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Devotional thoughts (Monday through Thursday mornings) from the pastor of Exeter Presbyterian Church in Exeter, NH // Sunday Worship 10:30am // 73 Winter Street

Monday, September 22, 2008

Amos 9

When the Lord has been warning His people for many centuries regarding the consequences for covenant disobedience, eventually the end must come. When anything of great consequence happens among the affairs of nations, some leader with authority must give the go-ahead word that sets things in motion in such a way that they cannot be turned back. Here that Word finally comes from the Lord. By His command the very capitals that hold up the structure of His building Israel shall be brought down, and judgment shall fall on the heads of His people.

When the Lord speaks that Word, there is no way for Israel to escape. There is no place to hide, no safety, no refuge, for God is determined to bring upon them the evil that they deserve. Who is it that has turned against them? It is the One who has sovereign power over the earth and over all its inhabitants. It is not simply Assyria with all her great armies. It is the One who rules the waters of the sea, the One who bears the great Name of “I am.”

What is Israel to this God when such a word of death is uttered? On one hand, she would seem to be like just one among many nations of the earth. He speaks of her as He speaks of the Philistines and the Syrians. Yet we find in the closing verses of this book that such an assessment is only for a moment. Even as the word of destruction is uttered by the Lord, we hear this mercy on His lips, “I will not utterly destroy the house of Jacob.” Many will die by the sword, many who have proudly insisted that they would not face disaster, yet that disaster will not be the end of the story of God’s eternal love for His people.

God speaks of another day coming in the future, a day that he simply calls “that day.” In that day He will raise up the booth of David. These words are quoted many centuries later by the half-brother of Jesus and a leader of the church in Jerusalem, James. In Acts 15 at a very critical juncture in the life of the New Testament church, James turns to the Old Testament Scriptures to show how Amos had written about the inclusion of Gentiles in the people of God.

A royal descendant of David, Jesus, the true King of the Jews, had fallen in death, but God had raised Him up to immortality, that He might be the fulfillment of the Lord’s promises to David, and therefore to all the Israel of God. It would not be enough for Him to bring salvation to the Lord’s chosen remnant from Israel and Judah. He would also possess a remnant from all the nations called by the Name of God. It would not even be necessary for those Gentiles to become Jews through circumcision in order to be numbered among the people of resurrection life. They would remain uncircumcised, and thus fulfill the prophecy of Amos 9:12 that they would yet by Gentiles, people of the nations, rather than converts to Judaism marked by circumcision.

This Jesus would bring in a whole new order in His day. He would be the firstfruits of a resurrection age. That age would be glorious. It would be a day of such bounty that the harvest of good things from the renewed land would be continually breaking forth, as if the farmer bringing in the crops would overtake those sowing the seed for the next harvest. The mountains of that transformed earth would drip wine, and would fulfill the longings of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and all Israel for a land flowing with milk and honey.

The Lord would bring into being a new Israel, an Israel so different from the people of the northern kingdom in the days of Amos, an Israel composed of Jews and Gentiles gathered in the Name of the resurrected Son of David, and saved by the blood of that Passover Lamb. They would be given a better land than Canaan of old, and that better land would never be taken from them, nor would they be uprooted by any foreign power ever again.

This is how the book of Amos closes. There is no changing the fact that the Assyrians would come. They would bring with them the devastating judgment of God against the people of the northern tribes. Sin must be punished. The loss of the nation of Israel would not be nearly enough to satisfy the justice of God. The capitals of God’s righteous wrath would come down upon our Savior on the cross for our salvation. Descendants of the Israelites who rejected Amos would yet come to Christ in a future day, and they would be joined together with Gentiles into a new Israel that would be a great worldwide reality. The world that would eventually be their home would be as new and fresh as their own resurrection bodies, made after the likeness of their Messiah King.

We still have the hope of this prophetic Word today, a Word that has proven to be most sure through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The reality of the final promise of this book is grounded in the fact of the resurrection of our Lord. We feed our souls today with the news of the coming kingdom, and we turn to God in our day of trouble and opportunity, asking the Lord for the complete fulfillment of this good promise from the close of this book every time we pray, “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

posted by Pastor Magee @ 6:00 AM

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