Amos chapter five, verses 18 through 27, these are God's words. Woe to you who desire the day of Yahweh, for what good is the day of Yahweh to you? It will be darkness and not light. It will be as though a man fled from a lion and a bear met him, or as though he went into his house, leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him. "'is not the day of Yahweh darkness and not light. "'Is it not very dark with no brightness in it? "'I hate, I despise your feast days, "'and I do not savor your sacred assemblies. "'Though you offer me burnt offerings "'and your grain offerings, "'I will not accept them, nor will I regard "'your fattened peace offerings. "'Take away from me the noise of your songs, "'for I will not hear the melody "'of your stringed instruments. but let justice run down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. Did you offer me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness 40 years, O house of Israel? You also carried Sikuth, your king, and Chiyun, your idols, the star of your gods, which you made for yourselves. Therefore, I will send you into captivity beyond Damascus, says Yahweh, whose name is the God of hosts. Amen. This ends this reading of God's inspired and inerrant word. There are many who think that they belong to God. There are many who use the covenant name of God, maybe not Yahweh or Jehovah, but the great covenant name by which he has now made himself known to us, Jesus, in whom Yahweh has ultimately communicated himself and whom we call Lord. which matches and takes over the Judaistic superstition not to say Yahweh, where it is Yahweh in the Old Testament, but they would say Adonai, they would say Lord, and then the Lord Jesus has come. And now we use the word Lord, not just in the general sense of Sir or Master, as it sometimes is in scripture, but especially to talk about Jesus Christ as Yahweh, as Jehovah, as the Lord. There are many who think they know the Lord, who think that the return of the Lord will be a good thing for them, who think that they are going to the Lord with joy when they leave this world, and they are disastrously mistaken. This passage teaches us that thinking that you are safe in the Lord without giving evidence of having been saved by the Lord by living and especially worshiping according to the word of the Lord. May leave you in for a disastrous surprise when the day of Yahweh comes. We're coming out of three sections in the book of Amos, started with hear this word, God makes a case against them. And in those three sections, he especially highlighted the worship at Bethel. You remember Bethel is at the southern end of the Northern Kingdom and Jeroboam very carefully put worship centers first and foremost in Bethel and then also in Dan so that anyone from the Northern Kingdom who wanted to worship Yahweh could be told here is this ancient tradition. And he even used the golden calf, which was an ancient tradition. By that time, if we went back to first Kings and looked at the institution of it, he used the same language as Aaron at Sinai, your God who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. And so he had set up that worship center there. It was a Yahweh worship center. It was to attract the ones who were going up to Jerusalem so that they wouldn't go there. And then also cleverly, he put one at the Northern end of the Northern kingdom so that it was always convenient to go to wherever was nearest to you. Well, not only did he set that up, but he made a feast like the great feast in Jerusalem, except for in, so the seventh month is in the eighth month. And there might be implication up there that he might've done similar with the other two feasts. And then he ordained priests, 1 Kings tells us, from whatever tribe he wished, not from among the Levites. So in the Northern Kingdom, and as the three hear this word portions that preceded this one, particularly focus on Bethel. And apparently there was a worship center at Gilgal. You remember Gilgal, which got its name from the circumcision of the generation that was entering the land and the Lord rolled away their reproach at Gilgal. And so they had set up these worship centers, these feasts, and They had used many of the things that belonged to true religion. They had used the name of the Lord, and they loved them. These are not pagans. These are quote-unquote Yahweh worshipers, professing believers. And God draws an analogy between when they're coming with joy to their feast days and they're offering sacrifices. If you look at verses, verse 22, the sacrifices are the same as in the first three chapters of Leviticus. Ascensions, tributes, and peace. Burnt offerings, grain offerings, and peace offerings. And so there's a lot that they're doing that's from the Bible, in celebration of God, unto the name of God, as members of the church of God. But God says, I hate, I despise your feast days, and I do not favor your sacred assemblies. Not only did they have imitations of the worship that the Lord had instituted mosaically, but you see in verse 23, there's also imitations of things