Transcript

Grab your Bibles and go to Amos 9 and we will conclude our preaching through the book of Amos this morning. If you are just dropping in on us, we have gone through this book for several months now and Amos was a farmer, a country boy, I guess you could say, from the rural region of Tekoa, a region of the southern kingdom, Judah, that was not good for much of anything but maybe grazing some livestock. And there God called this simple but godly man to go and preach his word primarily in the northern kingdom, and primarily to the area around Bethel where Amos did what God told him to do and proclaimed boldly and without apology the eminent and serious retribution and judgment of God against Israel for her sin.

Now we come to the very last section. Amos 9:11-15. Let’s read that together. Amos 9, beginning in verse 11.

11 “In that day I will raise up the fallen booth of David, And wall up its breaches; I will also raise up its ruins And rebuild it as in the days of old; 12 That they may possess the remnant of Edom And all the nations who are called by My name,” Declares the LORD who does this. 13 “Behold, days are coming,” declares the LORD, “When the plowman will overtake the reaper And the treader of grapes him who sows seed; When the mountains will drip sweet wine And all the hills will be dissolved. 14 Also I will restore the captivity of My people Israel, And they will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them; They will also plant vineyards and drink their wine, And make gardens and eat their fruit. 15 I will also plant them on their land, And they will not again be rooted out from their land Which I have given them,” Says the LORD your God.

I’ve entitled this exposition “The Final Message: A New Day of Promise for God’s Children.” What a difference in tone, what a difference in spirit and in emphasis we find in this last installment as Amos gives us this written down from his overall preaching. And what a deep joy it must have given Amos to be able to end his preaching with this sure word of grace and restoration and hope. Brothers and sisters, God’s last word is never judgment. God’s last word is always a word of grace, a word of revival, a word of renewal and restoration, a word of hope.

Let’s outline it this way. I. Notice the promise of a great and glorious new day. A promise of a great and glorious new day, and one thing I want to emphasize as we get started is: it’s God’s will that Israel has a great and glorious new day ahead for her, and it is God’s power that will procure therein. His wisdom ordained it, his will is committed to it, and his power will see that it is done.

He says in verse 11, “In that day.” You know, Satan is the great counterfeiter. As a matter of fact, Jonathan Edwards, the great revivalist and preacher of very very early America even before we were a country and only in colonies, Jonathan Edwards said Satan can counterfeit every part of the work of grace in a man’s life. He can counterfeit repentance. He can counterfeit conviction. He can counterfeit faith. He can counterfeit the new birth. He can counterfeit. Satan is the great counterfeiter and so it is with this new day God has promised for his children. Satan has always been throwing out his counterfeits but in this new day, this is the new day when the Lord will personally come to rule and reign in the earth when truth and righteousness and love and joy will fill the earth.

But boy, haven’t there been counterfeits. Over and over again we see these counterfeits. Some for example, thought that that day, this new day, would come when Barack Obama th was elected the 44 President of the United States. I’ll never forget Barbara Walters after President Obama had been in office a while said, “We thought he was the Messiah,” and she wasn’t making a joke. She thought he was really the answer to all of our problems. Some thought that day had come when a true outsider, one outside of the political th establishment, Donald Trump, was elected the 45 President of the United States. While we may appreciate his positions, he is no savior. A savior has to be righteous. This man is not righteous.

This cycle of deep disappointment has just been playing over and over again since the fall of man. Some people thought that that day had come when the Communists embraced or took over Russia in the October Revolution of October 1917 under the leadership of Stalin and Lenin. Some thought that day had come when socialism took over in Venezuela under the leadership of Hugo Chavez. And today in Venezuela, I just read an article where professional women, women some with Masters degrees, have given their lives over to prostitution to feed their babies. All these promises of a great new day but none of these proved to be that day, nor will they prove to be that day, that day of global righteousness and global peace, because that new day will not come until the Lord Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, comes and establishes not a reformed version of capitalism, not a reformed version of socialism or communism, but will establish a holy monarchy in the earth. He will be an absolute dictator but he will be an absolute dictator in righteousness, in truth and in justice.

