Amos chapter one. And what I'd like to do is read very briefly the opening couple of verses of Amos. I wanna do further reading along with the message inside of tonight's message. But Amos one, verses one and two. The words of Amos, who was among the herdmen of Tekoa, which he saw concerning Israel in the days of Uzziah, king of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam, the son of Joash, king of Israel, two years before the earthquake. And he said, the Lord will roar from Zion, and utter his voice from Jerusalem, and the habitations of the shepherds shall mourn, and the top of Carmel shall wither. Well, amen, we'll end our reading. We can trust the Lord to bless even this brief reading of His Word. Let's bow our heads together. Our Heavenly Father, we rejoice to sing praises to a God who's worthy to be praised. We confess that we have a prophet before us that speaks that you speak through with striking words, words that come and touch the very worship of those that were called by your name. You came to the point of saying, I hate, I despise your feast days. Lord, we ask that you might keep us from ever so transgressing that in our very corporate assemblies of approach unto you would be something you despise. Lord, we pray for gospel hearts. We pray for the help of your Spirit. We pray that we might be among those you describe as your people being willing in the day of your power. Lord, if we pray for power, we pray for days of your stirring, for days even of reviving grace, we know we're praying for willing hearts. And so we ask that you might grant us something more of that even tonight as we come and introduce this prophet in our gatherings together. We pray it in Jesus' name. Amen. As we come tonight to the prophecy of Amos and our little survey of the minor prophets, I have shared with you in the past that Amos has a special place in my own heart. The second time that I ever spoke publicly, well I should back up, it was the third time, my Sunday school teacher as a teenager asked me to do the lesson one day. I was petrified, but Sunday school quarterlies are nice things to have and I read it diligently and there we went. I was asked by a relative on a trip home from visiting my not-yet-wife. But in the middle of Virginia, a relative was a pastor of a little church there and asked me to speak in the evening, and I chose to speak from the prophecy of Amos. I preached too long for a young person. But my heart was full because I was so overwhelmed, as I said, with his prophecy of the famine of the Word. and just reading and re-reading the book to try and discover how such a thing could be. Amos was a prophet that was called to minister in a season where God had called several other prophets to minister. I won't give you a test on the chronology, but we noted when we looked at Joel that he's among the earliest of the minor prophets. Obadiah perhaps slightly earlier than him. Obadiah really giving a prophecy as we'll see against Edom. Joel's prophecy of the locust plague and ultimately the blessing of God in restoring the years the locusts have eaten and of course reaching to Pentecost and beyond. But there was a little gap as it were. And then in the middle of the 8th century BC, Amos our prophet about 760 to 755 BC, there was, I say, a cluster of prophets. Jonah. God's prophet to Nineveh about the same time, 760. Hosea that we've looked at already from about 750's to 725 were the years of his ministry. Micah would prophesy in the southern kingdom from about 750 to 700, so maybe a decade behind Amos is Micah. And then not among the minor prophets, certainly a major prophet in every way, Isaiah. is ministering at the same time in Jerusalem. So it is a season where God is giving His Word. It's a season, as we'll see, in which God's people needed His Word to be given. I want to give a little bit of the history this evening because I think in some ways the history, the setting, is vital really to a good understanding of the prophecy that Amos is called to bring to Israel. As we look at the history from about 850 BC to 800, there was a season of relative quiet Jehu, you'll recall, had an Old Testament professor that always reminded us about Jehu just about the time of the Christmas break, warning us not to be like him because he drove furiously. The Scriptures speak of that. But Jehu had, according to God's judgment on the house of Ahab, rid Israel of Baal worship almost entirely, at least among the king's seed. But it created a vacuum of leadership. It left the land deprived of leaders. There were threatenings by a strong Syria. Hazael was leader of Syria from about 840 to 806, so during those years. But after Syria came to wane and Assyria was coming to prominence, there was a season of relative calm for Israel and Judah. Israel and Judah had a season of peace between themselves. That's just striking to think of when you read your Old Testament, the seasons when Judah and Israel were fighting each other. That's sobering to see. But I want you to turn back with me to 2 Kings just for a moment, because there's mention here of our king, the king that reigned when Amos prophesied in Israel, the northern kingdom, Jeroboam II. And if we read in 2 Kings 14, 2 Kings 14 