Transcript

Well, grab your Bibles and let’s go back to Amos. Amos 8. If you’re visiting with us, we’re going straight through verse by verse, chapter by chapter, through the Old Testament book of Amos. I honestly did not know the powerful clear parallels that this 2,800 year old book would have to our present culture and the present condition of Christendom, or you might say the professing church of Jesus Christ. But powerfully it does and that’s why we love the word of God, it’s always relevant, it’s always up-to-date. It doesn’t always tell, well, it never tells your flesh what you want to hear but it tells us what we need to hear, amen? You don’t come to church to get a new thrill or new excitement, you come to get what you need so that you might be weaned off other pleasures and excitements and you might be drawn to those pleasures that last for time and eternity. God wants you to have the best. He does not want you satisfied on the chaff of this world, he wants you to feast on the infinite wonders, glories, beauties, pleasures, and enjoyments of him, the one true God. So we strap in this morning because this is a weighty text. It’s very weighty and we need some weighty things. You don’t always need to come to happy church. You need to come to holy church and find your happiness in the Holy One.

So in a very riveting and sobering matter, the prophet shares the following. Amos 8. Lord willing we will cover the whole chapter. Amos 8:1,

1 Thus the Lord GOD showed me, and behold, there was a basket of summer fruit. 2 He said, “What do you see, Amos?” And I said, “A basket of summer fruit.” Then the LORD said to me, “The end has come for My people Israel. I will spare them no longer. 3 The songs of the palace will turn to wailing in that day,” declares the Lord GOD. “Many will be the corpses; in every place they will cast them forth in silence.” 4 Hear this, you who trample the needy, to do away with the humble of the land, 5 saying, “When will the new moon be over, So that we may sell grain, And the sabbath, that we may open the wheat market, To make the bushel smaller and the shekel bigger, And to cheat with dishonest scales, 6 So as to buy the helpless for money And the needy for a pair of sandals, And that we may sell the refuse of the wheat?” 7 The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob, “Indeed, I will never forget any of their deeds. 8 Because of this will not the land quake And everyone who dwells in it mourn?

Indeed, all of it will rise up like the Nile, And it will be tossed about And subside like the Nile of Egypt. 9 It will come about in that day,” declares the Lord GOD, “That I will make the sun go down at noon And make the earth dark in broad daylight. 10 Then I will turn your festivals into mourning And all your songs into lamentation; And I will bring sackcloth on everyone’s loins And baldness on every head. And I will make it like a time of mourning for an only son, And the end of it will be like a bitter day. 11 Behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord GOD, “When I will send a famine on the land, Not a famine for bread or a thirst for water, But rather for hearing the words of the LORD. 12 People will stagger from sea to sea And from the north even to the east; They will go to and fro to seek the word of the LORD, But they will not find it. 13 In that day the beautiful virgins And the young men will faint from thirst. 14 As for those who swear by the guilt of Samaria, Who say, ‘As your god lives, O Dan,’ And, ‘As the way of Beersheba lives,’ They will fall and not rise again.”

This is the day of the divided kingdom. There’s a northern kingdom called Israel. There’s a southern kingdom called Judah. The northern kingdom has all but fallen into gross sin and even apostasy and in that context, God calls a man from the southern kingdom, the region of Tekoa, it’s a rural farming area, a man by the name of Amos, just a country farmer, and God commissions Amos to journey north up to Samaria, particularly the little region of Bethel where they had erected the Mother Church of the new false fake church of Israel, and there Amos was to cry out against this false worship and this false church they had developed and all the sins and the evil that was in the land.

