Moments ago, Amos chapter six and chapter seven as far as verse nine. Pride and the plumb line. I wonder, have you ever, are you honest enough to admit it by the twinkle in your eye, have you ever found yourself standing sideways looking at the mirror and to your horror found you've been sucking your tummy in? Well. the pride or perhaps the wishful thinking that by breathing in a bit you've lost a stone. Our passage focuses on a result of human pride that's far more serious than looking a bit foolish when you look in the mirror sucking your tummy in. Because our human pride is measured against the plumb line of God's holiness. pride, and the plumb line. We begin with the danger of comfort. In the sixth chapter, Amos is dealing with the danger of comfort, of complacency, and of a selfish desire, really, that amounts to a desire only for the things of this world. That's clear right from the very start when you look at verse one. Woe to you who had ease in Zion and trust in Mount Samaria. The aim of Amos' prophecy, of course, is largely to the north. Indeed, when you get to right at the end of our passage this evening, chapter seven and verse nine, the Lord says, I will raise the sword against the house of Jeroboam. That's the standing for the royal house then governing northern Israel. And yet, it is also Zion, Jerusalem, southern Judah, who is also in the same situation or heading that way. They are falling into this same sin of comfort, complacency, and a selfish desire for the things of this world. So the Lord is warning all His people, though this prophecy comes specifically to northern Israel. And notice at the end of verse 1 that the prophecy is addressed to the notable persons, the notable persons in Israel. In other words, this is addressed to the rulers, to the royal family, to the priests that have been appointed by the royal houses, to the nobility, to those with a measure of power under the king, to the military chiefs, and indeed to the wealthy. And many had grown wealthy in Israel at this time. This is addressed then to the notable persons in Israel. And we find they are what? They are comfortable. This is a period when the borders of the nation have been grown again, expanded almost to the same extent as they were under Solomon. The same is true in southern Israel. They had become fabulously wealthy, as we have seen and see again in this passage. Jerusalem and Samaria, references made to them here. Mount Samaria. They were fortified cities sitting on top of hills. They felt they were powerful. They felt they were wealthy. They felt they were successful. They felt they were secure. But in reality, despite their beds of ivory in verse four, and their great houses later on, and despite their fortified position, they are No more powerful than the other small nations around them. Verse 2, go over to Chalna and see. And from there, go to Hamath the Great, and then go down to Gath or the Philistines. Are you better than these kingdoms, or is their territory greater than your territory? No! No! Those other small nations sandwiched between Egypt that was at that time occupied in other conflicts, and Assyria similarly occupied in the other direction. They had expanded the borders at the expense of these two empires, but it wouldn't last long. But Israel felt that they were somehow now a world power. Those comfortable leaders were luxuriating on their hyper-expensive beds and couches. There they were. Verse 4, they lay on beds of ivory and stretched out on their couches. It's a picture of lazy, rich indolence. And while they are there, they are, we are told in verse 4, eating the finest cuts of meat. And what do they do? Verse 5, They while away their time singing and making new musical instruments. They invent them. They invent them. They haven't learned to craft an instrument. They're inventing new ones. They want to be seen as brilliant. They want to be seen as cultured. They want to be seen as innovative. There's no sense of any urgency regarding sin or external threats. In fact, at the end of chapter 7, the priest of Bethel will go to Jeroboam the king and ask him to silence Amos, because as far as he's concerned, Amos' prophecies are ridiculous. There's no sense then of the burden of sin. They felt themselves to be a cultural elite. Not so much fiddling while Rome burns, but fiddling while Samaria burns, except they couldn't yet smell the fire. They were so complacent, we find in verse 6, that they are drinking wine. But look how they're doing it. They drink wine from bowls. They're quaffing the stuff. They have bowls of wine, not a glass, not a beaker or a cup, but a bowl of the stuff that they're quaffing it from. And they spend their time anointing themselves with ointments. They're into skin care in a big way. Now, I'm not talking about the way some of us may care for our skin. I remember my grandmother, my nana, as a young child, I was always sent in to give her a kiss goodnight, and I hated it, because by the time I went in, she would have covered her face in Nivea cream, and I would have to kiss this Nivea cream, and it tastes horrible, I have to say. And I don't mean that. No, no, these were rich ointments and exotic perfumes and they were anointing themselves and beautifying