 –> 00:01:53.000] and are actually really disgusted by, these are the ones that God truly hates.[00:01:53.000 –> 00:01:56.840] But the sins that we regularly fall into, the ones that are attracted to us,[00:01:56.840 –> 00:01:59.740] these are the ones that are far more understandable in His eyes.[00:01:59.740 –> 00:02:02.020] Put aside your false gods.[00:02:02.020 –> 00:02:06.940] Get rid of the carved images and the likenesses that have been set up in your heart.[00:02:06.940 –> 00:02:10.760] Launch a 16th century reformation in your soul,[00:02:10.760 –> 00:02:14.520] cleansing out all of those images by confessing these sins.[00:02:14.520 –> 00:02:16.860] Our text this morning is Amos chapter 4.[00:02:17.480 –> 00:02:21.820] Hear this word, you cows of Bashan, who are on the mountain of Samaria,[00:02:21.820 –> 00:02:25.020] who oppress the poor, who crush the needy,[00:02:25.020 –> 00:02:28.000] who say to your husbands, bring wine, let us drink.[00:02:28.000 –> 00:02:32.580] The Lord God has sworn by His holiness, behold, the day shall come upon you[00:02:32.580 –> 00:02:36.640] when He will take you away with fishhooks and your posterity with fishhooks.[00:02:36.640 –> 00:02:39.840] You will go out through broken walls, each one straight ahead of her,[00:02:39.840 –> 00:02:42.240] and you will be cast into Harman, says the Lord.[00:02:42.240 –> 00:02:46.780] Come to Bethel and transgress, and Gilgal, multiply transgression.[00:02:46.780 –> 00:02:50.100] Bring your sacrifices every morning, your tithes every three days.[00:02:50.100 –> 00:02:53.040] Offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving with leaven.[00:02:53.040 –> 00:02:55.480] Proclaim and announce the freewill offerings.[00:02:55.480 –> 00:02:58.340] For this you love, you children of Israel, says the Lord.[00:02:58.340 –> 00:03:05.280] Also, I gave you cleanliness of teeth in all your cities, and lack of bread in all your places.[00:03:05.280 –> 00:03:08.060] Yet you have not returned to me, says the Lord.[00:03:08.060 –> 00:03:10.540] I also withheld rain from you.[00:03:10.540 –> 00:03:14.020] When there were still three months to the harvest, I made a rain on one city.[00:03:14.020 –> 00:03:15.860] I withheld rain from another city.[00:03:15.860 –> 00:03:19.320] One part was rained upon, and where it did not rain, the part withered.[00:03:19.320 –> 00:03:24.040] So two or three cities wandered to another city to drink water, but they were not satisfied.[00:03:24.040 –> 00:03:26.120] Yet you have not returned to me, says the Lord.[00:03:26.120 –> 00:03:29.860] I blasted you with blight and mildew when your gardens increased,[00:03:29.860 –> 00:03:32.380] your vineyards, your fig trees, and your olive trees.[00:03:32.380 –> 00:03:36.320] The locusts devoured them, yet you have not returned to me, says the Lord.[00:03:36.320 –> 00:03:39.260] I sent among you a plague after the manner of Egypt.[00:03:39.260 –> 00:03:42.840] Your young men I killed with a sword, along with your captive horses.[00:03:42.840 –> 00:03:45.760] I made the stench of your camps come up into your nostrils.[00:03:46.160 –> 00:03:47.940] Yet you have not returned to me, says the Lord.[00:03:47.940 –> 00:03:51.720] I overthrew some of you, as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.[00:03:51.720 –> 00:03:54.140] And you are like a firebrand plucked from the burning.[00:03:54.140 –> 00:03:56.080] Yet you have not returned to me, says the Lord.[00:03:56.080 –> 00:03:59.140] Therefore, thus will I do to you, O Israel.[00:03:59.140 –> 00:04:02.920] Because I will do this to you, prepare to meet your God, O Israel.[00:04:02.920 –> 00:04:06.480] For behold, he who forms mountains and creates the wind,[00:04:06.480 –> 00:04:08.820] who declares to man what his thought is,[00:04:08.820 –> 00:04:12.700] and makes the morning darkness, who treads the high places of the earth.[00:04:12.700 –> 00:04:15.420] The Lord God of hosts is his name.[00:04:15.860 –> 00:04:16.280] Let’s pray.[00:04:16.280 –> 00:04:21.240] Our Heavenly Father, we come to your word and we ask that you would pour out your spirit on us.[00:04:21.240 –> 00:04:23.360] We know that your word is effective and powerful.[00:04:23.360 –> 00:04:26.160] Your word called the world into being.[00:04:26.160 –> 00:04:29.700] Your word upholds and sustains all things.[00:04:29.700 –> 00:04:31.820] Your word is a lamp and your word is a sword.[00:04:31.820 –> 00:04:34.000] We are blessed to sit under its teaching.[00:04:34.000 –> 00:04:37.380] Would you bless this time now that we would joyfully receive your word[00:04:37.380 –> 00:04:39.540] and cling to it for the week to come.[00:04:39.540 –> 00:04:42.600] We praise things in the name of Jesus Christ and amen.[00:04:42.600 –> 00:04:44.980] And please be seated.[00:04:45.860 –> 00:04:51.520] Good morning and again greetings from Moscow.[00:04:51.520 –> 00:04:58.840] I can’t tell you how much the way this congregation is thriving is an encouragement to the saints back in Moscow[00:04:58.840 –> 00:05:01.780] and their thoughts and prayers are with you all here.[00:05:01.780 –> 00:05:07.120] And just to remind us where we are as we work through this book of Amos.[00:05:07.120 –> 00:05:11.080] Amos is prophesying against the northern kingdom of Israel.[00:05:11.080 –> 00:05:15.800] They’ve fallen away from worshiping the one true God and because of this judgment is coming.[00:05:16.840 –> 00:05:23.600] Ultimately, this judgment finally comes when the Assyrians conquer the northern kingdom and takes them all away.[00:05:23.600 –> 00:05:29.660] And the book of Amos serves as a warning to the ten northern tribes of this coming judgment.[00:05:29.660 –> 00:05:32.260] So let’s just dive into chapter 4.[00:05:32.260 –> 00:05:38.000] It begins with this first verse. It’s pretty exceptional.[00:05:38.000 –> 00:05:41.000] Hear this word, you cows of Bashan.[00:05:41.600 –> 00:05:46.020] This is a terribly un-PC thing for a prophet to have said.[00:05:46.020 –> 00:05:52.240] Just to unpack that a little bit, Bashan is the, if you’re looking at a map of the nation of Israel,[00:05:52.240 –> 00:05:58.840] Bashan is the furthest northeastern region of Israel, what we would now know as the Golan Heights.[00:05:58.840 –> 00:06:05.380] It was a lush plateau that was particularly good for grazing cattle, and in fact is to this day.[00:06:05.380 –> 00:06:09.120] If you’re in Israel and you get into this area, all of a sudden you see cattle everywhere,[00:06:09.120 –> 00:06:10.400] and you realize we’re in Bashan.[00:06:10.920 –> 00:06:14.960] The cattle there were known for being the largest in the Middle East.[00:06:14.960 –> 00:06:21.100] The cows of Bashan, these are the largest, most well-fed cattle in the Middle East.[00:06:21.100 –> 00:06:27.260] So much so that the cattle of Bashan actually becomes a standard image in Hebrew poetry[00:06:27.260 –> 00:06:33.260] for this kind of opulence and for this sort of largeness.[00:06:33.260 –> 00:06:35.040] Think of Psalm 22.[00:06:35.040 –> 00:06:40.700] Psalm 22, it’s in the Psalms, but it’s quoted as a prophecy of the crucifixion,[00:06:40.700 –> 00:06:43.660] and there’s a line at verse 12 where it says,[00:06:43.660 –> 00:06:48.240] many bulls have surrounded me, describing Christ’s anguish on the cross.[00:06:48.240 –> 00:06:54.040] He says, many bulls have surrounded me, strong bulls of Bashan have encircled me.[00:06:54.040 –> 00:06:56.220] The bulls of Bashan encircle him.[00:06:56.220 –> 00:07:00.700] And if we sing Psalm 22, you might remember that line comes again and again,[00:07:00.700 –> 00:07:02.680] the bulls of Bashan circling him.[00:07:02.680 –> 00:07:12.620] The idea here is that the bulls of Bashan are the largest, strongest, fiercest bulls that you could encounter.[00:07:12.620 –> 00:07:16.980] To say bulls of Bashan means that you’re surrounded by a ferocious force.[00:07:16.980 –> 00:07:20.340] And it describes the fierceness of those that crucified Jesus.[00:07:20.340 –> 00:07:28.260] But here in Amos, we should notice it’s not the bulls of Bashan that the prophet wants us to imagine.[00:07:28.260 –> 00:07:31.720] It’s the cows of Bashan that he is talking about.[00:07:31.720 –> 00:07:34.640] It’s the female of the species.[00:07:34.640 –> 00:07:36.120] It’s the cows of Bashan.[00:07:36.120 –> 00:07:41.640] And these are the most well-fed, fattest cows that you could imagine.[00:07:41.640 –> 00:07:43.520] Don’t think fierce strength.[00:07:43.520 –> 00:07:45.900] Instead, think of an obese cow.[00:07:45.900 –> 00:07:47.680] These are Wagyu heifers.[00:07:47.680 –> 00:07:52.640] And that’s the image that Amos is trying to conjure up in your mind.[00:07:52.640 –> 00:07:57.840] He wants you to have that in your mind as you think about particularly the women at this time.[00:07:57.840 –> 00:08:06.740] And I think it’s really the wives of the nobility in the northern ten tribes that he’s describing here literally as fat cows.[00:08:06.740 –> 00:08:10.000] And to be clear, it is the women that he’s talking about.[00:08:10.000 –> 00:08:12.460] That’s not just like one little line there.[00:08:12.460 –> 00:08:20.340] The first three verses, it’s really interesting because in Hebrew, you can tell when you see a Hebrew verb,[00:08:20.340 –> 00:08:23.340] it includes the gender of the subject in the verb.[00:08:23.340 –> 00:08:26.520] And through the first three verses, these are feminine verbs.[00:08:26.520 –> 00:08:30.260] It’s describing the women of the northern kingdom.[00:08:30.260 –> 00:08:35.380] So he’s speaking specifically of the women all the way verses one through three.[00:08:35.380 –> 00:08:37.380] And these women, he says in verse one,[00:08:37.380 –> 00:08:45.400] oppress the poor and they crush the needy, all while they demand that their husbands bring them wine.[00:08:45.400 –> 00:08:50.160] And the whole time they’re being super cruel to the helpless,[00:08:50.160 –> 00:08:53.580] and while they demand that their husbands bring them wine.