The reading for today's sermon will come from Amos chapter four. Amos four, hear now God's word. Hear this word, you cows of Bashan, who are on the mountain of Samaria, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy, who say to your husbands, bring that we may drink. The Lord God has sworn by his holiness that, behold, the days are coming upon you when they shall take you away with hooks, even the last of you with fish hooks, and you shall go out through the breaches, each one straight ahead, and you shall be cast out into Harmon, declares the Lord. Come to Bethel and transgress, to Gilgal and multiply transgression. Bring your sacrifices every morning, your tithes every three days. Offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving of that which is leavened, and proclaim free will offerings. Publish them, for so you love to do, O people of Israel, declares the Lord God. I gave you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and lack of bread in all your places, yet you did not return to me, declares the Lord. I also withheld the rain from you when there were yet three months to the harvest. I would send rain on one city and send no rain on another city. One field would have rain, and the field on which it did not rain would wither. So two or three cities would wander to another city to drink water and would not be satisfied. Yet you did not return to me, declares the Lord. I struck you with blight and mildew, your many gardens and your vineyards, your fig trees and your olive trees, the locusts devoured. Yet you did not return to me, declares the Lord. I sent among you a pestilence after the manor of Egypt. I killed your young men with a sword and carried away your horses. And I made the stench of your camp go up into your nostrils. Yet you did not return to me, declares the Lord. I overthrew some of you as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and you were as a bran plucked out of the burning. Yet you did not return to me, declares the Lord. Therefore, thus will I do to you, O Israel, because I will do this to you. Prepare to meet your God, O Israel. For behold, he who forms the mountains and creates the wind, and declares to man what is his thought, who makes the morning darkness and treads on the heights of the earth. The Lord, the God of hosts, is his name. Thus ends the reading of God's holy word. You may be seated. Pray with me, will you, as we come to God's word today. Our Father, we say amen to Your Word, and as You reveal Your holiness in it, and your sovereignty over all of creation and all of the affairs of our lives. And as you call us, Father, to trust you, we ask that your word would do its work this morning. Holy Spirit, be with us and illuminate the meaning of these words to our minds today and help our hearts to have confidence in their truthfulness. And Father, continue the work in us that you have begun of transforming our lives by the renewing of our minds according to the living and active power of your holy word. Father, we are grateful to be here and we are grateful for your word. May the words of my mouth today and may the meditations of our hearts today be pleasing in your sight as we come to your word. And this we ask in Jesus' name, amen. Well, it is very, very good to be getting back to you or getting back with you this morning to our study of the Old Testament minor prophets. We took a little break for the Easter holiday around Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday. And now we're coming back to the book of Amos. And as we come back to it today, and as we focus on Amos chapter 4 together today, let me just really quickly, if I can, try to reorient us briefly to what we've learned already so that we have the context coming into this great chapter, chapter 4. In the opening chapters of this book of Amos, God has been responding to the sin and the injustices and various forms of wickedness and unrighteousness that characterize the nations of the world in the time that Amos was writing. Both the unbelieving pagan nations of the world and the sin and wickedness that characterized His own people, the chosen nation of Israel at that time. And so in chapters 1 and 2 you remember we saw every imaginable kind of wickedness put on display by God as He made His case that the nations of the world had gone against their consciences, their God-given consciences in doing evil in the world. And he made the case that his own nation had not only gone against their consciences, they had gone against his revealed word and his revealed law in the scriptures and through the prophets and done what was sinful in the sight of God. And in all of that, We've been seeing a ton of massive parallels between the situation that God was spelling out there in the ancient world in Amos' day, and our situation now, today, in the 21st century. Right? There's nothing new under the sun we've been seeing. All of the typical ways in which the sinfulness of the human heart produced wickedness in human lives and then got amplified in every aspect of human society. In Amos' day, all of that's still true and clear and obvious. in our own day, in our own society, in every sector from private personal life to the culture and the economy and the government of our society to the church even, which just like it was in Amos' day is becoming more and more indistinguishable from the godlessness of the society in general. Several weeks ago, the last time we were in this book together, we looked at chapter three, and one of the ways in which God emphasized and highlighted all of the corruption and all of the idolatry and sinfulness that was at the heart of the Israelite society, he pictured it by way of the picture of their strongholds and their storehouses. Remember from chapter three? Now, every society has strongholds and storehouses, of course. Every society has ways to provide defense against threats and against enemies. And every