As a matter of fact, Amos goes on to say there is that day coming and he says, “I will raise up the fallen booth of David.” Now David comes out here. Well, David was the foremost king in Israel and David was the king God used the most to be a foreshadowing of the coming reign of Christ so that’s why David is mentioned. David was a great king. For example, David overcame the division of Israel. He brought Israel from twos separate kingdoms into one. Under his leadership, he prevailed over the Philistines and other Gentile powers. He brought about this united Israel for 33 years. David recaptured Jerusalem that had been in Canaanite control for so many years. He brought in the ark of the covenant and had it reestablished in Mount Zion and he centered worship there. He prepared for the building of the temple which was carried out by his son, Solomon. And King David treated his people well. He possessed a compassion and a love for his people. He wasn’t obsessed with these selfish games of previous kings where they imposed harsh taxes and confiscated the people’s possessions and forced them to fight against their will. David was a king for the people and so Israel always venerated him and honored him and it has been long since those glory days, but now the prophet says, “I’m going to return glory days, much like the days of King David.”

Well, there is the promise of a great and glorious day. Secondly, note the purposes and power of God comes through weakness. The purposes and power of God comes through weakness. Notice it there, the first line again in verse 11, “In that day I will raise up,” not just the kingdom of David, not just a country like David’s, but “the fallen booth of David.” The fallen booth of David. It’s an interesting choice of words. The word “booth” here has the idea of a temporary shelter. We might even call it a lean-to or a shack, or it could refer to just a tent. We know booths were utilized when the Jews were in their exodus from Egypt and they had no time to build a house so they just had little lean-to’s and little tents that they stayed in, these booths, and God gave them an annual feast of booths to remember that time. But one thing that was unique when you go back to the booths that Israel lived in when they were leaving Egypt, they didn’t have anything but this little temporary shelter but God was in it. I mean, these things were nothing compared to the mighty Egyptian palaces that these Jews had left that they served in, but God was with them.

We need to remind ourselves that this picture of a booth is a type of Christ. Christ came in a humble way. He was born of a virgin and laid in a feed trough in a no-place town called Bethlehem. He was born into a family that was of no esteem or no hierarchy or no special spiritual or ecclesiastical heritage. Just a carpenter’s son, they would call him. Very humble, just like a booth, nothing special about him. Jesus died in shame and in shambles. In the eyes of the world, he was not much but he was God. In weak things, God forms his purposes and his power.

And even David’s kingdom isn’t David’s kingdom. He says here like a “fallen booth.” David lusted after Bathsheba and took her as his own. David then to cover his sin kills her husband, Uriah, and then his kingdom is diminished and sin and bloodshed mark his latter days. But yet in the fallenness and in the weakness of David’s lineage, God yet promised the Messiah would come. David himself failing, David himself weak like a booth, but the true and strong unfading house was yet to be built and it would be built through the line of David. David didn’t last. His kingdom morally and spiritually fell apart. Israel, the house of David, if you will, became a wreck as we know it. As Amos is preaching to them, they can’t even get along. They split into a northern kingdom, Israel, and a southern kingdom, Judah, but God has yet ordained that in this great great failure and weakness, he will perform a strong and mighty thing. In the fallen booth of David, a great champion will come forth.

He continues in verse 11, he says, I will “wall up its breaches; I will also raise up its ruins And rebuild it as in the days of old.” I think it’s speaking of the fact that a day is coming when Israel, in particular, will once again be united as one and out of the ruins will come a great kingdom, and the best thing they knew that was great was looking back on David’s kingdom so he uses the figure of David.

We need to remind ourselves that God’s way often looks so weak. God’s way often looks so futile. It doesn’t look effective. As we lash ourselves to biblical means in doing God’s work, i.e. primarily and particularly centered in the preaching of the word, the preaching of the Gospel, that seems so weak in a day when man has so advanced with all the multimedia and technology and the internet and all that, but God has ordained to reveal his purposes and manifest his power in things the world would call weak, out of date, not effective.

III. Particulars of this great and glorious day. Can I just say ahead of time here that this gets challenging. Scholars whom we all love and respect are all over the place on Old Testament prophecy and let me just say upfront: no matter where you land in your eschatology, that is your view of end time events, we are going to be committed and bound to love each other and work with each other even though we may disagree on how everything unfolds. The only thing I can’t tolerate is a rigid dogmatic view that, “I’ve got my chart and everything happens according to this chart or we’ll change the Bible.” I don’t care if you are an amillennialist, or a pre-millennialist, a dispensationalist, or whatever you are, you ought to have the spirit that says there are a lot of difficult and challenging prophecies and it is hard to pin down this one exactly means this, this one exactly means that. But we can get some general truths that are glorious.

