Amos 4

And Amos.

Chapter number four.

The

prophet of Amos, chapter number four, verses one

through 13, the whole chapter.

God's word says, 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 now that we may drink.

The Lord God has sworn by his holiness.

Behold, the days are coming upon you, when

you will take when they will take you away with meat

hooks, and the last of you with fish hooks, you

will go out through breaches in the walls, each one straight

before her, and you will be cast into harmon,

declares the Lord.

Enter Bethel and transgress.

And Gilgal multiply transgression.

Bring your sacrifices every morning, your tithes every 3 days.

offer a thank offering also from that which is

leavened, and proclaim free will offerings, make them known.

For so you love to do, you sons of Israel,

declares the Lord God.

But I gave you also cleanness of teeth

in all your cities, and a lack of bread in all your places.

Yet you have not returned to me, declares the Lord.

Furthermore, I withheld the rain from you while

there were still 3 months until harvest.

Then I would send rain on one city, and on

another city, I would not send rain.

One part will be rained on while the part not rained on would dry up.

So 2 or 3 cities would stagger to another city

to drink water, but would not be satisfied.

Yet you have not returned me, declares the Lord.

I smote you with scorching wind and mildew,

and the caterpillar was devouring your many gardens and vineyards.

fig trees and olive trees.

Yet you have not returned to me, declares the Lord.

I sent a plague among you after the manner of Egypt.

I slew your young men by the sword, along with your captured horses,

and I made the stench of your camp rise up in your nostrils.

Yet you have not returned to me, declares the Lord.

I overthrew you as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah,

and you are like a firebrand snatched from a blaze, yet

you have not returned to me, declares the Lord.

Therefore, thus I will do to you, O Israel, because

I will do this to you.

prepare to meet your God, O Israel, for

behold, he who forms mountains, and creates

the wind, and declares to man what are his thoughts.

He who makes dawn in the darkness, and treads

in the high places of the earth.

The Lord God of hosts is his name.

Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, we worship you today as the

Lord, God of hosts.

And I pray that you bless this message to your people,

our minds and our hearts, to your word, and the message

in spite of the messenger.

For Christ glory alone, in his name I pray.

Amen.

A prophet's job was

tough, right?

Can you imagine delivering that message, especially

the job of a true prophet was especially tough.

There was a bunch of false prophets during

these times.

Remember the wicked king of

Israel, Ahab?

He's the one that married Jezebel and worshipped the ball.

He wanted to go to war against one

of his neighboring enemies.

So he summoned all of his false prophets together.

And they all got together and started dancing around and put

horns on their head and said, thus you'll do to your enemies.

You'll gore them with these horns.

But then he summoned Yahweh's prophet, Micaiah.

He told Makiah, you better tell me

the truth because you always talk bad.

You always tell me that things are going

to happen that are bad.

And so Micaiah goes along at 1st

with these false prophets, and he says

that you'll go, go ahead, go to war, you will succeed.

Then Ahab tells them this in 2nd Chronicles 1815.

He says, then the king, King Ahab said to him, how many times

must I adjure you to speak to me

nothing but the truth in the name of the Lord?

So here comes the part that always

brings trouble to the true prophets, the

part that has consequences for speaking the truth, Micaiah

tells him the truth, or what Yahweh revealed to him about

what was going to happen when he goes to war in verse 16.

He said, so he said, Micaiah, I saw all Israel scattered on the mountains.

Like, sheep which have no shepherd.

And the Lord said, these have no master.

Let each of them return to his house in peace.

I want you to feel the boldness

and the courage, the guts that this had to take for

Micaiah to speak this negative word

to a king in that time who

had the right by word for

your life and then for your death.

In fact, Ahab didn't

kill him, he said, send him to prison and give him meager

rations until we come back successfully,

which, of course, they didn't.

Ahab died in that war.

Uh, that he uh, his false prophets

told him that he would succeed in.

And so Micaiah rotted array in prison.

And Amos, the prophet that we're reading from today,

had a similar job.