society has ways to ensure provision for the people of that society. But the problem in Israel was that their strongholds and their storehouses had become emblems of how much they refused to put their trust in the Lord because they put their trust in their own abilities and in the things of the creation rather than trusting the Creator. And that was evidenced by all of the injustice and the inhumanity and the oppression and the violence that they would perpetrate in order to fill their storehouses. All of the sin that they would justify in order to build their strongholds for the sake of their own sinful, prideful, selfish greed. And so you remember, God had said to them, back up in verse 10 of chapter 3, that in filling up their strongholds and storehouses for the sake of their sinful greed and by way of violence and robbery and oppression, they were actually storing up for themselves violence and robbery and oppression. That's what was going to happen to them now. Because in his justice, God was going to respond to their persistent sinfulness by bringing the same things against them that they had been doing to others for so long. God was going to set himself against them as their enemy. and use the other nations in the world to tear down Israel's defenses and to plunder Israel's strongholds, to take away everything that they had put more confidence in than they'd put in him, to rip down their idolatrous altars of false worship and to punish them for their sin. And so, in all of that, we've seen this terrible irony. that we're again gonna see today, that in spite of everything that God had so lovingly and graciously and faithfully done for them, bringing them out of Egypt, giving them an inheritance, manna in the wilderness, leading them to the promised land, all that he had so freely done for them, still they refused to trust him. Still they said, we're better off if we do things our way instead. will have more if we follow after the sinful, prideful, selfish desires of our own hearts. If we trust God, we won't have as much as if we oppress other people in order to get for ourselves what we feel like we need. And so they perpetrated all kinds of violence and theft and injustice in order to make themselves richer than they thought God would make them or God could make them. And all of that is what then became their downfall. See, they thought they'd have more if they did it their way, and ultimately they ended up with less, and they ended up with a terrible lot. When the patience of God ran out, and the judgment of God boiled over, then they ended up suffering all the things that they had been guilty of, and they lost everything. That's how we come now. into Amos chapter four, and I tell you what, if you've read it, I'm sorry if you didn't read it this week, I'm sorry if you read Hosea four in preparation because I printed the bulletins wrong, but if you've read it this week, you'll know this is a powerful, powerful chapter. This message from God's word is one that everyone on the planet needs to pay attention to because here, having diagnosed all of the various kinds of personal and societal evils that are typical in the world and that trigger God's vengeance and justice against people and against nations. Here, God takes all of that collection of sins that he's been identifying and he boils it all down to one specific sinful heart impulse that is at the core of it all, and he calls for repentance with regard to that core. And here, what it is, he's calling us to repent of the core sinful tendency of self-pleasing and self-sufficiency. He calls us to turn from the sinful impulse of living for the priority of our own pleasure and our own desires and to turn to the priority of living for His glory. And that call to repentance comes with a promise. that just as it is a terrible irony that when we live for our own pleasure instead of God's glory because we think we're gonna get more that way, we end up with nothing, on the other side of that coin is if we will learn to trust God and forsake our own desires in order to live for the priority of His glory, we will have so much infinitely more blessing from Him than we could ever hope to imagine for doing things our own way. So He's calling us to turn and to turn to Him to put our trust and our hope and our confidence in Him as the only sure stronghold of our lives and of all reality and of eternity. So, walk through Amos 4 with me. There's three main parts to this chapter. Let me break it down for you. In the first part, verses one through five, God gets down to this bottom line and diagnoses this core, central, sinful impulse that is driving all of the wickedness that he's been identifying through the earlier chapters. Then in verses six through 11, God shows how he has been working sovereignly in all of creation and throughout history in all kinds of ways to call his people to repentance, but they wouldn't do it. They've refused to repent. And so at the end of the chapter in verses 12 through 14, he tells them what's in store for them. They're about to meet their God in all of His almighty, omnipotent sovereignty, and that's not gonna go well for them in all of their sinful self-sufficiency. They're no match for Him. And again, see now, the beauty of this chapter is this call to repentance. because the same God who will meet unrepentant sinners in all of their self-seeking and self-sufficient pride and sinfulness, he'll meet them with all his sovereign might and power. He is at the same time the God who will employ all of that same sovereign might and power to protect and to defend and to provide for and to preserve anyone and everyone. who will turn from their sin and turn to Him as their only safe refuge and stronghold. Because He is a merciful God and full of kindness and ready, like the prodigal son's father was ready to embrace any who will come running back to Him and lavish them with goodness and blessing