So if you will listen carefully, I’m going to give you the exact, proper and right interpretation this morning, all right? No, I’m not. I’m going to give you what I feel is the best way. By the way, I have changed through the years. You know, Brother Matt as got a position now but talk to him when he’s 57. He’ll say, “Doggone, I had it figured out until I kept studying the Bible. I just knew So-and-so’s chart was right and then I kept studying the Bible.” Now there are some things we are dogmatic, no, there are some things we are bull-dogmatic about, amen? There are other things the Christian family has to learn to say, “Hey, we can disagree on some of this and it is still all good.” But let’s don’t miss the glory in some idolatry of defending our system. Can I say that again? Let’s don’t miss the glory of an idolatry of defending our system of how the end times are supposed to unfold.

First of all, this great and glorious day that God has promised includes all peoples. It includes all peoples. A phenomenal thing happens in verse 12 and, once again, you’ve got to go back into an ancient Jewish mindset to realize how powerful this next statement was, “That they may possess the remnant of Edom.” These are Gentiles. These are non- Jews, at least in the proper sense, related to Israel but still considered outside of the covenant. Jacob’s brother, Esau, is the head of the Edomites. Then the rest of verse 12, “And all the nations,” or you could translate that, “Gentiles who are called by My name.” Power stuff or a Jew to hear that. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, time out, God. We are the people called by your name. You know, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, us, we are the covenant people of God.” And God as he closes his message through Amos says, “Yes, and I’ve got a lot of people from all kinds of nationalities and backgrounds and demographics and people groups that are all called by my name outside the family of Israel.”

So this universal aspect of this new kingdom, the point is being made that God is restoring his kingdom through Israel that it might extend to the ends of the earth. In Acts 15 as Jews are seeing Gentiles come to faith in Jesus Christ and a lot of the orthodox Jews were getting concerned, “Wait a minute, we’ve accepted Jesus as the Messiah, he is the only way of salvation, but you mean non-Jews are getting saved too?” So they had a meeting at the church, the mother church in Jerusalem to try to figure this out. Acts 15:14 and 15, “Simeon has related how God first concerned Himself about taking from among the Gentiles a people for His name. With this the words of the Prophets agree, just as it is written.” Isaiah prophesied of this in Isaiah 11:10, “Then in that day The nations will resort to the root of Jesse, Who will stand as a signal for the peoples; And His resting place will be glorious.” So here we have other aspects or other places where the truth of God’s salvation extending beyond the Jews is brought out.

He uses that phrase in verse 12, “all the nations,” or Gentiles, “who are called by My name.” Literally you could say all who belong to me, all whom I claim as my own. Let’s back up just a second. There is not even the harshest Arminian, you know what an Arminian is, he’s the one who believes that God does his part and we do our part but we have to do our works and our part or we won’t get saved. We don’t hold to that but some do. But even the harshest Arminian would say that Israel is God’s elect. God elected Israel. He didn’t elect the Philistines. He didn’t elect the Canaanites. He didn’t elect the Egyptians. He didn’t elect the Babylonians. Whoever it may be, God elected Israel. They will tell you that. God’s choice. God’s elect. But here God says, “I have chosen some not only out of Israel but out of all the nations of the world by My name.” Name means the character of God. That means his capacity through his Son Jesus Christ to accomplish what’s needed for all of his to be saved and make it to heaven for all eternity. So in the purposes of electing grace, God has purposed a people called by his own name from all peoples, tongues, tribes and nations.

Then in verse 12 he says, “Declares the LORD who does this.” So it’s almost as if Amos is understanding that perhaps even the godly remnant that Amos fellowshipped with would struggle with this truth a little bit and Amos says here, “Well, God is going to do this. He is God, you understand. He is the one who can do this.” These are the kind of things a sovereign God can do. These are the kind of things a sovereign God does do. He is God Almighty. He desires to glorify himself through his sovereign will and his sovereign purposes.

