Rayburn gives us an impressive list of the things we can learn from the book of Amos...
- That God’s wrath and judgment is a reality in the world and it falls first and most severely on God’s house, the church;
- That there is a progression in unbelief, beginning with indifference to God’s Word;
- That there is a point of no return which unbelievers even in the church pass with their constant refusal to heed and answer God’s summons to repentance; and once having passed these people are dead even though they live;
- That divine wrath is revealed suddenly and ferociously over and over and over again in the history of the world and yet, nevertheless, it always surprises the unbeliever;
- That the poor are swept up in this judgment as well as the rich; and that in God’s holy judgment he remains forever no respecter of persons;
- That repentance consists not of feelings and experiences, but of the repudiation of one’s sin and the putting on of obedience before God because of one’s consciousness of the Lord, of his reality, of his presence, and the reality of salvation in him and him only.
In today's passage we also see that God will vindicate His faithful ministers who speak the truth just as surely as He will punish the false teachers and unfaithful ministers; you cannot rebel against God without impunity forever; you cannot mistake His patience to mean anything but the fact that He is delaying judgment, for it is surely coming; absolutely no guilty persons will escape unpunished; but that there will always be a remnant of genuine believers.
We are that remnant and we must live like we are.
The beginning of our John passage is not in the earliest manuscripts, but it is still faithful to the rest of the gospel. Jesus did not condemn the woman, but neither did He ignore or condone her sin. He stands ready to forgive any sin, but true repentance and confession means a change of heart which will bring with it a change in behaviour.
Tomorrow's Bible In a Year Passage passage: Ezekiel 1-2; John 8:28-59
3 comments:
Amos 9:2-4
2 “If they dig into Sheol,
from there shall my hand take them;
if they climb up to heaven,
from there I will bring them down.
3 If they hide themselves on the top of Carmel,
from there I will search them out and take them;
and if they hide from my sight at the bottom of the sea,
there I will command the serpent, and it shall bite them.
4 And if they go into captivity before their enemies,
there I will command the sword, and it shall kill them;
and I will fix my eyes upon them
for evil and not for good.”
There's no hiding from God, we either except His ways and live the way He wants, or we will suffer. He loves us enough to give us the freedom to make this choice.
Also amazed by the wisdom Jesus shows in how He handles the Pharisees when they try to stump Him publicly by bringing that women to Him to see what He'll say to her. Again He shows and says it's about saving not judging.
“And on that day,” declares the Lord God,
“I will make the sun go down at noon
and darken the earth in broad daylight.
God, who made the sun, has power over it. Sometimes I forget this. If God can make the sun go down at noon then nothing is too difficult for him. I need to have faith in that.
I always enjoy reading Jesus' response to the questions the Pharisees ask Him. Like Nathan said, they constantly try to corner Him, but His knowledge and understanding is beyond everyone's comprehension and it shows in his answers.
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