He was born in a little town

just 12 or 13 miles outside of Jerusalem in Judah.

Judah was the southern kingdom of Israel after

they divided.

And so he was called to be a prophet to

Israel, the northern kingdom.

So he would automatically be considered an outsider

to the people that he was called to prophesy to.

And Israel, since they divided from Judah,

committed the sin of idolatry.

They built these 2 idols, these

2 golden calves, one in Bethel, and

one in Gilgal, so that the people of Israel wouldn't

have to go into Judah, to Yahweh's temple, to

worship, they could just go into Israel, it

was easier for them, and he was worried about people leaving and

not being faithful to Israel and trying to go back to Judah.

So they set these 2 idols up in Bethel, and they

would go and worship there.

They were an alternative to the true way that

Yahweh had called his people to worship him.

So Yahweh calls Amos to

go to Israel as an

outsider as someone who is from Judah,

to tell them that God

is going to judge them for their sin of idolatry.

Amos was a simple man.

He was a sheepherder, a cattle farmer

of the day.

And so you can imagine he wasn't one of the most

educated people.

He wasn't maybe the most eloquent of speech as

a shepherd, but God called him to speak to kings

and to the muckety muck of the land

of Israel.

And right out of the gate.

It barely introduces Amos in chapter

one, verse one, tells you that he was a shepherd called

of God to go to Israel, and the very 1st verse of

his prophecy, in verse number 2 of chapter one, it says,

he said, Amos, the Lord roars from Zion,

and from Jerusalem, he utters his voice.

And the shepherd's pasture grounds mourn,

and the summit of Carmel dries up.

Thus says the Lord, for 3 transgressions

of Damascus, and for 4, I will not revoke its punishment because

they thrashed Gilead with implements of sharp iron.

Now this is just some sheepherder.

And can you imagine being pre?

Who are you coming to tell me this?

And the thing is, there's 9 chapters in

the book of Amos, and each of those chapters just build

on his preaching of judgment until the very

last couple of verses of chapter 9 where he

speaks of God's grace out of the judgment has come in grace from that.

But he preaches this message of judgment to

the people of Israel, because the people

of Israel are all guilty of

the sin of idol worship.

They all participated in this sin of going and

worshiping these golden calves that were created.

And all the ceremonies and rituals and

rites that had to do with these golden calves were

copies of what God had set up for his worship in Israel.

They had the form of what God had set up.

They did sacrifices.

They did bread offerings and tithes and

free will offerings.

And, and, but they were had the form of God's

worship that he set up, but they didn't have the substance.

They looked like they were obeying God, but

they weren't really obeying God where it mattered and

being obedient to him in his worship.

And as we think about his message to

these wicked idolatrous Israelites,

we can also see relevance in

this message to our world and our culture today.

There are so many things done in

Christ's name, in worship of him,

that are fabricated by the minds of

wicked people, of sinners just like us.

And the conscience of our fallen

culture may be eased by doing these forms

of worship, but without the reality of

true worship of God, that's all they are.

It just looks like it.

It's false worship.

And us, even if we gently

explain, and we probably all have experience with this.

If we gently explain the truth about

how God wants to be worshiped from his revelation

to people who are in this false worship.

We tend to offend those

people, right?

If even a gentle word to them, and

you can show them from scripture what it says about his

worship, and they still get offended.

The proper reaction would be thankfulness

for showing the truth and your care for their souls,

but darkness and sin make that impossible.

Now, just imagine that.

That would be a gentle word to a friend.

Now, Amos has a strong word to

his enemies in Israel that

split from the kingdom with Judah.

But 2 things make this very important for

us to push past this offense that we may cause out

of love for our friends and telling them the truth about

false worship.

First, there is no salvation in

worship that is a lie.

There's no salvation outside of Jesus Christ.

Second, God, the

God, the God revealed to us in scriptures that created the

universe and everything in it, including us, is the

only true God that deserves any worship whatsoever.

