Introduction
When we come to chapter seven of Amos, we shift from poetry to prose, from woe-oracles to narrative. The theme and the message are the same as throughout the rest of the book, but the form in which it comes is quite different. In the first six chapters, Yahweh has been the main speaker; now the main speaker is Amos himself.

The Text
“Thus hath the Lord God shewed unto me; and, behold . . .” (Amos 7:1-8:3).

Overview
In this section, there are four vision reports (7:1-3; 4-6; 7-9; 8:1-3). The first three vision reports are given, and then the flow is interrupted with a narrative of how Israel officially responded to the ministry of Amos, which was not well. After this, the last vision is given, and with a striking and ominous pun.

The first vision is that of a swarm of locusts which devasates Israel. Amos is appalled and intercedes, and so the Lord relents (vv. 1-3). The second vision is that of a great fire that completely parches everything. Amos intercedes again, and again the Lord repents (vv. 4-6). The third vision comes, which is that of the Lord standing on a wall holding a plumbline (vv. 7-9). The Lord is the Lord, Israel is the tilting wall, and Amos is the plumbline. The Lord will relent no longer—that wall has to come down. The high places will be made desolate.

After the first three visions, Amaziah, priest at Bethel, tries to rid himself of Amos. First, he tries to get the king to take action, accusing Amos of sedition and conspiracy (vv. 10-11). That doesn’t work, and so Amaziah turns to cunning. Go home and prophesy there (v. 12). But stop prophesying in Bethel, for it is the king’s chapel and court (v. 13). Amos refuses because it was not his idea to become a prophet (vv. 14-15). And then, Amos makes it even more personal, prophesying straight back at Amaziah, and with full consciousness of what he is doing (v. 16). Thus saith the Lord: your wife will become a whore in the city, your sons and daughters will be slaughtered by the sword, your land parceled out, you will die in a polluted land and Israel will go into exile (v. 17). You thought the land could not bear up under my words before?

Then Amos is shown the fourth vision, a basket of ripe fruit (8:1). There is a close pun between this summer fruit, w hich represent harvest judgment, and the word for end, which God uses in v. 2, promising that He will not relent as He did in the first two visions. No more. The end will come. The word for summer fruit is qayis, and the word for end is qes. At the end the music of the temple will be turned into howling. There will be dead bodies everywhere, and there will be silence.

For He is Small
In the first two visions, Amos takes up a prayer on Israel’s behalf, but note carefully how he pleads. He says, twice, that God should relent because Jacob is small (vv. 2,5). But Israel has incurred judgment precisely because she does not know this, or has forgotten it. Throughout this book, Israel has been preening herself over her wealth, her privilege, her status, her security. But Amos sees how vulnerable she is and pleads that way—Lord God, Jacob is small. “Lord God of hosts, have mercy on the United States for we are tiny.” The fact that such a plea would stick in our throats reveals a large part of our problem—the same, incidentally, as Israel’s.

Blood and Lies
The enemy of our souls hates us, and consistently deploys two weapons against us. The first is overt persecution. Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, takes a quote from Amos and sends it off to Jeroboam II, accusing Amos of disturbing the peace with his conspiracy, his sedition, his lack of decent patriotism. The land is not able to bear up underneath his hate crimes. Amos prophesies jagged things; he does not know how to get along at court, or in ecclesiastical palaces, which everyone knows is by prophesying smooth things. From what we can see in the text, this didn’t work—Jeroboam doesn’t do anything.

So Amaziah moves on to lies. Many Christians who would be valiant in the face of an open threat, straight up the middle, are far too gullible when it comes to the cunning of our adversary. “Thus and so.” “Really?” What lies does Amaziah, priest of Bethel, try to pass off on to Amos? This is quite apart from the lie he told the king about Amos. The prophet was not being seditious by calling the king and the nation to repentance. If that is sedition, then the gospel is always sedition. And, of course, apart from repentance, it is understood to be sedition. But the statement that the land could not bear Amos’ words was a straight-up lie. What the land really couldn’t bear was the coming judgment fromGod.