and verse 25, we'll probably do our tradition and back up a little bit. Verse 23, In the fifteenth year of Amaziah the son of Joash king of Judah, Jeroboam the son of Joash king of Israel began to reign in Samaria, and reigned forty and one years. So it's a relatively long reign as some of the later reigns would go. But verse 24 we read on, He did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord. He departed not from all the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat who made Israel to sin. He restored the coast of Israel, coast is an Old Testament word really that means borders, it's not always a beach. He restored the coast, the borders of Israel from the entering of Hamath under the sea of the plain, according to the word of the Lord God of Israel, which he spake by the hand of his servant Jonah, the son of Amittai, the prophet which was of Gathipher. I pause and want to read that because it's always been interesting to me and I'm sure we'll comment on this when we come to Jonah's prophecy itself. We only have record of two prophecies that Jonah gave. One obviously is his book and his story and the prophecy he gave to Nineveh that yet 40 days and Nineveh will be destroyed. And then what we read here, and we don't have Jonah's sermon itself, we just have a record that he had been given under God to preach, to proclaim that Israel's borders under Jeroboam are gonna be restored. Jeroboam II came to rule over and reign over more land than any other king of the northern tribes of Israel. It was a time, as we'll see more in a moment, of great prosperity. But I say it's always taken me back Jonah is an interesting case study. It's one the Lord has used to rebuke and humble my own soul many times. Because Jonah was called upon to preach things that he didn't want to preach. He didn't want to go to Nineveh. That's obvious. He ran away. He wanted to preach in Israel. And here, when he was given to preach in Israel, he wanted probably to preach a message a lot like Amos' contemporary, because Israel needed it. But instead, he's called of God to preach prosperity. And so here, not a prosperity gospel, but to give prediction of prosperity that would come in the days of Jeroboam. And so Jonah has this remarkable paradoxical ministry of preaching judgment to a nation that is about to receive spiritual blessing in God turning his hand and reviving Nineveh. And then to Israel, he's to preach a message of material prosperity when they're on the verge of spiritual judgment. I say Jonah, and we'll see more when we come to him, is given remarkable things to preach. But it's under this Jeroboam II that Amos is called to minister. Jeroboam, again, had about a 40-year reign in the northern kingdom. He was an able leader. He was living during a season when Assyria had crushed Syria, and so that threat is gone, and the Assyrian threat is not quite there. And during these years of prosperity, the peace that existed between Israel and Judah allowed them to control the trade routes between these now competing Gentile empires. Egypt was never to come to full prominence again, but they always wanted to be there. And in these trade routes, Judah and Israel, right in the crossroads of all these nations and empires, they come to great prosperity. They come to such prosperity as we'll find in the prophecy of Amos, that they had winter houses and summer houses. They had where they lived when they worked, and they had where they lived when they were on vacation. They drank wine and bowls. Little small wine glasses for them. They had such abundance that if you read chapter 4, as we will, Lord willing, in a further study, you see that calamity after calamity after calamity was sent of God upon the land, and it didn't faze them. They just, well, let's put it in today's context. The community just came together, all the insurance adjusters came out, they got it all rebuilt, and they went on. No problem. We can handle hurricanes. We can handle tornadoes. We can handle this stuff. And the refrain is, yet you've not returned unto me. Yet you've not returned unto me. And so here, this nation is prosperous. They've known a season of peace. Surely God's blessing is behind this prosperity. Well, Amos comes to minister during this reign of Jeroboam. Again, about 760. If you're familiar with your Old Testament chronology, something rather significant happened in 722. Samaria fell. The northern kingdom, gone. Amos comes to bring warning of God's chastening to that generation. Because in less than a generation, that judgment would fall. Amos was a herdsman. We read in chapter 7, a herdsman of Tekoa and a gatherer of sycamore fruit. been gathering a lot of fruit with very sticky figs the last several days. He was from Tekoa, which was a village in the south. So God's calling him to go to the northern kingdom when he himself is a citizen of the southern kingdom of Judah. Tekoa is about four miles south of Bethlehem. Now in our context, four miles is just a little further into or out of town. But that's, if you will, about halfway between here and Clemens, if you're just getting on I-40 and heading out that way. Four miles south of Bethlehem, he's a shepherd. He's a landowner with perhaps even under-shepherds