Be Concerned - Amos - God Calls

Amos begins in Amos 3 with God's call of Israel, and he said, I'll tell you why I'm going to have to punish you. It's because you've had so many privileges. Now, just stop and think about our nation and the nations of the world that have heard the gospel, they have had God's blessing upon them, and yet what have we done with all these privileges? We are going to have a greater judgment before the Lord Jesus Christ than those who have never known Him.

In Amos 3:3-8, he discusses the call of Amos. I can just hear the people in Bethel in Israel saying, who is this farmer coming up here to tell us the word of the Lord? He comes in here and says, "Hear the word of the Lord." What authority does he have? Well, of course, Amos pointed out that he was not one of the graduates of the school of the prophets. He did not come up through the ranks. God called him and God anointed him and God said, you preach.

Amos 7:14, "I was no prophet, nor was I a son of a prophet, but I was a herdsman and a tender of sycamore fruit, and the Lord took me as I followed the flock, and the Lord said to me, go, prophesy to my people Israel. Now therefore, hear the word of the Lord." What authority do I have? Well, he said, I'm going to tell you what authority I have.

have been called by God. And in these next verses, verses 3 through 8, he's going to give a series of illustrations to show how he's been called of God. Two friends walking together, a lion roaring, a bird being caught in a trap, a trumpet blowing in the city, a lion roaring. He's going to end up telling us how God has called him.

Verse 3, "Can two walk together unless they are agreed? Will a lion roar in the forest when he has no prey? Will a young lion cry out of his den if he has caught nothing? Will a bird fall into a snare on the earth where there is no trap for it? Will a snare spring up from the earth if it has caught nothing at all? If a trumpet is blown in the city, will not the people be afraid? If there is a calamity in the city, will not the Lord have done it?"

"Surely the Lord does nothing unless he reveals his secret to his servants the prophets. A lion has roared. Who will not fear? The Lord God has spoken. Who can but prophesy?"

Now, what's he talking about here? Well, he's explaining that nothing happens without a cause. Cause and effect. Two people are walking together, they met. A lion roars, that means he's about to grab his prey. Or he cries out from the den, he's caught his prey, he's having his dinner.

A bird is in the snare, somebody put the trap there. The snare springs up because the bird was there. A trumpet is blown in the city, people are afraid. What's happening? A calamity comes, the Lord brought it.

Now he says, I am here preaching why the Lord did it. "Surely the Lord God does nothing unless he reveals his secret to his servants the prophets." Amos is simply saying, I'm not here by accident, I'm here by appointment. I didn't do this myself, the Lord did it. Now, let's take these images that he gives to us here.

"Can two walk together unless they are agreed?" Out in the wilderness, you don't find two people walking together unless they made an appointment. They they would not be able to find each other. Oh, it's different in the city. You meet your friends and neighbors in the parking lot or in the supermarket or at church, but Amos was a wilderness man and if two people are walking together, they made an appointment. Who are the two people walking together? Amos and God.

Who is the lion roaring about to devour his prey? God is. You see, the prey is Israel. Amos 1:2, "And he said, the Lord roars from Zion." Amos 3:8, "A lion has roared. Who will not fear? The Lord God has spoken. Who can but prophesy?" So, Amos and God are walking together and God is the lion and Israel is the bird about to be caught in the snare. They've trapped themselves by their own sin.

Amos is blowing the trumpet in verse 6. Now, in Numbers 10, the Jewish people were instructed about trumpets. They had special trumpets. They blew the trumpets for the new moon. They blew the trumpets for the feast days. They blew the trumpets to assemble the people. They blew the trumpets to declare war. And in a Jewish city, whenever they heard the blowing of the trumpet, they knew that something was up.

Well, Amos is blowing the trumpet and he said, you had better be afraid. Calamity is going to come and that calamity is going to come from the Lord. It won't be an accident. God had already sent calamity to them. Amos 4:6, famine. Amos 4:7, drought. Verse 9, blight and mildew and locust. Verse 10, plagues and war that killed some of their young men.

That sounds like our nations today, doesn't it? Famine and drought and blight and locusts and sickness and plague and war that's killing people. But now he says, I'm blowing the trumpet and you had better listen. Now, the conclusion is that Amos has every right to be proclaiming the word of God. He is God's called servant.

Notice verse 7, "Surely the Lord God does nothing unless he reveals his secret to his servants the prophets." "The secret of the Lord is with those that fear Him, and he will show them his covenant." Psalm 25:14. God said concerning Abraham, he said, "Shall I hide from Abraham the thing that I'm going to do?"