And he has revealed to us the way that

he wants to be worshiped in his Bible,

in the word that he has given us as a gift.

And we all, every single one of us,

experience, have experience with the consequences of

sin in our lives.

But the consequences of false worship, of

worshiping idols created by our minds, whether they're

golden statues or things

that we've created in our minds, the consequences

of false worship and false teaching are eternal.

They last forever.

And so we need to be encouraged to gently,

or firmly, depending on what the situation calls

for, tell our friends about true worship of

the true God.

Makes it difficult in our culture, in our age,

because our culture and our age has made truth subjective.

In other words, it's what you want

to believe, and that's okay, if that's what you believe.

And what I believe is what I want to believe, and that's okay.

It's made truth, a preference, an

opinion, instead of what truth actually is.

Your truth and my truth may

be different, but according to our age, they're both true.

Just yesterday, we were watching a cooking video

at lunch on how to make key lime pie.

And the presenter was showing his different

little tricks of making the crust and making the

filling more delicious and more creamy and

how to balance the whipped cream and everything with the custard

of the key lime pie.

It looked delicious.

Rachel doesn't like pie, and she doesn't like graham cracker crust.

So I just get to watch it and imagine what it might taste like.

But the presenter of the video,

uh, 2 or 3 times during the video.

You know, there's things that you can adjust in recipes

that you can adjust for your taste and for your preference.

And he had this key lime juice that he particularly liked.

And he said, if your truth is that

you like a different juice, if you like fresh squeeze juice, then that's good.

He made your preference or opinion

over what juice you used in the pie, a truth.

And you see the difference there.

When he said that, he destroyed the meaning

of the word truth and made it just like an opinion.

But in reality, he

could have said, if your preference is this juice over that, that's

one thing, but not your truth.

Your truth doesn't matter.

What is the truth is what matters.

And the truth is, we've been revealed

from scripture, how God wants to be worshiped,

and he is the only God, the God over

all lowercase G gods, and

he deserves to be worshiped in the way that he sets forth for us.

And it's so important.

It lasts for eternity, that the truth about

who God is and how he wants to be worshiped is

a life and death issue.

It's not just about juice in a pie, but

it is life and death.

And that's why I believe Amos throughout the whole book,

but especially in this chapter here is trying to teach us that

we all must understand the seriousness of

worshiping a holy God.

We're not playing around with our time

in our worship, like the Israelites were.

And first, in the 1st 5 verses, we

do that by living in the light of his holiness, by

living in the light of his holiness.

Verse one says again, hear

this word, you cows of Bashan,

who are on the mountain of Samaria, who

oppress the poor,

who say to your husbands, bring now, that we may drink.

The Lord God has sworn by

his holiness.

Behold, the days are coming upon you when

they will take you away with meat

hooks and the last of you with fish hooks.

You will go out through breaches in the walls,

each one straight before her, and you will be cast

to harm and declares the Lord.

Enter Bethel and transgress.

In Gilgal, multiply transgression.

Bring your sacrifices every morning, your tithes every 3 days.

All for a thank offering also from that which is

leavened, and proclaim free will offerings.

Make them known.

For so you love to do, you sons of Israel.

declares the Lord God.

I want you to detect the sarcasm in

how Amos is preaching here, and when

I think of sarcasm,

I think of 2 people, Mark Twain and Winston Churchill.

They were masters at sarcism.

But one time, Winston was talking about one

of his political rivals, and Winston

Churchill's opinion, this political rival was weak

and spineless and didn't have guts,

like Churchill thought that England needed at the time.

And so he said talking about this man, he says, I remember

when I was a child being taken to the celebrated Barnum

Circus, which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities.

But the exhibit on the program, which I most desired

to see, was the one described as the boneless wonder.

But my parents judge that the spectacle would

be too demoralizing and revolting for my youthful eye, and

I have waited 50 years to see the boneless

wonder sitting on the treasury bench.

that Churchill was quite the quipper.

