Introduction:
We have come to the second of three pointed words from the prophet, addressed to a disobedient Israel. The first begins with “hear this word” (3:1). The second does the same (4:1). The third begins with “hear ye this word” (5:1). God’s judgments are not designed by Him as surprise attacks. Surprise does result, but not because God did not give fair warning. What God does in this regard, He explains beforehand. The surprise is the result of moral stupidity and blindness. In this chapter, Amos continues to hammer away at his twin themes—opulent violence and its necessary connection to false worship.

The Text:
“Hear this word, ye kine of Bashan, that [are] in the mountain of Samaria, which oppress the poor, which crush the needy, which say to their masters, Bring, and let us drink . . .” (Amos 4:1-13).

Overview of the Text:
We have noted that Amos loves to use the number seven, and this passage is no exception. Here it comes in a two plus five structure, followed by a capstone conclusion. The first two units are fierce condemnations—the first of Israel’s rich cow-women (4:1-3) and the second of Israel’s false worship (4:4-5). Then Amos comes at them with five examples of Yahweh’s foreshadowed judgments, each of which Israel assiduously ignored. Each of the five concludes with the same concluding judgment: “yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the Lord.” God spoke to them through famine (4:6); drought (4:7-8); crop failure (4:9); pestilence and war (4:10); and natural disaster (4:11). Then comes the conclusion—“prepare to meet thy God” (4:12) and a prophetic hymn to the sovereignty of God they must prepare to meet (4:13).

Cows of Bashan:
Those who don’t care about the poor, and who oppress the needy, and who call out to their husbands for more drinks—pink champagne on ice—are sarcastically taunted here by the prophet. He calls them cows of Bashan. Bashan was rich pasture land, and the word is connected to the word for fatness. This striking image of the cows is meant to refer to the luxury that they were abusing the poor to maintain, not to mention voluptuousness and sensuality—as we might speak today in a similar tone about the great mammals of Hollywood and their impressive udder implants.
God swears by His own holiness (probably meaning His own temple) that these women were going to hauled away through breaches in Samaria’s walls (v. 3), and they would be taken with fishhooks (v. 2) One of the practices of the Assyrians (who would those who conquered Israel) was to hook lines of captives together by means of a hook through the cheeks. God swearing that this judgment would fall, and swearing this by His own temple, highlights the importance of the next point that follows—the false worship of Israel was the central problem.

Context Defines Everything:
God had set His name in Jerusalem, and so to establish other centers of worship after He did this were rebellious in principle, down to the ground. It did not matter how particular they were to follow the details of the law. This was done both at Bethel and Gilgal (another false shrine in addition to Dan), and what the Israelites thought they were doing was in strict accordance with the law. They brought sacrifices every morning, like the law said (Lev. 9:17). They rendered tithes every third year, like the law said (Dt. 14:22-29). They offered thanksgiving sacrifices with leaven, like the law said (Lev. 7:12-15; 22:29-30). They announced their free will offerings, like the law said (Lev. 7:16-17; 22:18-23). The sailor seeks to defend himself—he works hard, obeys orders from the ship’s mate, always seeks the best interest of the crew’s mission, and he could extend the list indefinitely. “Yes,” Amos might reply, “but please recall that your ship is a pirate ship.” The groom doesn’t understand why we won’t come to the ceremony. “All the right words are in the vows—sickness, health, richer, poorer, better, worse. What’s your problem?” The problem is that he is trying to marry another groom. Getting the details right while in the wrong place just compounds the wickedness. “Come to Bethel,” Amos says, “and transgress.” “Come to Gilgal,” he adds, “and multiply transgression.”

Refusal to Read:
In the message last week, we noted that America’s wealth is under judgment, not because it is wealth, but rather because we have associated it with all the evils that Israel had tied her wealth to. One of those things was a refusal to hear what God says when He speaks in the course of historical events. This point is pounded by Amos in this chapter. God says that “He has done this thing,” and yet a nation in need of repentance “has not returned” unto Him. What do modern American Christians say is meant by famine, drought, crop failure, pestilence and war, and natural disasters? We say it means nothing. We point to whacked out prophets who assign trivial meanings to historical events, and so we ignore the explicit teaching of Scripture, and the long history of the Church on this. For the curious, our particular crisis of faith on this goes back to the War Between the States.
But Jesus rebuked uninspired Jews of His day for their inability to read the signs of the times (Matt. 16:3). The men of Issachar were wise and knew how to read the times (1 Chron. 12:32). When Jesus spoke of the disaster at Siloam, He did not tell Jews not to draw a lesson from it. He told them not to draw the wrong lesson from it (Luke 13:4). One of the reasons it is so important to be steeped in Scripture is that it enables you to read the book of history, and not just the other parts of Scripture. The biblical worldview is not static. Jesus is the Lord of history. Jesus is the Lord of American history. And Jesus is the Lord of the next one hundred years of American history.