[00:08:53.580 –> 00:08:58.940] And the way it describes them asking for their husbands to bring them wine,[00:08:58.940 –> 00:09:01.400] it’s specifically referring to a drinking party.[00:09:01.400 –> 00:09:04.960] You need to be throwing these wine drinking parties.[00:09:04.960 –> 00:09:07.700] They’re demanding endless keggers at this time.[00:09:07.700 –> 00:09:13.020] Now, it’s kind of a shocking image, and especially if you contrast that in your mind[00:09:13.020 –> 00:09:16.700] with what Scripture holds up as the ideal wife.[00:09:16.700 –> 00:09:21.240] You think of Proverbs 31 and that description of what a woman is supposed to be like.[00:09:21.240 –> 00:09:27.820] And the thing that I think is really striking, if you hold up Proverbs 31, the first three[00:09:27.820 –> 00:09:33.640] verses here, the godly wife is a wife that is known for her production.[00:09:33.640 –> 00:09:40.280] When you read through Proverbs 31, you get this picture of this woman who makes everything[00:09:40.280 –> 00:09:43.200] fruitful and is supplying things for everyone.[00:09:43.200 –> 00:09:48.320] She clothes her family, she takes care of her village, her works go out and praise her in[00:09:48.320 –> 00:09:48.620] the gates.[00:09:48.620 –> 00:09:50.720] She’s producing, producing, producing.[00:09:50.720 –> 00:09:55.680] That’s what a godly home is supposed to be like and I think it’s the ideal, the biblical[00:09:55.680 –> 00:10:00.660] ideal for femininity is this thing that seeks to provide and produce for others.[00:10:00.660 –> 00:10:04.120] Her own works praise her in the gates as the proverb concludes.[00:10:04.120 –> 00:10:09.560] But the women that Amos is addressing, one of the things you notice is they’re known and[00:10:09.560 –> 00:10:11.540] remarkable for their consumption.[00:10:11.540 –> 00:10:18.460] It’s just, they consume and that is the whole expression of their femininity is this[00:10:18.460 –> 00:10:23.240] consumption. These women are not known for their production, but their consumption. And I think[00:10:23.240 –> 00:10:30.720] it’s a striking contrast. And I think it’s also kind of a useful way of evaluating both ourselves[00:10:30.720 –> 00:10:37.380] and our culture around us. Is our femininity productive or consumptive? It tells you like,[00:10:37.380 –> 00:10:42.880] is your culture healthy or is it sick? And I think we can see lots of signs where there are certain[00:10:42.880 –> 00:10:47.520] problems in our culture. Now look at verse two though, moving on. It says,[00:10:48.300 –> 00:10:55.540] The Lord God has sworn by His holiness, behold, the days shall come upon you when He will take you[00:10:55.540 –> 00:11:03.880] away with fishhooks. The days are coming. That phrase right there should be burned into your[00:11:03.880 –> 00:11:11.180] mind. The days are coming. This is Amos’s promise. It’s his warning. You party now. You have your[00:11:11.180 –> 00:11:16.580] drinking parties now, but the days are coming. You’re living in this opulence. You’re oppressing[00:11:16.580 –> 00:11:23.780] everyone, but he says the days are coming. When we look at creation, when we look at the natural world[00:11:23.780 –> 00:11:29.800] around us, natural revelation has given us the ability to deduce certain principles, certain[00:11:29.800 –> 00:11:36.300] rules for the way that nature behaves. An apple dropped from a tower falls at 32 feet per second[00:11:36.300 –> 00:11:41.540] squared, and we call this the law of gravity. And we call it a law. It’s really interesting. We call it[00:11:41.540 –> 00:11:46.520] the law of gravity. We call it a law because it’s not just nature’s suggestion that things[00:11:46.520 –> 00:11:51.080] should fall at a certain rate. It’s not just a good idea. It’s the law. It’s just what’s going to[00:11:51.080 –> 00:11:57.120] happen. It’s nature’s law. And that force is always at work and it never turns off. A ball thrown into[00:11:57.120 –> 00:12:02.000] the air, up high in the air, might look for a time as if it’s broken the law of gravity as it ascends.[00:12:02.000 –> 00:12:06.960] But if you keep watching, you will see that the law of gravity is still enforced. Even though it’s[00:12:06.960 –> 00:12:13.000] going up, it’s still enforced because gravity is weighing that ball down, slowing its climb until[00:12:13.000 –> 00:12:19.280] that ball ceases to go up and instead starts to go down. In fact, it’s a truism for us, isn’t it?[00:12:19.280 –> 00:12:23.960] That what goes up must come down. What goes up must come down. It’s the law of gravity.[00:12:23.960 –> 00:12:30.620] But God has given us a different code of law, the moral law revealed in His Word and written on our[00:12:30.620 –> 00:12:36.780] hearts. Instead of governing physical principles, this law governs moral principles. Thou shalt not[00:12:36.780 –> 00:12:43.240] kill, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not commit adultery. I find that we often think that God’s[00:12:43.240 –> 00:12:48.660] moral law is different than His physical law. I see people make this contrast frequently,[00:12:48.660 –> 00:12:55.640] that the physical law, you know, you’ll always have to obey gravity, but God’s moral law can be[00:12:55.640 –> 00:13:02.940] broken. Sometimes people get free of it and they don’t obey it. But what I think that you will notice[00:13:02.940 –> 00:13:10.720] is that it’s not actually the case. God’s moral law can be defied for a time. His moral law can be[00:13:10.720 –> 00:13:18.780] defied for a time, just as a ball can go up for a time, seemingly defying gravity. But as Amos says[00:13:18.780 –> 00:13:24.640] to the women of Israel, days are coming. Days are coming. This is another way of saying that what[00:13:24.640 –> 00:13:31.000] goes up must come down. With regard to the moral law, what goes up must come down because days are[00:13:31.000 –> 00:13:37.360] coming. You can defy his word for a time, but days are coming. Days are coming when the cows of Bashan[00:13:37.360 –> 00:13:43.100] will be drug out of their city like a fish with a hook in its mouth. That’s a really, he’s not[00:13:43.100 –> 00:13:48.720] painting complimentary images here when he describes the women here. They’re going to be[00:13:48.720 –> 00:13:56.120] brought out with a hook in their mouth like a fat fish pulled out of the water. And in verse 3 he says,[00:13:56.120 –> 00:14:02.760] this is a little bit cryptic at first. It says, you’ll go out through broken walls, each one[00:14:02.760 –> 00:14:10.860] straight ahead of her. That seems a little bit cryptic. But actually if you’re reading closely,[00:14:10.860 –> 00:14:19.040] you’ll realize this phrase is a, he’s echoing what happens in the book of Joshua, in Joshua 6,[00:14:19.040 –> 00:14:24.700] when the Israelites surround the city of Jericho and they march around it and they blast the trumpets[00:14:24.700 –> 00:14:31.860] and the walls fall. And then God says that when the walls fall, you’re all going to turn and the walls[00:14:31.860 –> 00:14:37.860] will essentially have fallen so completely that every man will be able to charge straight into the[00:14:37.860 –> 00:14:42.840] city. You’ll be able to, there’ll be a gap right in front of you and you’ll be able to all charge[00:14:42.840 –> 00:14:46.540] straight into the city. It’s not that there’ll be a little hole here, a little hole here, and you all[00:14:46.540 –> 00:14:53.420] kind of stream through. The walls will fall and you’ll go straight in, every man right in front of[00:14:53.420 –> 00:14:57.640] him, and that every man right in front of him is the exact words that are being used here[00:14:57.640 –> 00:15:02.560] to describe what’s going to happen to these women. There’s going to be a moment when you[00:15:02.560 –> 00:15:09.400] will go, you’re not going to be the army that’s going in, you’re going to be the captive slaves[00:15:09.400 –> 00:15:17.000] that will go out through broken walls, everyone, each one straight ahead of her. So in other[00:15:17.000 –> 00:15:25.720] words, in Joshua you have this wicked city Jericho being captured and now that same language is being[00:15:25.720 –> 00:15:31.420] used to describe the Israelites going into this captivity. These Israelite women have become the[00:15:31.420 –> 00:15:36.920] city of Jericho that needs to be wiped out and needs to be taken away. Israel has become Jericho[00:15:36.920 –> 00:15:43.280] needing to be wiped out. Why do they need to be wiped out? Amos seems to think that the root of[00:15:43.280 –> 00:15:49.420] their problem is what is going on in Bethel and in Gilgal. Look at verses 4 and 5.[00:15:49.420 –> 00:15:55.180] Come to Bethel and transgress at Gilgal. Multiply transgression. Bring your sacrifices every morning,[00:15:55.180 –> 00:16:01.340] your tithes every three days. Offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving with leaven. Proclaim and announce[00:16:01.340 –> 00:16:08.860] the freewill offerings. For this you love, you children of Israel, says the Lord. He’s speaking[00:16:08.860 –> 00:16:16.260] sarcastically here. He says, come transgress. Come up to what you’re doing in Gilgal. Come to Bethel.