And Amos is quite the quipper as well,

but this is much more serious than some kind of English politics.

The Bible uses sarcasm to get our attention.

Doesn't it doesn't it make us perk up and perk

our ears up to what they're trying to say.

Christ used sarcasm as well.

Here in the 1st verse, Amos

begins talking about the extravagance and

the decadence of the culture of Samaria.

And he uses a sarcastic insult to do it.

Look again in verse one.

He says, hear this word, you cows of Bashan,

who are on the mountain of Samaria.

Now, imagine the pearl clutching, muckety

muck, these rich, well-to-do, Sumerian

women who were living lives of

luxury, just telling their husbands, hey, go get a drink.

Let's start partying right now.

They would clutch their pearls when they heard Amos preaching this message.

Now, when he says, you cows

of Bashan, it's not the same thing as what we would say,

if we would call someone that now, that the

cows of Bashan, a cow was looked at as a luxury item, right?

Most of them had the poorer people, if they had meat,

it was sheep and birds and stuff like that.

But if you were rich and well-to-do, you would

have a nice fat, juicy cow.

And Bashan was a very fertile region.

It would be like saying something about Kobe

beef, like the best beef in the world.

These were the cows of Bashan.

And so they would look around at the prosperity.

And that's that, he was bringing that to the attention that,

look, you have everything you need.

You're living in luxury, the lap of it, and you're

fat and sassy on all this good things and prosperity you have.

But you're worshiping a cow.

You're worshiping a cow made out

of metal that doesn't speak, that doesn't

hear, that doesn't listen to you, can't do anything, even if it could.

But the prosperity that they did receive,

how does it say that they got their prosperity?

By oppressing the poor, by crushing

the needy?

And their whole life is centered around recreation.

Go get, go get, go get me a drink so we can just sit around

and take it easy and relax.

But God will not stand for that forever.

God will bring judgment on it.

Look at verse two.

The Lord God has sworn by

his holiness.

Now, when you when the Bible says this.

This is the most intense and serious of

promises that God makes.

He's promising.

He's swearing by his holiness,

his ultimate attribute, that judgment will come.

When he does this, and he describes what

will happen, we can tell that it won't be pleasant.

All their recreation and sitting around, all their lavish

lives will be over with.

He promises that a day will come when

someone will come from the outside, break down

the walls of their city, and take them out with meat hooks,

and with fish hooks, and that the secure luxury

that they lived in, they'll completely lose.

Verse three, you will go out through breaches in

the walls, each one straight before her,

and you will be cast to Harmon.

Now, the cities of the time, your

city wall was your security against outside enemies.

The wall would stand against most battles.

And so you would run to the city if you were being attacked and

be secure in there.

But the promise says that those walls will be breached,

that will be taken through holes in the walls.

And we live in a culture much like that.

They were relying on those walls for security on

their oppression of the needy and their wealth for

their security.

And our culture is just like that, but

on steroids.

We place our trust in our jobs, in

our technology, in our science, but

true security doesn't come from any of those things.

If you're in Christ, you know that your

only true security, lies in his person,

and in his work, if you take that away and

we have no amount of wealth, no amount of stuff

that we have, no amount of expertise that we have in any given subject,

can offer us the security and true peace of knowing Christ.

And God's promise of judgment, that he swore

by his holiness here came through.

It was fulfilled just as he said.

When years later, they were fought

against by the Assyrians and taken into Assyrian

exile as slaves through breaches in their walls.

And then Amos continues in

his holy sarcasm here in verse 4.

Enter Bethel, where one of the cow idols were and transgress.

In Gilgal, where the other idol was, multiply transgression.

Bring your sacrifices every morning.

Your tithes every 3 days, offer a thank

offering, also, from that which is leavened, and proclaim

free will offerings, make them known, for so you love to

do, you sons of Israel, declares the Lord God.

And one of the commentators that I read,

said that this was kind of a parody of

a hymn that the idol worshiping Israelites

would sing on their way to the cows.