Now when we come to chapter 8, we just left an interlude in Amos’s prophecies of doom and destruction against the northern kingdom. In that interlude, Amos was confronted by Amaziah. Remember, Amaziah was the false high priest of the false church that King Jeroboam had set up in the northern kingdom and Amaziah has now closed his meeting, or rather Amos has closed his meeting with Amaziah and he’s moving on now to other things. So we come to I. of the sermon I’ve entitled “Ripe for Wrath.” Ripe for wrath. As Amos gets close to his closing words, the Lord shows him yet in a vision something else. He says there in verse 1 of chapter 8, “the Lord GOD showed me, and behold, there was a basket of summer fruit. He said, ‘What do you see, Amos?’ And I said, ‘A basket of summer fruit.'” What does that mean? Well, in Israel summer fruit is the very last of the harvest season so what God is saying in this vision, “You see a basket of fruit. It means it’s over now. There is a completeness. It’s come to an end. There’s nothing else to be harvested.” And the word “end” there in verse 1 has the idea of “cutting.” It simply means that they’ve gone out, got the final and last gleanings of the fruit from the stalk or the vine, cut it off and brought it in. “The last of the fruit,” God is saying, “has been cut. The end time has come. There is no more to be done for the crop. Now just the stalks or the bare vines will be left to die or be plowed under. We’re done.” God’s point is, “It’s time.” I. It’s time. It’s all done. That time has come. God’s vineyard has done what it’s going to do. God’s vineyard, of course, is Israel.

Isaiah 5:3-5, “And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, Judge between Me and My vineyard. What more was there to do for My vineyard that I have not done in it? Why, when I expected it to produce good grapes did it produce worthless ones? So now let Me tell you what I am going to do to My vineyard: I will remove its hedge and it will be consumed; I will break down its wall and it will become trampled ground.” That’s where Amos is going. Everything has come to an end. The harvest is in, there’s nothing more to do. The whole course of God’s continued mercies to Israel, grace to Israel, the disciplines he’s brought them, the visitations he’s brought them, the warnings and the instructions of the prophets, the gift of the law and the temple, all of these are now come to an end. That’s what God is saying. You see, when someone begins to walk toward sin and unrighteousness, there’s a beginning to that and there’s a middle to that but -listen to me friend – there is an end to that. Israel has come to her end of sinning and rebellion. She has sown her wild oats and now she will reap her harvest of destruction.

Romans 2:5 I think speaks to this very process that comes to an end in judgment, “But because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself in the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God.” Some people think, “Well, what’s God doing today? Why is God waiting?” God’s not waiting for anything, God’s very active. He’s actively storing up righteous indignation and wrath against sinners. He just hasn’t unleashed it yet. One day the veil will come back and God will pour forth the active wrath he’s been storing up against sin. You see, God has ordained and ordered mankind and the universe to function well and function long only on righteousness. Did you get that? If a people, a country, civilization, mankind, even the universe, if it’s going to function well and function long, it must function in righteousness but when unrighteousness and sin abounds, then the heavenly rains the heavenly sunshine does not help the vineyard, it actually rots the vineyard.

I have three tomato vines in my backyard and they did really really well this year. I told my wife, “This is the first time I’ve ever planted anything that you can actually eat something that came off of it.” And it gave us a lot of tomatoes but, you know, right now they look awful. Just skinny, wiry vines, the green has gone and 3 or 4 or 5 rotting tiny tomatoes. Now the sunshine that once produced great tomatoes and now the rains that once watered and fertilized those great tomato plants, now only brings their destruction. That’s what God is saying. Israel has run her course. She’s sinned so long that the very reality of me, the holy God, dealing with her, now brings her into her final stages of rot, ruin and destruction. The harvest is in.

Look at verse 3 now, the first part, “‘The songs of the palace will turn to wailing in that day,’ declares the Lord GOD.” Now remember, this was a day of prosperity. This was a day of economic expansion. This was a day that they were congratulating themselves for their new worldly type of worship that everybody loved so much and God said, “Yeah, you’re singing your songs and your revelry but instantly it’s going to change because I’m bringing judgment.” Now we know historically speaking, history bears this out to perfection that the Assyrian army was the agent of God’s judgment and she marches in and in just a day or two time, devastates the land. So the image here is like a beautiful singer is singing and in mid-voice she’s struck with some illness or some horrific thing and she goes from a beautiful melody to a shriek of horror and despair. God said, “I’m bringing judgment on you that quickly. Your singing is going to be turned to howling in despair.”