[00:16:16.260 –> 00:16:22.780] Come here and sin up a storm. Come multiply your transgressions. You love this. You love to do this,[00:16:22.780 –> 00:16:26.880] what you’re doing there. What is it that’s happening at Bethel and Gilgal that makes[00:16:26.880 –> 00:16:34.580] Amos so sarcastic? Remember just the kind of history of where we are. After Solomon died,[00:16:34.580 –> 00:16:41.000] his son Rehoboam took the throne, and the northern ten tribes revolted against Rehoboam,[00:16:41.000 –> 00:16:46.060] against the throne in Jerusalem, rejected not just the king, but when they did this,[00:16:46.060 –> 00:16:50.860] they also rejected the temple that was in Jerusalem. So they didn’t rebel just against[00:16:50.860 –> 00:16:57.880] Rehoboam, the king. They rebelled against all of the worship that God had commanded them to perform[00:16:57.880 –> 00:17:04.420] at the temple in Jerusalem. They rebelled and rejected that at the same time. And because they[00:17:04.420 –> 00:17:11.060] had rejected the temple in Jerusalem, they created multiple shrines all throughout the nation of[00:17:11.060 –> 00:17:17.800] Israel, the ten northern tribes. They’ve got shrines all over the place. At this point, when we’re[00:17:17.800 –> 00:17:23.740] writing here during Amos’ life, the two most prominent shrines in the northern kingdom are[00:17:23.740 –> 00:17:29.820] Bethel and Gilgal. Bethel is just a little over ten miles north of Jerusalem, so it’s actually not that[00:17:29.820 –> 00:17:36.560] far away. It would be on the southern border of Israel. So Bethel is right there, and during this[00:17:36.560 –> 00:17:44.140] time, Jeroboam II, who is now the king in the northern region, he has taken Bethel as his capital[00:17:44.140 –> 00:17:53.200] city. You see this if you flip to Amos 7. I’m just gonna read verses 10 and a few verses on from there.[00:17:53.200 –> 00:17:59.520] Then Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, sent to Jeroboam, king of Israel, saying, Amos has conspired[00:17:59.520 –> 00:18:04.200] against you in the midst of the house of Israel. The land is not able to bear all his words, for thus[00:18:04.200 –> 00:18:10.000] has Amos said, Jeroboam shall die by the sword, and Israel shall surely be led away captive from[00:18:10.000 –> 00:18:16.700] their own land. Then Amaziah said to Amos, Go, you seer, flee to the land of Judah. There eat bread,[00:18:16.700 –> 00:18:22.540] and there prophesy, but never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary. It is the[00:18:22.540 –> 00:18:29.020] royal residence. So this is now, Bethel is where the king, Jeroboam II, has set up his throne, and it’s[00:18:29.220 –> 00:18:35.100] also a place where they’re worshiping disobedient to God. Gilgal had also become another alternative[00:18:35.100 –> 00:18:39.780] site of worship. You see that in Hosea 12 where it describes the shrine, well, the unbelieving[00:18:39.780 –> 00:18:45.560] shrine, the disobedient shrine that’s there in Gilgal. So these are two places where Israel[00:18:45.560 –> 00:18:50.020] is now disobediently worshiping. They’re supposed to be worshiping in Jerusalem, but they’re[00:18:50.020 –> 00:18:58.280] disobediently worshiping in Gilgal and Bethel. The worship at these two shrines,[00:18:58.920 –> 00:19:06.000] God rejects. That’s why he says, go to Gilgal, go to Bethel, go transgress, go sin up a storm[00:19:06.000 –> 00:19:11.740] with the way that you worship there. He rejects it because it’s disobedient worship, and there’s[00:19:11.740 –> 00:19:18.860] a few different reasons why this is considered disobedient worship. First of all, it was disobedient[00:19:18.860 –> 00:19:24.000] on the surface. It was disobedient on the surface. They had been commanded to sacrifice at the temple[00:19:24.000 –> 00:19:28.620] in Jerusalem only. God said, when I plant my house there, that’s where you’re to take all[00:19:28.620 –> 00:19:33.800] of your sacrifices. So they’re not supposed to sacrifice anywhere but in Jerusalem. So it’s[00:19:33.800 –> 00:19:39.280] disobedient for that reason. They’re worshiping in multiple locations chosen by them according to[00:19:39.280 –> 00:19:46.580] their own convenience. Also, God had commanded that you were to sacrifice only by the priests drawn from[00:19:46.580 –> 00:19:52.880] the Levitical family, the Levitical tribe. The northern kingdom had begun appointing priests from[00:19:52.880 –> 00:19:58.240] wherever they wanted. So these are not authorized priests that are offering their worship.[00:19:58.320 –> 00:20:05.640] So that’s what I mean by it was a problematic worship on the surface because it was formally[00:20:05.640 –> 00:20:10.360] wrong. It’s in the wrong place. There’s the wrong people doing it. But we also know that this worship[00:20:10.360 –> 00:20:16.800] was disobedient because it was offered up by a disobedient people. We get that in verse 1.[00:20:16.800 –> 00:20:21.900] There are people who oppress the poor and crush the needy. And then this is going to be expanded on[00:20:21.900 –> 00:20:27.200] in chapter 5. So next week you’re going to get more from this where Amos describes in greater detail[00:20:28.020 –> 00:20:35.940] of their worship. They pretend to serve God while disobeying his law as well as worshiping demons at[00:20:35.940 –> 00:20:44.120] other shrines. So their worship is formally corrupt but also on the inside in their hearts it’s corrupt[00:20:44.120 –> 00:20:49.960] and hypocritical. And for both those reasons God is not regarding their worship and he’s going to[00:20:49.960 –> 00:20:57.480] judge them. In short they maintained a charade of religiosity while giving free reign to demonic lusts.[00:20:57.720 –> 00:21:04.620] And because of this God hated their worship. And as Amos is warning days are coming. Okay you can’t keep[00:21:04.620 –> 00:21:10.480] doing that. The ball that goes up is going to come down and days are coming. But one thing that you[00:21:10.480 –> 00:21:17.140] should notice though is how patient God has been with them. There’s an incredible patience of God in[00:21:17.140 –> 00:21:23.680] this and it’s easy to miss it because this is so loaded with language of judgment and it’s harsh[00:21:23.680 –> 00:21:29.280] language so it’s hard to notice I think the incredible patience and care that God has shown[00:21:29.280 –> 00:21:35.640] him. The phrase days are coming indicates that although Israel has merited a great judgment God[00:21:35.640 –> 00:21:41.960] has withheld his hand. He’s waiting this long period of time before the judgment actually comes.[00:21:41.960 –> 00:21:47.820] He’s waited patiently giving Israel multiple chances to turn from her hard-heartedness. Verses[00:21:47.820 –> 00:21:55.640] 6 through 11 kind of goes back and recounts over the past all the different ways in which God has[00:21:55.640 –> 00:22:04.240] mercifully offered correction that Israel could have taken. And we need to see that. It’s easy to[00:22:04.240 –> 00:22:11.800] miss it because it’s hard stuff that he sends, but he sends it with the goal and the opportunity of[00:22:11.800 –> 00:22:18.000] this could soften your heart. This could correct you. This could bring you to repentance. In verse 6,[00:22:18.000 –> 00:22:27.200] he sent famine. In verses 7 and 8, he sent drought. In verse 9, he sends blight and mildew. Blight is[00:22:27.200 –> 00:22:32.540] like a parched dryness when everything goes dry and crispy, and then mildew. And those two things[00:22:32.540 –> 00:22:39.340] together, he sends. He sent, in verse 10, plagues that were like the ones that he had sent to Egypt.[00:22:39.340 –> 00:22:45.180] And then verse 11, he overthrew them with fire, like what he had done to Sodom and Gomorrah.[00:22:45.180 –> 00:22:51.420] Now, I said that God mercifully offered correction, and then I list a bunch of really hard things that[00:22:51.420 –> 00:22:58.800] God sent them. Why would I call it merciful for God to send famine, drought, blight, mildew,[00:22:58.800 –> 00:23:07.320] plagues? How is that mercy? Well, first, notice that it’s not as if giving them prosperity had[00:23:07.320 –> 00:23:13.380] helped them that much, right? The prosperity had fattened their hearts and turned them against God.[00:23:13.380 –> 00:23:18.060] It was their prosperity that had hardened their heart against God. So you can’t say that the only[00:23:18.060 –> 00:23:23.240] thing that a loving God can give is prosperity, because it’s clear that prosperity can come and[00:23:23.240 –> 00:23:30.120] it can become a snare and a curse. Prosperity received with an irreligious heart becomes an[00:23:30.120 –> 00:23:37.240] occasion for greater sin, not a prompt to repent. Instead, God gives them a correction.[00:23:37.240 –> 00:23:46.140] And that is exactly what He told them beforehand would happen. And this is the thing that’s really[00:23:46.140 –> 00:23:51.620] important to notice. God had told them beforehand, when you start to disobey like this, I’m going to[00:23:51.620 –> 00:23:56.860] correct you. And here’s how I’m going to correct you. And He tells them everything that is happening[00:23:56.860 –> 00:24:03.320] now. When God first brought Israel into the promised land, He knew that a time would come[00:24:03.320 –> 00:24:07.700] when their prosperity and the blessing that He gave them would actually harden their hearts[00:24:07.700 –> 00:24:12.620] and turn them against Him. And so in Deuteronomy 4, I’m looking at verse 25,[00:24:12.620 –> 00:24:21.120] He gives them this warning. Deuteronomy 4, 25. When you beget children and grandchildren and have grown[00:24:21.120 –> 00:24:26.620] old in the land and act corruptly and make a carved image in the form of anything and do evil in the[00:24:26.620 –> 00:24:30.940] sight of the Lord your God to provoke him to anger, I call heaven and earth to witness against[00:24:30.940 –> 00:24:35.300] you this day that you will soon utterly perish from the land which you cross over the Jordan to[00:24:35.300 –> 00:24:40.600] possess. You will not prolong your days in it, but will be utterly destroyed. And the Lord will scatter[00:24:40.600 –> 00:24:45.000] you among the peoples, and you will be left few in number among the nations where the Lord will[00:24:45.000 –> 00:24:52.380] drive you. And there you will serve gods, the work of men’s hands, wood, and stone, which neither see[00:24:52.380 –> 00:24:58.020] nor hear nor eat nor smell. But from there you will seek the Lord your God and you will find him if you[00:24:58.020 –> 00:25:02.180] seek him with all your heart, with all your soul. When you are in distress and all these things come[00:25:02.180 –> 00:25:06.960] upon you in the latter