that came in with the temple worship. Take away from me the noise of your songs. Well, they didn't have Levitical choir. They had a priesthood from whomever. And they didn't have Levitical instrumentalists. They had instrumentalists from whomever. And so they had things that imitated, gave you the experience of maybe even more skillfully or enjoyably or according to the tastes of the people. But they had things that imitated and seemed to them if you can say it this way, to be right out of their Bibles. And God said he hated it. And that's bad enough to be bringing worship to God that you love, that you feel is very worshipful, you feel like you're drawing near to him, or maybe you think you are because you've rationalized whatever the observance is. And your feeling and your idea is exactly the opposite of the reality. that God hates it. God does not like worship because we like it. That has no bearing on whether or not the worship is good. And he draws an analogy between that which is happening in their lives to that which will happen at the end of their lives. Woe to you who desire the day of Yahweh, what good is it to you? And he likens it to those who tell themselves that they've escaped when they are actually in the last moment of their life. Telling themselves, ha ha, I got away from the lion. They come around the tree and there's the grizzly and they're done. They race home, tell themselves, oh, I'm safe in the house. And he even adds the detail of leaning on the wall. But there's a serpent in the wall, a venomous snake. And it bites him. He thought he was safe. But he thought he was safe in the moment that he was about to die. And in doing so, They were children of their parents, children of their forefathers. Verses 25 and 26, they thought that they were offering sacrifices to Yahweh. And this is something especially for us because in the wilderness, there was worship that was presided over by Aaron and his family. There was right worship. But they should have known that they were doing their right worship with the wrong art. How? Because they were also worshiping idols. So there's three great dangers here. He spends most of the time on the false worship instituted by Jeroboam. So there's worshiping the right God in the wrong way. There's worshiping the right God in the right way with the wrong heart. And you can know that you're worshiping with the wrong heart if you're also satisfied in addition to worshiping the right God to worship other gods as well. to find the core of your identity in something other than Him as well. To have as your chief pleasure, which governs all of your other pleasures, something other than Him as well. To have as your chief hope, the thing that you're resting on and makes you feel secure, makes you feel safe, something other than Him as well. These things that belong to Him alone. To use the language of verse 26, If you're lugging along for 40 years in the wilderness, Sikkoth, Chiyun, and the star of your gods, which you made for yourself, then it doesn't actually matter how sincere you think you are when you attend the Yahweh worship at the tabernacle, does it? Because you're not. You're just deceiving yourself. You can easily deceive yourself, and even more easily deceive others. You can't deceive God. There's no such thing. And so it was on account of those things, especially, that the Northern Kingdom was going to be carried beyond Damascus. Damascus is the capital of what we call Syria. And past them, not really any relation. It was us, Syria, the ones who were going to come and and carry them out. But one of the things that they had done late in the life of the Northern Kingdom is start to really imitate the Syrian worship in Damascus. And so they played the Syrian worship games and they were gonna win Syrian worship prizes. Assyria was gonna come and get both nations, Syria and the Northern Kingdom, Ephraim, Israel. May the Lord give us then not to give to anything or anyone else the place in our heart that belongs to Him alone, but to give us a right heart towards Him, that when we worship Him, we will worship from the heart. And may He have mercy on us and keep us from coming to Him with anything that we have invented. Because as we learn from the Bible as a whole, the substance of the things that God has commanded for His worship, whether the Old Testament or the New Testament, is Jesus. And so adding anything to that is attempting to come to God in part without Jesus. And may the Lord prevent us, spare us, keep us from doing such a thing. Let's pray. Our Father in heaven, we pray that you would help us not to do anything in worship that you have not commanded, but for us, Lord, it is the other two cases in which the text spent less time, but are greater dangers for us, that we would be worshiping you in the right way, but with an insincere heart. or that we would be adding other things to our lives in the place that belongs to you. And so we pray that you'd forgive us our sin and we pray that your spirit would help us against it. For we ask these things through Christ, amen.