The five lies of Amaziah to Amos were these: First, he tells him to go, as if he were at liberty to go (v. 12). Second, he tells him to flee, as though the only way to protect himself from harm was by running away (v. 12). Third, he tells him that he will have a good living at home in Judah. There he can eat his bread safely (v. 12), and make a decent living. Fourth, Azariah was a decent king in Judah and so prophets of Yahweh are welcome there, and can prophesy there, with emphasis on the there. If Amos says that he must be a prophet, then the reply is that he can be a prophet someplace else. Amaziah even calls Amos a seer, granting the point of his office. But not a seer for these parts. And fifth, whatever you do, don’t prophesy in Bethel because this is a religious establishment that answers to the king (v. 13). It is not surprising that kings love to meddle with the Church. What is surprising is that the Church sometimes loves this as well.

For the Healing of the Nations
Throughout this book, we have been hammering at the two central problems that Israel had—corrupt worship and a high-handed opulence that was grinding the poor. You always become like the god you worship (Ps. 115), and so if you worship a calf made of gold, you will become hard, cold and metallic yourself, not to mention deaf, dumb and blind.
But you do not avoid false worship by “avoiding false worship.” You can only avoid false worship by worshipping God in spirit and in truth. The water for the healing of the nations (which includes the healing of their economic woes) is water which flows over the threshold of the new temple, and it gets deeper and deeper. And so again, with these two elements, we must guard against two errors. One says that the “important thing here is water,” and so we shouldn’t mind if it flows from Bethel, Dan, Gilgal, and Jerusalem. The other says that we have to keep the water pure and holy, so we dam it up behind the walls of Jerusalem.

Introduction:
In this passage, we begin part way through chapter five, and continue on through the entirety of chapter six. Amos eloquently continues to hammer away at the two things that turn God’s stomach—false worship and an opulent, violent stupidity.

The Text:
“Woe unto you that desire the day of the LORD! . . .” (Amos 5:18-6:14).

Structure and Overview of the Text:
Amos continues his prophetic denunciation of Israel in his characteristic fashion—a seven part chiasm, with a sevenfold woe at the center of it.

a. disaster is approaching (5:18-20)
b. things Yahweh hates (5:21-24). God despises their worship activity.

c. threat of exile—glh, pun on Gilgal (5:25-27)
d. a woe is declared for seven kinds of sin (6:1-6).c’. threat of exile—glh, pun on Gilgal (6:7)
b’. things Yahweh hates (6:8-10). God detests the pride of Jacob

a’. approaching disaster (6:11-14)

 

The false teaching at the false center of worship was that the day of the Lord would be good for them (v. 18). But Amos says that the day would be filled with bad surprises (vv. 19-20). Relief will bring no relief. God detests their cultic worship (v. 21). He can’t stand their sacrifices (v. 22). He has had it with their music ministry (v. 23). Rather, He wants judgment and righteousness like a river, a mighty river (v. 24). Israel struggled with this problem from the very beginning, from the time in the wilderness (vv. 25-26), as Stephen notes when he quotes this passage (Acts 7:38- 43). The result will be exile (v. 27).

The heart of the chiasm is the seven-fold woe—coming down on those who are, first, at ease in Zion and Samaria (6:1); second, who kid themselves about the evil day (v. 3); third, who sprawl on luxury furniture (v. 4); fourth, who eat luxury meats (v. 4); fifth, who jam on instruments like they were David (v. 5); sixth, who slam down wine from punch bowls (v. 6); seventh, who anoint themselves with refined oil (v. 6). They do all this not grieved for the affliction of Joseph. Their problem was a moral stupidity that amounted to insanity.

They were to be led off into captivity (v. 7). God swears by Himself that He hates the pride of their palaces (v. 8). Even the few survivors will die (v. 9). A relative will come to bury them and will ask if any lived (v. 10). The answer is no, and they will be told not even to mention the Lord, a far cry from how we began this—with hypocrites desiring the day of the Lord (5:18). God is going to level the whole thing—the great houses and the little ones (v. 11). Rich and poor together will all be destroyed. The perversion of Israel’s justice into poisonous wormword is like running horses on rock and plowing the ocean with oxen (v. 12). So the lunacy of those who vaunt themselves over a bunch of nothing (v. 13). But God will raise up a nation against them, and Israel will be afflicted (v. 14).