So this singing in Israel was an expression of their godless lives. Is it not true when you listen to the music of a people you can tell something about their moral character? Have you listened to America’s music? Have you listened to the music in the church today? We’ve brought it into the church. Well, the professing church. I don’t think any true churches would put up with that very long. But he said, “I’m going to turn this singing from joy into wailing.” Their singing was not holy. Their singing was not God-centered. Their singing was not God-exalting and scripturally and doctrinally sound, but it was base sensual music and sensual lyrics that stirred up the emotions and the base nature of man, that glorified worldliness and glorified sin. You know, in essence when bad music takes over a professing church, it pretends to honor God but it’s actually simply a worship of the creature, not the Creator who is blessed forever.

They had put up these temples. The central most temple was likely the Bethel temple but they had temples in Dan and Beersheba and Gilgal. They had various temples set up around the land and, by the way, once again, they were not supposed to do that, they were supposed to go into the temple in Jerusalem. This was their creativity coming in. They were going to do church better than God and his word had described it to be done. And it’s interesting that when the marching blood-thirsty Assyrian army crashes in on them, probably the last place they would flee to physically speaking for refuge, were these high placed temples. They would be on higher ground. They would be something of a strong fortress. So they’re running into these places where they had all of their worldly music and festivities and called it a worship of Jehovah but it was a false worship, and instead of going in there to sing and be joyous, they’re going to run in there and there is going to be shrieks of defenselssness, there are going to be victims in there, there are going to be the wounded in there, and there is going to be a cry of despair in there. God said, “I’m changing everything quickly because the time has come.”

He says in the last part of verse 3 that there are going to be corpses everywhere. The point is, the death toll will be so great and so quick there will not be time to properly bury the dead. So all around these fake, false, idol filled temples where they had synchronized or tried to synchronize true Jehovah worship with false, worldly, carnal, Baal worship, there are going to be dead bodies. God said, “I’m going to turn your happy church into hell church. I’ve had enough of it.” This wasn’t a people who were struggling with staying repentant, these were a people who gave themselves full over to man-centered creature worship and idolatry but yet kept the camouflage, the cosmetic of orthodoxy on the outside.

Well, we see these things and we see their commitment to this wickednesses. Now let’s look at verses 4 through 6, the idolatry of abusing their fellow man in verses 4 through 6. Look at it there. This is a powerful statement because he’s actually pointing out here that they made sport, it became their hobby to run over the vulnerable. He says, “Hear this, you who trample the needy, to do away with the humble of the land, saying, ‘When will the new moon be over, So that we may sell grain, And the sabbath, that we may open the wheat market, To make the bushel smaller and the shekel bigger, And to cheat with dishonest scales, So as to buy the helpless for money And the needy for a pair of sandals, And that we may sell the refuse of the wheat?'” In verse 4 he says they want to trample their fellow man. Now, the idea of “trample” here is the idea of “panting after.” They were such a corrupt people they aggressively hunted the weak and the vulnerable like hunting down a beast to take advantage of them. Again, it was sport to them.

The last part of verse 4 he talks about to do away with the humble of the land. They kind of had a genocidal spirit where these lower class peoples of the land were viewed as being in the way and they’re a problem and so we’ll just abuse them and run over them and, in one sense, exterminate them from the land. I find it interesting that if you have studied the abortion industry in America, you’ll find the founders of the abortion movement, some of them at least, were nothing less than involved in genocide. They felt like the undesirable elements of the culture can be reduced and eliminated if we bring abortion in and abort their children. They’re in the way. They’re the problem and that’s sort of what’s being viewed here. It’s the sin of making an idol out of actually abusing others – listen to this – abusing other fellow beings who are made in the image of God. That’s one of the cornerstone issues here. Brothers and sisters, animals are animals, plants are plants, but people are different. People are made in the image of God so God takes it very seriously when there is an actual premeditated, even industry, of abusing those who are their fellow men.

