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.