I can’t get away from Ephesians 1. We are in Ephesians and I keep going back to it on Sunday night, but let’s look at Ephesians 1 again and notice his will to do it this way. His will to perform his works this way. Ephesians 1:4 and 5, “just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will.” God, why did you choose us before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless? Why did you predestine us to adoption? “It’s my will to do so,” he says. That’s basically what Amos is saying here at the end of verse 12, “Declares the LORD who does this,” it’s because it’s God who does it this way. Ephesians 1:9, “He made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His kind intention.” It’s his intention to do this. Ephesians 1:11, “we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to His purpose who works all things after the counsel of His will.” That’s all that matters and that’s what Amos is saying here, he does what he wills to do and that includes the saving of precious souls from all peoples, tongues, tribes and nations. All of this is under his glory and in our day and time, just a note of application here, he has commissioned us now – listen – he has commissioned us as Grace Life Church of the Shoals or every true local church to be on mission with him as he performs this task, to bring for himself those whom he has called according to his name out of every people, tongue, tribe and nation.

Now we go down to the end of verse 13 and he has this phrase, “‘Behold, days are coming,’ declares the LORD.” Then we have what is obviously figurative language, figures that point to another truth. He says, “When the plowman will overtake the reaper And the treader of grapes him who sows seed; When the mountains will drip sweet wine period” that’s figurative, is it not? “And all the hills will be dissolved.” So this reminds us, by the way, that when he says, “Behold, days are coming,” that God is planning, God is working towards something. God is not passively idle. God is not sitting on the sidelines right now in history just saying, “Well, I’m just waiting and I’m going to get involved later.” No, God is very very active right now. Preliminary work is going on hastening to this final day. God is working. The day is set for his return and the mechanisms to prepare for that day are whirring right along. Everything is working right now and one of the things that is working and very busy is God is storing up wrath against sinners who will not repent. Romans 2:5, “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.” So right now there is this building and storing up. Things are happening that God is doing and all events of all times and all workings of all times, are to accomplish this final number of the elect that God has ordained to be his from all the nations of the earth. Listen, every tiny event of the universe is working to fulfill these two divinely ordained goals: building up wrath for those who will not repent and trust Christ, and building up eternal redemption to be rendered and given to those who do trust Christ and are his forever. Everything is building to those two conclusions.

So first of all, we see that all peoples, even the Gentiles, are those who need to come to faith in Jesus Christ. Now, I don’t know how election works exactly, I don’t know how predestination works exactly. I know our job is to preach the Gospel to every single person and encourage every single person, beg every single person, challenge every single person, command every single person, to repent and believe on Christ, and he has ordained that some would be saved out of all peoples.

So it includes all peoples. A second subpoint here on these particulars: it’s also being fulfilled in the church era, in the era you and I now live, the church age or the church era. That’s B in the outline. In verses 11 and 12, we see this glorious declaration that things are going to change. A day is coming when no longer are you going to be torn down and judged. No longer is my retribution going to be against you. That curse has been reversed and now you are being raised back up. As a matter of fact, he says there, let’s see, in chapter 8 in verses 8 through 11, he talks about this curse that is coming on them, this quaking in the earth, how it is a time of mourning and a bitter day. He says in verse 11 of chapter 8, “‘these days are coming,’ declares the Lord God, ‘When there is going to be a famine in the land, a famine of the word.'” Then he goes on and talks about even the young and the healthy will fall and faint from the oppression. He said all of that is going to stop. It’s going to be reversed and the curse is going to be lifted and blessed days are coming.

Well, when are those blessed days? Well, notice how he words it here in verse 13, “the plowman will overtake the reaper And the treader of grapes him who sows seed.” I think he’s talking about there is a day is coming when in God’s grace there is going to be a continuing cycle of harvest of precious souls as his elect hear the Gospel, savingly believe, and come together to form local New Testament churches, and then they continue to work together to send out more preachers who will still win more precious souls, establish still more local churches, and the cycle continues. The plower and the seed sower just kind of continue on and on. The plowman will not get to stop. He will keep finding more receptive fruit. And the reaper will not get to stop because the crop continues to produce fruit. They can’t stop.