In verse 5, he continues on. In other words, when they’d go to church, they would go to observe the new moon festival but while they’re there, their hearts aren’t on worshiping and honoring God, their hearts are not centered on finding pleasures in God, their heart is simply, “When is this service going to be over so I can go out and make more money?”

Then he says, “And the sabbath, that we may open the wheat market.” When is this church service going to be over? We’ve got to get out there and take advantage of more people, make our bank accounts bigger.

Then he says, “To make the bushel smaller and the shekel bigger.” This is verse 5, last part. “And to cheat with dishonest scales.” So they didn’t come to church to love God. They were not like the Psalmist in Psalm 42:2 that says, “My soul thirsts for God. My soul thirst for the living God. When shall I come and appear before him?” That wasn’t their heart. Their heart was, “Let’s jump through the hoops, let’s go through the motions. The only reason I come here is because we’ve brought the Baal idols in anyway and that makes it a little more fun or I wouldn’t even come to church at all.”

Dear sir, can I ask you something? Do you go to church to have fun? You just walked into the wrong church. Now, we have some fun, amen? We enjoy things together but that’s not why we’re here, though. That’s not the foundation stone of what this church is built on or any true church is build on.

But that’s where they were, in such a crooked industry they had. The businessmen when he talks about their weighing out a bushel but it wasn’t a bushel and they had dishonest scales, they would actually fix the scales, manipulate the scales so when they sold a bushel it was only about ¾ of a bushel but they got paid for a full bushel. And then the scales for measuring the silver, they would just put the silver pieces until it weighed a certain amount to pay for the bushel and they would manipulate it so they would pay more than a bushel price. So they got less of a bushel and they got more money than you would normally pay for a bushel. They cheated on both sides and what he’s saying is, “This is commonplace in your culture.”

Can I challenge our businessmen here today? Brothers, listen to me, sisters, listen to me: first of all in balance, the poor and the needy here are not those with a car, a cellphone and two color tvs. That’s what we call the poor today. That’s not the poor. And there are those whom you hire to work for you who are undisciplined and ungrateful and won’t put in a full day’s work. The Bible speaks to that too, amen? You shouldn’t prop them up. But on the other side of that, brothers, if you love Christ, make sure you’re careful in your business to be square and be righteous and when a guy does a good job, bless him. Be good to him as much as you can.

Now Israel, again, they didn’t just cross a line or two, they’re traveling down the highway of this wickedness and God says, “I’ve had enough of it.” In verse 6 he says, “You, in effect, buy the helpless,” and what he means by that is, “You rob them. You abuse them. You use the judicial system against them until the weak and the poor are in such a destitute state they have to sell themselves to you as a slave just to pay their bills.” What a wicked system that they had engaged in against their fellow human beings all made in the image of God.

Then he said, “And that we may sell the refuse of the wheat.” That means wheat without any meal in it, hollow grains that had no substance in them. They would mix this chaff in with the good wheat and sell it all like it was good wheat and God said, “I’m going to remember every bit of this and I’m coming against you in judgment.”

What a warped and unsound culture we live in. Can I just go here a little bit? We’ve got hurricanes in Texas and hurricanes in Florida. For me, I heard too much about the pets that are in danger. I care about the pets, I do care about them, but as long as there’s one human being still in jeopardy, the dog can drown. Period. Dogs are dogs. Animals are animals. People are made in the image of God. I didn’t say abuse animals. Don’t go out here and misquote me. I’m just saying when you’ve got to make a choice.

I remember years ago, there was a whale stuck in a frozen harbor. The Russians, the Americans, they spent millions of dollars to go in there and keep drilling holes so that whale could come up and breathe and go back down. I can fix that. No cost. Call the Eskimos. They’ll harpoon him, drag him up on the shore, they’ll eat and use every bit of him. It’s done. When did we start viewing the animal kingdom like it has the dignity of humankind?