for eternity. So, let's unpack it all. Let's look at these three main parts of chapter four. The first one, verses one through five, God is boiling down all of Israel's various sinful tendencies and habits to this one common spiritual sinful denominator. And it begins with this stinging address in verse one, and with an oath A vow that God takes in verse 2, swearing by His own holiness to deal with them righteously in their sin. He says, the Lord God has sworn by His holiness that He's gonna respond, and violently, to their sinfulness with sovereign justice. I mean, the imagery is stark here, right? He's talking about dragging people away by hooks and casting them out. There's strong language in these opening verses, right? The Lord God has sworn by His holiness. Think about that word holiness. There's a sense in which The word holiness defines something or someone as being in kind of a league of their own. That's kind of what the biblical word holy means. They're in a league of their own. They're qualitatively higher than and above other beings in critical ways. And in that sense, holiness defines what God is, see? There's nothing like Him. There's no one like Him. He's infinite, He's eternal. Where everything else is made by Him and so finite and limited. His ways, His thoughts are absolutely qualitatively different. They're higher by an infinite degree than our thoughts, than our ways. That's what it means that He's holy. It means that He's God and we're not. He's the creator and we're the creation. And then there's also a sense in which the word holiness doesn't just define what God is, it defines how God is, in terms of His righteousness, in terms of His moral character, right? He's pure. He's good. Psalm 145, verse 17, the Lord is righteous in all His ways. And that's what holiness means. And when we put those two senses of holiness together, what God is as a singularly unique and eternally higher than any other being, also how God is in His purity and righteousness in all of His ways, then we can say that His holiness is holy, see? Right, His holiness is a holy holiness, see? That makes us think about what the angels said about Him in Isaiah chapter 6. As they're filling the temple and singing His glory and saying that He is holy, holy, holy. Three times to emphasize the absolute superlative and complete character of the holiness of God. Holiness describes the totality of His nature and also the holiness of His ways and also the absolute, utter perfection of His holiness. And it is that holy holiness of His holiness that God is swearing by here in Amos chapter 4. He's literally saying, the oath that I'm making here, the vow that I'm making here is as certain as the righteousness with which I speak it and the very existence by which I make it. Bottom line, it's a big deal. There is unfathomable weight behind this oath that God is making. He is unimaginably serious here. And that simply means that whatever it is that he's talking about here is a big deal. It's a real doozy, right? This is no trifling matter. Something of massive weight and urgency lies behind this violent oath that God is swearing by His own holiness here. So what is it? What can it be that's this serious that lies behind these words that God is speaking? It comes down to this, and it's scary because it's common. It's so utterly common. What's driving this oath of God, who swears by his holiness, is a society and a religion that are organized on the basis of human self-pleasing rather than the glory of God. That's what it comes down to. And again, as these verses proclaim this to us today, the parallels in our own time, the parallels to our own society, the parallels to what has become of the evangelical church in America today are striking and they are alarming. Look at what God addresses here. First, he addresses the society of Israelite culture in Amos' day. He says, here's the problem I have with your culture. And he does it by singling out one particular segment of that society and culture, which has become representative of the culture as a whole. And that segment is the wealthy women of Israelite society. Now God's not bashing women here at all. God made human beings in his image, male and female, he created them. There is nothing less image bearing and precious to God about womanhood than manhood. He's not bashing womanhood here, he's bashing the sin of some of the women whose lives were characterized by a particular besetting sin that had become sort of the heartbeat of the society of Israel at large. And that besetting sin was a primary and singular commitment to self that manifested in self-indulgence and self-pleasing and self-preservation at the expense of holiness and righteousness and love and the well-being of others. Someone has said, and I think they're right, that in God's design, women are the final guardians of morals and values and virtues and standards in the society. And so you can get the pulse of a society by looking at how women are typically living their lives in that society. And that's what God is doing here through Amos. He looks at Israelite society and he calls the women there very unflatteringly. He calls them the cows of Bashan. Bashan was a very fertile region in the north where the cattle never had any lack. The best grass grew there and plenty of it. These were not skinny cows, right? They luxuriated in the sun all day long. They had nothing to do but eat and drink and content themselves. They were good looking cows. And God is, you gotta be careful. I'm kind of on a little tight rope here, ladies, sorry. This is what God is saying. God is saying this is kind of how the Israelite women have become. They've become consumed with self-interest. with living for their own pleasure, with spending their time basically just sitting around eating and drinking and partying their days away and being obsessed with how they look and with what everybody else thinks of