days, when you turn to the Lord your God and obey his voice, for the Lord your[00:25:06.960 –> 00:25:12.780] God is a merciful God. He will not forsake you nor destroy you nor forget the covenant of your fathers[00:25:12.780 –> 00:25:20.220] which he swore to them. Notice that God’s bringing these temporary curses upon them. It’s a sign of[00:25:20.220 –> 00:25:26.540] his mercy. It’s a sign of his love and his care for them. He’s a merciful God and his chastisement[00:25:26.540 –> 00:25:34.520] is meant to turn us from our sin and that’s why his chastisement is a mercy. His love, it’s a[00:25:34.520 –> 00:25:41.000] revelation of what God is like. The God of unfailing covenant love. And each of these plagues that God[00:25:41.000 –> 00:25:47.560] has sent upon Israel was intended to be a sign of his love for them. Keeping his covenant and calling[00:25:47.560 –> 00:25:53.300] them back. You’re going to start to turn. I’m going to send these punishments upon you. And it’s so that[00:25:53.300 –> 00:25:58.800] you can return to me. It’s to wake you up and draw you back to me. It’s interesting because[00:25:58.800 –> 00:26:05.420] to prepare for this sermon, I wanted to read through the text in the Hebrew. And my Hebrew is[00:26:05.420 –> 00:26:10.720] okay, but not great. I can make my way through, but then every now and then, like if I hit a not[00:26:10.720 –> 00:26:15.640] very common word or even a slightly uncommon word, I generally have to go look it up. And when you go[00:26:15.640 –> 00:26:21.780] to look up a word and understand its meaning, its definition, one of the best ways for unpacking[00:26:21.780 –> 00:26:26.860] the meaning of a word is to look at other verses and to see it in context of other passages. And[00:26:26.860 –> 00:26:32.000] that’s how you kind of get an understanding of what a word is. When I’m going through chapter four,[00:26:32.000 –> 00:26:36.460] particularly when I hit this section where it’s describing the curses that God is bringing on[00:26:36.460 –> 00:26:41.240] them, it starts to have a bunch of unfamiliar words. So I’m looking them all up. And one of the things I[00:26:41.240 –> 00:26:47.860] found really strange was how when I wanted to see where else these words were, they were all found in[00:26:47.860 –> 00:26:54.680] Deuteronomy 28. These are all words that come from Deuteronomy 28. And I was wondering, what is it[00:26:54.680 –> 00:26:59.940] about Deuteronomy 28 that makes this passage resonate so much with it? In Deuteronomy 28,[00:26:59.940 –> 00:27:05.620] we’re coming to the very end of the Torah, the end of the first five books of the Old Testament.[00:27:05.620 –> 00:27:14.040] And during that, and specifically in Deuteronomy 28, God lists in detail the plagues that he promises he[00:27:14.040 –> 00:27:20.220] will strike the Israelites with if they turn from him and turn from keeping his law. He will strike[00:27:20.220 –> 00:27:24.800] them with blight. He will strike them with mildew. You can see why those are words you’ve got to look[00:27:24.800 –> 00:27:30.600] up. It’s a long list of punishments that he has prepared for them. And Amos is just showing them[00:27:30.600 –> 00:27:36.340] how God is doing exactly as he said he would do. He’s being faithful in keeping his covenant love[00:27:36.340 –> 00:27:42.360] with them because that’s how God always is. He’s never not like this. He’s always like this.[00:27:42.360 –> 00:27:48.140] Unfortunately, Israel persists in her hardness of heart. And it’s striking to see those last two[00:27:48.140 –> 00:27:55.500] punishments against Israel because God says, I sent you the same plagues I sent Egypt. I overthrew you[00:27:55.500 –> 00:28:01.980] the way that I overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. God’s triumph over Egypt and over Sodom and Gomorrah[00:28:01.980 –> 00:28:05.800] had been legendary in the Israelite memory. Think of that if you’re an Israelite kid growing up.[00:28:05.800 –> 00:28:12.580] Those are two nations that you know well. My God struck down Egypt. God was the God who had brought[00:28:12.580 –> 00:28:17.680] them out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. He’s the God who struck down Sodom and Gomorrah.[00:28:17.680 –> 00:28:25.440] And now God is having to deploy on Israel the same plagues that he had once leveled against[00:28:25.440 –> 00:28:33.220] Egypt. Same with Sodom and Gomorrah. What God had done for Israel’s behalf, he’s now doing to Israel. And[00:28:33.220 –> 00:28:39.500] even then, Israel remains hard-hearted. After each plague, when you’re reading verses 6 through[00:28:39.500 –> 00:28:47.000] 11, if you read through those carefully, you’ll notice after each one, after each plague, the Lord[00:28:47.000 –> 00:28:52.500] says, yet you have not returned to me. Yet you have not, I struck you with the plague, yet you have not[00:28:52.500 –> 00:28:57.240] returned to me. I struck you with the blight and the mildew, yet you have not returned to me. And that[00:28:57.240 –> 00:29:02.680] word returned in Hebrew, it’s the exact same word for repent. Just context determines whether you[00:29:02.680 –> 00:29:08.040] translate it as return or repent. So I think you could translate it, it would be right to translate[00:29:08.040 –> 00:29:15.080] as repent here. I gave you these things and you still didn’t repent. Again, it’s a sign that though[00:29:15.080 –> 00:29:20.380] he is striking them with hardship, his intention with it was a loving kindness. He was trying to[00:29:20.380 –> 00:29:28.980] turn them from their sin. And so as Amos has warned, days are coming. God’s delay in judging the[00:29:28.980 –> 00:29:34.840] Israelites is not the delay that that impotent dad at Walmart who starts counting when his children[00:29:34.840 –> 00:29:42.280] disobey. It’s not that kind of delay. We know that when he gets to 10, nothing will happen. He’s not[00:29:42.280 –> 00:29:48.040] teaching obedience. He’s just teaching numbers. But that’s not what’s going on when God delays his[00:29:48.040 –> 00:29:53.640] judgment. God is displaying his covenant faithfulness. And when that covenant love is[00:29:53.640 –> 00:30:00.140] rejected, then comes God’s judgment. Then comes his judgment. The promise that the days are coming[00:30:00.140 –> 00:30:07.140] is fulfilled, and those days finally come. Through the prophecy of Amos, God sent Israel this chilling[00:30:07.140 –> 00:30:14.300] warning, prepare to meet your God, O Israel. Verse 12, prepare to meet your God. And that’s what happened[00:30:14.300 –> 00:30:18.740] to Israel. About a generation later, when the Assyrian army conquered the land and led the[00:30:18.740 –> 00:30:24.240] northern tribes away as captives, and the northern nation of Israel ceased to exist. They were gone,[00:30:24.240 –> 00:30:30.160] never, you know, they’re the lost tribes, never to be seen again. So prepare to meet your God, O Israel.[00:30:30.160 –> 00:30:36.260] The days came, and they were not prepared. But the chapter doesn’t end there, okay? We have one more[00:30:36.260 –> 00:30:41.020] verse, and I think it’s a very important verse to cover. Verse 13, for behold, he who forms mountains[00:30:41.020 –> 00:30:46.200] and creates the wind, who declares to man what his thought is, and makes the morning darkness,[00:30:46.200 –> 00:30:53.220] who treads the high places of the earth, the Lord God of hosts is his name. The final verse here is not[00:30:53.220 –> 00:31:01.440] a reiteration of the curse. It’s not an I told you so. It’s a summary statement of who God is, okay?[00:31:01.440 –> 00:31:07.780] It closes just by this clear statement of who your God is. And I think that there’s something profound[00:31:07.780 –> 00:31:13.500] here that we need to look at briefly before we close. The God of the Bible is the one who made[00:31:13.500 –> 00:31:18.240] the mountains, he says. He who forms mountains. The God of the Bible is the one who breathed the[00:31:18.240 –> 00:31:23.700] mountains into existence. He’s the one that causes the wind to blow. All the weather that we experience[00:31:23.700 –> 00:31:30.200] right now is a result of his continued present power. He speaks it all into existence. He’s the[00:31:30.200 –> 00:31:36.840] God who rules over all with angelic armies. When we say, it says here at the end, the Lord God of hosts[00:31:36.840 –> 00:31:42.180] is his name, when it refers to hosts. It’s referring to the fact that he is the one who stands ruling over[00:31:42.180 –> 00:31:49.460] angelic armies who are there to do his will. When we talk about God’s judgments, I think it’s always[00:31:49.460 –> 00:31:54.460] really important to remind ourselves who God is. When you talk about his judgments, you have to step[00:31:54.460 –> 00:32:01.560] back and ask, who is God? I say this because whenever somebody starts to make judgments, we have a natural[00:32:01.560 –> 00:32:05.900] impulse to ask the question, who put you in charge? When somebody makes a decree, makes a[00:32:05.900 –> 00:32:12.980] decision, and their will is enforced on others, then people naturally say, who are you to make this[00:32:12.980 –> 00:32:17.260] decision? Who are you to make this determination? Why do you get to be the one that makes this[00:32:17.260 –> 00:32:22.420] decision? Why does President Trump get to direct our foreign policy? Well, because he was elected by[00:32:22.420 –> 00:32:28.340] the American people to be our president. Why does mom decide, get to decide whether or not we watch[00:32:28.340 –> 00:32:33.220] the Olympics? Because she birthed you, and she’ll probably remind you. I birthed you. I brought you[00:32:33.220 –> 00:32:39.900] into this world, so I get to make certain decisions. Those stay with me. You see how a judgment always[00:32:39.900 –> 00:32:46.540] provokes the question, why does he get to decide that? Why does God get to determine a final judgment[00:32:46.540 –> 00:32:50.840] on Israel? We’ve