working for him. On the very hillsides, perhaps, that were being worked the night of the angel's visit to the shepherds of the nativity. He's not a prophet. He's not the son of a prophet. Amos is a farmer, a shepherd, a country bumpkin, if you will. But God sends him to the northern kingdom. He sends him even to the courts of the king. He's brought there on false charges, we'll find later. I want tonight just really to look after these introductory thoughts with regard to the context in which he ministers to come to Amos' opening appeal. The book isn't a sermon like the book of Deuteronomy is a sermon. It contains several visions as we will see along the way. But he has a rather unique opening format. And I want to read together the introduction to a sermon, if you will, tonight and share comments from it as we come to close our thoughts this evening. So read with me again. from Amos. We'll start in chapter 3 now in verse 3 of chapter 1. Thus saith the Lord, for three transgressions of Damascus and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof, because they have threshed Gilead with threshing instruments of iron. But I will send a fire into the house of Hazael, which shall devour the palaces of Ben-Hadad. I will break also the bar of Damascus, and cut off the inhabitant from the plain of Avon, and him that holdeth the scepter from the house of Eden. And the people of Syria shall go into captivity under Keir, saith the Lord. So there's a prophecy against Damascus, one of Israel's arch enemies to the north. Well, that's okay. Verse six, thus saith the Lord, for three transgressions of Gaza and for four, now, what's Gaza? Well, Gaza's in the news still today, the Gaza Strip. It's one of the chief cities of a Philistine pentabulous. Five cities, Gaza, now that I've mentioned it, I'll have to see if I can get them all. Gaza, Eshkelon, hmm, I know these. I know them well. Yeah, that's what you get, Kimbrough, for starting into something without preparing. I'm trying to think now of Atteah the Gittite, Gath. There's another one of the Philistine cities. But here, the Philistines themselves, arch enemies of Israel from days gone by. For three transgressions of Gaza and for four, I'll not turn away the punishment thereof. because they carried away captive the whole captivity to deliver them up to Edom. But I'll send a fire on the wall of Gaza, which shall devour the palaces thereof. I'll cut off the inhabitant from Ashdod, and him that holdeth the scepter from Ashkelon. I will turn mine hand against Ekron, I think now we've gotten all five, and the remnant of the Philistines shall perish, saith the Lord God." Preaching against the sins of them Philistines. Well, Amos, amen. Verse 9, Thus saith the Lord, For three transgressions of Tyrus, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof, because they delivered up the whole captivity to Edom, and remembered not the brotherly covenant. But I'll send a fire on the wall of Tyrus, which will devour the palaces thereof. Tyre and Sidon, legendary centers of evil. Verse 11, Thus saith the Lord, for three transgressions of Edom, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof. Because he did pursue his brother with the sword, and did cast off all pity, and his anger did tear perpetually, and he kept his wrath forever. But I will send a fire upon Teman, which will devour the palaces of Basra." Edom, the remnant of Esau, Perennial enemies of the covenant people. What an amazing case study of apostasy. Verse 13, Thus saith the Lord, For three transgressions of the children of Ammon, and for four, I'll not turn away the punishment thereof, because they have ripped up the women with child of Gilead, that they might enlarge their border. As a peace-loving people, murdering women with child for greater territory. But I'll kindle a fire in the wall of Rabbah, and it shall devour the palaces thereof with shouting in the day of battle and with a tempest in the day of whirlwind. And their king shall go into captivity. He and his princes together, saith the Lord. Chapter 2, Thus saith the Lord, For three transgressions of Moab, and for four I'll not turn away the punishment thereof, because he burned the bones of the king of Edom into lime. But I'll send a fire upon Moab, and it shall devour the palaces of Kerioth. And Moab shall die with shouting and with the sound of the trumpet. And I'll cut off the judge from the midst thereof, and will slay all the princes thereof with him, saith the Lord. Ammon and Moab, the children of Lot. Never overly influential and powerful themselves, but always ready to ally with anyone that came to attack Israel or Judah. Amos comes. He gives these prophecies. We see that formula that opens each one of these predictions for three transgressions and for four. It's a poetical description simply giving a revelation of overflowing sin. These nations are filled with iniquity. Their crimes, the awful crimes that we read here that they've committed. God is not unmindful. You think even of Edom and its hindrances to Israel even in the days of the conquest. Well, here. God through Amos gives prophecy against these nations. Nations, as we said, thus described, with overflowing sins. And I think when we come