them. It's a society, dare I say, full of Kardashians. These are the real housewives of Israel, if you get my meaning, right? epitomizing self-indulgence, epitomizing me-centered vanity and sensuality and me-centered living. This isn't the first time God has said something like this. He says something very similar in Isaiah chapter 3 about the women of the southern kingdom of Judah. He said, Isaiah 3, The daughters of Zion down in the south are haughty, they're arrogant, and they walk with outstretched necks, look at me, look at me, glancing wantonly with their eyes, seductively, mincing along as they go, tinkling with their feet. They're covered from head to toe with all of the fancy jewelry and clothing that they need to get people to notice them and fawn over them. He listed headbands and crescents and pendants and scarves, headdresses, armlets, sashes, perfume boxes, amulets, signet rings, nose rings, festal robes, cloaks, handbags, mirrors everywhere. turbans and veils. So it wasn't, see, that they just wanted to dress nicely and look feminine and be beautiful to the glory of God. That's a really good thing for women to do. But here, the problem was that they were utterly vain and consumed with their own appearance and beauty above everything else. And they spent all of their time and money and energy trying to get people to notice them and to fawn over to them and to be seduced by them. Again, it's all too familiar, right? Every year in our culture, there's a whole crop of new shows on TV that glamorize this kind of thing, this kind of wanton, self-consumed, seductive vanity. And then what happens is this, in the culture, those shows and the women in those shows become the trendsetters, the standard setters. that the typical women in the society who are tuning into the shows want to pattern themselves after and dress like. That sort of thing becomes what's considered fashionable and what the cultural appetites get defined by. And what you gotta understand here is, again, it's not like it's just the women who are the problem here in this society. It's not that God's got some unique problem with women in general at all. It's actually quite the opposite. He made women to be unique reflections of everything that he has made in this world to be pure and beautiful and virtuous and upright and good. And so when they're doing the opposite in a society, if there's one place you can look in a society to get some sort of a rapid sense of where the society is as a whole in terms of godly goodness and virtue and beauty or not, it's to the women. If they're remaining upright and righteous and virtuous, if they're the guardians still of all of that, then there's hope for the society still. But in general, if they've become worldly and self-consumed and literally covered from head to toe with visible signs of their pride and haughtiness and seductiveness and vanity, seeking as the goal of their lives, their own pleasure and wanting more than anything for everyone to glory in them, rather than living for the glory of God, then you've got a good sense of where the society is as a whole. And that's God's point here. By highlighting Israel's leading women, he's got his finger on the pulse of the culture and the society at large. And here what God seems to be saying is that in general, they are exhibiting this way of life that absolutely minimizes and marginalizes the spiritual dimension of life. They're all about the flesh. They're all about the outside. They're all about the physical. They're focused like animals, like so many heads of cattle on physical existence primarily and exclusively, body-centered, appearance-oriented, appetite-driven. Is this not a possibly very apt description of our own society? And what a contrast it is to what God actually wants and designs and wills, right? In 2 Corinthians 5, Paul distinguishes unbelievers as those who boast about outward appearance and could care less about what is in the heart. And that's the problem with Israel here. Peter, in 1 Peter 3, he exhorts women, don't let your adorning be external. Like the braiding of the hair and putting on all the gold jewelry and the clothing you wear. You want to look good, that's good, but don't let your primary definition of beauty be about the outside. Let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart. Let that be what people see shining the beauty of the glory of God the most and reflected in all of the rest. In Israel, in Amos' day, This was one of the biggest diagnostic indicators of the condition of the society. They weren't concerned about the soul. They weren't concerned about the heart because they were overly concerned about the appearances and about the body and about appetites and pleasures and desires physically. And Amos also notes that this fleshly, sensual, self-consumed vanity also meant that they had become absolutely indifferent to the needs of people around them. As long as they had what they wanted, and as long as they got it to excess, because they felt entitled to all of that, then they could care less about the plight of the poor and the needy and people who were suffering all around them. And they were, in fact, willing, whether directly or indirectly, even by their own level of overindulgence and self-consumption, they were willing to participate in the oppression of the poor, hoarding everything to themselves and leaving people without. The crushing of the needy, he says. They were the ones who oppressed the poor, who crushed the needy, who say to their husbands, bring that we may drink, right? That's all the husbands were good for. Go out and work and make money so that we can party. So the bottom line. Everything was always all about self. Self-concern, self-importance, self-governance, self-determination, doing and demanding and expecting that everything be done, not for the sake of what's good or virtuous or beautiful or loving or kind, but doing