You remember, we've gone through the psalms of ascent, that the Hebrew

people would sing as they ascend the hill of Zion in

Jerusalem to worship God, but it seems like they've

copied some of those things that they had in the true

worship of God in the false worship of these cows.

So that Amos is kind of parodying one

of those psalms that they sing like a biblical weird out.

And so they were convinced, these Israelites,

that they were worshiping Yahweh,

in their own way, that they were worshiping

these cows, these idols in a way

that they had made up, but they had made it up in a way to

mimic and copy what God had set up.

They had sacrifices.

They had tithes and offerings.

But the truth was nowhere to be found.

And again, very relevant to our culture.

We do the exact same thing in our time today.

And there's a big push, even today,

because of the COVID debacle that we just went through.

Many are leaving these big mega churches

with the smoke and the lights and the performances and everything,

and going to something, I don't know, going to

something that seems authentic, that

has the trappings of authenticity, of worship

of Christ, without understanding the truth,

the old buildings and the stained glass, and the statues,

and the smells, and the bells, as they say.

There's been a big influx

of people into Roman Catholicism, and into Greek orthodoxy,

because they have the ceremonies,

and they have the rituals and the old buildings

and seemingly old religion.

But the rituals that

they have and the rights that they do don't make it true.

The cows of Bashan had rituals

and right.

They had rituals and rites that looked like

the true rituals and rites given to them by Yahweh.

They had festivals and sacrifices.

They had their own priests that looked like Yahweh's priests.

They sang songs, and they repeated prayers, just like the

Hebrew, the true worshipers of Hebrew did.

But then they went home, still in their sin,

and oppress the poor.

and crushed the needy.

They had the appearance of authenticity, but

not the substance of truth that the Bible reveals to us.

But God is holy, and he's set apart from everything else.

And he should be set apart in our lives and in our worship.

We don't just sing because it's something that we do.

We sing because God has commanded us

that this is the way that he wants to be worshiped in this way.

And the same thing goes for every single part of our worship.

We don't have the stained glass and all the things

that you walk around with and all that stuff.

But we have the gift of God of Revelation

and how he wants to be worshiped.

Psalm 991 through 9 says the Lord reigns,

let the peoples tremble.

He is enthroned above the cherubim.

Let the earth shake.

The Lord is great in Zion, and he is exalted

above all the peoples.

Let them praise your great and awesome name.

Holy is he.

The strength of the king loves justice.

You have established equity.

You have executed justice and righteousness in Jacob.

Exalt the Lord our God, and worship at his footstool.

Holy is he.

Moses and Aaron were among his priests.

And Samuel was among those who called in his name.

They called upon the Lord, and he answered them.

He spoke to them in the pillar of cloud.

They kept his testimonies in a statute that he gave them.

O Lord our God, you answered them, you were a

forgiving God to them, and yet an avenger of their evil

deeds.

Exalt the Lord, our God, and worship at his holy hill

for holy is the Lord, our God.

We worship a God who is holy,

and it matters how we worship.

It's not just an issue of preference of what key

lime juice you prefer.

It matters what the truth is, and we

should always be seeking to worship him in the truth.

And if we are confronted by

someone who has the truth and wants to correct us,

if they are true, we need to search that out, and be

thankful for their love and the grace of God for them, telling us that.

So we take serious, the

worship of God, by living, just like he's a holy God,

because he is, but also by recognizing

his holy judgment.

And we'll read verses 6 through 11 again, it's important for us to remember.

But I gave you also cleanness

of teeth in all your cities, and lack of bread in all

your places, yet you have not returned to me, declares the Lord.

Furthermore, I withheld the rain from you, while

there were still 3 months until harvest, then I would send

rain on one city, and on another city, I would not send rain.

One part would be rained on, while the part not rained on would dry up.

So 2 or 3 cities would stagger to another city to

drink water, but would not be satisfied.

Yet, you have not returned to me, declares the Lord.

I smote you with scorching wind and mildew.