been listening to all these things that he’s going to do to them. Why is it his right[00:32:50.840 –> 00:32:59.220] to make this decree over them? Because he is the God who spoke all things into existence and currently[00:32:59.220 –> 00:33:04.500] upholds them by the power of his being. He’s your maker. He is your maker and your redeemer. And so he[00:33:04.500 –> 00:33:09.180] gets to make these kinds of decisions. He’s the sovereign over all with a throne that sits above[00:33:09.180 –> 00:33:15.780] every power in the heavenly places. So yes, he gets to pronounce a judgment on Israel. And I want to[00:33:15.780 –> 00:33:22.560] dwell on this point for a moment because when we consider how God leads us, particularly in how he[00:33:22.560 –> 00:33:28.040] leads us sometimes with a carrot, sometimes with a stick strategy, okay? When we see how God leads us,[00:33:28.360 –> 00:33:32.580] sometimes moving us with blessings and sometimes moving us with punishments,[00:33:32.580 –> 00:33:41.060] we can easily come to a crass view of what God is like. You start to come up with a crass view of[00:33:41.060 –> 00:33:46.020] what God is like and what serving him really means, what worshiping him really means. What I mean is[00:33:46.020 –> 00:33:52.880] you get this popular notion of God that Christians worship him kind of pragmatically as a means to some[00:33:52.880 –> 00:33:59.020] very immediate end. You worship God in order to get him to do things for you. Pray to God to get[00:33:59.020 –> 00:34:05.440] rain, to get into law school, to get you healed from cancer. You have this thing that you need and[00:34:05.440 –> 00:34:10.720] because he apparently has power over these things, you do whatever you can to move the levers to see[00:34:10.720 –> 00:34:16.020] if you can get him to give you this thing that you need over here. This kind of worship of God is less[00:34:16.020 –> 00:34:22.400] about worshiping him as it is about manipulating him, getting him to do things for you. It’s not[00:34:22.400 –> 00:34:28.020] so much that God is God, but more almost a genie in the bottle that does stuff for you. That’s how we[00:34:28.020 –> 00:34:34.500] start to treat him with our prayer life. But this is actually a very pagan notion of deity. The old[00:34:34.500 –> 00:34:40.720] pagan gods were gods who provided certain functions, right? Baal brought rain, Asherah brought[00:34:40.720 –> 00:34:47.620] fertility. You go and you offer sacrifices to the one that works the lever that you need moved,[00:34:47.660 –> 00:34:52.580] right? Because they’re attached to certain things that they’re able to provide for you. They were[00:34:52.580 –> 00:34:57.260] gods who were worshipped in order to provide certain functions. They were genies that you[00:34:57.260 –> 00:35:01.660] could be brought into your own service. But one of the things that I find very interesting about the[00:35:01.660 –> 00:35:08.660] old pagan pantheon of gods is the way that none of them were the creator god. It’s really interesting.[00:35:08.660 –> 00:35:13.260] They’re never the creator god. They’re somehow downstream. The creator god is in the background[00:35:13.260 –> 00:35:20.120] and forgotten. The pagan gods, none of them made the world. They were players inside of the system[00:35:20.120 –> 00:35:25.680] and they were worshipped for what they could do within the system. Essentially, they were worshipped[00:35:25.680 –> 00:35:31.780] for how they could be manipulated to your own immediate benefit. You also see none of them[00:35:31.780 –> 00:35:38.720] made the world and also none of them provided a moral code to which you had any obligation.[00:35:38.860 –> 00:35:45.140] They might have certain proclivities that you needed to humor. Athena loved war, Aphrodite preferred[00:35:45.140 –> 00:35:50.080] love. So they might have certain proclivities that you need to humor, but it’s not as if the moral[00:35:50.080 –> 00:35:56.200] character of Athena was this universal code that we all had a moral obligation to. It was just her[00:35:56.200 –> 00:36:01.440] personality that you needed to take into account if you wanted something from her. There’s no universal[00:36:01.440 –> 00:36:08.020] obligation to adhere to the ethics of one or the other. In fact, if you read much pagan literature,[00:36:08.020 –> 00:36:14.440] you find that the gods were just as likely to break any moral code as you are. In fact, kind of maybe a[00:36:14.440 –> 00:36:20.900] little bit more so. They get pretty bad. I point all of this out because with Israel, we see that[00:36:20.900 –> 00:36:27.700] God is both blessing Israel with prosperity and then removing that prosperity from them and cursing[00:36:27.700 –> 00:36:34.960] them with plagues. And he does both things out of his love and faithfulness to Israel. And I think[00:36:34.960 –> 00:36:39.480] there’s actually, it’s kind of hard, I think, for people to understand. Why would you worship a God[00:36:39.480 –> 00:36:47.080] who both blesses you and curses you? The fleshly heart sees religion to the extent that the fleshly[00:36:47.080 –> 00:36:53.220] heart is willing to grant any truth to a religion as a means of manipulation for material profit in[00:36:53.220 –> 00:36:58.440] this life. You serve a God in order to get him to do something for you. And if that God doesn’t[00:36:58.440 –> 00:37:04.340] cooperate and do what you wanted, then what’s the point of that religion? If Kabbalistic love charms[00:37:04.340 –> 00:37:09.180] don’t actually make women fall in love with you, then what’s even the point? Why would you bother[00:37:09.180 –> 00:37:17.120] with that? But the thing about the Christian faith is that our God does not serve us. We serve him.[00:37:17.120 –> 00:37:22.100] And we need to have, we need to make sure that we fundamentally understand this very different[00:37:22.100 –> 00:37:28.540] nature of who our God is compared to almost everybody else’s conception of him. He doesn’t[00:37:28.540 –> 00:37:35.280] serve us. We serve him. And it is right that we serve him because he is our creator and our[00:37:35.280 –> 00:37:43.260] sustainer. He’s our redeemer. He’s above all. He’s the one who made us and his moral code,[00:37:43.260 –> 00:37:49.920] his own nature defines for us all of our moral obligations. He made the world. He holds all[00:37:49.920 –> 00:37:54.980] things together by his current and present power. And we serve him because his moral character is[00:37:54.980 –> 00:38:00.740] the straight edge to which all human, all of humanity will be judged. That’s why we worship[00:38:00.740 –> 00:38:07.040] him, because of who he is, not because of what he is, if he’s going to give me a good thing today[00:38:07.040 –> 00:38:13.420] or tomorrow. What is more, this God who made us and who will judge us, his character is the very[00:38:13.420 –> 00:38:20.760] definition of faithful love. His character is the fulfillment of all that our souls long for,[00:38:20.760 –> 00:38:28.800] because we were made in his image. His character is what we need. He is not a Baal or an Asherah[00:38:28.800 –> 00:38:34.620] or a Zeus or an Aphrodite. He is Yahweh, the living God who made and sustains this world.[00:38:34.620 –> 00:38:42.140] And this is how we make sense of a God who both blesses and curses his people. That kind of God[00:38:42.140 –> 00:38:47.500] does not make sense if deities exist to serve us, to give us whatever we pray for. When that God is[00:38:47.500 –> 00:38:52.880] the actual God who rules over all of it, then it starts to make sense. And it makes sense because[00:38:52.880 –> 00:39:00.020] we realize that he doesn’t serve us. We serve him. He is our God. We kneel before him. He is not a means[00:39:00.020 –> 00:39:08.860] to certain ends for us. He is the end that we serve. He is the actual end that we serve. And that’s why[00:39:08.860 –> 00:39:16.380] a blessing or a curse, whatever it takes to restore us to him, is actually a blessing, is actually love,[00:39:16.380 –> 00:39:22.640] is actually a good thing because it’s raising us up to know him. And so he can use whatever tool is[00:39:22.640 –> 00:39:28.640] before him to wake us up in our hard-heartedness and to get our eyes up on him. If it doesn’t matter[00:39:28.640 –> 00:39:33.660] that we know him, if I just need Aphrodite to make some girl fall in love with me, it doesn’t really[00:39:33.660 –> 00:39:39.860] matter about Aphrodite. I just need her to do what I need her to do. But that’s not who God is. He[00:39:39.860 –> 00:39:45.160] himself is the end that we seek. And so all of these things, it’s why he can be sometimes blessing,[00:39:45.260 –> 00:39:50.700] sometimes cursed because we’re seeking him. If he is the end, then anything that directs us toward him[00:39:50.700 –> 00:39:57.120] is actually a blessing. When he blesses us and it turns our hearts to him, then that blessing is a[00:39:57.120 –> 00:40:02.680] good thing. But if he chastises us and that chastisement softens our hearts and turns us to[00:40:02.680 –> 00:40:08.800] him, then that chastisement is also a good thing for which we should be grateful. Prosperity in this[00:40:08.800 –> 00:40:15.240] life is not the end. God is the end because he is the God over all things. He’s the God of verse 13.[00:40:15.700 –> 00:40:22.780] He is the God that all of our attention should be on. Prosperity then is not the end. God is the end.[00:40:22.780 –> 00:40:28.000] And whatever points us to him, blessing or hardship, is a good thing. And whatever distracts[00:40:28.000 –> 00:40:34.780] us from him, even great prosperity, is a curse that we should want removed. And so in conclusion[00:40:34.780 –> 00:40:40.880] then, we need to remember that days are coming. Therefore, as Amos said, prepare to meet your God.