But that’s the point here, you see, they had lost the respect and the love and the dignity of their fellow man. It was a sport for them. If we can take advantage of them and get by with it, high-five each other. “Didn’t we pull off a good one?” You should be known, businessman, as the guy who at the end of it tried to be as generous as you could to your employees. If they’re faithful, if they’re hard-working, if they’re honest. If they’re not, they need to be disciplined or fired, amen? But those that are should be helped the best we can.

The second. Are we on number 3 now? I had my outline wrong in my notes but I don’t have the truth wrong, I don’t think. Just the outline. III. The land quakes under the weight of the judgment. The land quakes under the weight of judgment. Verses 7 through 9, he says here, “The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob, ‘Indeed, I will never forget any of their deeds.'” Now when he says, “I’m swearing by the pride of Jacob,” he means, “I’m swearing by myself,” because he is the pride of Jacob. Jacob is personified, is a personification. He represented the country. It was God who formed Israel. It was God who sustained Israel. It was God who loved her and was faithful to her. It was God who gave her this land. Jehovah is the pride of Jacob and he’s the one true God, not the Baal idols they brought into their new-fangled, culturally relevant, Jehovah temples, not those Baal idols but Jehovah God is the one they owed all honor and glory and loyalty to. You know, God would cease to be God if he did not punish them for this hardened evil that’s been cultivated in their land. Now remember, this has been going on since Jeroboam I, about 150 years ago. He’s the one that set up these idol temples and called it Jehovah worship and they had been frolicking in it ever since but, boy, what an accountability that calls us into. Presidents, politicians, pastors, bear a weighty responsibility for the condition of the people under them.

He goes on in verse 8, “Because of this will not the land quake And everyone who dwells in it mourn? Indeed, all of it will rise up like the Nile, And it will be tossed about And subside like the Nile of Egypt.” So he talks about the land convulsing. He talks about the land heaving and falling. The Nile River does that, it has a high season and a real low season. He says the weight of this, the weight of your sin and the weight of your wickedness, the brazen openness of idolatry and even mixing my holy name with your sensuous idolatry, the weight of that and then me, the Triune Holy God, coming against that with the fullness of just wrath. The land can’t hold up under it. The weightiness of it.

So he says, “Does not the land,” he doesn’t mean here literally. There is a coming day of final judgment that’s yet in the future when there is going to be cataclysmic things in the natural earth itself and even in the universe, but here it’s figurative language. I think the idea is what would happen to planet earth if the natural laws God sets up and that God sustains are removed? What happens if just the force of gravity is removed? Total, immediate, cataclysmic extinction. By the way, they’re not laws of science, that’s the power of a person named Jesus Christ. The Bible says he holds everything together by the word of his power. And that’s what’s going to happen on the final day of coming wrath, God will pull back the sustaining life force that only God holds and everything will go into utter abyss and darkness and destruction. So here we get a little forecasting, a little prophecy of that end time judgment as he says, “Does not the earth just quake under the weight of God coming against your sin?”

Look at verse 9, “‘It will come about in that day,’ declares the Lord GOD, ‘That I will make the sun go down at noon And make the earth dark in broad daylight.'” Not literally. Not here. Later some of that is going to happen but not here. They had been glorying in their clever worship, they had been glorying in the national growth of the country, they had been glorying in an economic boom, it was a day of dawning, it was a day of brightness to them, but God says, “Suddenly I’m going to bring it to darkness.” Suddenly the darkness of God’s wrath will come upon them. The description the prophet gives is as if the very molecules of the atmosphere themselves will go into dark mourning and despair under the weight of God’s wrath.