And the caterpillar was devouring your many gardens and vineyards.

fig trees and olive trees, yet, you have

not returned to me, declares the Lord.

I sent a plague among you after the manner of Egypt.

I slew your young men by the sword, along with your captured horses,

and I made the stench of your camp rise up in your nostrils,

yet you have not returned to me, declares the Lord.

I overthrew you, as God overthrew Sodom

and Gomorrah, and you are like a firebrand snatched from

a blaze, yet you have not returned to me,

declares the Lord.

And we see in the previous passage that the

people of Israel were very busy.

They were very busy making money by oppressing the poor.

They were very busy religiously.

They made a bunch of sacrifices and offerings.

They announced that they made offerings to their false gods.

But here in these verses,

We see that God is busy too.

He is busy in holy judgment.

Now, at the beginning of verse 6, he starts out this

passage by saying, but I gave you also.

And so that connects it with the previous passage,

they gave all these things, and God,

look, you've been busy doing all that stuff, but I've been busy too.

And here is what I've been busy at.

All those judgments represent all the troubles of life.

The lack is represent, the trouble

of lack is represented by famine and drought.

The trouble of affliction is represented by blight,

and by plague, and the trouble of opposition by war,

and by earthquake, and all of these come from God,

and are a form of judgment on the people of Israel.

Yet they did not return to him.

These are all a wake up call.

For them to realize that there is a god in control

and he's not made out of metal in the shape of a cow.

The golden calves that they made

to worship, and Bethel, that can't hear the prayers

prayed to them, have no control over any of these troubles.

And I want you to see something important, that's really neat here.

We've been reading from Jerry Bridges on Wednesdays and

in regards to the sovereignty of God.

There's, uh, in verses 7 through 8, it says, furthermore,

I withheld the rain from you while there

were still 3 months until harvest.

Then I would send rain on one city,

and on another city, I would not send rain.

One part would be rained on, while the part not rained on would dry up.

So 2 or 3 cities would stagger to another

city to drink water, but would not be satisfied, yet you

have not returned to me.

So to these false worshiping, non-believing

Israelite, Sumerians.

All of this, though the reigning on one city and the not

raining on another 2 was just chance.

The city that it rained in was a lucky city.

And the cities that it didn't rain in were just unlucky cities.

They there was just unlucky

about where the rain fell.

But this is clear in this passage

that there's no such thing as luck or

coincidence or chance.

God is in control of all things.

But even though that was true, they still

decided to worship a cow.

Why would you do that?

Why would you worship this thing of metal?

You see, the cow doesn't put any pressure on you?

It doesn't say, you should live like this, that

you should be perfect as I am perfect, because it's just a cow.

It's just something that you can do to fill that

gap that you know exists and that you need to worship something.

But God will hold you to account.

He will bring judgment on you.

He is passing judgment right now.

One of my favorite Old Testament commentators.

So if you're going through the Old Testament and looking for commentaries to help you understand things.

There's a guy named Alec Mottier.

And he said this, and I love this quote.

We do ourselves an immense disservice, and we weaken

our ministry to each other as soon as we dismiss or

diminish this great doctrine.

Amos writes of catastrophes small and great,

of things as chancy as rainfall to us at least,

things as indiscriminate as the death toll in

battle, but none of these things separates us from God,

his will reigns even there.

To all of our family members, our coworkers, our nation, our world,

and each of us ourselves need to understand this great truth.

There is only one God, and

he is sovereign over all things.

And he is the only God that

will judge all men and all women.

He is just, and he is righteous,

and he is worthy of all worship from every single person.

All of the roads of religion

in this world, don't lead to this God.

They will not cut it before his throne.

There's no judgmental salvation, as

we were talking about before service.

The people of Israel, thought they

were all good because they were Israelites, right?

They were God's people.

They thought they were fine, but the whole

time that they were participating in this idol worship,

this false worship, God was trying to show them and tell them something.

that he was in control.

They were just too blinded by their

sin and their circumstance to see it.