everything for the sake of self and of luxury. And this fundamental commitment to self is the height, is the epitome of idolatry. This is the biggest idol that we serve, is the idol of self. This is the thing that we love the most, that we struggle the most with loving more than we love God. It's not just money, it's not just stuff, it's me. Money and stuff are demigods in our little idolatrous pantheon. And at the top of the pile is self. I want what I want. And that's what was going on in Israel. Self is the source of every form of idolatry and false religion in the world and that's why God hates this so much. That's why God swears by his own holiness to root it out. That's what verses two and three are all about. All of the worldly status. that they'd idolized and luxuriated in for so long in Israel, God says it's gonna be taken from them. You're not gonna have that luxuriating status anymore. It's gonna be replaced by subjugation. in the justice of God. All of the security that they just assumed they had because they were wealthy and they led these pampered lifestyles and nothing could ever touch them, all that's gonna be lost when their city falls down and the walls that they thought kept them safe would be breached and then they'd be let out through the breaches into captivity, which is what happened when Babylon shows up later. all of their personal self-indulgent came to a crashing halt. In verses four and five, God looks past the society in general and zeroes in specifically on one aspect of their self-centered society, which was their religion, and he diagnoses the same problem there. See, it's not just the secular culture, it's everything. And in these verses four and five, God is taunting, He's mocking them for their kind of religion that they purvey. And He's not mocking just out of some kind of capricious cruelty or pettiness. He's not like us. He's doing it in order to expose how hypocritical they've become when this selfishness is roiling in their hearts and yet at the same time they act like they're so holy and pious. in their worship. So he talks about Bethel. Bethel, we saw that a couple weeks ago from chapter three. That was sort of the place where the, it was the religious hub of Israel up in the Northern Kingdom. And there were all kinds of gods that they worshiped up there. Not just Yahweh, but they had, in order to be culturally popular, they had brought in all the gods of the pagan religions and built altars to them also. And so God is saying, and he's got plenty of irony and sarcasm in his voice when he says it, he says, come to Bethel, come to worship. But look what he says, come to Bethel and transgress. Your worship is inherently sinful, he says. Because when you worship here, it's false worship. For all their religiosity, for all of their observances, They were worshiping false gods and their hearts were hypocritical. And so their religion was polluted and defiled as well as the society at large. He says, bring your sacrifices every morning and your tithes every three days. They were very, very devout. See, they worshiped often. But look at verse five. They were offering sacrifices of thanksgiving with things that were leavened. What that means is they weren't doing things God's way. They were doing things their own way. Like in Leviticus chapter 10, when Aaron's sons, Nadab and Abihu, decided that they wanted to worship God on their terms. And instead of sticking to the guidelines that he had prescribed, they offered strange fire on the altar of incense, and so God consumed them. Because in their arrogance, in their self-willed pride, They disregarded God. They dishonored God. Here, it has to do with leaven. You remember leaven, right, from the Exodus account? They had to get out of Egypt fast one night, so there was no time to make dough and let it rise, to bake in the oven into loaves of bread. Don't use any leaven, just bake it quick. Bake it flat, because you gotta get out in the morning, And leaven also, remember they had to remove it all from their houses because it signified sin. Because sin is like leaven, like you put a little bit of leaven in a lump of dough and it gets its way through the whole lump, right? And rises the whole dump, the whole lump. The same with sin, a little bit gets into the whole life, goes everywhere. So for those reasons, symbolically, leaven was forbidden in their worship, but here they are in Israel in Amos' day using leaven. Again, against the express commandments and prohibitions of God. We don't wanna do things God's way, we wanna do things our way. The stuff God wants us to eat at the communion table doesn't taste very good, we're gonna make better bread. And it just signified how much corruption and spiritual decay they had let in to leaven their lives and their society. And then also in verse five, God makes a point of highlighting their motives, the heart, because they go around publishing their offerings. Look how much I tithed, right? Boasting in their religious devotion, just like the Pharisees of Jesus' day, making a big show of dumping a bunch of money into the pot. Well, Jesus praised the widow who put the two mites in quietly, humbly, giving all she had. For so you love to do, God says, to the people of Israel, glorying in self. This is what made him happy. Not him, he didn't make him happy. It wasn't holiness that made him happy. All their sacrifices, all their tithes, all their offerings, all their devotion, it was all all about them. It was all for self. So none of their worship to God was real in his eyes. And worse still, all of this arrogance and hypocrisy did the opposite of what true devotion to God does. True devotion to God renders joyful, grateful hearts because he's a kind and steadfastly loving and merciful God who lavishes us with abundant goodness. And that gratitude translates into lives of growing holiness and spiritual maturity. Well here, this false, empty, hypocritical