This is how Israel is going to feel when the wrath of God comes in full upon them. In reality, this day being prophesied here by Amos, when the Assyrian army crashes upon them and destroys them, it might have been a bright, brilliant, sunshiney day but to their hearts and their souls it will be black darkness. Some of you, some of you sitting here, you’ve played games with God a little too long. Some of you sitting here this morning, you’re not struggling, you’re not wrestling, you’re given over to yourself, your pride and your sin. I’m going to tell you there is a day of blackness coming if he’s holy and he’s God. You’d better humble yourself now and become a repenter; somebody who’s in the fight against his flesh; somebody that’s in the fight against the pleasures of the world that don’t last; somebody that’s in a fight against the lust and the sins we all have in our hearts and come into the church service with a humble repentant spirit saying, “O God, show me! God, teach me! God, help me!” God will always have grace and patience with that kind of a man even though he struggles but you bow your neck and be like these guys and say, “I just can’t wait until it gets over so I can go out.” Do you know why they hated the church service? Because for a little while they couldn’t be their own master. They wanted to get out from under this God thing and get out there in the world where they were the boss again. Every one of you men that own things, run things, have businesses, have your corporation, praise God for you. I thank God, that’s good, but you must also have one you bow before and so must this preacher because if I come in here with authority and it’s not authority under God, I have no authority at all.

So suddenly it’s going to all go black for Israel, God says. Now a word on the thoroughness of the devastation. The thoroughness of the devastation. Verse 10, “I will turn your festivals into mourning And all your songs into lamentation; And I will bring sackcloth on everyone’s loins.” Now sackcloth was a cloth made out of hair. It had always been associated with mourning and lowliness.

“And baldness on every head.” The baldness of the head, it meant a lot more in that day than it does in this day because hair, and particularly for men it was the beard, hair on a man’s beard in this day was his glory and hair on a woman’s head on this day was her glory. What he’s saying is, “All your glory is gone.” Baldness. It’s all gone.

And the last phrase of verse 10, “And I will make it like a time of mourning for an only son.” In the human economy, there is not a greater grief than the death of a child and in ancient Israel if you had one child and he was a male son, a male child and he died, the grief was doubled because you had no one to carry on your name among God’s chosen people, Israel.

Then he says, “And the end of it will be like a bitter day.” Here’s what he’s saying: there’s no letting up. You’ll think, “Well, it started, it’s awful, it’s beyond description but it’s going to get better.” And God says, “No, it’s not going to get better.” The thread is all the way through, it’s going to be a nightmare. That’s a prophetic picture of hell. Hell is a place where God judges sinners, not just their sins but sins and sinners, and it has no end and your last day in hell, there will be no last day but figuratively speaking, your last day in hell will have all the horrors of the first day. The thoroughness of judgment.

V. To me this is so devastating: the removal of the word. God said, “I’m going to not let you have my precious word anymore. You didn’t want true preachers, you wanted false preachers. You wanted happy church. You wanted to mix my name with Baal worship. You didn’t want faithful preaching.”

Verse 11, “‘Behold, days are coming,’ declares the Lord GOD, ‘When I will send a famine on the land, Not a famine for bread or a thirst for water, But rather for hearing the words of the LORD.'” So here apostate Israel when the crush of the Assyrian army comes in in judgment, even they are going to finally say, “O God! O God! O God, is there a word for us, a word of hope? Is there any word from God?” Isn’t it interesting that when we get in distress, I mean you remember the phrase, “There are no atheists in foxholes”? Everybody seems to cry out to God. Did you notice during these past two hurricanes? I didn’t hear any of the secular progressives complaining that people were talking about praying for people. In every other setting, they run through a wall in despair that somebody prayed in the public square.

That’s what’s happening to Israel here. In these days of enduring God’s wrath, there will not be a word from God. They will long for one but God will not speak. He will be completely silent and there will be no one to lighten their burden. Again, as I believe all the Bible is contemporary, this is a strong message for us in America today. I believe God is in the process of removing the word from our country. You look at the pulpits in this land and you see almost every kind of… Elvis in the pulpit. Ridiculous, blasphemous gimmicks, fads and nonsense. Anything and everything but a dependency on the preaching of the word.