Prepare to Meet Your God:
When Amos tells Israel to prepare to meet their God, the presupposition is that they are summoned to meet Him in battle, and that they will lose. Because they did not read all the foreshadowings in all the earlier chapters, they will be entirely astonished in the last chapter. They won’t know what to do, or where to look.
Who is the God we must meet? He fashioned the mountain ranges. Have you seen them? Do you want them to fall on you? He speaks, the wind forms into a storm system, and heads toward New Orleans. The God you must meet knows all your thoughts, all the shifting evasions, all the rationalizations, and all the theology that prevents you from reading the signs of the times. He holds light and darkness in His hand, and He walks on the high places of the earth. Getting our worship of this God right, honoring His name as the God of hosts, is essential.

Introduction: 
The two great sins that Amos condemns throughout the course of this book are abuse of authority and power, and the corruption of true worship. As a native of Judea bringing an indictment against the Northern Kingdom of Israel, Amos goes out of his way to show that he is not engaging in any kind of carnal partisanship, and he comes now to Israel in the name of the Lord of hosts.

The Text:
“Thus saith the LORD; For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not turn away [the punishment] thereof . . .” (Amos 2:6-16).

Overview:
Remember the seven plus one formula. Amos has rebuked the seven nations round about, and then he settles into a detailed dissection of the sins of Israel, which continues for the rest of the book. He begins with the usual “three, no, four” formula (v. 6). But he then gets even more detailed and specific than he has up to this point, listing all four sins that he has in mind. The first is that the righteous are sold for silver and the poor for a pair of shoes (v. 6). The second is corruption of worship by various means. For example, there is sexual corruption—a man and his father share the same girl (v. 7), and they carouse next to altars with the proceeds of their unjust litigations (v. 8). The third is the ungrateful abuse of the land God had taken for them from the Amorite, becoming Amorites themselves (vv. 9-10). The fourth great sin was that of ignoring the prophets (vv. 11-12). God is sick of them all, weighed down underneath them like an overloaded cart would be (v. 13). Because of all this, an inexorable judgment is coming (vv. 14-16).

The Poor for a Pair of Shoes:
The sins that Amos points to are indicators of judicial oppressors—the problem is not that muggers and thugs are roaming the streets. The problem is, as an old song puts it, that not all robbery is conducted with a six gun—some do it with a fountain pen. The problem here is corrupt judges. One of the oldest mistakes in the world is that of thinking that if it is legal then it must be okay. The silver here is likely going to judges in the form of bribes. And once the corruption has set in, it doesn’t take much to sway a judgment—a pair of Gucci shoes perhaps?

The poor live close to the margin, and it doesn’t take much to destroy them. Consider the situation in 2 Kings 4:1- 7. But when cruelty reigns, the misery of the poor is the point. These are people who start to breathe heavily with desire when the opportunity of crushing some miserable wretch arises (v. 7a). We are not talking about abstractions here—say a man owns stock in some mutual fund that has invested in a company that used to own a factory in a country where the dictator two dictators back did some bad things. In Amos, this sin is personal.

Perversion at the Altar: 
Amos notes that the next set of problems occurs right next to their altars. Remember that this is the northern kingdom, which means that their places of worship were already corrupt. But even what they consider as holy and set apart to God is defiled by them. What were these problems? The first is a sexual perversion, that of a man and his father having the same girl. It is not clear if this is the result of widespread promiscuity, or if it is more flagrantly incestuous than that (Lev. 18:15; 20:12; Dt. 22:30). In either case, it is terrible. They also take the collateral provided by the poor in a high-handed way (Ex. 22:26). They take the repossessed wine of the condemned and hold a party in the house of their god. All this is linked to their altars, to their worship.