worship did the opposite. It led to more and more festering sin in their lives, in their homes, in their families, in their society. And this is all what invited the outpouring of God's judgment. And again, we could spend all day making the parallels, couldn't we, to our own society and culture, and the extent to which the worship of self has become systematized here. If there's anything that we've learned so far from the minor prophets, we've looked at Hosea, we looked at Joel, we're looking at Amos now. One thing that's in common is this. There is nothing that is inconsistent with God's holiness, even as he's proclaiming it in stark terms here, and his mercy. Everywhere that he's saying how holy he is and what a radical contrast his holiness is to our sin, everywhere where he's saying that that cuts us so deep because we see the contrast in our own lives and in our own culture, he's also highlighting his mercy. because there is this call to repentance. When he's swearing in his holiness to deal with their self-serving sinfulness at the same time, he's calling them to turn from it and to turn to him and we're reminded of the great promise that whoever will turn to him will find mercy and he won't cast them out. So I want you to notice in this next section, verses six through 11 here, we'll summarize it pretty quickly. God is both talking about the kinds of judgment that he has sovereignly been ordaining already for them to suffer in their lives because of their sin, and that the purpose of those sovereign judgments is so that they would return to him, see? Open your eyes, people. He's saying, you've been going through hard things in your life, and those have been by my design to bring you back to me, to get you to stop putting your trust and confidence and self in the things of the creation and return to me and find mercy. Verse six, he talks about cleanness of teeth. That's not a good thing. We think that's a good thing, right? We buy all the whitening stuff. Here, cleanness of teeth isn't about having shiny, healthy-looking teeth. It meant they didn't have any food to eat. That's why their teeth stayed clean, because they weren't eating any food. He's talking about famine, lack of bread, he says. because the sovereign hand of God's judgment withheld the bread. You see what he's saying? You've been sinning for a long time. And one of the ways I've been dealing with it is by causing you to go hungry sometimes. And yet you didn't return to me, he says at the end of the verse there. That's what he wanted him to do. Stop living in luxury and self-sufficiency. Stop putting all your trust and confidence and hope in the things of this world. Stop being so consumed with your appetites. Remember in the New Testament, God talks about people whose God is their belly. They care much more about their appetite than they care about Him. And so, in order to bring them back to Him, He restricts their ability to gratify their appetite in a sinful way. Trust me, hope in me, depend on me by taking away the things that they are instead hoping in and focused on. And taking it away should have prompted them to return to him, but it didn't because they're stubborn. So verse seven, drought. I also withheld the rain from you, nothing to drink. Crops wouldn't grow. God would cause it to be dry as a bone here, and it's raining over there, so they'd have to run around over there to try to find water. As soon as they got there, it stops raining over there. And we go, oh, it's climate change. Yes, yes, there are ways in which God has designed the world to work, and laws of physics that govern all of those kinds of things, but the point is, God reigns sovereignly over all of it. and is working out his purpose in it. And a big part of his purpose is to get people to trust him and to return to him. But still, yet you did not return to me, declares the Lord at the end of verse eight. So verse nine, pestilence, disease, I struck you with blight and mildew. Again, that affects the food supply. Verse 10, I sent among you a pestilence after the manor of Egypt, afflicting their physical health. There was a pandemic that God was sovereign over. And then warfare, right? I killed your young men with the sword and carried away your horses. Warfare, death, yet you did not return to me, declares the Lord. Verse 11 probably refers to what we like to call natural disasters. Earthquakes, floods, fires. If we had been in Sodom and Gomorrah and we were atheists who didn't believe in God and we saw all of that stuff falling down out of heaven and consuming that city, we would have said, well, it's just a natural disaster. A bunch of meteors hit. I overthrew some of you as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and you were as a brand plucked out of the burning, yet you did not return to me." Notice how in all these verses, all of the typical troubles of life are laid out here, and all of them are attributed to the sovereign hand and will and purposes of God. not to chance, not just to the arbitrary, impersonal, random forces of nature, not to some imaginary, personal, but uncaring force like mother nature. Here in his word, God makes it so clear, doesn't he? That whatever it is, whether it's deprivation, like famine and drought, or infection, like blight or disease, pandemics, or opposition like warfare or natural disasters, quote unquote, over all of them, God sits in heaven and reigns and is accomplishing his sovereign purposes. So again, just notice the first person singular attributions in all these verses. I gave you lack of bread. I withheld the rain. I struck you with blight and mildew. I sent pestilence. I overthrew you. Remember what he said up in chapter 3 and verse 6? Does disaster come to a city unless the Lord has done it? Does that mean that there aren't human causes, natural causes that are wired into the course of history and the created order? Of course it doesn't mean that. Of course