themselves. Their perfumes and their skin creams and almost anything else that they could use to, in their view, enhance their physical beauty. So, in a sense, in verse seven, it was one long banquet and party. They were reclining at banquets, they're told. And they live in these great houses. Verse 11, the Lord speaks about breaking the great house into pieces. And these houses with their ivory beds and their couches and their place for these great parties with a quaffed wine from bowls are large and impressive and richly decorated. And we know from this passage they had no interest in justice. And verse 12, the horses run on rocks. No. Does one plow them there with oxen on rock? No. Yet you have turned justice into gall and the fruit of righteousness into wormwood. Justice and the things of the Lord, they didn't care for that. Instead, they preened themselves. Look at verse 13. You who rejoice over Lodibah, you rejoice over nothing. who say, have we not taken Karanaim, horns, strength for ourselves by our own strength? Oh, they preened themselves. They were successful. They preened themselves. They had enlarged their territory, that they were big on the world stage. They were strong as a nation. And yet in this same passage, we find what? That their complacency and comfort have placed them under the direct judgment of God. Back in verse eight, what does the Lord say? The Lord God has sworn by Himself, the Lord God of hosts says, I abhor the pride of Jacob and hate his palaces. Everything they took pride in, God said, I hate, I abhor. And so the Lord in verses nine and 10 says he's gonna bring terrible destruction upon them. 10 living in a house, they'll all die. And a relative and one who's gonna bury the bodies comes in to take them and says, are there any more here? Don't say it. Don't mention the Lord. It's an evil day. You see, the Lord would bring a terrible destruction upon the nation. Again, it's this concept of the nation being had to be decimated. And we learn in verse 11 that their great houses, but also the ordinary, very humble dwellings, the great houses and the small, would be broken in pieces by the Lord. The Lord would raise up a nation, verse 14, against them. God would do this. The Lord, the covenant God, Yahweh, would raise up a nation who would be the instrument of His justice and judgment. And that nation would rain His wrath down on Israel. You see, they had placed their comfort in their own abilities, their own achievements. They were complacent as a result. They trusted themselves, thinking they had put the Lord in a box. They didn't need Him. Let's put the Lord in a box and let's seal it with parcel tape. The Lord will do what we want when we want Him to." They had taken the sovereign God of time and eternity, the Creator, the God who is omnipotent, the God who is omniscient, and they put Him in this box and said, there's our God who will dance to our tune. The danger of comfort had brought them into gross sin and under the judgment of God. Now let me say straight away, there is nothing wrong with a comfortable home or a comfortable bed. Far from it. There is nothing wrong with being wealthy, far from it. But there is nevertheless for the Christian a danger in comfort. It doesn't mean when you go home you have to go and order yourself a hair shirt from the internet and from now on wear it underneath your clothes. Get rid of your mattress and lay on bare boards. That's not what we're talking about here when we speak about comfort. Comfort the things of this world when we place our confidence in them. Comfort when we take the things of this world and we say, well, we've achieved that, we've bought that, we've risen to that height, it's what we've done, what our strength has enabled us to do, and we take comfort in that. It dulls our spiritual life. We come to rely on our ability to work to maintain our lifestyle. That becomes all important. I have to do this to be comfortable, to be happy in life. And so we work hard to get the latest gadget, perhaps the latest iPhone. We work hard to get the latest model of car. Whatever you want to put in that category, really, you can put anything in there. It's not the item itself that's wrong. Please don't think if you've got a brand-new phone or a brand-new car, I'm going to go with you. I'm not. That's to miss the point. But when we put all our pride into these things and we take comfort in that and we become complacent in that, that it's what we've done, what we can achieve, our strength, we get comfortable with these things. We come to rely on these things and begin to see ourselves then as safe and somehow protected and buoyed up by them. The danger of comfort is set in. We are comfortable with the things of this world and the ways of this world. And we become spiritually complacent. That's what had happened in Israel. They'd become comfortable with the world and spiritually complacent. And so work or income or pension plans, our savings accounts, our investments, all sorts of practical, perhaps internet security, soon feature as more important in our thinking and our lives than spiritual matters. And we end up thinking that our comfort comes from us. This spiritual complacency grows. What happens? You see it so often. Two