A Land of Forgetfulness:
The Amorites had been a race of giants, and God had delivered them up to the Israelites. They had been glorious and majestic like oaks and cedar, and yet God had destroyed them, leaf above and root below. God had destroyed them utterly (v. 9). Not only that, but God had spared the Israelites for 40 years in the wilderness to possess this land (v. 10). Having done all this, God provided them with a means of remembrance—He raised up prophets to teach them, and He raised up the ascetic Nazirites to remind them of their wilderness wanderings. Is this not the truth, O Israel? In this verse, verse 10, God moves from the third person to the second person, addressing Israel directly. You, O Israel. Yes, you. God had given them the means to remember, and yet they had forgotten.

When God Gets Weary:
Of course, in one sense, God never wearies. But in the same sense in which our sins grieve the Holy Spirit, so the continued impudence of high-handed rebellion wearies Him (v. 13), with the necessary result being judgment. The swift will not be able to run; the strong will be impotent; the mighty will be trapped; the archers will be defeated; the cavalry overthrown. The heroes of Israel will flee, naked, from the field of battle.

Some Clear Applications:
We, like ancient Israel, have a corrupt judiciary. We frame iniquity with a law. Let us begin with some of the more obvious examples. We think that a man can put on a black robe, ascend to the bench, and redefine marriage. But while he is there, he might as well try to invent a new primary color. We think that a man can sanctify wholesale murder in the same way. Roe v. Wade, the milestone abortion decision from the early seventies, was itself a legal abortion, and was one of the most godless events in the history of our nation (and there have been many to choose from). May all those black-robed injustices (let us not call them justices) fall in repentance on the Rock of Christ. If they do not, then the Rock who is Christ will fall on them, and they would prefer to have the mountains fall on them.

Back in the sixties, they used to have a sign that read, “Make love, not war.” Now, thanks to the abortion decision, it is possible to do both. It is possible to be immoral and shed innocent blood. And take special note of how the godless love to parade around altars when they are doing this. It is no accident that most of our homo-battles have to do with altars—the consecration of bishops and priests, or the walk of a couple so-called grooms, or so-called brides toward an altar.

In response, do we remember God’s deliverances of our nation? No—and we are too sophisticated to identify with those who do remember them. We would rather be urbane and unfaithful than hokey and faithful. We don’t have to choose, but what if we did? Then be hokey.

Introduction:
As we work out way through the book of Amos, we have to remember the two great themes—the violence of oppressive cruelty and the abandonment of right worship. The prophet Amos requires us to reject all those who embrace either sin. These are the two great themes of this prophet of God.

The Text:
“Thus saith the LORD; For three transgressions of Damascus, and for four, I will not turn away [the punishment] thereof . . . ” (Amos 1:3-2:5).

Overview:
Remember that the prophet Amos speaks to us in sevens. We have here a series of denunciations, all of them voiced as “for three [sins] . . . and for four.” The fourth is the crowning sin, and the one at the center of the rebuke, but the three and the four together make seven. Moreover, before Amos gets to the nation of Israel (his central target), he takes a tour of the surrounding nations, seven of them. Each rebuke has a standard introduction. Each has a statement of that nation’s sin. Then there is a standardized pronouncement of coming judgment, all of them by fire—seven nations and seven fire judgments. And then each has some details of the Lord’s judgment on that nation. The nations are grouped in an a/a/b/b/c/c/d pattern—Damascus and Gaza together, Tyre and Edom, and Ammon and Moab, all crowned with the rebuke of Judah. These seven denunciations lead us to a 7 + 1 surprise—the eighth nation is Israel.

The Sins of the Seven Nations: 
What sins have these nations committed? First Damascus was guilty of cruelty in her warfare against Gilead (1:3- 5). The threshing sled is a picture of extreme and thorough cruelty in war. Gaza, and the other cities of the Philistines, are judged because their slave-trading with Edom (1: 6-8). Tyre was guilty of the same inhumane offense—selling slaves to Edom (1:9-10). Edom, descended from Esau, for his part kept a grudge for a long time and pursued his brother with a sword (1:11-12). Ammon, one of the nations descended from Lot, was guilty of gross cruelty in war for the sake of border expansion (1:13-15). Moab, descended from Lot through his other daughter, was guilty of descrating the bones of Edom’s king (2:1-3). And Judah, in the crowning sin, was guilty of apostasy away from the worship of the true God, forsaking His laws (2:4-5). Amos, like the God he represents was not playing favorites here. All these nations are denounced, some for sins they committed against others on the list, and some for sins they committed together with others on the list.