Two Problems With Their Wealth:
This passage repeats and highlights one of the problems with Israel’s wealthy elite, and brings out another. The first problem is that they used the vulnerability of others to gain their wealth. We see this in the great statement of 5:24—judgment and righteousness need to flow as a river. This ruling elite “put away the evil day” and caused the “seat” (or throne) of “violence” to come near (6:3). They were getting their wealth from rip offs.

The second problem was their enjoyment of luxuries in a time and place where it was not fitting. When they should have been grieved for the affliction of Joseph (6:6), they instead gave themselves over to ostentatious and violent self-indulgence. The context determined the sin—we cannot condemn ivory beds per se, not unless in the next breath we also condemn couches, veal, musical instruments, wine, and anointing oil.

From the Wilderness On:
In Stephen’s trial, he defends himself with a long recital of Israel’s history, and he quotes and paraphrases from the Septuagint version of Amos, which causes some of the different readings. The gist, however, is the same. The people of Israel worshipped the golden calf made by Aaron (Acts 7:40-41). God gave them over to worship the tabernacle of Moloch and the star of the god Remphan, with the resultant exile past Babylon (vv. 42-43). From the Hebrew text we have Moloch and Chiun, and exile past Damascus (5:26). The ancient prophets used to regularly misspell the names of idols as a way of taunting them, which is possibly how Chiun gradually became Remphan over the centuries. In 6:13, Amos deliberately misspells the name of the first of the towns reconquered in the TransJordan (2 Kings 14:28) so that it means “nothing.” According to ancient Mesopotamian texts, Chiun is another name for the planet Saturn. And Stephen rebukes their worship of the host of heaven, so this fits.

Acceptable Worship:
Although there is one reference to Zion here (6:1), Amos is assaulting a system of false worship, deliberately set up to compete with and supplant the true worship that God required in Jerusalem. Worship at Zion could be corrupted as well, but worship at Bethel, Dan, and Gilgal was corrupt of necessity.

Worship is a big deal. Our God is a consuming fire, and so we must worship Him with reverence and godly fear (Heb. 12: 28-29). If God hates going to particular kinds of worship services, we have no business wanting to go. If God refuses to go, then why do we agree to go?

Because the children of Israel were prancing around with images, and had been doing so from the forty years in the wilderness on down, God was sick of them. They had images of false gods (Moloch and Saturn), and they had false images of the true God (golden calves as Aaron would have construed them). It does no good, incidentally, to try to make a distinction between images and idols because the word used here is images (5:26). We are not to bow down to any likeness. When worship is false this way, God hates it. When worship is false like this, God can’t stand the feast days, the solemn assemblies, the sacrificial offerings, the vocal music, or the instrumental music. He hates all of it, and the better it is, the worse it is. We are engaged in trying to recover the dignity of liturgical worship, and so if there is anyone who needs to keep this kind of thing in mind, it would be us.

Introduction:
In this next section, we are going to have to follow the way Amos arranged the unit, which, although it starts at verse 1, does not match the chapter divisions (vv. 1-17). This section is a chiasm, and again, not surprisingly, it is seven-fold.

The Text:
“Hear ye this word which I take up against you, [even] a lamentation, O house of Israel . . .” (Amos 5:1-17).

Structure and Overview of the Text: 
Amos begins this word has he has the previous two (3:1; 4:1), with the exhortation that the rebellious house of Israel needs to hear (v. 1).

a lamentation over the fall of Israel (vv. 1-3)
b call for repentance (vv. 4-6a). Amos tells Israel to seek and to live. He uses seven verbs in this exhortation.

c condemnation of injustice (vv. 6b-7)
d Yahweh His name! And on either side of this statement is a hymn to God’s power (vv. 8-9).

c’ condemnation of injustice (vv. 10-13)
b’ call for repentance (vv/ 14-15). Amos tells Israel to seek and to live. And again he uses seven verbs.

a’ coming lamentation (vv. 16-17)