Isn’t that the way it is in the church age? We don’t say, “Okay, these five years we are sowing seed, and the next five years we are going to have a harvest of souls.” No. We are sowing this morning and they are baptizing in Vienna, Austria this morning. We have had baptisms just recently. We sow seed and we harvest and it all keeps going on. They just kind of overlap over one another, do they not? I think this was a picture of the church age, for sure. Those who tread the grapes will have a steady flow of ripe grapes and they will keep treading until the seed time comes again. They will say, “Phew, we didn’t get to stop. We just keep on going.” That’s this day of grace we are living in. It’s an unending harvest. We don’t stop until we drop. We don’t get to the point and say, “Woo, I’m 57. I’m 57. I can stop now.” No, no, no, sowing keeps going on, the harvest keeps going on until Jesus comes back. What a picture we see of that here.

I’ve asked God and one of the things I have been praying recently is, “God, I don’t know what you’re going to do with me but I pray you’ll just let me be effective for you in my old age.” I may change my responsibilities or you may change my responsibilities, but I still want to be effective for God because this continuing of sowing and reaping just doesn’t stop during this age. Remember Jesus said in John 4:35, “Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, and then comes the harvest’? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look on the fields, that they are white for harvest.” What he means is the harvest is already happening and will continue to happen until Jesus returns.

Now, harvest time was always a time of celebration and joy and that’s the age we’re in. Folks, it’s a joy that God has granted grace. That men and women, boys and girls, young people, senior adults, can come to the end of themselves and see their sin and recognize their need and place their faith in Christ in a full and free forgiveness. It’s a day of joy and celebration. Now friends, brothers and sisters, as we grow old, we can do what we can do but we can’t quit and we keep wisely investing in the next generation so they will keep this going on. So I think when he talks about the plowman will overtake the reaper and the treader of the grapes, him who sows, that continual harvest, a beautiful picture of the church age we are in now.

Then continuing on in verse 13, the last two lines, “When the mountains will drip sweet wine And all the hills will be dissolved.” In this agricultural context that Amos is writing in, mountains and hills were obstacles to agriculture. Amos came from a mountainous rugged area that you couldn’t grow any crops. They were a problem. You couldn’t plant crops on those mountains, it’s too rocky, too steep. You couldn’t transport seed to other fertile grounds because the mountains and hills were too hard to get over. And often these high mountains and hills were high places they would put their idol temples on. But I think the point is in this church age and in the age of grace – now listen – mountain after mountain and hill after hill of obstacle has been removed and the sweet wine of the Gospel success flows from them.

I thought of a couple of illustrations. I thought of China when the Communists took over China and they began a severe persecution against the Gospel and against the church and Christians and others were wondering, “What’s going to happen in China with the communists crushing the church?” Well, the church went underground and now today the church in China has grown from a few million to they estimate over 50 million believers in China. Mountain after mountain, hill after hill dissolved as God’s Gospel and God’s power and God’s purposes to save for himself a people who will call upon his name among all peoples, tongues, tribes and nations, will not be thwarted in this new day.

David Livingston, the physician in the middle part of the nineteenth century goes to Africa. Africa was called in those days the dark continent, scarcely no faith in Christ anywhere but just tribal blindness and darkness. And David Livingston went to Victoria Falls there in Zimbabwe, the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia. I have been to the very spot. They took us in a boat out to the edge of the falls. It’s called one of the seven great wonders of the world. It’s an unbelievably beautiful and majestic setting. They’ve got a little land area, it’s not very big, that goes right up to the edge of the falls and you can get out there and they will actually feed you a little lunch thing there. But there is a plaque there to David Livingston…and by the way, just to give you a note of how Christians have been a force for good in all societies, one of David Livingston’s main passions in going to be a Gospel missionary to Africa was to end the slave trade. He thought, “If I can get them the Gospel and get enough of them converted, we can start a righteous trade with Africa and end this horror and this evil of slavery.” David Livingston stood there and he looked out across those great vast plains and he said, “I see the smoke of a thousand fires,” in other words, thousands of villages who had not yet heard of the name of Jesus. And Livingston spent his life spreading the Gospel to those villages, so much so, yes, there is more work to do but there are strong Christian churches and strong Christian witnesses today all over Africa. A mountain that dissolved before them. Amos says a day is coming when God is going to move mountains and move hills and obstacles to redeem his people from all peoples, tongues, tribes and nations.

Well, a third particular here that I want us to see. I think also you cannot remove from the prophecy the fulfillment of a redeemed national Israel. There is a redeemed national Israel that is going to come about in the end times. In verses 14 and 15, you read what is obviously figurative language and you get to very specific practical actual things.