God reveals his will and his way to his servants, and they reveal his will and way to us. The lion is roaring and Amos says, I've got to prophesy. "A lion has roared, who will not fear? The Lord God has spoken, who can but prophesy?" Like the disciples in the book of Acts, "we cannot but speak those things that we have seen and heard."

By the way, when God calls his servant, he gives him the message. It's so sad when we have preachers who preach because they have to say something, not because they have something to say. Get your message from God. Hear God blow the trumpet. Hear God roar through his word and then share that message with God's people.

Now, in verses 9 and 10, we have a third call. God's call of Israel verses 1 and 2. God's call of Amos verses 3 through 8. Now, God calls the Gentile nations. Here's an interesting thing. In Amos 1 and Amos 2, God had indicted the Gentile nations.

Now he says, "proclaim in the palaces at Ashdod." Now, that's the Philistines. "And in the palaces in the land of Egypt and say, assemble on the mountains of Samaria. See great tumults in her midst, and the oppressed within her, or the devastation within her, the oppression within her. For they do not know to do right," says the Lord, "who store up violence and robbery in their palaces." Now, what is he doing here? He's calling the Gentile nations to witness the punishment of Israel's sins.

By the way, it's bad enough when our sin catches up with us, but when the unsaved crowd stands there and laughs at us, that makes it even worse. Whenever there's a scandal in the church, the unsaved crowd just loves to write about it and talk about it and make it a big item of news. And that's a disgrace to the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

It's very sad, but it's true. The prophet said to David, who had committed adultery and murdered a man, said, because of what you've done, the Gentile nations have looked with disdain upon our God and upon our people. You brought disgrace upon Israel. God calls the Gentile nations and says, watch what I'm going to do. You Philistines, you Egyptians, see how they have oppressed the poor. See how they are heading for devastation.

I have stored up violence. They are storing up violence. They are robbing their own people, but judgment is coming. The time has come for judgment to begin at the house of the Lord. And it's going to come.

And I fear that many people are going to watch and say, well, let's just laugh at them. Oh, they're born again Christians. Oh, yes, they believe in the word of God. And look at the way they live. What a disgrace that is. What a shame it is.

Now, in verses 11 through 15, God calls forth his wrath. First, he called Israel and said, you are accountable and responsible. And then he called Amos and said, go give them the word of God. Now, why? That they might turn from their sins, repent and be saved. They would not do that. So God called the witnesses and said, all right, just watch now. Here's what I'm going to do to my people.

By the way, no unsaved person should feel secure because God judges his people. If I'm talking right now to some unsaved person who says, sure, I've seen sin in the lives of un of Christian people. Oh, yes, I know all about that and I just applaud when I see God judge. Just remember what Peter wrote, 1 Peter 4:17, "for the time has come for judgment to begin at the house of God. Now, if the righteous one is scarcely saved, where will the ungodly and the sinner appear?"

My friend, you aren't a Christian, and you gloat over the sins of the saints. Well, if God punishes his own people when they sin, what's he going to do to you? You're not even one of his children. You better not laugh and ridicule too much. Your day is coming. But I trust that you'll ask the Lord Jesus to save you. I would rather be a Christian under the chastening hand of God than an unsaved person heading for a Christless eternity in the lake of fire.

Now he calls forth his wrath, verses 11 through 15. "Therefore thus says the Lord God, an adversary shall be all around the land." That's Assyria. The Assyrians were going to come and circle Israel. "He shall sap up your strength from you, move in and take away everything valuable, and your palaces shall be plundered." Your manner houses. He goes on to talk about this. He declares that judgment is going to come from Assyria.

Now, he illustrates it and being a shepherd, he uses his illustration from the flock. "Thus says the Lord, as a shepherd takes from the mouth of a lion two legs or a piece of an ear, so shall the children of Israel be taken out who dwell in Samaria."

When a shepherd was defending his flock, he had to prove that an animal was killed by a lion or a bear. In other words, he might steal an animal and then go to the boss and say, well, now, that animal was taken away by a lion or a bear. He had to prove that. In fact, Exodus 22:13 talks about that. Exodus 22:13, "If it is torn to pieces by an animal, then he shall bring it as evidence, and he shall not make good what was torn." This distinguishes the accident from deliberate robbery.

So, what does Amos say here? Well, he says, Israel's going to be like a little sheep or a lamb, and the lion is coming. The lion's roaring, now the lion is attacking and the shepherd goes and kills the lion. But alas, he has to prove that the animal was taken by a predator and so he brings a piece of the ear, brings a leg or two. What's Amos saying? He's saying a remnant's going to be left over. That's all. Just a remnant. There won't be many of them. By the time Assyria is through with Israel, there's not going to be much left.