Two aspects to that. Sometimes there seems to be a preaching of the word but the church has brought in so much worldliness, it’s almost like the preaching of the word is set aside as secondary. “Oh, we do that to make sure we’re okay, but really these are the things we love, these other events.” Nothing wrong with other events as long as they never in any way diminish the church’s love, loyalty and the dependence on the preaching of the word of God. But we’re beyond that today. No longer, we’ve passed the days when we’re letting other stuff crowd out the preaching of the word, now we’ve just got out-and-out false preaching in pulpits. Joel Osteen is the big poster child for false preaching today. He is a false prophet. He doesn’t preach the word. He doesn’t preach a gospel. He’s a false prophet. He’s not even preaching good pop psychology even though what he does is closer to that than anything else. I believe a balance of biblical teaching will bring you to the conclusion that a people generally get the kind of preacher they deserve.

Can I say something to you, Grace Life Church? Don’t take for granted that you’ve had a strong pulpit. Don’t think it’s just going to always be this way. Now I don’t have to be here. I’m expendable. I could be gone tomorrow but it’s not easy in this day to find a faithful pulpit because God can take it away if you don’t deserve to have it. Remember when Paul was preaching to the Jews and they would not receive it and Paul said, “God is shutting you out and now I’m going to the Gentiles”? God said, “They don’t deserve the word anymore. They had their shot, not take the Gospel to the non-Jews, the Gentiles.”

God removing the word from the land. They get no word from God any longer. Verse 12, in this condition, “People will stagger from sea to sea And from the north even to the east; They will go to and fro to seek the word of the LORD, But they will not find it.”

Then finally in verse 13, “In that day the beautiful virgins And the young men will faint from thirst.” He’s saying the destruction and devastation of your people will be so great that the vigorous young men and women, young men and women that are the hope of the community and of the nation, young men and women that are so full of hope and buoyancy, even they will be cast down to utter despair.

VI. Verse 14, the cornerstone sin from which all their guilt flowed. He returns back to this issue again, verse 14, “As for those who swear by the guilt of Samaria.” What does he mean by the guilt of Samaria? Well, Samaria is the chief city in the region, in the area around Samaria is the Bethel temple they had erected. It was a fake church. It was a counterfeit church. They had brought in the sensuous idol worship of Baal calves and mixed it with Jehovah worship but when you boil all of that down, though, here’s what you get to: the emphasis shouldn’t be for us on these golden calves brought in, as hard as that thought is in a temple dedicated to Jehovah God, it’s the fact that they were about worshiping themselves and not God, because when they veered from what the word taught worship was to be to what they liked and worshiped, then they were worshiping themselves. All idolatry is self-worship.

Do you know there are people who literally go to church today because their deer hunting buddies go to that church? That’s the same stuff. That’s wonderful if your deer hunting buddies go to your church but that’s not why you go to that church. Many of the guys that go to the church, my ball team, all of us root for the same ball team, that’s okay but that’s not why you go to church. You may have to go to church and everybody there is a weird nerd to you but they love God and they love the book and they love Christ and they’ve lashed themselves to being biblical in doctrine and in methodology and you say, “Even sometimes it bothers me but that’s where we’re going.” We need some men to be men and anchor themselves to the truth of the word of God because at the end of all of this, this is worshiping the creature rather than the Creator. Any time you veer from him, you worship self and that’s where they are and that’s the cornerstone guilt or sin from which all their other sin and guilt flowed.

He mentions, what? Dan. Dan was another place they had one of these fake, false, counterfeit worship centers set up. Then, “As the way of Beersheba lives,” he says in verse 14. That was sort of their motto. That was sort of their battle cry. “Oh, look what we’ve done! We’re so proud of our new kind of church!” Well, yippe-yi-yo-ki-yaya. What does God think about it? “Well, we’ve been doing this for decades. Look at the numbers. Look at the excitement. Look at how it’s working.” God said, “That’s your battle cry, everybody is excited about it, everybody loves it?” Look at the last phrase of verse 14, “They will fall and not rise again.”