[00:40:41.160 –> 00:40:47.460] Or as Paul said, for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ. There’s a time coming[00:40:47.460 –> 00:40:54.900] when we all must go and meet our God. Days are coming. We all will stand before him. Now, to end[00:40:54.900 –> 00:41:01.860] a sermon on that ominous note might seem a little bit harsh and depressing. Judgment is coming. Amen.[00:41:01.860 –> 00:41:09.240] Have a nice day. We’ll just leave it there. And I think especially when we live in a nation in which[00:41:09.240 –> 00:41:17.100] we can see signs of God’s displeasure all around us. Like as we read through these curses in verses 6[00:41:17.100 –> 00:41:21.420] through 11, how many of these do you start to see in the world around us? How many biblical[00:41:21.420 –> 00:41:27.860] curses do we see on our nation now? And you start to feel that we’re under chastisement. You feel God’s[00:41:27.860 –> 00:41:34.620] displeasure with us. We see national sin around us that deserves God’s wrath. And we see signs of[00:41:34.620 –> 00:41:39.640] judgment upon us. And I think that’s a little bit unsettling because it’s all around us. And in many[00:41:39.640 –> 00:41:44.580] cases, it’s inside of us. We know that we’ve been complicit in so many of these things. But I want[00:41:44.580 –> 00:41:51.760] to close with three brief points. First, remember that God in his covenant love uses temporary[00:41:51.760 –> 00:41:57.500] judgments as a way of calling his people back to him. The things that we see around us that seem to[00:41:57.500 –> 00:42:03.380] be signs of his displeasure with us, we need to remember are his invitations to us to return to[00:42:03.380 –> 00:42:11.340] him. It’s him saying the door is open. Repent. Come. Come right now. Repent. It’s every verse he says[00:42:11.340 –> 00:42:17.880] repent. You can turn right now. You can repent right now. The signs of his displeasure are the[00:42:17.880 –> 00:42:24.960] signs that the door is open for us to repent. In fact, they are signs that his love is still waiting[00:42:24.960 –> 00:42:31.000] on us. Remember that God is the one who chastens those whom he loves. He’s the father who chastens[00:42:31.000 –> 00:42:35.800] those whom he loves. When we feel his chastening, we need to understand that that is a declaration of[00:42:35.800 –> 00:42:42.820] his love over us. There is something encouraging about that. Second, remember what was at the heart[00:42:42.820 –> 00:42:49.020] of Israel’s disobedience. It was a disobedient worship. Remember, it all comes down to what’s[00:42:49.020 –> 00:42:55.980] going on at Bethel and Gilgal. What’s at the heart? It’s fundamentally a matter of worship, okay? So what[00:42:55.980 –> 00:43:01.240] would it have looked like for Israel to have repented in accordance with God’s Word? Well, for[00:43:01.240 –> 00:43:06.360] starters, in some crazy way, I think it would have looked like this. It would have looked like what[00:43:06.360 –> 00:43:13.360] we’re doing right now and right here. Returning to God starts right here on Sunday morning, confessing[00:43:13.360 –> 00:43:19.400] our sins, listening to His Word, praising our God, okay? Returning our nation to God begins exactly[00:43:19.400 –> 00:43:25.800] like this. This is how we do it. This is what, when He says, turn, return, repent, this is[00:43:25.800 –> 00:43:30.560] that happening, okay? We are doing that now. At home in Moscow, our pastor Doug, I think[00:43:30.560 –> 00:43:34.900] you get to hear from him next week, has always told us that when we go to worship on Sunday[00:43:34.900 –> 00:43:39.200] morning, we should think of our worship as the sound of a battering ram on the gates of[00:43:39.200 –> 00:43:45.320] the enemy’s great city, okay? When we worship, we’re doing something fundamental for our city[00:43:45.320 –> 00:43:51.120] and for our nation, for our people, right? This is the way that a nation begins to turn,[00:43:51.540 –> 00:43:57.740] begins to repent as we come together to worship. And that’s why this is the sound of the battering[00:43:57.740 –> 00:44:04.240] ram on the gates of the enemy’s city, okay? It’s boom. And we just did it. You just heard the boom[00:44:04.240 –> 00:44:10.060] as that battering ram lands. And then we go out and we save up all of our energy and we get the ram[00:44:10.060 –> 00:44:16.080] back again. And then next Sunday, we’ll have one more big boom. And that’s what faithful cultural[00:44:16.080 –> 00:44:25.980] renewal looks like. John, sorry, the last point. Also, we need to remember that all judgment[00:44:25.980 –> 00:44:32.280] culminates in the final judgment. And that’s that sobering moment that all human history is headed[00:44:32.280 –> 00:44:39.240] towards, right? So every little judgment is just a taste coming towards that final judgment. And[00:44:39.240 –> 00:44:45.220] again, I note that that’s an ominous, it’s an ominous concept. And it’s one that would be worth[00:44:45.220 –> 00:44:51.500] us dwelling more on at some later date. But it’s important when you think about the judgment and[00:44:51.500 –> 00:44:57.240] the final judgment and what exactly the final judgment is, you must remember that the final[00:44:57.240 –> 00:45:02.400] judgment, in addition to this moment when God judges everything in all of human history,[00:45:02.400 –> 00:45:09.420] it’s also the culmination of your own union with Christ. And this is, I think, something that is[00:45:09.420 –> 00:45:17.720] not understood well enough. The final judgment is the culmination of your salvation. Everything[00:45:17.720 –> 00:45:21.600] that’s going on in your life, God is working on you, dealing with sins, putting certain things[00:45:21.600 –> 00:45:28.940] to death, and making you more and more like his son. The final judgment is the culmination of that[00:45:28.940 –> 00:45:35.120] process. And when you stand before God in the final judgment, you stand before him for the first time[00:45:35.120 –> 00:45:42.460] ever with that whole work complete. It’s the moment that you get to finally be the man, the woman that[00:45:42.460 –> 00:45:49.380] God is making you. And that’s why it’s not something to dread, because it’s the culmination of your[00:45:49.380 –> 00:45:54.660] salvation, and him finally declaring, this, this is what I was bringing you towards. This is what[00:45:54.660 –> 00:46:02.940] I was making you into. 1 John 3, beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not yet been revealed[00:46:02.940 –> 00:46:07.540] what we shall be. It’s not yet revealed what you shall be. You don’t even know what you’re going to[00:46:07.540 –> 00:46:13.420] be like yet, but we know that when he is revealed, that is the second coming, when Christ comes and[00:46:13.420 –> 00:46:18.620] calls us all back to him, when he is revealed, we shall be like him. Okay, you don’t know what it’s[00:46:18.620 –> 00:46:23.880] going to be like yet, but at that moment you will be like him, and everyone who has this hope in him[00:46:23.880 –> 00:46:32.040] purifies himself just as he is pure. Okay, that hope is a purifying hope, and that purification[00:46:32.040 –> 00:46:38.320] is completed at that moment of the resurrection as you step into the final judgment. You step into him[00:46:38.320 –> 00:46:47.000] completed in the image of Jesus Christ, completed in the glory of Christ. So the final judgment is not[00:46:47.000 –> 00:46:52.300] just when God is done with this world, it’s also when God is done with you, and what I mean by that[00:46:52.300 –> 00:46:58.120] is the final judgment coincides with when Christ’s work of your redemption is complete. You meet him[00:46:58.120 –> 00:47:05.660] completed, or as John just said, fully and completely purified. I think in the benediction that we have,[00:47:05.660 –> 00:47:11.700] I love this when we do it from Jude, because he says, now to him who is able to keep you from[00:47:11.700 –> 00:47:17.940] stumbling and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, okay?[00:47:17.940 –> 00:47:23.540] That moment that you step into the final judgment, you step into it faultless. You step into it[00:47:23.540 –> 00:47:28.880] purified because the faith that you have is working on you now and it’s all culminated. It’s all[00:47:28.880 –> 00:47:35.700] completed at the final judgment. I say this because I think that Christians fear talking about[00:47:35.700 –> 00:47:41.600] judgment, okay? I mean, and that’s what Amos is about. It’s about judgment. And I think Christians[00:47:41.600 –> 00:47:46.160] fear or are a little bit nervous about talking about judgment because they think it somehow makes[00:47:46.160 –> 00:47:51.260] them into a works righteousness people who think that they are better than everyone else. Going to[00:47:51.260 –> 00:48:00.660] go around whispering Amos-like judgment against everything that you see all around you. And you[00:48:00.660 –> 00:48:04.520] start to worry, I don’t want to become somebody who’s oriented towards a works righteousness that[00:48:04.520 –> 00:48:09.760] thinks he’s better than everybody else. But the final judgment will be the final display of Christ’s[00:48:09.760 –> 00:48:17.100] grace, not our self-righteousness. We need not be embarrassed or shy about longing for God’s straight[00:48:17.100 –> 00:48:22.600] edge to be applied to all of creation. Because that’s the moment when you are going to be[00:48:22.600 –> 00:48:27.660] straightened completely, when you will be perfected completely. It will be a glorious thing[00:48:27.660 –> 00:48:34.740] that all of us should be longing to see. We do not yet have any idea how great that moment will be.[00:48:34.740 –> 00:48:39.960] It’s something that’s right and good for us to long to see. All right, let’s pray. Our Heavenly Father,[00:48:39.960 –> 00:48:45.100] we pray for our nation. We pray for your mercy for our people. You’ve been gracious to us in your[00:48:45.100 –> 00:48:50.840] kindness, and you’ve been gracious to us in the correction that you have sent us. Father, would[00:48:50.840 –> 00:48:57.240] you wake up our nation that we might return to you with truly repentant and faithful hearts? May the[00:48:57.240 –> 00:49:02.180] sound of true Christian worship flood our nation on Sunday mornings, and would you please be with us?[00:49:02.180 –> 00:49:07.400] Bless us, Lord, that we might worship you with the sincerity and truth that you desire. We thank you[00:49:07.400 –> 00:49:13.020] for our Lord and our Savior, Jesus Christ. May his name be great in our nation. May his righteousness[00:49:13.100 –> 00:49:17.280] fill our hearts, and it is in his name that we pray as he taught us to pray, saying,[00:49:17.280 –> 00:49:26.440] Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. show less