He talks here about their false sense of security, in the corner of a bed and on the edge of a couch. In other words, here are the people sitting on their beds, sitting on their couches. They are at ease in Zion. Amos 6:1, he talks about that. "Woe to you who are at ease in Zion and trust in Mount Samaria." Notable persons in the chief nations to whom the house of Israel comes.

Oh, we have great leaders, we have a great army. We have palaces and bulwarks and fortresses. Nobody can come and take us. And so they sit on the corner of the bed talking. They sit on the edge of the couch talking. And then the enemy comes.

"Hear and testify against the house of Jacob," says the Lord God, "the God of hosts." So often he uses that phrase, the Lord of hosts, the Lord of the armies. "That in the day I punish Israel for their transgressions, I will also visit destruction on the altars of Bethel." Judgment begins in the house of the Lord. Now, Bethel was the king's chapel. It was the place where all of the elite of Samaria went for their worship. But their worship was not sincere. It was purely hypocritical. God said, I'm going to start at Bethel. I'm going to destroy your religious system.

You know, we have a great system of religion today and I wonder if the day isn't going to come when the Lord's going to come and wipe the whole thing out. "And the horns of the altar shall be cut off." Now, it used to be in that day, if somebody were after you, you could run to the altar and take hold of the horns and that gave you sanctuary. He said there'll be no more sanctuary in the temple. There's no place to run, no place to hide. "The horns of the altar shall be cut off and fall to the ground." So God is going to come and destroy their religious system.

Then he's going to destroy their economic system, their affluence. "I will destroy." It's an interesting word. "I will strike the winter house along with the summer house." Many people can't afford to have one house. "The houses of ivory shall perish." They were decorating their houses so beautifully. This was a prosperous time in Israel.

And they were using their money for things that are not going to last. "The houses of ivory shall perish. The great houses shall have an end," says the Lord. When the judgment of God falls, everything is going to fall with it. And they got all this money by crushing the poor, by stealing from the needy, by being crooked in the way they were working down at the courts.

God's call of wrath. The judgment of God is going to come. Everything we see is going to be burned up someday. What a tragedy it is to waste our lives and energy on things that don't really matter. Let's live with eternity's values in view.

[Interview]

And now Warren Wiersbe is with Back to the Bible CEO Arnie Cole to dig a little deeper into today's message.

Arnie: So there's so many lies in our culture today. Lies about relationships, lies about who God is, lies about what's right and wrong. And our young people in particular, really any age, they're being seduced by these lies. So what's the best way to help people grow and know the truth?

Warren: One of the problems we face today has been caused by our universities. They start teaching relativism. There are no absolutes. And yet there are absolutes. You go into the hospital for surgery, they have absolutes. Well, what are we supposed to take out, they, what difference does it make? Nobody would talk like that.

You take your car to the garage to have it serviced. Well, what are we supposed to do? Well, it needs this, this and this. Well, what difference does it make? It makes a lot of difference. So today our kids are surrounded by this relativism that is so dangerous.

Proverbs 23:23 says, "Buy the truth and sell it not." That's a great verse. The truth costs something and today we've got to teach our young people that you stand for the truth because that's the only way to let the truth control your life. "Buy the truth and sell it not." Now, kids don't like to be preached at and maybe we shouldn't preach at them. I don't know. But we ought to give them the word of God, whether you call it preaching or teaching or mentoring or whatever you call it.

Arnie: So realizing where we live today, it's all about my family being comfortable, me being comfortable. You talk about having the mind of Christ, which means being prepared for battle. Well, battle seems uncomfortable. And don't you think most Christians are of the mindset of comfort and not battle?

Warren: I would agree with what you said. I think the verse you probably have in mind is what Peter wrote, 1 Peter 4:1. "Therefore, since Christ suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same mind." The mindset of the Lord Jesus was that of conflict. Now, he did bring comfort. Come unto me, I'll give you rest. He did bring healing. He did bring love. But in order to do that, he had to fight a battle.

And he had a betrayal problem right in his own band of disciples. Satan had put Judas and said, this is your job from now on. You have said it correctly. Today, whether we like it or not, we're fighting a battle. We're not fighting for victory. Jesus has already won the victory. We're fighting from his victory.

And any student in school who is peddled these lies that are so popular today can call upon the Lord Jesus and get wisdom and guidance from him. We do have to have the mindset of a soldier to put on the armor of God and to fight the battle. I think today one of the most difficult places to be a Christian is the average high school and even grade school. This is where our churches and our godly parents come in, where we get the equipment and get the training and get the mindset.