God of All Nations: 
One of the striking things about these rebukes is that Amos fully expects these heathen nations to conform to God’s standards. “We serve other gods” is no excuse; it is no defense. The God who will judge them for their sin doesn’t care. Idolatry would be a central part of the problem.

Remember two things about his. One is that in the Old Testament, Israel was called to be a priestly nation. This meant that Gentiles could worship and serve God acceptably without becoming Israelites. We see Melchizedek, and Jethro, and Namaan, and the inhabitants of Ninevah under the preaching of Jonah, and those Gentiles who came to the Temple in order to woship God in the court designated for them to worship in. Being a Gentile in the Old Testament was not exactly parallel to being a non-Christian today. The second point is that because in the gospel God has universalized Israel, and all who believe are to be made part of this priestly nation. Thus, to be a non- Christian today is parallel with being a rebellious Gentile in the Old. We can therefore speak with a comparable authority to all nations today—certainly with the Great Commission in force we cannot speak with less authority than did Amos.

Amos Speaks for God: :
When Amos comes against these nations, he does so in the name of the Lord. His rebukes show that he knows (for example) that Damascus sinned against Gilead (part of Israel) which does not prevent him from rebuking Israel later. Ammon sinned against Gilead too—does that mean that Amos is on “Israel’s side.” No, he is on God’s side. Amos does not rebuke Israel on the basis of Edomite scholarship, or rebuke Moab on the basis of Philistine newspaper editorials. He doesn’t rebuke America on the basis of Michael Moore’s lies, or defend America on the basis of Sean Hannity’s pom poms. Amos brings the authoritative law of the sovereign and holy God to bear.

Getting It Straight:
Judah should have thought of her relationship to God as that of belonging exclusively to Him. Instead they fell into the trap of believing that God belonged exclusively to them. Because of this, presumption they came to believe that they had the right to alter the worship that He required of them. “Their lies caused them to err” probably refers to their idols as lies. In the rhetorical pattern set up here, the seventh sin is the worst, the crowning sin. As awful as cruelty in war might be, as terrible as slave-trading is, as horrific as ripping open pregnant women is, the worst is to worship idols—that is, after all, the font that creates all the rest of the polluted water downstream. So right worship and mercy go together, and if you separate one from the other, you kill them both.

Corrupt Worship:
We have to fix this in our minds at the beginning because the book of Amos has long been used by leftist ideologues to justify their violent coercions. And the fact that it has been abused in this way by the envious left has often caused fat cats of various stripes to ignore the warnings that the prophet delivers to their doorstep. But this is like Ammon defending itself because the prophet rebuked Edom, or Edom defending itself because the prophet rebuked Gaza.
A curse on all socialists, soft leftists, bedwetters, hand-wringers, liberation theologians (whether black, brown, or white), Marxists, communists, or sojourners. They want justice without right worship, which means that they bring nothing but raw injustice, some of them wanting it in the name of Jesus. A pox on all money-grubbers, manipulators, riggers, fat cats, mammonphiles, imperious neocons, and greed monkeys. They want profits without right worship, which means that they are denying the God who alone gives us true affluence. When the gospel creates free men, then and only then will we have truly free markets.
What should we then do? How do we then live? To the law and to the testimony. Right worship is the tree. Mercy is one of the fruits necessarily produced by that tree. We cannot have the tree without the fruit, and we cannot have the fruit without the tree.

Introduction:
As God gives us the grace, we will now begin to work our way through the prophecy of Amos. Apart from what is revealed in his writing here, we know nothing about the man. Among the minor prophets, he occupies the vanguard in this period of Israel’s history, even though he is placed third in the canonical order.

The Text:
“The words of Amos, who was among the herdsmen 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” (Amos 1:1-2).

