Amos 8:1-12 - The Great and Fearful Day of the Lord

Amos 8:1-12
The Great and Fearful Day of the Lord

The sun is shining through the artistically colored windows. The worship team is at its prime. The people are all dressed in their Sunday best poised and ready for worship. They are standing tall, faces up lifted toward the sky as the music is about to begin. There is a quiet reverence in the sanctuary. It seems as if nobody is shuffling, nobody is restless, and everyone is focused on the song they are all about to sing. Even the dust gently drifting in the luminously colored beams of light filling the sanctuary seems Holy. The voices raises the chorus begins but God can not hear the words of song because of the chaotic din. The man on the third row is wondering if he can nonchalantly slip his cell phone out of his pocket. He is positive that the service started a few minutes late, will that mean it will run a little late, will he be able to make it downtown in time if the service is 5-10 minutes over. Why did he sit on the third row? He can’t sneak out toward the end everyone will see him. He stands looking up at the screening singing the words. His face looks focused; by all appearances he is engrossed in worship. There a woman toward the back on the right. She is smartly dressed; her hair is neatly pulled back. She is the picture of modesty and propriety, but as she sings she begins to wonder if she can get away with cutting Amelia’s pay, she just can not afford to pay that woman as much as she is getting paid. Perhaps, she can tell Amelia that the work she did this last time around was just not up to par. Sure she knows that Amelia works herself to the bone and really does a fine job but sometimes you just have to pay someone a little bit less. She can tell Amelia that the seams were just not right that she was just not as happy and then simply give her 20% less than the agreed upon price for the garment. It will be ok, Amelia will find a way to make up for it somehow, I bet she over charges some of her customers anyway.
As the song proceeds the din grows louder and louder. God looks down on the people, hands over ears waiting, waiting for the noise to stop, waiting for the din to die down but the service seems to go on and on the raucous get louder and louder and finally something has to be done. It is at this point that Amos (the tree farmer and sheep herder) shakes his head once again wondering why God can’t give him something pleasant to say to these people, he steps out of his anonymous place in the pew into the aisle and raises his voice above the melodious strains of pious worship and says, “This is what the Lord God [just] showed me. . .”
God can not hear the worship. The worship is pointless the worship is useless the worship is not worship, when over laid with the din of unworshipful attitudes which fill the sanctuary. God wants to mourn, God wants to wail, this is an outrage this is deplorable. God will turn their empty songs in to wailing, their hollow praise into mourning. If they want the festive worship over so they can get on with business, God will put a stop top the festivities.
Israel is a basket of over ripe the fruit the last of the harvest taken in. It is past its prime the bananas are getting a little brown the peaches are soft and the apples would probably be a bit mealy when bitten into but it is worse than that. They are not merely over ripe they are rotten, more than a little past their prime those bananas are so far gone they can’t even be frozen and turned in to bread, best just throw them out and wait until next year there is nothing good left from this harvest.
God is a little more than fed up with the people of Israel at this point. When it comes time for the festive observances which God had set up for them, they are not grateful for the break from the routine, they are not joyful in the celebration of how God had provided for them once again, they are not enraptured and engrossed in worship of their God who lovingly and faithful takes care of them in season and out of season. Instead they can’t wait to get back to business. They can’t wait to get back to their shops and to their markets they can not wait to get back to work. Not because they need the money and every moment they are spending away from their labours is resulting in not being able to earn the money they need to survive but because they want to get back to business practices which are just a little on the “shady side” to say the least. They are selling their harvests with bushel baskets which are too small. They are doing business with falsely weighted scales which are in their favor. Not only are they dishonest in their practices but they are cheating the poor and robbing the needy of their due. God had set up a system by which no one in Israel would go hungry and in their practices they are sweeping up every last grain so they can sell it with their dishonest weights and their small bushel baskets, but they were forbidden by God to sell the sweepings. They were not allow to go back through the field and harvest what they missed they were not allowed to take a broom to the threshing floor and pick up every last grain they were to leave this to those who had fallen on hard times they were to leave the leftovers for the poor and they needy so they could come and pick up the scraps which were over looked. But they were not doing this; they were picking every last head of grain and picking up every last wheat berry so that they could turn the most profit while the most vulnerable in their nation starved to death at on their doorsteps searching for the food which was rightfully theirs by law. They are not respecting each other and in doing so they are not respecting God.