there are those things. People aren't puppets. We all have wills and we all do things that we're culpable for and responsible for everything that we do. And the creation operates according to a very defined set of physical laws. And over all of it, the sovereign eternal mind and will of God reigns. Everything happens because he ordains it to happen. He accomplishes His will and His purpose in all of it. That's how we have to understand the world, the universe and history, if we're gonna understand it according to His word. And we don't like it. Our sinful flesh tends to want to rebel against this kind of truth all the time. Our minds aren't comfortable with the logic of it. because His thoughts are higher than our thoughts. Our emotions don't like the feel of it because His ways are higher than our ways. Our wills don't want to submit to it. We want to imagine that we're freer than we are. We like to complain when things aren't the way that we want them to be. And so, when things are inconvenient to us, we tune out this truth that God is sovereign. when we've decided we don't like forest fires in our area, so let's pray for rain, and then it rains a bunch, then we decide, well, now we're unhappy about all the rain, and we're done with all this rain. Who sent the rain? Who's sovereign over every single drop of it, and how much, and when, and whether? Every complaint that I have about it's raining too much is a complaint about God's sovereign purpose in the rain. Maybe one of the sovereign purposes is to teach me not to complain, but to trust Him. And when the giant big old tree falls right next to my house, to give Him praise that He caused it to fall at just the right angle that all it did was nick off the gutter and not go through the wall. It's easy to tune out the truth of God's sovereignty when we don't like the way things are going. but the reality is that things are always the way that they are because they're the way that they're supposed to be because of God's sovereign will and purpose, none of which we'll ever fully understand because his thoughts are higher than our thoughts, because he's God, he's holy. So here he's revealing that a big part of his sovereign purposes in sovereignly orchestrating all kinds of things in this world that are difficult and painful is to call people to repent, of putting more confidence in the creation than in the sovereign creator. If I cling too much to something, then he might shake it and rattle it and turn it to dust so that I'll realize it's not worth clinging to more than he is. To teach me to repent of worshiping the creation, treasuring the creation more than treasuring him, being consumed with the stuff of earth more than with the God of creation. organizing my life more around self and the pleasure that I can get from the created order, then I organize my life around him and whatever I can do to bring him glory. That's what God would call us to turn from and turn to. And see, again, we see that irony of it all, the tragedy of it all, When we refuse to trust God because we think that we'll be better off if we do things our way, then we end up with far less. And that's why we sin. That's why we do things our own way is because we think if I do them God's way, I won't have as much as if I do it my way. It boils down to that. I want more. than what trusting him offers. So instead, I do it my way, and I do it for the sake of self-gratification and self-pleasure. That's what Israelite society was addicted to. It's what our society is addicted to. It's what all false religion, it's what so many churches even now are in service to. This way that seems right unto man, but the tragedy is in the end it leads to destruction. You think you're gonna get more, but you end up with nothing. It leads to destruction, it leads to death. The promises of the flesh in this world do not make good. They don't pay. Sin binds and enslaves and destroys, and all the while, God, who sinful people refuse to trust, God offers freedom. God offers life in abundance. God offers fullness of joy. Psalm 16, you make known to me the path of life and in your presence, there is fullness of joy and at your right hand are pleasures forevermore. God highlights this same irony through Jeremiah, right? He says, I'm the fountain of living water, but my people have forsaken me to try to dig their own cisterns in the ground by their own efforts and in their own understanding, and those cisterns they're digging can't even hold any water. That's what sin does. And the residues of that kind of sin are in us still, even though he's given us the water of life in Christ Jesus, still we struggle to trust him. Still we insist on doing things our way. Still we're all about self. Still we think that it's gonna be better for us if we take matters into our own hands than if we simply trust and obey the God who made us. So this is the same thing that God is highlighting here in Amos 3 and 4. And again, he uses the picture of strongholds, right? Instead of finding refuge in God, they've taken to selfishly shoving worldly goods into strongholds at all costs. And God says, I'm gonna tear down those strongholds and call you to return to me. They've said, surely self is a safer stronghold than the sovereign God. Isn't that tempting for us to think? God says in Proverbs 3, trust in the Lord with all your heart and don't lean on your own understanding. And we think, well, that's just, he can't mean that literally. That's just gotta be some kind of poetic religious platitude. That can't actually be a way of life, right? It is, and it's God's sovereign plea for the way that actually leads to the fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore. Here's what God says after he says, to lean not on your own understanding, he says in all your ways acknowledge him, all of them, and he will make your path straight. Don't be wise in your own eyes, rather fear the Lord and turn