Verse 14, “Also I will restore the captivity of My people Israel.” What does it mean when he says, “I will restore the captivity of My people Israel”? It means he will restore the captivity of his people Israel. I don’t think you can see anything figurative in that. “And they will rebuild the ruined cities and live in them.” What ruined cities? The ones that are going to be ruined that Amos has been prophesying about through the judgment. “They will also plant vineyards and drink their wine.” Prosperity and blessing. “And make gardens and eat the fruit.” He said, “I will also plant them,” Israel, “on their land,” Very specific. “‘And they will not again be rooted out from their land Which I have given them,’ Says the LORD your God.”

Now, I studied at some length the amillennialists who say that’s only figurative language that is fulfilled by the church, and I just don’t see that. I respect their position but I see God having a literal plan for national Israel. You see, this land he is restoring them to was God’s land and them being removed from it meant being removed from the presence and the blessings of God, and then being restored back to it means, “I am restoring Israel back to my presence and back to my blessings.” Now, though the Gospel – listen to me now. I know it gets a little heavy but you can think – the Gospel through it going into all the Gentiles and into all the world, there is a sense in which it makes all people the peoples of God, those that are converted, that is. It makes all the lands the lands of God and that is true and though this teaches that, I believe specifically this text requires us to ultimately see a fulfillment when Christ returns to the earth and establishes what scholars have called a millennial kingdom with a redeemed Israel at its center. Now, some Gentiles will be saved and enter into that kingdom but it is centered in Israel. I do not see an absolute replacement theology, that is that everything God has promised to Israel is replaced by his promises to the church. The church is the new Israel, they would say; simply and that’s totally and only it. I don’t see that. I see both. As a matter of fact, I see more than both and I’m going to talk about that in just a moment. God’s elect people, God’s elect nation, Israel, is the people he is going to restore in a national sense in the end times. He’s going to redeem them and reclaim a remnant of them and they will be ruled over and led by Jesus when he returns. He is their Messiah.

Then he says in verse 15 they will never again be rooted out of the land. That brings me to another challenging thought. No matter how you slice this, this has an eternal aspect to it, never again be rooted out. Never again will they be separated from God in any way. There is an ending, or rather an eternal aspect to God’s final dealings with his people. As a matter fact, to God’s final dealings with all of us who are his.

Now I’m going to give you what I’m going to call IV: a very brief end time primer. A very brief end time primer. There it is. I believe this promise, this promised new day Amos has given Israel, did have a shadow fulfillment under Cyrus the Persian. Cyrus takes over Babylon, he has a policy to let people return to their homelands and rebuild their cities, rebuild their religious establishments, and we see Cyrus doing that. However, however, however, to my dear amillennial scholars whom I read this past week who say this is primarily the only fulfillment Israel has, I’m telling you, these glorious things written here did not happen in that restoration. Far, far, far, far from it. There has to be something more but I believe that was a shadow fulfillment.

Secondly, I believe these verses point to a partial fulfillment in the church age. A partial fulfillment in the church age. The church age is part of the fulfillment of these very promises as I pointed out at some length already. But I would like to bring up Romans 11:1 and 2, and Romans 11:5 and 6 as the Apostle Paul is talking about Israel and how Israel is affected by the Gospel. Paul says in Romans 11:1 and 2, “I say then, God has not rejected His people, has He? May it never be! For I too am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, of the tribe of Benjamin.” Now hold on just a second, I would think if replacement theology is absolutely 100% the truth of Scripture, Paul would stop at that point and say, “Forget all of this stuff about Israel, period. It’s all over now because it is all swallowed up in the church. The church takes the place.” But he doesn’t do that.

Verse 2, “God has not rejected His people whom He foreknew.” That’s got to be national Israel. “Or do you not know what the Scripture says in the passage about Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel?”

Now Romans 11:5-6, “In the same way then, there has also come to be at the present time a remnant according to God’s gracious choice.” Now that’s the church age and in the church age a remnant of Israelites are getting saved. So right now in the church age, God is building his church. He’s not dealing with national Israel and he’s saving his people, some out of Israel, a little remnant, but some out of all peoples of the world.