God says they are like over ripe fruit. They look good on the outside but at the core, in the center of their beings they are rotten, rotten to the core. They might look righteous, they may beautiful but they are evil they are ugly. And God is tire of it. God can not stand to look at them any more. God can not stand to have them singing in the sanctuary. God is going to turn their singing into mourning and their songs into lamentations. God is mourning, God is lamenting it is high time that the people joined their God in this respect. They are going about their sinful lives, going living daily in the muck and the mire of their sin, pretending to be righteously dressed, pious minded people but they are really clothed garment they stole from the poor and their minds are continually on who and how they can cheat next, to get just a little more ahead.
God can not stand idly by while the poor are starving to death and the needy are trampled under foot. But this is not where God’s ire ends. Even as the people are cheating and stealing longing for the Sabbath to be over so they can cheat and steal some more they are full of pride. They seem themselves in a distorted mirror and instead of seeing who they really are, ugly, evil and rotting from the inside out, they find pride in what they see, believing themselves to be examples of piety, pillars of righteousness. They are a diva preening in the mirror seeing how beautiful she is proud of her long silky hair and her exquisite clothes who then turns from the mirror and lashes out at those she sees as her servants slaughtering them with her poison tongue and reducing them to piles of ash with her belittling triads. The beauty is really only found in the mirror because the person in the room is as ugly as can be. They are prideful in how they worship, they are prideful in their prosperity, and they are prideful of the peace they have brought to the nation. Their pride exceeds reality and so God says, that God will swear by their pride.
You must know at this point, that they believed that, you could not swear by something that is lesser than you. They believed you could only swear by something greater than yourself, so normally when God swore God swore by God’s self, since there was nothing greater than God. But here in this passage God, with tongue in cheek, swears by the pride of Jacob, Jacob being a representation of the people of Israel. God is telling them that their pride has gotten so big that even God can swear by it now.
God says, I am coming and I am going to set things right. In verse 9 God says, “On that day,” and in verse 11, “the time is surely coming.” If you were just reading this you might just over look these phrases or you might stop and wonder to yourself, ‘on what day?,” or “what time?” And you would be right in wondering because these were phrases which meant something to the people hearing them. “That day,” and the “time” which “is surely coming” is what Israel knew as the “Great and terrible day of the Lord,” often shortened to “The day of the Lord,” or even more simply, “that day.” This is the day when God will set all things right, the day when God will right all wrongs, the day when the evil will suffer and the righteous will be lifted up. This is a great day if you are righteous, if you are one of the ones who had been wronged. BUT, if you are the wrong which needs to be righted; if you the one doing evil, well then it is a terrible day; a day of which you should live in fear. And far too many in Israel at this time are on the wrong side of this day and God says it is coming. The day of the Lord is coming and they had better be ready for it, because they are lying and cheating and stealing and God is going to set them right and it ain’t going to be pretty and it ain’t going to be nice. It will be, for them, a day filled with mourning and lamentations. It will not be a day to which they will look forward. It will be a day to avoid; a day to push off as long as possible. But God says it is coming and you had better be ready.
Amos is standing up in the temple of the Lord and telling the people there who have gathered before God to worship, that their worship is worthless, their praise is empty. They might as well go home and prepare for the day of the Lord, because this is not what God called for them to do.
We gather each Sunday here in this sanctuary to draw close to God; to hear God’s voice; to give God the honor and praise which God alone deserves and I can not help but wonder what God has to say to us this morning. Are we attending to the voice of the Lord, are we listening to God’s words, and allowing them to change our lives and remake us into the people God is calling us to be? Or do we come to God this morning worried and distracted by many things. Are we distracted by the care of our worldly lives? Are we more concerned with what we will do when we get home, or when we get back to the office tomorrow, than we are to attending to the will and ways of our God for our lives? Are we here in body but not here in our hearts?
We come before God this morning, and we might look like ripe fruit but are we rotten on the inside? We might be able to stand before our friends and loved ones here in this church and appear to be the people God is calling us to be but God knows what we look like on the inside. God knows if at the core of our beings we are not the people we appear to be on the outside.
We as Christians look forward to the day of the Lord; we look forward to Christ’s return. We look forward to the day when God will set all thing right once and for all but first we must be ready for that day, first we must seek the heart of God and allow God to remake us so that we are no longer a part of that which needs to be set right.
This is God’s call to us this morning. We gathered here to worship and the din and the raucousness of our distractions and sin have nearly driven God from our midst this morning and Amos has stepped into the isle and told us that we need to change. We need to set aside that which distracts us from God, we need to allow God to cleanse us of our unrighteousness and anything in our lives which is pulling us away from God and allow God to cleanse us and purify us, so that we can join with those who look to the horizon for our Lord’s coming with hopeful anticipation instead of fear and trembling. The day of the Lord is coming, let it be a great and not a terrible day for you.