Sunday services no longer matter. I've seen many churches now where they only have a morning service, no evening service. Doesn't matter. Put the Lord back in His box. Worshiping the Lord, meeting with the Lord's people, growing in our knowledge of the Lord together. That all takes second place to our wants and our desires and our comforts and our spiritual complacency. And yes, we feel it's fine to work on a Lord's Day when we don't need to work. We take the overtime on a Lord's Day when we can avoid it. That's fine, we say, doesn't matter. We're not under the law, remember, the Sabbath day to keep it holy. And we begin to give the message to our family, to our children, our husband or wife, our friends, our friends in church, our neighbors, that really, the Lord's Day, spiritual things. They don't matter. And our comfort and our complacency has led us to begin a formal cold spiritual experience because sin has grasped us. It's gripped us and has dragged us down. And it drags us down into the icy cold waters of complacent Christianity. Don't fool yourself, Christian. The danger of comfort, not that comfort is wrong, is that we become complacent. And the danger of comfort and complacency is that it takes us far from the Lord. And yet, what does Peter say in 2 Peter 3? When you look at that passage, verses 11 to 13, he says, this world is going to end. He says the Lord's gonna destroy it with fire. What sort of persons ought to be there in all holy conduct and in righteousness? We should be looking for the day when we're gonna be with the Lord forever. That's our aim, that's our comfort, that's our end, that's where we're looking to. We're not complacent about that, we're rejoicing in the prospect. What are we aiming for? That day which is yet to come. We're not aiming for the things of this world. If God blesses us, we give him thanks and we use them wisely. No, we're aiming for that day when we will be with the Lord forever, not complacent and comfortable with this world. We need to pray, don't we, that we won't slip far from the Lord with our comfort and our complacency, but pray rather that the fire of God the Holy Spirit would so melt the ice around our hearts. They would see what we are living for today and the end to which we are striving. And we need to pray that the comfort we enjoy doesn't dull our hearts and douse the fire of the Lord, but rather that we would aim at serving the Lord all the better because of the things He has given us. You see, 1 Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians 5 verses 9, 10, and 11, Paul says this basically, our one true comfort. is the eternal fellowship with our Savior that's promised to us. Is that where we are finding our comfort? Are we like Israel? We're comfortable with the world. Oh, my Christian friends, let's never be altogether comfortable with the world because we will become complacent and that ice will form around our hearts. Pray that God's Holy Spirit would set fire to our hearts. that we might serve him now and aim and strive for that end. And that will be our comfort when we are forever with the Lord. So we come to the beginning of chapter seven and the need for intercession. Now in verses one through to six, the prophet is given two visions that are distinct but intimately related given to Amos by the Lord. First three verses, we're told that the Lord formed locust swarms at the beginning of the late crop. So it's late spring. And in late spring, the harvest crop would produce feed for the cattle. If that was a poor harvest, many of the cattle would die in the dry months to come. It would be many, many months before it would rain. But before they gathered in their own harvest crop, the king would first take his tax from the crop. But what happens here is that after the king has taken his tax, the Lord forms the locust. They've already lost their tax to the king and now the locust comes. They eat the grass of the land in verse 2. It's utter desolation. The rest of the crop is destroyed, and it brings hardship for Israel. And verses 4 through to 6, we have in a similar way, the Lord called for conflict by fire, and it's consumed the great deep and devoured the territory. then is we're seeing now God's judgment in fire, and it's seen upon all the territory, all the land of Israel. And again, this would destroy the crops. It would destroy livelihoods. It would destroy food sources. But it doesn't stop there. It goes beyond there. Notice what it says at the end of verse 4. It's consumed the great deep. This great deep. two meanings here first there is the underground water reserves during the hot dry months that would come those underground water reserves could be drawn on but now they wouldn't be able to because this fire has destroyed those underground water reserves But also, in the second place, the fire is a reference to Canaanite religion. They turned the underground deeps into some sort of idol and worshiped them, and now God moves in sovereign judgment on the land. The water reserves are damaged, and by extension, the idolatry of Israel is rendered dead. And notice what happens with each vision. Verse 2 and verse 5. Each time Amos turns to the Lord in prayer, and each time he says almost the same thing. Verse 