So don't be blind to what God is trying to show

us, that he is in control.

We need to recognize his sovereign hand over

all things, and worship him for it in his holiness.

And then finally, we

take the worship of God serious in his holiness

by taking a posture of all before

a holy God.

The last 2 verses of our chapter.

Therefore, thus I will do to you, O Israel,

because I will do this to you, prepare

to meet your God, O Israel.

For behold, he who forms mountains, and creates

the wind, and declares to man what are his thoughts,

he who makes dawn into darkness, and

treads in the high places of the earth, the Lord,

God of hosts, is his name.

Get ready, Israelites.

The final judgment is coming.

The judgment that I've promised in my holiness

that the Assyrians will come and take you.

Prepare to meet your God.

Not the false God that you bow down

and offer before made out of metal, but the real

God that you should have been worshiping this whole time.

You see that the play on words here.

If you would go up to these Israelites

and say, hey, can you point to your God,

they would point to 2 golden cows.

But in reality, regardless of whether they accepted

it or not, or they understood it or not, they should have pointed to

Yahweh, Jehovah God of the world.

That is who their God really is.

Yahweh is their God, and everyone else is God,

whether they like it or not.

But here in this passage is also a

show of grace, as God does, that

justice is always tempered with grace for his people.

God could have sent all this judgment on them right

then and there, and without

any profits, telling them anything.

And he would have been completely justified and do that and

still retain his title as a perfectly

holy just God.

But he told them about the problem.

Like he sent Jonah to Nineveh, like he said, Isaiah

to the kings of Israel.

He told them of their sin.

He showed them that they needed to repent

and gave them a call to repentance.

A gospel call to true biblical

repentance is not mean, even though sometimes

it may offend the people we are calling to repentance.

It is actually a call of love to

make someone aware that there is a true God,

and that he has showed us how he

would like to be worshipped, and the way that he's provided

for us through grace.

So if you think of the state of your soul,

and I pray that is in a state of grace, that

you think about the troubles in your life, as we've

all gone through, but you could also think about the blessings

that you've gotten in your life that you didn't deserve.

The Israelites ignored all of this and

did what they wanted to do.

But all these things, the troubles and

the blessings, the justice and the mercy

are all from the hand of a sovereign God, who

has purpose and reason for everything, that

he does, and that gives us a purpose, and gives us

a reason to bend our knees before the true God

and complete awe.

Look at verse 13 again.

He, for behold, he who forms mountains and creates

the wind, and declares to man what are his thoughts?

Idols can't do that.

He who makes dawn into darkness and treads

in the high places of the earth.

The Lord God of hosts is his name.

That's Yahweh Sabo.

There is no God.

created by the imagination of men who

is alike, the living God of scripture,

the creator of all things.

Hebrews 1228 says, therefore, since we receive a

kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us show

gratitude by which we may offer to God an

acceptable service with reverence and awe.

For our God is a consuming fire.

Psalm 211 says, worship the Lord with reverence and rejoice

with trembling.

Isaiah 8.13.

It is the Lord of hosts whom you should regard as holy,

and he shall be your fear, and he shall be your

dread.

That is the God that we serve.

a weak God, a

very strong God, who should cause our knees to knock.

But a very loving and

gracious God, a God who is good.

And this brought to my mind, my

favorite author, C.S. Lewis, and one

of the 1st series of books that got me into

reading when I was a lot younger, he

wrote called The Chronicles of Narnia.

They're great, and I recommend them to everyone, no

matter your age.

In the Chronicles of Narnia, he

wrote it as a metaphor for the gospel, for

his niece and nephew.

And in the metaphor, Aslan,

the lion is the king and creator

of Narnia, and he represents Christ in the story.

And there's 4 kids in the 1st book, the line

in which the wardrobe, that are the protagonists, and they haven't

met Aslan left, although they've come to the land of Narnia.

And so they're speaking with a family of beavers.

This is a fantasy to worry, by the way.

And the beavers are telling them

about King Aslan, the lion.