to consider this opening appeal, this introduction to his message, that Amos brings a word that could be preached today, It could be preached in this pulpit. I'm not talking about, you know, a liberal, unbelieving pulpit somewhere. It could be preached in this pulpit. It could be preached in any Bible-believing pulpit. And God's people would heartily say, Amen. There may even be places of unbelief. There may even be pulpits where apostasy does prevail. and a message like this would receive an amen. I mean, think of some of the atrocities that have been committed in nation after nation in our generation. Men that have served in the armed forces, come home, struggling at times to deal with things they've been exposed to. We could hear a lot of amens. about the evil of those that have ripped up women with child, about the evil of those that have broken covenants and unjustly slain their enemies. Amos comes to Israel and he utters these prophecies and Israel could affirm and give their assent and their amen to all that he said. But all of these are the prelude. He begins to get closer home. When we come to the fourth verse of the second chapter, we read a seventh of this formula. Thus saith the Lord for three transgressions of Judah, and for four. I'll not turn away the punishment thereof. Because they have despised the law of the Lord, and have not kept His commandments. And their lies caused them to err, after the which their fathers have walked. But I'll send a fire upon Judah, and it shall devour the palaces of Jerusalem." So he's preaching a little ways into the future for the southern kingdom. Maybe the Israelites are listening to that and saying, well, that's interesting. But then he comes in verse 6, the 8th and final one in the series, well, it's for Israel. Thus saith the Lord, for three transgressions of Israel and for four, I'll not turn away the punishment thereof, because they sold the righteous for silver and the poor for a pair of shoes. a harbinger there of much that Amos will rebuke, civil injustices, of course that followed spiritual apostasy. But I pause and I wanted to read these prophetic descriptions that open his prophecy tonight because I think that in many ways There's a danger that certainly existed among his hearers at the time, can easily be reflected in our modern days. There's so many evils in the world that a preacher could preach against them. A preacher could name names, this nation and its evils, that nation and its evils. Bad stuff that some people in our country are doing. And we could say amen to all the condemnation of such evils, but to hear those condemnations and then turn a deaf ear to the condemnations that belong to us. Israel, as we will see in the prophecy, is in great sin and great apostasy itself. One of the tendencies of the fleshly mind is to be ready to hear a rebuke of other people's sins and not ready to hear a rebuke of its own. And if I could suggest here Maybe Amos perhaps could have started a campaign in Israel to rally some other young prophets to himself. We've spoken of the school of the prophets that began, I believe, with Elijah and Elisha, and out of which these minor prophets came. Yeah, let's go have a little outreach up to Tyre. Let's go down to Gaza. in those other four cities. Preach against them Philistines. Let's deal with these problems and be blind and unhearing with regard to our own. And I don't think that denominationally and our church itself that the things that are described in Amos with regard to Israel belong to us. I mean, when you read here, they had come to the point even of engaging in cultic prostitution like the pagans that surrounded them. That's a pretty good reason to lie behind God saying, I hate and despise your feast days. I'm not very happy with what goes on at church. But the tendency to have an eye on the sin that surrounds us and not be burdened about our own. Or to put it in another context, to be burdened and concerned about the sins that corrupt our nation and corrupt the nations of the world, and be desirous and engage in activity trying to fix those problems, and not realize the real root of the problem is unbelief. It's apostasy from the gospel. that we need to preach the truth of the gospel as the root of the solution to all the other problems. As we've hinted along the way through the years, to always be careful not to take up lesser causes to the exclusion of the main cause, which is the gospel. The tendency often has been to enter into alliances in places we shouldn't in order to avoid, as Israel and Judah did, what God had ordained. Let us preach the gospel in days where the Gazas and the Damascuses and the Tyres and the Edoms and Moabs and Ammons have their sins to be sure. But the Gospel needs to be preached, not just condemnation of the other guys. When Amos comes and introduces his prophecy with these condemnations of the surrounding evil peoples, he concludes with condemnation regarding Israel's evils. Reading on in chapter 2, he says from verse 7, Well, let's start in verse 9. No, let's back up and read verse 7. We stopped reading in verse 6. That pant after the dust of the earth on the head of the poor. Turn aside the way of the meek. Here's your cultic prostitution. A