So the center of this word is the nature and character of God. Hear the lamentation, O Israel (v. 1). The virgin Israel is fallen (v. 2). Their fate will be terrible—a reverse decimation (v. 3). God’s appeal to Israel is simple: seek God and live (v. 4). The corollary also follows—if Israel seeks God, then they will not seek Bethel, Gilgal, or Beersheba (v. 5). These false shrines will fail. Seek God and live (v. 6). A condemning fire is coming (v. 6), and will fall on those who pervert justice in the courts (v. 7). The first part of the hymn declares the power of God over the stars, day and night, and the oceans (v. 8). Yahweh is His name (v. 8b). The second part of the hymn is to the God who strengthens the victim (v. 9). Amos then condemns the injustice of those “justices”who hate the prophet and the preacher because they want to sin with a free hand (v. 10). They walk on the poor, but God sees it (v. 11). They rip off the poor in court, and God knows it (v. 12). Because they don’t like being rebuked, they charge the prudent with hate and thought crimes if they say anything (v. 13). Amos returns to his call for repentance—seek good and live (v. 14). Hate evil and love good (v. 15). Establish justice in the gate, and perhaps God will relent (v. 15). But that is not going to happen, and so lamentation is coming (vv. 16-17).

Bethel and Gilgal:
The theme of Amos is not the oppression of the poor by the rich. This is not a class warfare thing—all the oppressed in Samaria who are being mistreated by these fat cat scoundrels are also going to be destroyed by the Assyrians (v. 3). There is no liberation theology here, but there is justice as God defines it. The theme of this book is not the oppression of the poor by the rich—it is the oppression of the poor by the fat cat false worshippers. Bethel is mentioned seven times in Amos. He brings this issue of worship up again and again. The two Hebrew words for exile have g and l as the root, just like Gilgal, and so Amos puns their judgment. And Beth-el, House of God, is rejected as Beth-aven, House of Worthless Idolatry.

Seek, Live:
God invites Israel to seek Him and live (v. 4). Seek and live. The flip side of this is found in the next verse. Seek idols and die. Seek the right God under the wrong golden and calf-like forms and die (v. 5). But the exhoration is repeated again. Seek the Lord and live (v. 6). This is also emphasized by the chiasm—seek good, not evil, that you might live (v. 14). If America is to be pulled back from our idolatrous slow-motion disaster, then we will need to seek Him in order to live. It will not be sufficient if all Americans seek Him in the cubby-holes of their own hearts, while refusing to admit publicly what they are doing. No Savior, no salvation. No Jesus, no way.

Hate, Love:
The perverted justices hate any kind of challenge in the gate (v. 10), and so the prudent are threatened and kept in check (v. 13). This is described as an evil time. And so the prudent are stirred up—don’t let them dictate to you what you can say. Seek good, not evil (v. 14), and if you do then God will be with you. That means there is nothing to fear—not even a Canadian human rights commission. When God is with you, you are charged to hate evil and love good, and do so outside the recesses of your heart. We are charged to hate evil in the court system, and to love good in the court system—in the gate (v. 15). Ancient courts were held behind the city gates, and in rooms and alcoves in the region of the gate.

Yahweh His Name!:
Although Amos is concerned with the false worship established in the northern kingdom, Scripture elsewhere addresses the issue of iniquity trying to co-exist with “true” worship. So the problem of Bethel and Dan is not solved simply by heading south to Jerusalem. Remember, the Lord Jesus fiercely denounced the worship that was occurring there. Reformation is not accomplished in that way.

True worship is what occurs when we come to worship God, with all the externals established in true obedience, and all the internals lined up to match. Clean the inside of the cup, the Lord said, but He did not say that the outside was irrelevant. He said that then the outside would be clean also.

So who is the Lord, that we may worship Him? He is not to be trifled with, and He cannot be tied up with worthless interpretations of the First Amendment, or bottom-line profit and loss statements, or progressive tax policies. He is the Lord. He spoke the seven starts of the Pleiades into existence, and He holds Orion in the palm of His hand—and out there in the galaxies, they have never even heard of Justice Souter.

We worship the God of the galaxies, the God of day and night, the God of oceans and rain, and the God who rises up to defend the downcast.

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.