Summary Pastor Horvath preaches on Amos chapter 3. Transcription Choose show more to view the transcription. Transcriptions are AI generated and MAY be incorrect. Rely on the spoken word heard in the audio file. show more Today, we will continue the sermon series in the book of Amos. The text before us this morning is Amos chapter 3, verses 1 through 15. I’ve titled my sermon, Three Summons from the Lord. As we will see in a moment, in Amos chapter 3, Yahweh gives three summons or three calls. God is effectively calling Israel into account based upon her covenant standing. My aim in preaching today is twofold. First, I want you to understand the words of Amos. I’m preaching so that you might understand what God’s Word says, particularly the three summons from the Lord Himself. Second, I’m preaching because I want you to consider what these three summons mean for you. To help you follow along with my exposition, I have three points. First, a summons to the ten tribes of Israel. Second, a summons to Israel’s neighbors. And third, a summons to the people of God. With that being said, if you have your Bible with you, you can go ahead and turn to Amos chapter 3. And I’m going to read verses 1 through 15, and then I’ll pray a prayer of illumination. Hear now the living God’s very words. Hear this word that the Lord has spoken against you, O people of Israel, against the whole family that I brought up out of the land of Egypt. You only have I known of all the families of the earth. Do two walk together unless they have agreed to meet? Does a lion roar in the forest when he has no prey? Does a young lion cry out from his den if he has taken nothing? Does a bird fall on a snare on the earth when there is no trap for it? Does a snare spring up from the ground when it has taken nothing? Is a trumpet blown in a city and the people are not afraid? Does disaster come to a city unless the Lord has done it? For the Lord God does nothing without revealing his secret to his servants, the prophets. The lion has roared, who will not fear? The Lord God has spoken, who can but prophesy? Proclaim to the strongholds in Ashdod and to the strongholds in the land of Egypt and say, And see the great tumults within her and the oppressed in her midst. They do not know how to do right, declares the Lord, those who store up violence and robbery in their strongholds. Therefore, thus says the Lord God, an adversary shall surround the land and bring down your defenses from you, and your strongholds shall be plundered. Thus says the Lord, as the shepherd rescues from the mouth of the lion, or a piece of an ear, so shall the people of Israel who dwell in Samaria be rescued with the corner of a couch and part of a bed. Hear and testify against the house of Jacob, declares the Lord God, the God of hosts, that 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. Bow your head with me. Do not let us harden our hearts when you call us into account. By your Spirit, turn your word from resonance. Into summons. From warning into wisdom. And from judgment into repentance and life. We ask this in reverent faith before the God who speaks and whose word never returns empty. Amen. Consider this first point. A summons to the ten tribes of Israel. I’m going to draw your attention back to verses 1 and 2. Hear this word that the Lord has spoken against you, O people of Israel, against the whole family that I brought up out of the land of Egypt. You only have I known of all the families of the earth. Therefore, I will punish you for all your iniquities. And they function like legal charges against the nations. These charges go out to Israel’s neighbors. But these charges also include Judah and Israel, the two kingdoms, the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. In short, eight times in the first two chapters, God states that He will exercise His wrath on the nations. The sin of the nations that warranted God’s just judgment comprised of things like violence, lying, human trafficking, rape, exploitation of the poor, and murder. These indictments, these eight indictments, are referred to by theologians and Bible students as the oracles of God. And they’ve been given that nomenclature because each one of the eight accusations begins with the words, thus says the Lord. And if you glance or look at Amos chapters 1 and 2 and consider the typesetting in your English Bible, the phrase, thus says the Lord, sort of just jumps off the page at you. And that is purposeful because chapters 1 and 2 are organized and arranged around these eight oracles or these eight charges of judgment against the nations. Now, when we come to chapter 3, a significant change in Amos’ vocabulary occurs. Instead of oracles, Yahweh gives three summons. And these summons functioned like a covenant lawsuit. They are different than the charges against the nations. This change takes place because God effectively shifts His attention away from the nations and fixes His scope on the ten northern tribes of Israel. In other words, God’s focus is no longer the sin and injustices of the world. Instead, in chapter 3, His concern moves to the sin and injustices committed by His covenant people. In verse 1 of chapter 3, the word that is translated into English as here is the Hebrew word shema. And for some of you, this word shema might sound familiar. That is because in Deuteronomy chapter 6, we are given the great shema. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. It’s the great shema. And right after that famous line, the message in Deuteronomy teaches that Israel, as God’s unique covenant people, should do the following four things. They are to love God fully with their heart, soul, and strength. They are to keep God’s word close in the mind and in the heart. They are to teach His word diligently to their children and their grandchildren and their great-grandchildren. And they are to keep God’s word ever before them, symbolically on the hands and foreheads and doorposts. But literally, God’s word is to be the lens by which they view all of life through. Attached to this great Shema in Deuteronomy blessing and cursing. If God’s people remained faithful to Him, then they would experience blessing. But if Yahweh’s covenant people transgressed His will and ways, they would experience curses. In Deuteronomy chapter 28, one of the specific curses for disobedience or breaking the covenant was the invasion of foreign conquering foes. This would come to fruition in 722 BC when the Assyrian armies sacked Samaria, the capital city of the 10 northern tribes. What I want you to understand is this. In verse 1, Yahweh is calling Israel into account in a different way than how He has already called the nations into account. Particularly, Yahweh is charging Israel for their covenant unfaithfulness, namely their sin of idolatry and lawlessness. And God does so in a very profound way by using the very familiar covenant language, said again here in Amos 3. God brings out the charges with the words, Hear, O Israel. Verse 2 emphasizes that Israel’s judgment is, in fact, a result of her covenant unfaithfulness. In short, because they are God’s people, Israel will be judged for their iniquity. Look with me at verses 3 through 8. Verse 3 through 9. Verse 3 through 6. Rhetorically communicate the concept of cause and effect. And verse 7 and 8 explain that Israel’s judgment was the outworking of cause and effect. The cause was this. Israel, God’s covenant people, was unfaithful to Yahweh by engaging in idolatry and lawlessness. That’s the cause. The effect is this. God the lion roared from his holy hill and disaster befell Samaria. This is the first point. A summons to the ten tribes of Israel. The vocabulary of chapter 3 changes with the use of covenantal language. Hear, O Israel. God’s wrath shifts from the nations to his people. In God’s cosmic courtroom, Israel is on trial for breaking covenant with Yahweh. This leads us to our second point. A summons to Israel’s neighbors. Look with me at verses 9 through 12. And see the great tumults within her and the oppressed in her midst. They do not know how to do right, declares the Lord, those who store up violence and robbery in their strongholds. Therefore, thus says the Lord God, an adversary shall surround the land and bring down your defenses from you, and your strongholds shall be plundered. Thus says the Lord, 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 with the corner of a couch and part of a bed. The Hebrew word that is translated in verse 9 as proclaimed is the same Hebrew word that is used at the beginning of verse 1. It is this word, Shema. Hear, O Israel. In verse 9, God employs this familiar covenantal language again. At this time, Yahweh issues a summons to two foreign nations. Ashdon, which was a major Philistine city, and Egypt. In verse 9, God summoned the Philistines and Egyptians to serve as witnesses in his cosmic courtroom. When taking the witness stand, these two foreign nations were to do two things. They were to testify against Israel, and they were to witness what would become of Israel. The Philistines and Egyptians were summoned to testify against Israel because they were firsthand eyewitnesses to Israel’s covenantal status and standing. In the Exodus, Egypt witnessed Yahweh’s