2, O Lord God, forgive, I pray. Verse 5, O Lord God, cease, I pray. He's pleading with the Lord. He takes to intercessory prayer. On behalf of the nation, he pleads with the Lord. Cease that Jacob may stand, that Jacob may stand, for he is small." Namos is faced by this double vision of a terrible judgment of God, and he intercedes, he pleads for mercy. He doesn't plead for justice, he doesn't demand the right pleads for mercy, forgive I pray, cease I pray, why the Jacob may stand for he is small. And we're told that on each occasion as Amos prays, what does the Lord say? It shall not be, this also shall not be. The Lord relents and says he will not bring that particular judgment on Israel. And before we can go into the last part of our passage and understand where the Lord was taking Amos, let's pause there for a moment and see the need for intercessory prayer. The Lord calls us as his people to pray, to plead, not merely to recite our prayers. Of course we should teach our children to pray. Perhaps like me, when you went to school, we were taught to pray in school. We were taught the Lord's Prayer. Unfortunately, it was in Welsh, so it's not much use in English. But we were taught to give thanks for our food at every meal in school. Junior school, we would be taught to pray and give thanks for our food. That's remarkable, isn't it? But this isn't merely a recitation of prayers. This is really praying. We need to be like Amos, who pleaded with the Lord for mercy. pleading for mercy on our nation. Is there ever a nation like ours that has seen so much blessing for 500 years and yet has now turned its back on that blessing and that Lord that has blessed it so singularly? We need to pray for mercy in our area, for our colleagues, for our friends and neighbors and family. I need to be those who lay hold of the throne of grace and plead for mercy. The Puritans used to call this doing violence to heaven, pleading and deceiving, pleading that the Lord would hold back His judgment from our land and move in power to save. If it be His will that He would save now and move now. The danger is we don't really see the purity and holiness of God as we do, as we should, do we? And neither, on the other hand, do we see the terrible lowness and filth of sin as we are. And so we miss the fact that sin is such an offense before God. We don't see it really as cosmic rebellion. We see it as people making mistakes and making errors. But it's to break the law of the eternal creator, and the consequences there for a sinner are terrible. What does Romans 6 say? The wages of sin is death. Not just death in this life, being spiritually dead now and dying at the end of natural life, but going into that eternal death, which is to live under the fire of God's judgment in hell for eternity. It should cause us to pray that God would move to save people around us today. That's what we should pray. Plead with the Lord, intercede before the Lord. Lord, will you not move to save? We need to pray that the Lord would stir our hearts to pray in earnest that He would move to save, that He would give us a desire to see Him move to save, that He would give us a desire then to go and to reach the lost. We need to pray for mercy, pray for others to be saved. Pray that God would be gracious and would hold back from judgment. Pray that we would be so moved that we and our tomb will go with a message of hope to the lost and pray above all that God would be glorified in it. May we see then the need for intercession. Now these two visions of judgment, the locus and the fire of conflict on each occasion, Amos intercedes before the Lord and the Lord says, I relent, I will not bring that judgment to pass. And then Amos is given a third vision, the true measure, the true measure. This third vision arises directly from the previous two. That's clear from the opening words of verse 7 of chapter 7. The message of the Lord's judgment on Israel In the previous two visions are the clear context now for this third vision that amos is given Now remember this is a vision And so amos here will speak about the lord physically doing something It doesn't mean the lord would literally stand there in a physical body with a physical plumb line. This is a vision he is given And he is describing it it is given to him such a way that he can describe it in a way that we can understand And in the vision, Amos sees the Lord, and what's he doing? He is standing on a wall. It is a wall made with a plumb line. And in verse eight, the Lord even draws his attention to the plumb line. Amos, what do you see? Amos says, a plumb line. He's drawing his attention to the one thing that's vitally important. Now, there are others here who are far better qualified than I to talk about a plumb line. But in essence, for dummies like me, a plumb line is a string with a heavy object at the end that's non-magnetic. The idea is that you place it in a point. It should hang straight down because of the force of gravity. And it should tell you, is that wall a straight line or not? It will judge whether that wall is straight or crooked. Because if it's crooked, it's not going to stand. So in other words, it's designed to measure how true the wall is. Now in the vision, the wall is clearly