A Warning to Israel
6Yahweh says: “For three transgressions of Israel, yes, for four, I will not turn away its punishment; because they have sold the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes; 7They trample on the dust of the earth on the head of the poor, and deny justice to the oppressed; and a man and his father use the same maiden, to profane my holy name; 8and they lay themselves down beside every altar on clothes taken in pledge; and in the house of their God they drink the wine of those who have been fined. 9Yet I destroyed the Amorite before them, whose height was like the height of the cedars, and he was strong as the oaks; yet I destroyed his fruit from above, and his roots from beneath. 10Also I brought you up out of the land of Egypt, and led you forty years in the wilderness, to possess the land of the Amorite. 11I raised up some of your sons for prophets, and some of your young men for Nazirites. Isn’t this true, you children of Israel?” says Yahweh. 12“But you gave the Nazirites wine to drink, and commanded the prophets, saying, ‘Don’t prophesy!’ 13Behold, I will crush you in your place, as a cart crushes that is full of grain. 14Flight will perish from the swift; and the strong won’t strengthen his force; neither shall the mighty deliver himself; 15neither shall he stand who handles the bow; and he who is swift of foot won’t escape; neither shall he who rides the horse deliver himself; 16and he who is courageous among the mighty will flee away naked on that day,” says Yahweh.
After judging Damascus, Gaza, Tyre, Edom, and then Ammon and Moab, God turned to Judah and Israel and named every one of their sins. He also warned of the judgment that would fall on them in their corruption. Judah and Israel fell away just when they were strong. When they broke God’s law and gave themselves to corruption, God raised his hand in judgment, and the Gentile nations invaded them. God did use those nations as his rod and staff, yet their sin of persecuting and killing God’s people by the power of the world is still a sin that can never be forgiven.
Judah and Israel were fundamentally different from the Gentile nations, yet they committed the same sins. They were the chosen people, who had received the law from God and had the temple in Jerusalem, a nation that should never have betrayed him. They despised the law of Yahweh, did not keep his statutes, were led astray by idols, and forsook God; that is a sin of an entirely different order from the Gentiles’ ignorance of God.
Judah ought to have looked at the world in a completely different way from the Gentiles. Yet once God’s grace made them prosperous, they began little by little to change for the worse. They took their blessings for granted and were absorbed into the world. When they first came out of their hard and bitter suffering, they treasured the law and tried to live by the word, but as their prosperity went on, they copied exactly the evils the Gentile nations had committed.
Satan had watched people fail to resist temptation and eat the forbidden fruit; from that he knew that if he gave people constant plenty and ease, they would go bad. That is how Satan has worked to this day, using history, culture, and knowledge to make God’s people stumble and to keep pressing them to forsake God. Many believers do not notice Satan creeping up without a sound, and they take in the culture of the world and come to terms with it. If we cannot let go of the world and keep meeting it halfway, we will be corrupted in the end.
Without the wisdom of God, we cannot discern what is false, and we decide everything by what seems right to us. Before long we will find ourselves acting with no sense of right and wrong at all. This was as true of Israel in the north as of Judah in the south. God brought them out through Moses after four hundred years of slavery in Egypt, and he raised up Joshua to lead them in conquering Canaan. His purpose was for the people of Israel to live as witnesses who proclaim the Kingdom of God. But once Israel and Judah grew rich in material things, they took up the sins of the Gentiles, and God had no choice but to judge them as he judged Sodom.
If God’s people never forget his grace and live with thankful hearts, they will never be stripped of their blessings. But if they forget to give thanks, mistreat the poor, hold a merely outward faith, or act without common decency, they will come under God’s wrath. When people forget grace they grow proud, and pride makes them foolish and at last drags them down to death. Forgetting to give thanks is a grievous misfortune for exactly that reason.
Israel had reached its greatest strength since Solomon. With such power in their hands, those in authority began to oppress the poor in order to gain still more wealth and power.
Amos 2:6
6Yahweh says: “For three transgressions of Israel, yes, for four, I will not turn away its punishment; because they have sold the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes;
Those in power ought to take care of their poor kinsmen; to torment them instead is a sin harder to forgive than the sins of the wicked Gentiles. The unrighteous sold for silver God’s people who lived honestly to keep righteousness, and they sold people for the price of a pair of shoes. Such a sin is so great that God will never forgive it. And this was the sin Judah and Israel were committing.
The righteous knew they could do well for themselves if they compromised with the world, but to live justly they held on to their faith to the end. They knew they would pay a price for refusing to side with the wicked in power, yet they could not defy God’s law; rather than defy it, they chose suffering of their own accord. The apostle Paul too knew that life as a law-keeping Pharisee would give him a comfortable future, but he did not betray Jesus Christ; he took the path of suffering. He knew that choosing the truth would bring hardship and persecution, yet for the gospel he laid down his life of his own will.