Overview:
Tekoa was about ten miles south of Jerusalem, and this small town in Judah is where Amos was from (v. 1). But Amos was a prophet to the northern kingdom of Israel, and so it was that he conducted that ministry as a satiric outsider. He prophesied two years before the earthquake, a notable event remembered in Zechariah 14:5. The most likely date for his ministry is between 760 and 755 B.C., right near the end of Jeroboam II’s reign. The earthquake serves as a great metaphor for Amos’ message of impending judgment. As mentioned at the first, Amos was a shepherd, and if there is anything that a shepherd dreads, it is the sound of a lion’s roar (v. 2). The Lord, who was Israel’s shepherd, had become Israel’s predator. In the prophecy of Amos, the Lord was roaring. Moreover, He was doing this from Zion, and His voice was from Jerusalem. That was where God had established His name, and yet the northern kingdom had established false worship at Dan and Bethel. As a result of God’s predation, the pastureland of Carmel was going to wither, and the habitations of the shepherds would wither.

A Host of Sevens:
Amos is from an obscure place because God loves to rebuke the sleek and fat of this world with those who are little in the eyes of the world (1 Cor. 4: 9). But Amos is far from being some kind of hick or cornpone. This is a book of magnificent poetic force, and the literary abilities exhibited by the prophet are considerable. He is no court flatterer, but his abilities are not at all beneath the task of rebuking a corrupt aristocracy. One of his favorite literary and structuring devices is that of the organizing power of seven. There are at least twenty-three places where Amos relies on the number seven to organize his material, which we will note as we go through the book. He asks seven rhetorical questions (3:3-6), there are seven empty rituals that Israel performs (5:21-23), there are seven plagues (4:6-11), seven verbs of exhortation (5:14-15), and so on. Moreover, the entire book is structured in a seven-fold chiasm.

The Great Themes:
The book of Amos is a book of rebuke and denunciation. According to Amos, the two great sins committed by Israel were, first, compromised and corrupt worship, and second, a resultant abuse of power. The same thing comes up in the book of James, a New Testament book with a strong similarity to the book of Amos.

What is pure and undefiled religion? The answer to that question is two-fold, not solitary. The famous part of the answer is to visit widows and orphans in their affliction (1:27). But James also says that pure and undefiled religion keeps itself “unspotted from the world”(v. 27).

It is not the case that good deeds stand alone. Good deeds cannot justify a sinner, as we all know (Eph. 2:8-9). But good deeds cannot even justify themselves. All true living flows from true worship. Any one who worships at Dan and Bethel will inevitably grind the poor. And any one who tries to implement a syncretistic alliance between Zion and Bethel will do the same. Wisdom says that all who hate her love death (Prov. 8:36).

This is why the great order of the day today is reformation of the Church, and restoration of true worship. This is not because we want to bottle true worship up to hide it from the world, but rather because we want to unspotted religion to be what visits the widow and the orphan. To skip over the question of right worship, discarding the question of immoralities and heresies, for the sake of the poor and oppressed, is extremely short-sighted. To say, as one evangelical leader (Jim Wallis) has done, that we should not be that concerned about sodomy in the church because we mustn’t get distracted by secondary issues when the question of global poverty is so pressing, is to fly in the face of the message of Amos. To argue this way is to assume that Amos would agree that so long as we quit grinding the poor, worship at Dan and Bethel are fine with God. It is to assume that it would be fine with James to be corrupted by the world so long as we visited widows and orphans. But not only is it not fine, we need to flip this around. So long as you worship at Dan and Bethel, no matter what you say, or how eloquently you say it, the poor are going to catch it. False worshippers always stand up for the poor the way that Judas did.

The Engine and Drive Train:
To say that worship is the center of everything, is not to say that worship is everything. In our worship of God, we have our names and identities established. Once we are named by God, we are then commissioned to go out into the world, and to represent Him there. One of the central tasks that God has assigned to the Church in this regard is the task of mercy ministry. But this is just like everything else we do. We worship God on the Lord’s Day. Everything else that we do—art, literature, education, business, politics, economics, and mercy ministry—must be connected to this worship. The drive train has to be connected to the engine, which is true and faithful worship.

Promise Fulfilled:
Amos is a fierce and biting book, and we need to be prepared for its message. We need to be ready to be convicted, prodded, encouraged, and rebuked. But the book drives inexorably toward a glorious conclusion, one where the promised salvation of God does come into the world. As we allow the unbending righteousness of God to speak to us, we must constantly fix our eyes on the promise fulfilled in Christ.