Israel and the Lord is standing on the wall and he is measuring that wall. The wall has been made with a plumb line. Israel has been made as the covenant people of God by the law of God and the word of God. And now in verse seven, Amos has this tremendous vision. At the end of verse eight he says, the Lord says to Amos, I will not pass by them anymore. Once I have held back judgment, twice I have held back judgment, but no more. I will not pass by. Israel then is pictured here as a crooked wall. being measured by the standard of God's covenant, the holy plumb line. Amos had earlier been the intercessor, but now the Lord shows Amos that Israel was so far gone in their sin, that Israel had so broken his covenant entirely, that the Lord now will judge them, and there is no going back from this. The judgment is fearsome. Verse 9, the high places of Isaac shall be desolate. That's a curious phrase. The high places of who? Isaac? Yes, it matches with what comes later. Verse 16, do not spout against the house of Isaac. We don't normally hear in Scripture Israel referred to as the house of Isaac, it's the people of Abraham, or it's the house of Jacob or Israel, but the house of Isaac, the high places of Isaac, yeah. Yes, it seems they had turned the second of the patriarchs of the nation almost into some religious fetish. They would visit them, and as long as they went there, they could put God back in His box, and God would dance to their tune, and they could then indulge in their pagan practices. The Lord says, those high places will be desolate. Your place is a pilgrimage no more. Finished. Then he says, the sanctuaries of Israel should be laid waste. All those places of worship you've built, I'll destroy them. I will raise the sword against the house of Jeroboam. There will be war and he will be defeated and his royal line will come to an end. Pillars of the high places, the walls of the sanctuary, the royal house, it's crooked. The plumb line measures them, it's crooked. The nation is badly built and badly out of shape. And they were gonna be torn down by the Lord. That, says the Lord to Amos, is the true measure. So the vision of the plumb line brings us face to face, doesn't it? a vitally important issue. It's this. How do you see the world around you? How do you see it? You see, the true measure of Israel, didn't lie with her idol-worshipping priests. It didn't lie with her empty pilgrimage sites associated with the patriarchs. It didn't lie with the current scheming of national politics led by the king. The true measure was the measure of the Lord's. He alone was able to measure and truly see the disobedience and sin that was there. It was His measure that was true, His that was straight and clear and unclouded by sin. How do we see the world around us? How? What's our world view? Israel saw things through the lens of current circumstances. The nation seemed wealthy, prosperous, the borders enlarged, money running in, little immediate international threat. They seemed successful on the world stage. All was well and so they could live as they wanted. Isn't there a similarity with our own Western society today? Haven't we felt over the last decades that we are safe and secure, comfortable? Didn't we win the Second World War and the Cold War? Haven't we won? Haven't the trading houses of commerce beaten the clothes shop of communism? We're comfortable. So we live today by our own standards. We've got a history stretching back well over 500 years. Go back through the centuries. Think of just a handful of names. Think of the Lloyd-Joneses, the Campbell-Morgans, the Joseph-Parkers and the Spurgeon. Go back a century and see the Wesleys and the Whitfields and the Howell Harrises. Go back a century and see men like Sibbes and Goodwin. Go back again a century and see men like Cranmer and Hooper and Ridley and Latimer. Go back a century, see a Wycliffe and the Lollards. We have a history of God's grace to us as a nation stretching far back into history. We've had Reformation, we've had Revival, we've had preachers, we've had teachers, we've had evangelists, we've had Bible colleges galore. And what does our society see today? Only the present. Only what it has and what it can gain. only an excuse for living in whatever twisted, barbarous, sinful way it fancies. It sees God as an inconvenience, so God is set aside in His little box, and the worldview of so many today is functionally that of the atheist and the pagan. That's the United Kingdom today. But we are called to be the Lord's people, like Amos was being called to be the Lord's. And in the midst of a sinful and a perverse age, we are being called to see everything through the lens of God's Word. His plumb line is the only true measure, and we must see everything through His Word. If you like, the bottom line in our thinking, in our worldview, our presupposition, our starting point for everything is that God is true. Therefore, God's Word, the Bible, is true. Therefore, God, as the Creator, is right in everything He says, and what He says is good and proper. And yes, God does have the right to say how people ought to live. He's the Creator. He's the Sovereign. He does have the right. It's according to His will that people are saved. God does