When God saw the righteous persecuted, he was angry, and he commanded the prophet Amos to proclaim judgment against the unrighteous. The wicked rulers likely thought they would live at ease forever on the wealth they had seized from the righteous. Yet they perished in the great earthquake two years later, and that shows how small human greed and human life really are.
No one can ever escape God’s wrath or hold it back. This is because there is nowhere in the world where rulers who sell just and righteous people for silver can hide from it. They coveted the dust on the heads of the poor, turned aside the way of the humble, and committed sexual immorality, father and son going to the same young prostitute, and they had no fear at all.
According to the law of Moses, for a father and son to lie with the same woman, even if she was a prostitute, was incest, a sin punishable by death. We call someone the dregs of humanity when they have done what no human being should ever do. To trample the poor without a trace of guilt, as one treads on the dust rolling about on the ground, to judge and persecute the prophets and the Nazirites, and for a father and son to lie with the same woman: these are the deeds of the dregs of humanity.
The only thing that gave them power to torment the poor was money. Once money had given them power, the very people who should have made God known abused their own kin by the methods the wicked Gentiles had used. The rulers of Israel, who heaped every kind of persecution on those trying to keep their faith in order to bring them down, will face a punishment more dreadful than hell. When people gain great power in the world, faith that serves God looks trivial, and those who strive to keep their faith look foolish. So the world does not respect people of faith, and it feels no guilt in mocking God’s people. The world persecutes the saints so that the lamps they carry cannot give their light, and it hurries all the faster to hide in the darkness. If we do not lift our lamps higher before a world that clings to its darkness like this, the precious souls God is seeking will be buried in that darkness.
People attach great weight to appearances. So once they have wealth, honor, and power, they proudly think themselves above others, and foolishly decide that they may treat the poor however they please. The standard of that judgment is none other than themselves, which is why they have nothing to say when God judges them. If they had once been oppressed for being poor, then on gaining power they should have behaved all the more humbly, lifting up and helping the weak; but Judah and Israel did not live as God wished. Because the body always remembers sin first, the first sin is the difficult one; once it hardens into habit, it is far from easy to turn around.
When we fail even though we have the will to keep our faith, the cause is that the body responds more strongly than the will. Because changing such bad habits takes long perseverance, we need to strive not to sin from the very start. Those who lack right conduct and good character find it hard to hold on to their faith. We must live morally and conscientiously because, in the end, we are to reveal God through the right deeds that faith produces. Only when our lives are marked by a moral conscience and upright character can we take up God’s work without being hindered by the world.
Living honestly and faithfully is the basic posture of God’s people. Those who have a moral conscience, sensible conduct, and good character can win respect even in a world that rejects God. God desires saints whose character has been well formed in these basic ways and who are filled with the word and with grace.
Exodus 22:26-27
26If you take your neighbor’s garment as collateral, you shall restore it to him before the sun goes down, 27for that is his only covering, it is his garment for his skin. What would he sleep in? It will happen, when he cries to me, that I will hear, for I am gracious.
When Israel ceased to fear God and fell into corruption, things came to an absurd pass: they took the only garment a poor brother had and spread it out to lie on beside the altar. They could commit such enormous evil at Yahweh’s altar because those in power trusted in the strength of their wealth. Since they had the means to give large offerings, no one had the courage to point out their wrongs.
Even while they were committing the sin of taking the clothes of the poor at the holy altar, not even the priests could rebuke them. At the altar where sins are forgiven they drank wine until they were drunk, a terrible sin, yet with their consciences seared, everyone ceased to see sin as sin. Their conduct at God’s altar makes it plain that they really did persecute the righteous to make them abandon their faith. They would have mocked the poor, telling them that if they believed in God as well as they did, they too would prosper.
Churchgoers today hold the same mistaken faith. When their business does well or their children succeed, they boast that they have been blessed because they believed in God so well. They commit the sin of crediting all of God’s grace to their own merit. I once heard someone say, without the least embarrassment, that they would never have come to church if God had not helped their business. Most such people are the first to abandon God when hardship comes or their feelings are hurt, and they decide this way because they have no assurance about life after death. Look at the churches today, and you will find people like this, who have not been born again, trying to wield power in the church and committing the sin of mocking and oppressing poorer members. What is sad is that even as they throw the church into confusion, neither the congregation nor even the pastors can bring themselves to tell them that such behavior is sin and that they must repent.
As sin filled Israel, conscience, morality, and faith slowly began to rot, and in the end they produced a mixed religion. They thought it wise to serve God after a fashion while pretending to serve idols so as not to be hated by others; that way, they reasoned, they could live without persecution.
Friends, the church is not the world. People live for themselves because they think this world is the end, but the church is a gathering of saints preparing for the kingdom that lasts forever. As long as we live, then, we must live by God’s law. And yet if God’s people are not born again, they will keep doubting his guidance and insisting on their own ideas. Such an attitude is no different from the grumbling of the Israelites against God after the Exodus, or from their scorn for Moses, who gave up his own life for them. God is not like us; he has no needs and does not come asking for help. His hand is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear; it is our sins that are blocking his work.