And this is one of my favorite conversations in the book, so I'm going

to read it for you here.

Who is Aslan?

asked Susan.

Aslin?

said Mr. Beaver.

don't you know?

He's the king.

It is he, not you, that will save Mr. Tumnus.

Is he a man?

asked Lucy.

Aslin a man?

Said Mr. Beaver sternly.

Certainly not.

I tell you, he is the king of the wood, and the

son of the great emperor beyond the sea.

Don't you know who is the king of beasts?

Aslin is a lion?

The the lion, the great lion?

Oh, said Susan.

I thought he was a man.

Is he quite safe?

I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion, that

you will, dearie, and no mistake, said Mrs. Beaver.

If there's anyone who can appear before Aslam without their knees knocking.

They're either braver than most or else just silly.

Then he isn't safe, said Lucy.

Safe, said Mr. Beaver.

Don't you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you?

Who said anything about safe?

Of course he isn't safe, but he's good.

He's the king, I tell you.

Lewis understood the reality of

who we're dealing with with God.

He's not safe, but he is good.

And this was the problem with the Sumerian

Hebrew people.

They didn't know who God was.

They didn't know that they had to fear him.

They had no reverence or respect with

whom they had to do.

was the preaching that Amos,

the sheepherder from Sorrento

outside of Baton Rouge, was supposed to go to

these northern tribes and preach to them,

to knock them into their senses.

This is the, you don't understand.

God is going to judge you.

He's not happy with your worship of

this cow, even though it looks like the worship that he set up.

It is absolutely not.

He was to try to bring them to the understanding

of who this god was, that they

were mocking with their false worship.

And that god who they were mocking

was the god, they were going to have to face

at the end.

Prepare to meet your God, O Israel.

And this is the same sense of wonder

that all of us should come into

the presence of the holy God with.

It's amazing to me that the creator

of the universe, the one who formed the mountains, as Amos said, the

one who knows your thoughts before you think it, who turns the

dawn into darkness, is the

same God who sent his son to

live and die for us out of love and grace

and mercy.

And that grace that he sent didn't just extend to us.

It extended to the Hebrew people who,

for centuries before this and for decades after,

would continue in rebellious sin.

But he promised them.

He promised them judgment in the form of Assyria, coming to bring

them into exile, but he also promised them grace

and return as well.

Isaiah prophesying to the same people in

chapter 43, verse 5.

He says, do not fear, for I am with you.

I will bring your offspring from the east and gather you from the west.

I will say to the north, give them up and to the south.

Do not hold them back.

Bring my sons from afar, and my daughters from

the ends of the earth.

So every day when you wake up in the morning.

And when you go to bed at night.

Think of this when you have a birthday or

celebrate a holiday.

Think of this every time we come here and we sing,

even without instruments, as we pray, as we stumble

over our words, as we talk about him, that he

has made promises to us.

He made promises for judgment, because

of our sin, but he also made promises of grace,

because of his son, who took our sin for us.

And because of all these things, this

holy God, who should make our knees knock, has

given us this grace that we can come before his throne and

worship him in spirit and in truth.

Jesus Christ himself told the Samaritan woman in

John 423, but an hour is coming, and

now is, when the true worshipers will worship

the Father in spirit and truth for such people, the Father

seeks to be his worshipers, God of spirit,

and those who worship him, must worship him in spirit

and in truth.

Let's pray.

Hey, Father, we love you and thank you for your great mercy to us.

We don't deserve a bit of your grace.

We deserve the same judgment that these Israelites are received.

But Lord, you have promised grace, just like you promised them

that they could return, you've promised us that if we trust in Christ,

if we have biblical repentance from our sins.

We can turn to Christ and you will save us and bring us into

your presence for eternity.

And we praise you for that.

All of this should cause us to worship

you with fear and trembling, but also with great love and great gusto.

Lord, make that be so in our lives.

May we take that out of this building into our everyday life

for your glory and your praise, Christ's name, amen.