have the right to judge those who will not trust in Christ as Savior. Not just in this nation, but in every nation, in every age. He is the sovereign God of time and eternity, the Creator of the heavens and the earth. His Word is true. His Word is law. That's the worldview that we should have. Everything filtered through that. How do you look at the world around you? How do you look at the world around you? Many years ago when I was a young teenager, sometimes when we're teenagers we find things that older adults say, either puzzling or funny or just, we shrug our shoulders, don't we? I remember one elderly lady, she must have been in her late 70s, giving her testimony. I remember her saying how, after she'd been saved and at the end of a service, she came out. It was down in West Wales, and she said, she said, the sky seemed bluer, and the grass seemed greener, and the birdsong seemed sweeter. I thought, that's a strange thing to say. But actually, I began to understand it as an older man. It wasn't that it was literally bluer and greener and sweeter. No, she began to understand that this was a world created by the sovereign God, the Savior, that He was the one who was ordering all things, the Lord. And she was beginning to see the world through His eyes. How do we see the world around us? Do we see it through the lens of God's Word? Because the lens of God's holiness and righteousness and purity will give you one view. And on the other side, the lens of accommodating everyone and everything in a society like ours will give you a very different view. But it's God's measure that is right and true and accurate. And it doesn't matter what people feel. If you're a Christian this evening, you have to stand on the authority of what God says in his word and in that alone. Years ago, we did a short series on the five solas. Perhaps I'll test you on the way out. I'm sure everybody goes out the back door, isn't it? What are the five solas? Well, of course, there is sola scriptura, Scripture is our final and ultimately only authority in all matters of life and death. But as well as the soul, there's the totas. You see, as Christians, we are to be sola Scriptura, Scripture alone, and tota Scriptura, all of Scripture alone, all of Scripture alone. We stand on what God has said in its entirety, the Bible is God's word, and we stand on all of it. Today he calls us then to be his people as he was calling Amos to be his man here. Amos, there's my measure. See that this wall is crooked, that I will bring down the crooked. He calls us to be His people and see the crookedness of sin in our own day and age and realize that He is the judge. We are to be His people today. He calls us to live for Him, to serve Him. We are to be His witnesses to the grace of God in the gospel. What are we to preach? We're to preach the truth. We're not to make people comfortable. to tell him sin is sin, God is right, and He's right to judge sin and just to do so, and that when He does, there is nobody who can contradict Him. And yes, it may well be that Western civilization and our nation in particular is under the temporal judgment of God in this world. A society that is going the way ours is going cannot last long, cannot last long. And it is for sure that at the last, God will judge every person by the standard of His holiness, and every person by that is found wanting. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, Jew and Gentile, whatever nation or culture or background, all are sinners. All come short of His standard of holiness. All will face His judgment. And who will sit on the judgment seat? The Lord Jesus Christ. And it is His measure that matters, His measure of society and of sin that is true. That's why we must preach the gospel. Sin is sin. God will judge sin. And the only way to be right is for a person to be justified freely by the grace of God. That's only available through repentance of sin and faith in the finished work of Jesus. so that our sin is washed clean because His blood cleanses us from every stain. Isn't that amazing? If I suggested to you that you put a vial of blood into your washing machine to clean your clothes and they were all white, you'd think I was crazy. How does God clean the filth of our sin? The precious blood of Jesus washes us as white as snow, white as wool. You see, God's measure, the true measure, says we're all sinners. All of us stand under his judgment. But praise God, he has made this way of salvation. Praise God that the work of the Lord Jesus Christ is finished, it is complete, it is sufficient. That's a message we can go and preach. Not because it'll make us popular, as you'll find out with Amos. His preaching didn't exactly make him popular. God doesn't command us to go and be popular. He commands us to go and be faithful. It's a message we can preach this week. We can tell one person this week, two people this week, five people, 10 people. We can leave that piece of literature because this is the only answer, God's measure. See the world as God sees it. See God's measure as the only measure. Take His word, take the gospel, preach that. Because this is the message that changes lives, changes families, changes societies, changes nations to the glory of God alone. Amen.