Amos 4:6 And I also have given you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and want to bread in all your places: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the LORD
All of us have probably endured days when we think to ourselves, “Yep, Mom said there would be days like this.” There is pain in everyone’s life. Maybe you sleep on a hard mattress, toss and turn, and cannot get sleep. It is just a miserable mattress, and if you are not happy in sleep, it is hard to be happy when you are awake. Maybe you just can’t see anymore and you are tired of not being able to see. You bump into things and think, “I remember when I could see clearly.”
There are sorrows in life, but a lot of times sorrows are voluntary. In the case of the mattress, it may be a good use of money to get a mattress on which you can actually sleep. When it comes to not being able to see, maybe you should go to the eye doctor and get some glasses with the prescription that you need. Miseries are sometimes fixable. They are voluntary miseries.
A lot of our profound misery in life is voluntary. I think about sin in particular. The sorrow of sin is voluntary. Amos was a prophet who was speaking to God’s people. He had two sides to his message. One was “you have not returned to God” and the other was “seek God and live.” What becomes abundantly obvious is that the sorrow of sin is voluntary. In Amos 2:10 God basically says, “I brought you out of Egypt. I brought you into a new land. I brought you out.” Yet, in their hearts they were turning back to Egypt throughout much of their history.
In Amos 4:6 God says, “And I also have given you cleanness of teeth in all your cities.” That means drought. It continues, “And want of bread in all your places: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the LORD.” That is a refrain you find quite a few times in Amos 4, “Yet ye have not returned unto me.” God had sent judgment and pain, yet they did not return to Him.
God did not send judgment because He hated them. God sent judgment precisely because He loved His people and was chastening them like a loving parent chastens a child to bring them to a place of safety and security. God kept sending chastisement and they just ignored it. Amos 5:2 says of them that they were forsaken. It was not that God chose to forsake them, but they chose to forsake God, so they were forsaken. “You have not returned unto me.”
Amos 5:4 demonstrates the refrain of this chapter which is “seek ye me, and ye shall live.” So, you have not returned to me, and if you will seek me, you will live. Verse 14 says, “That ye may live.” Verse 15 says, “It may be that the LORD God of hosts will be gracious.” God of hosts is a God of power, armies, and vengeance, yet if they returned to Him, He would return to them.
Verse 26 says, referring to the worship of false gods, “Which ye made to yourselves.” The whole point is that all of this misery was voluntary. The sorrow of sin is voluntary. They ignored God’s chastening in chapter 4. They closed their eyes to God and to life in chapter 5. They made choices. All of us make choices. God says in the last verse of chapter 5, “Therefore will I cause you to go into captivity.” So, God does not enjoy chastening His own. He enjoys fellowship, and you can to. The sorrow of sin is voluntary, but so is fellowship with God.