3. I believe there is a partial fulfillment here in the second coming of Christ and that millennial kingdom centered in Israel. As Paul continues in Romans 11:25-27. I know this is going fast. You probably don’t have time to take notes. Get a copy of it later. Romans 11:25-27, he says, “For I do not want you, brethren, to be uninformed of this mystery–so that you will not be wise in your own estimation–that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in.” Here is the Apostle Paul dealing with the saved Gentiles and Israel as two separate entities in the New Testament under the church covenant.

“And so all Israel will be saved.” Wait a minute, he’s just said earlier a remnant is being saved, then he says, but all Israel. I think he’s talking about a national Israel. That’s verse 26, “and all Israel will be saved; just as it is written, ‘The Deliverer will come from Zion, He will remove ungodliness from Jacob.'” Then this talks about a new type of kingdom he’s got for Israel, “This is My covenant with them, when I will take away their sins.” As a matter of fact, six times in Revelation 20:1-6, the duration of 1,000 year kingdom is mentioned as the Messiah’s kingdom.

So when we look at this particular one in Amos, I think you see four different things being spoken of. There is a shadow fulfillment when Cyrus, the Persian, let the Jews come back together, nor nearly fits this language. There is some symbolic fulfillment that is fulfilled in the church age as God is saving people among the Gentiles. There is the specific promise to Israel and then there is the eternal state. That’s another part and I think that’s one of the things that we have to be honest about when we’re looking a prophecy and eschatology. Listen, it just doesn’t all fit in your system and it doesn’t all fit in my system, but we do know the glorious general truths. So, 4: a partial fulfillment of this has to be in the eternal state as he says to them they never again will be rooted out. There is an eternal aspect to this. We know at the end of the 1,000 year reign of Christ in the theocratic kingdom, if you will, a theocracy that Christ will have, then will come the eternal state at the end of that.

1 Corinthians 15:24-28 is a very interesting text of Scripture where Paul says, notice what he says, “then comes the end.” What’s going to happen at this end? “When He hands over the kingdom to the God and Father,” it’s as if he already has a kingdom and now he hands it over, that means he already has the millennial kingdom, then he hands it over to God and Father, “when He has abolished all rule and all authority and power.” As you know, there is a rebellion at the end of the 1,000 year reign. Christ puts it all down. He crushes it all. Then he gives it all to the Father. Verse 25, “For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. The last enemy that will be abolished is death.” Verse 27 of 1 Corinthians 15, “For He has put all things in subjection under His feet. But when He says, ‘All things are put in subjection,’ it is evident that He is excepted who put all things in subjection to Him.” In other words, he’s saying God the Son is not putting God the Father in subjection under his feet. It’s obvious God the Son is under God the Father. Verse 28, 1 Corinthians 15, “When all things are subjected to Him, then the Son Himself also will be subjected to the One who subjected all things to Him, so that God may be all in all.” Christ be with your Spirit, brethren, amen. I believe this refers to the end of the millennial kingdom when the eternal kingdom will now be set up and Christ will say, “I’ve ruled on earth. I’ve redeemed national Israel and now everybody is gathered into this final eternal state and I’m yielding it all up to you.”

So at the end of the millennial kingdom, Christ ends the theocratic state uniting it with the eternal state that never ever ever ends and never ever ever changes. It’s the eternal kingdom of God. But this much you must be certain of: all things are centered in and summed up in the power and the work of Jesus Christ. Actually I should say in the person and work. All things. Even when Israel was journeying out of Egyptian bondage, the New Testament author says the Rock that was with them was Christ. All things are summed up in him. All things are centered in him. All things are about him.

Now let me just circle the field and leave you with this last final thought as we close the book of Amos. In Amos 9:11 he says, “I will. I will. I will raise up the fallen booth of David.” In chapter 14, “I will restore the captivity of my people.” Verse 15, “I will plant them and they will not be again rooted out from their land.” By his wisdom, he willed to do it. By his power, he performed it. Now that parallels over to us in the church age, does it not? Do we not see a truth there for us? He predestined us, Ephesians 1 again. He chose us according to the kind intention of his will. By his wisdom, he willed to save us. By his power, he performs it. It doesn’t depend on the man who will or on the man who runs, but on God who has mercy. God will perform these days. A great and glorious new day is promised for God’s children. No matter how your eschatology works out, in the end Jesus is Lord and all he saves will be with him forever in his love, in his joy, in his mercy and in his grace.