You know, we’ve been through some things here at Grace Life Church where I’m convinced God crushed everything that didn’t look like him. Everything we erected, and I did some of it, and I’ve had to repent of some of it. Everything we did, it’s as if God crushed it and said, “The only thing I’m leaving around here is stuff that looks like me.” Do you know what I say? Hallelujah and praise God! Thank you, Jesus! Because fads go and gimmicks come and go and clever stuff comes and goes and contemporary comes and goes but the faithful preaching of this book and building a church on the faithful preaching of this book will last until Jesus comes again and that’s where we have to lash ourselves and stand there.

God said, “Because everything else you do, I’m going to bring it to an utter end.” Here’s why that’s so devastatingly important. Listen to me this morning. Don’t go to sleep on me yet. Listen to why this is so important: all this other wickedness in their life, the sexual immorality and promiscuity, the vile ungodly justice system that allowed them to trample on the poor and the truly vulnerable and treat them in inhumane ways, all of those sins – listen – could be dealt with if when they went to church they heard the word. Are you hearing me? That gets it all right. You don’t know how to do children’s ministry if you don’t know what this book says about moms and dads in children’s work. You don’t know how your music should be if you don’t stay in that book. If you lose that, everything else goes.

Now, as I was meditating on this chapter this week, that thought of thoroughness kept coming up in my mind. Thoroughness. It’s like God through Amos the prophet used every descriptive word and metaphor to bear upon Israel how completely thorough his judgment is going to be. You know, God doesn’t do anything halfway and when he comes in wrath, it’s going to be all the way defined by the dictates of his own holy character.

Then I had this thought. Are you listening? Say Amen if you’re listening. He’s also completely thorough about saving sinners. Woo! He doesn’t leave one stone unturned in saving his children. He doesn’t leave anything to question or shadow of doubt. When he said, “I’m going to save my children, they’re all wicked, they’re all worldly, they all deserve to be crushed in hell but in my great goodness, a goodness mankind can’t understand, in my love, a love mankind cannot comprehend, I’m going to save my children. I’m not sending a prophet to do it. I’m not even sending a holy angel to do it. I’m sending my Son, Jesus Christ.” There used to be a song that was sung that says, “Jesus never fails,” and I want to tell you, every single one of God’s children Jesus came to save, he completed it. “And when before the throne,” the song says, “When before the throne/ I stand in him complete/ Jesus died my soul to save/ And my lips shall still repeat.” Jesus paid it all. Not most of it. Not part of it. “Jesus paid it all/ All to him I owe/ Sin had left a crimson stain/ He’d washed white as snow.”

Jesus died on the cross to pay my redemption price. He was buried in the grave and there he buried death, hell and the grave. He rose to illustrate the fullness and completeness of my justification. He ascended back into heaven and he is seated at the right hand of God the Father where he will faithfully intercede for me until I’m home and glorified with him in heaven. There is a devastating thoroughness to God’s wrath against sin but an abounding and glorious thoroughness to his purpose to save his children from sin.

Are you his? Do you come to church thinking about the next thing you need to do if you can get out of here? Or do you come to church saying, “O God, help me not to think that way. Help me to find my pleasures in you.” If you’ve got a struggle in there that wants to find more pleasures in God and wants to love him and treasure him more even though you don’t like you ought to, then you’re in pretty good shape. But if you’ve gone weeks and months and it’s just cold and it’s just going through the motions and something in you doesn’t say, “O Christ, how I need you and how I want to love you more,” if there’s not some of that in there, you’re not God’s child. Make sure. Make sure you’re not one destined for the thoroughness of wrath, make sure you’re one destined for the irrevocable completed thoroughness of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone.

I believe America is like Israel. My, the light this country has sinned against, the light we’ve sinned against. I believe we’re ripe for wrath. Who knows, North Korea might be the instrument that brings a devastating judgment on this country. Who knows? But those who are righteous in those countries are always taken care of in God’s grace. I can’t tell you how he’s going to do it, but he takes care of his remnant. Make sure you’re one of those.