Amos 4:4-5 Come to Bethel, and transgress; at Gilgal multiply transgression; and bring your sacrifices every morning… This entire prophecy is one of denunciation. Only once or twice is there even hinted the possibility of better things, and only at the very close, like a gleam of sunset glory at the end of a day of gloom, is the full promise given of a restoration of Israel to goodness and to glory. The prophecies against the six enemies of the chosen people and against Judah, with which the book begins, are only preparatory to the full description of the sin of Israel and the punishment which is to come upon its people. Israel, so far as it is like the nations that know not God, is exposed to the same judgments as they. I. THE PROPHECY IS ADDRESSED TO THOSE WHO ABUSE THEIR PRIVILEGES. Israel was the chosen people, having the oracles of God. They knew the spiritual being and holy character of Jehovah. They had entered into covenant with Him. They had been taught both how to worship Him and how to please Him in their lives. And yet they did not walk as children of the light. They sinned even in their worship. The shrines at Bethel and at Gilgal were the centres of a mingled idolatry and Jehovah-worship. Though they brought sacrifices every morning and tithed their increase or possessions every three days, though they offered not only unleavened bread, but the leavened also, though they encouraged one another to multiply their free-will offerings; however much they might increase their devotion to such religious forms as pleased them, all this was only the increase of their sin, according to the taunting exhortation of the prophet. Mere religiousness never will save a people or a person. External forms grow more rigid when the life has gone out of them, and so announce the loss. To worship the Lord and serve our own gods is the height of impiety. The calf-worship was worse than Baal-worship, because it was a mare conscious defiance of Jehovah. Israel was a prospered people. These days of Jeroboam II. were at the very summit of its prosperity. The northern kingdom extended to the limits reached under Solomon. Damascus was taken; Moab was reconquered; Israel was powerful and rich. But Israel, instead of making of this richness a very garden of the Lord, suffered all the weeds to grow out of it which so easily find root in such a soil. The sins which mark prosperity are the sins of the prosperous classes. Those who were high in position and rich in possessions in Israel were indulgent toward themselves and oppressive toward the poor. Nations and men need to be warned in their prosperity. It is not easy to tell the truth to the rich and the high. It takes the sense of a prophetic mission to give one courage so to do. Let us beware! What prophet has a message for us like that of Amos the herdsman from Judah for court and priest and people of Israel? Prophets enough, but how many, alas, with no message from the Lord! Our ears are filled with the teachings of political economists contradicting and confounding one another. The air is strident with the harsh cries of the false prophets of materialism. II. THE PROPHECY IS ADDRESSED TO THOSE WHO NEGLECT THE DISCIPLINE OF ADVERSITY. Israel had had its share of that. Jehovah could not vindicate His Fatherhood unless He corrected the faults of His children by reproof and punishment as well as by the encouragement of prosperity and the stimulus of opportunity. By a famine of food and a famine of water, by a failure of crops, by the scourge of pestilence, by general destruction brought upon them in many ways He had sought to rouse the thoughts of His people and to turn their attention to their evil ways. But it had all been to no purpose. "Yet have ye not returned unto Me, saith the Lord." When all the discipline which the wise father has been able to devise has failed, his heart is sad and disappointed. We have heard a great deal about probation in the pulpits of the past and in the theological discussions of the present. And yet the term and thought are often misused and distorted. We are not set out upon this earthly life that God may put us through its various experiences to see what is in us, as though He were an assayer to whom each human life was brought that He might determine its value and use by an application of the most efficient tests. We are God's children in our Father's house, and He is trying to educate and discipline us for our proper place and part in the home life as we come to our maturity. We must learn self-restraint and submission to others; we must grow into fuller sympathy with His ways and plans. All this is discipline, not probation. It is education, not testing. True, it does all test us, but in no peculiar sense. Everything tests us. Each command and each caress equally, by the response which it elicits, shows our quality and fibre. But you neither kiss your child nor send him on an errand to test him. But there comes a time, where all has been done that love and wisdom can devise, when the father says, and the mother sits by consenting through sorrow too deep for tears and moans, "We have done all that we can for him. He abuses all his privileges and misuses all his opportunities. He profits nothing by the consequences of his evil doing or by the punishments we have inflicted. We are only making him worse by trying to help him. We have done all that we can do, 'yet he has not returned unto us.'" That is just the case with the mass of the people, both of Israel and of our time and nation. III. THE PROPHECY IS ADDRESSED TO THOSE WHO HAVE STILL AN OPPORTUNITY TO RETURN. The language of the prophet is stern and severe, and yet it is not an unrelenting severity, nor the sternness of a final sentence. There is this contrast between the threats against the Gentile nations and those spoken to Israel. Nothing is said of a relenting there, but here it is always implied or expressed. The threat against the chosen people is all the more severe by reason of its vagueness: "Thus will I do unto thee, O Israel"; as though could not bear to put into words the terrible things which He foresaw would become necessary. But the threat is relieved by the command which has in it both the elements of terror and of comfort: "Prepare to meet thy God, O Israel!" There could be no escape from that encounter. But there was yet time and opportunity for them to make the needed preparation for that meeting. It could not be a preparation to meet their doom which they were bidden to make. It could only be a making ready by penitence and amendment of their lives to meet their God without fear that they might receive His pardon and be restored to His favour. Indeed, the very announcement of a purpose to punish implies a possibility of averting the threatened wrath. The thunderbolts of God are to arouse the attention of the rebellious ones, and the flashes of His lightning show the path which leads to Him. Yes, one more opportunity is given to every one to whom either the threatening of the law or the invitation of the Gospel comes; to every one to whom at least it has a meaning. Law and grace are but the two hands of love. It behoves the men of the nineteenth century, whether they are in the enjoyment of proud prosperity or in the endurance of humbling discipline, to remember that the purpose of both is to draw or drive them back to God. (George M. Boynton.) Parallel Verses KJV: Come to Bethel, and transgress; at Gilgal multiply transgression; and bring your sacrifices every morning, and your tithes after three years: |
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