covenant faithfulness toward Israel through His redemption. Egypt had a front row seat to the Lord’s mighty hand and outstretched arm. Egypt had an experiential knowledge of the ten plagues and the parting of the Red Sea. They saw and knew that Israel was God’s people. They could attest to this. Likewise, the Philistines also witnessed Yahweh’s covenantal fidelity to Israel. The Philistines were able to give testimony about how God delivered His people time and time again, but particularly through the exploits of a shepherd king. In short, the Philistines, and the Egyptians could objectively take the witness stand and implicate Israel for her covenant unfaithfulness by stating, we have seen that you alone among the families of the earth are Yahweh’s people, and yet you are lawless. You have stored up oppression, violence, and robbery. In addition to testifying against Israel, the Philistines and Egyptians were summoned by God to witness what He would do to Israel. Verses 11 and 12 describe what would take place in 722 BC. They give us a graphic detail of Samaria being ravaged by the foreign armies of Assyria. The Philistines and Egyptians were called to witness these events so that they could testify to Yahweh’s covenantal faithfulness. They already saw and witnessed God’s fidelity to His people through His redemptive acts. But now the Philistines and the Egyptians would see the Lord exercise faithfulness in His wrath and judgment. Because remember, the covenant made with Israel comprised both blessing and cursing. Yahweh summons Ashdod in Egypt so that His cursing of Israel could be justified on the account of two witnesses. This is the second point, a summons to Israel’s call the Philistines and Egyptians into His cosmic courtroom in order that they might testify against Israel for her lawlessness and give witness to Yahweh’s faithfulness, not only in blessing Israel, but cursing her as well. This leads to the third point, a summons to the people of God. Draw your attention to verses 13 through 15. Hear and testify against the house of Jacob, declares the Lord God, the God of hosts, that 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. 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, declares the Lord. In verse 13, the word that is translated in your English Bible as here is once again this Hebrew word, Shema. This time, Yahweh used the covenant language to issue a summons to the house of Jacob. The moniker, House of Jacob, can be understood as a term of endearment, concerning Israel, a term that’s personal. Just think about the familiar phrase, Jacob have I loved, but Esau I have hated. Here, Yahweh adjusts His scope away from the nation and state of Israel and now turns toward the people themselves. Using an enduring term, God makes things personal. One can argue that a nation’s identity is rooted in its people, their character, sentiment, and collective life, not just in written law or public policy. In short, a nation is not just an institution made of policy and law. It is a culture made of human beings. And in this vein of thinking, Yahweh’s judgment was not only reserved for the nation’s leaders and representatives, but it was aimed at the individual citizens who had dirty hands and unclean lips. The Hebrew terminology that is used for house in verse 15 can refer to family dwellings or places of worship. Now, the people of Israel had both summer residences and winter residences. In modern parlance, they had beach houses and chalets. And as a result, they also had summer places where they practiced idolatrous worship, and they had winter places of false worship. And because of the people’s idolatry, Yahweh would strike down the summer and winter residences. He would strike down the beach houses and chalets, along with the seasonal places of false worship. The houses of false worship. In short, God’s judgment would not only deal with the national sins of Israel, but it would also address the individual, unfaithful, covenantal breaker in His house. Said differently, in 722 BC, Yahweh would not only rain down judgment buildings of Samaria, but He would strike the homes of its people. This is the third point, a summons to the people of God. Hear, O house of Jacob. In summary, Amos chapter 3 is an indictment against Israel for her covenant unfaithfulness and lawlessness. Three summons are given. First, a summons to the ten tribes. This summons was a covenantal indictment explaining that Israel would be judged for their collective and national lawlessness. Second, a summons to Israel’s neighbors, Ashdod in Egypt, to pagan nations, served as witnesses in God’s courtroom. Faithfulness in Yahweh’s fidelity. Third, a summons to the people of God. This summons was a personal reminder to the individual covenant breaker. Dirty hands and unclean lips would be dealt with by Yahweh himself. Helped you understand the words of Amos. Particularly the three summons from the Lord. But more importantly, as a pastor, as a shepherd like Amos, I want you to consider what these three summons mean for you. So in closing, I have three points for you to consider. The first is this. We cannot miss the fact that Amos chapter 3 is directed at the covenant people of God. It’s not directed to the nations. It’s directed at God’s covenant people. And as partakers in the new covenant, you and I need to take two apostolic statements very seriously. St. Paul stated that what happened to Israel in 722 B.C. was a warning for the good of the universal church. And in 1 Peter 4.17, the apostle said, it is time for judgment to begin with the household of God. As God’s covenant people, Israel was to operate in a peculiar way. Likewise, as the church, we are to function in a particular way, according to the new covenant. Therefore, if Israel was judged for her unfaithfulness and lawlessness, how can we, the church, expect that God would not discipline us for our various forms of idolatry and disobedience? How can we expect God not to judge our sexual immorality? How can we expect God not to judge our lying, our theft, our robbery, our oppression of those who are weak and poor? How can we expect God not to deal with our sin? Second, as Ashdod and Egypt bore witness to Israel’s unfaithfulness and Yahweh’s fidelity, they learned something about the wrath of God, something that the Apostle Paul articulated in Romans chapter 2 verse 9, and that is this, there will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the covenant people of God first, and also those who are outside of the covenant. Therefore, if you don’t identify as a Christian, and you’ve listened to an exposition of Amos chapter 3, you might have started to think that God’s wrath is only reserved for His people. Now, while God does discipline those whom He loves, you need to know He also exercises justice against all evil. And sin, including your sin, your sexual immorality, your hatred, your anger, your malice, your lying, your robbery, and your pride. All of it, Yahweh will deal with in hot, furious wrath. Third, it is easy to believe that God will judge the nations for their lawlessness. It’s even easy to conceptualize that God will correct and discipline the church when she is in error. But the thing we often dismiss or don’t want to consider is that you and I have a propensity to sin and violate God’s law. We have a proclivity toward iniquity. And if you’ve been baptized in the triune name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, if you have been united to Christ Jesus by faith, then you should understand what Hebrews chapter 12 explains. God, as your loving heavenly Father, is going to discipline you. He will discipline you for your sexual immorality, your untruthful, deceitful words, your theft, your anger, your loss. God will discipline you. But hear this. There is good news for everyone in this room, for every lawless nation, for every impure nation. For every non-Christian, for every baptized individual. There is good news. And this good news is the reason that I got out of bed this morning. It’s the only reason I would come from Pennsylvania to Capitol Hill and stand before you today. This is the good news. Jesus, the eternal begotten Son of God, came into the world to save you from God’s wrath. Incarnate by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, Jesus united human nature to His divine nature so that He might represent you in God’s cosmic courtroom. He lived a sinless life procuring real righteousness on your behalf. Jesus stood on trial in your place, and He was condemned for your sins. On the cross, Jesus suffered and died as your substitute, taking God’s just judgment for you. The righteous suffered in the place of the unrighteous. He was buried, and on the third day, He rose again victoriously, conquering the power of sin, Satan, and death. He was seen by more than 500 eyewitnesses. Then He ascended into heaven, where He sits at the right hand of the Father, reigning and ruling over every nation, church, and house. The good news is this. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection satisfied the wrath of God for everyone who repents of their sin and comes to Him. In faith. But everyone outside of Jesus will face tribulation, distress, and judgment. Therefore, hear. Do not harden your hearts. Turn away from your sin. And in repentance, turn toward Jesus in faith. Amen. Bow your head with me in prayer. Heavenly Father, as we consider Amos chapter 3, I pray that by the power of the Spirit, it would not be lost on us that you deal faithfully and truly and in justice with your people. I pray, Father, that by the power of the Spirit, you would make known to us all the ways in which we have been living in the name of the Spirit. We have a propensity to break your law, to despise your word, to harden our own hearts, to ignore your shamans. Lord, we pray that by the Spirit’s power, you would give us faith and repentance. show less