away from evil, all the things that tempt you by saying I can give you more than God can give you, turn away from them and simply fear the Lord and it will be healing to your flesh and refreshment for your bones. The question is, do you believe that? Do we trust that? Do we trust him to make our paths straight? Or do we believe that doing things our way, according to our understanding, in a lifestyle organized by our own selfish desires is gonna get us more, be better for us? Bottom line, does self seem to be a safer stronghold to you? than the eternal, holy, sovereign God? And the answer is yeah. In our sin it does. I know it does. I know that very often it seems safer and better to rest in the stronghold of self than in the stronghold of God. Because that's what's at the heart of every sinful thing in our lives. It's this old impulse. This lying, deceptive impulse that says self is a better guide. Self is a surer hope. Self is a safer stronghold than the God who proclaims himself in the closing two verses at the end of this chapter. Talk about poetic. Israel is trusted more. Indulging in their own pleasure, leaning on their own understanding, doing things their way, all the while God has been sitting up in heaven, doing all that he pleases, orchestrating all of creation and history to bring about natural disasters and famines and drought and sickness and warfare, hard trials. that should cause image-bearing human beings to realize that trusting in the creation is never safer than trusting in the creator. And so God now, the eternal sovereign Holy One says to them in verse 12, therefore thus I will do to you, O Israel, because I will do this to you, prepare to meet your God. I'll tell you, if you're living in sin, You never ever want to hear the Holy God say something like that to you. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, Hebrews 10 31 says. And again, listen, it's not like he's being silent now, right? It's not like he said this way back then and he's not, he's just not speaking anymore. in the face of the same self-serving, self-sufficient, self-righteous wickedness that continues to characterize human lives now in our own society. Now, God is shouting the same thing through his holy word. Return to me. Repent. Now is the favorable time. Now is the day of salvation. Come unto me, all who are weary, and I will give you rest, he says. And he's speaking loudly, not just in his word, but through providence. In our world, just like he did in Amos' day, are there still trials today? Are there still famines today? Are there still droughts today? Are there still changes in climate today? Natural disasters, pandemics, diseases, wars, violence? Of course there are, there's all these things still. God sits in heaven and does whatever he pleases. He is no less sovereign over all of it now than he was then. And in it all, he is calling us to turn to him, to trust him, to stop trusting self, to stop storing up treasures on earth, but to store up treasures in heaven through faith in him. Verse 13, he who forms the mountains and creates the wind and declares to man what is his thought, who makes the morning darkness and treads on the height of the earth. The Lord, the God of hosts is his name. This is the God who is, and he is the only safe refuge and shelter and stronghold of our lives. Because he's the one whose power is absolute, right? He's the one who made the mountains. He's the creator of the wind. David says he's the one who sets the stars in the sky and calls them by name. And he's the one whose unlimited power is transforming power. He changes the morning into darkness. He takes the blackness out of the night and makes it into the brightness of dawn. Don't you hear echoes of Isaiah's words there that we think about at Christmastime? When he says, those who walked in darkness shall see a great light. Those who have dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shown, for unto us a child is born, and unto us a son is given. He wields omnipotent, life-transforming power. Can you trust him? This is the God who is, and he is not far off. He treads on the heights of the earth. You don't have to go searching the universe for him, he's right here. He became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace, full of truth to save us, to redeem us, to reconcile us to God, to give us life and to give it abundantly, to give it eternally. He, in all His eternal holiness and infinite power and steadfast love and mercy, He is the only safe stronghold. Safer than anything that this world has to offer, safer by far than self. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Do not lean on your own understanding in how many of your ways. all your ways acknowledge Him and He will, not He might, He will make your path straight. Do not be wise in your own eyes, but fear the Lord, turn away from evil, and it not might be, will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones. It will be, amen? Pray with me. Our God and our Father, your word is so powerful. It is so vivid, it is so profound, it is so clear cut. We praise you for your revelation to us and we ask, Lord, that as your word is sharper than any double-edged sword and there are no dull parts in it and you use it to penetrate the very depths of our souls and expose any residual sin within us, that you will help us to see the ways in which we don't trust you and in which we trust self more. and that then, God, you will help us to hear your voice calling us to return to you and being assured that as we do, like that prodigal father, you embrace us and you lavish us with goodness and kindness and mercy and steadfast love and faithfulness. You say, I don't condemn you. And so, Father, help us to luxuriate in your grace and in your goodness, help us to be satisfied with you And Father, chase away every other desire from our hearts and help us to walk by faith, we pray in Jesus' name, amen, amen.