Amos 2:6 Thus saith the LORD; For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof
Years ago, I took a jeep trail in Northern Arizona to a place called Havasu Point. It is basically a peninsula that juts out into the middle of the Grand Canyon. It is a stark drop off from that narrow point on three sides. I have camped there twice with my dad and friends on different occasions. I remember one time it got to be nighttime as we were trying to find the spot where we had camped before. Ahead I saw some lights. I thought that maybe someone had gotten our camping spot. I started walking, and all of a sudden, the ground beneath my feet rolled gently and then very quickly went down into nothing. I realized that the lights I was looking at were not lights from a camping spot forty yards ahead of me, it was a camping spot one full mile across to the North Rim. I was perilously close to a void, but I did not know it. Maybe you have had the experience of waking up in the middle of the night and trying to find your way to the refrigerator or restroom and you stub your toe because you can’t see. We misperceive things when we live in the dark.
First John famously says “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all…If we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin.” So, we are to live in the light, yet so many times God’s people choose to live in the dark. Amos tells us that God is the one who would make the morning darkness because God’s people had been living in darkness. They were living in a place where light had become darkness to them.
Amos was a farmer, not a man of noble birth, yet he was God’s vessel to give God’s message to God’s wayward people. It was a message of judgment. He gives seven sins and seven nations. It begins in verse 3, “For three transgressions of Damascus, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof.” So, maybe this number seven is a picture of complete and full rebellion against God. God pronounces judgment against Damascus and Gaza, Tyre, Edom, Ammon, Moab, and His own people Judah. Amos 2:4 says, “Thus saith the LORD; For three transgressions of Judah, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof.”
The purpose of the book is found in verse 6. It is God’s judgment, not against these other nations and not even specifically against Judah, but against Israel, the northern tribes. It says, “Thus saith the LORD; for three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof.” God declares judgment on a people who had turned their backs on Him.
There are three things we misperceive when we don’t live in the light but in the dark. First, it is easy to think that other people are a justification instead of a warning. When God pronounced judgment on Damascus, Gaza, and even Judah, this was not a reason to justify Israel’s sin; it was a reason to realize that God will judge sin. If God would judge these others, then God will judge them. Sometimes we look at other people and say, “Hey, they are doing it. It must be okay.” If that is the lesson we are taking from the world, then we are truly blind, walking in the dark. We are misperceiving things. Others are warnings and not justifications.
Second, knowledge is responsibility and not power. We often think to ourselves that we know so much that it gives us power. We know what is right and wrong, therefore we have the ability to make good decisions, but knowledge is more responsibility than it is power. In Amos 2 God pronounces judgment on Judah and then he pronounced judgment on Israel. So, knowing about Judah didn’t help Israel unless Israel took to heart what God said about them and the judgment God would send on these other nations. So, it is great to know something, but really it is worse than knowing nothing if I don’t do something with the knowledge that I have. It is good to have Bible knowledge, but it is more important to have Bible obedience, to respond in submission to the truth God has given.
Finally, blessings are mercies and not deserts. They are not something we deserve. Amos 2:10 says, “Also I brought you up from the land of Egypt, and led you forty years through the wilderness, to possess the land of the Amorite.” Then he says in verse 11, “And I raised up of your sons for prophets.” God had done so much for Israel. It is easy to mistake the blessings we have for what we deserve and not realize it is of God’s mercies we are not consumed. His mercies are new every morning.
In Amos 3:2 God says to His people, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth: therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities.” God’s judgment was more tragic upon His own people than it was upon the pagan nations because God’s people had knowledge, and that was responsibility. They had the warning of others, but that wasn’t justification. They had blessings that were God’s mercies, not that which they deserved from God.
So, are you walking in the light today? Are you seeing things as they really are? May God help us to take the stories of others, nations or people, as lessons, not justifications. May God help us to take the knowledge that we have as a responsibility and not merely power. And may God help us to see the blessings of God as mercy and not as something we deserve.