man and his father will go in unto the same maid to profane my holy name, and lay themselves down upon clothes laid to pledge by every altar, and they drink the wine of the condemned in the house of their God. Yet destroyed I the Amorite from before them, whose height was like the height of the cedars, and he was strong as the oaks. Yet I destroyed his fruit from above and his roots from beneath. I brought you up from the land of Egypt and led you forty years through the wilderness to possess the land of the Amorite. And I raised up of your sons for prophets, and of your young men for Nazarites. Is it not even thus, O ye children of Israel, saith the Lord? He recounts, as is so often the case in the Psalms and in the Prophets. He recounts their history. He takes them to the Exodus. He takes them to God's granting of the land to them. He said, I freely gave you all of this. And what have you done? He didn't just give them the land. He didn't just give them tangible earthly prosperity and security. He gave them spiritual prosperity. He gave them Nazarites and prophets. But then read on, verse 12. But ye gave the Nazarites wine to drink, which of course was contrary to the Nazarite vow, and commanded the prophets, saying, Prophesy not. And God says, Behold, I am pressed under you as a cart is pressed that is full of sheaves. It's possible that the translation should be, and you may have it in a marginal reading, God saying, not I'm pressed under you like a cart is pressed, it's full of sheaves, but I'm going to press you. like a cart presses that's full and heavy as it goes along. Therefore, flight shall perish from the swift, and the strong shall not strengthen his force, neither shall the mighty deliver himself, neither shall he stand that handleth the bow, and he that is swift of foot shall not deliver himself, neither shall he that rideth the horse deliver himself, and he that is courageous among the mighty shall flee away naked in that day, saith the Lord. Amos came to a prosperous, contented, wealthy, wicked people. He pointed out the evils that surrounded them to get their attention, and then he stopped and focused on their own sins. Not the least of which, as we'll see going forward, was their casting off of spiritual privilege, of their sinning against light. That's the thing that we have to understand as we come later in the book to that famine of the Word. They had the Word. God revealed Himself and made Himself known to them abundantly. More than any other people of the earth. In fact, one of the strongest statements in the Old Testament Scriptures regarding God's election of the nation of Israel is found in this prophecy, chapter 3, verse 2. You only have I known of all the families of the earth. Now there's a nice little language lesson. God wasn't saying there He was ignorant that other countries existed. that we're to know has the meaning often of special acknowledgement. You only have I known of all the families of the earth. You've had privilege upon privilege. You have had light shining. But you've turned from it. You've desired the false light of pagan temples and pagan idolatry. And in the name of your God, you have corrupted the worship of His house and made it like all of that. This is the people to whom Amos is called to minister. We'll see as we get into the prophecy that Amos, and actually it's a book the liberals like, which is kind of mind-blowing. But Amos speaks a lot of social injustice in his book. And that's a common, can we say front, that liberal unbelief will use, twisting things often. But the sins against their neighbor. What does the New Testament, the Apostle John say? If any man says he loves God whom he hath not seen, and he doesn't love his neighbor whom he has seen, the love of God is not abiding in him. Their forsaking of the first table of the law brought them to have no qualms about forsaking the second table of the law, sinning in every way. Well, it's a context like that A prosperous, wealthy, self-satisfied, but wicked people. God calls this farmer to preach to. I trust over these next weeks as we continue into this book, Amos is one of the longer of the minor prophets. It will give us grace to find application in our own times, in our own souls. Let's bow our heads together. Heavenly Father tonight, I confess as we read the opening chapters of this prophecy, that it could very well have been written to the church of our nation. There are houses that still are called by the name of Christianity, in which even the likes of cultic prostitution, perhaps not openly advertised, but quite readily found. This among the catalog of sins in this book. Lord, give us wisdom and grace in seeing what you said to Israel of old. Finding a gospel word for ourselves and for our times to share with others. We come and I ask that even at the close of this Lord's Day, that Your living Word, the happy Word of freedom from the law, as we read and considered this morning, and the sober Word of a needy generation, will each find a place in our hearts. Bless us as we go to our homes, to our varied occupations. May we be as lights shining in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation. We pray these things in Jesus' worthy name. Amen.