Because churches are committing the same sins as the world, the Kingdom of God is not advancing. God’s people should be doing much to proclaim his Kingdom, but because of their corruption, God’s precious time is being wasted. So that the people of his Kingdom can carry the gospel to the nations, to Samaria, and to the ends of the earth, we must always keep our lives pure.
Amos 2:10
10Also I brought you up out of the land of Egypt, and led you forty years in the wilderness, to possess the land of the Amorite.
When children do not obey their parents, the parents end up spending precious time steering them back onto the right path. God too had to keep speaking to Israel, because he had to turn them back. He had to tell them again and again by what mighty works he had led them in the past, and the precious time that should have gone into helping them grow was being used up. Up to then he had given them countless chances; when they complained, he showed them miracles and led them into Canaan. Yet Israel forgot all that grace and was living like the rest of the world.
I felt sorrow at the sight of God going out of his way, in order to turn his people’s hearts, to remind them how much he had loved them and what works he had done for them. That is because I saw in it the heart of a Father who longed to bless them.
When children obey what they are told, parents look less to their past than to the bright future opening before them, and they search for ways to help. But when a child strays from the right path, the parents are so busy dealing with the trouble at hand that, far from looking to the future, they cannot move a single step from where they stand. In the same way, when God’s people do not obey the word, God must deal with the sins and problems they create every day, leaving him no room to give them blessing, and they have no chance to receive it. With the heart of a Father who loves his children, God recalled the past for Israel and gave them a chance to come back, but they would not listen. As a result, judgment fell on them in the end.
We too, if we do not listen to God’s voice pleading with us that we must hold fast to our faith to live forever, will face a fearful judgment. God made the prophets proclaim his word even though he knew they would be persecuted, and he raised up Nazirites to teach Israel what kind of people they were meant to be. Yet after receiving so much of God’s love, the people forced the Nazirites to drink wine and persecuted the prophets to stop them prophesying.
The Nazirites were people set apart as holy: they were to drink nothing that came from the vine and no strong drink, eat nothing unclean, leave their hair uncut, and keep away from dead bodies. Yet Israel forced these Nazirites to drink wine and persecuted the prophets so they would not prophesy. This went far beyond any matter of Nazirites and prophets; it was an enormous rebellion against God. They did not fear God, and that is why they could do such evil to the Nazirites and prophets he had specially raised up.
The people of Israel demanded that the prophets tell them only what they wanted to hear, and they threatened them into proclaiming nothing but blessing so that they themselves could prosper. Even now, churches that should proclaim the gospel alone have taught a blessing-seeking religion, as if prospering in the world were the blessing God gives. As a result, God’s people have been corrupted to the point where they cannot recover their faith. You can see it in the fact that many believers do not clearly know who Jesus Christ is, and find churches and pastors who preach only the truth a burden.
People are flocking not to churches that proclaim the Kingdom of God and repentance, but to churches that ask nothing of them, please their ears, and preach worldly success. But we must understand that the Bible speaks only of the Kingdom of God, of witnesses who proclaim the gospel, of God’s righteousness, repentance, and Jesus Christ; nowhere does it record the worldly blessings people like to hear about. When his people live according to his will, God solves their problems for the sake of their faith, and he uses the world as a means of assuring them of his Kingdom. The world is not the goal; building up their faith is.
God told fallen Israel that he would crush them as a cart loaded with sheaves presses down the ground. It is a fearful word: once God’s judgment begins, even the swift cannot escape, and even the strong cannot use their strength. When a great earthquake strikes and a tsunami follows, for instance, no one can outrun it however fast they run, and even those with great wealth and power are swept away all the same. God’s judgment, too, will come in an instant, leaving no place anywhere in the world to hide.
God has already warned of judgment, and that judgment will surely come. From now on, only those sheltered in God’s arms can endure it. If we too do not turn back while we have the chance, we are bound to suffer the same judgment Israel suffered.
God wants us, too, to hear the word of judgment Amos proclaimed. Having a little more wealth and power than others does not make anyone strong. We must not use wealth as a weapon to persecute the righteous, nor despise the poor, nor hinder those who proclaim the truth; we must help those who are trying to live by faith. Israel, which did not turn back even after rebuke and warning, suffered greatly for the sin of despising God. Had Israel turned in wisdom and repented before judgment came, God would have withdrawn his judgment.
Being weak, we may fall into sin as we live in the world. But we who have met God know what he wants, and so we need to strive to live in holiness. God told Judah to turn, yet they did not repent and suffered a great judgment; having seen that, we must fear God and never leave the place of repentance.
I hope you will walk in holiness according to God’s will, since he rejoices at even the smallest sign of turning back.