Illustrating Amos

Oh, Amos. I can honestly say in 30 years of church going I've never heard a sermon on you. I can see why.

Case in point: Amos 1:13

Thus says the Lord, "For three transgressions of the Ammonites and for four, I will not revoke the punishment; because they have ripped open pregnant women in Gilead, that they might enlarge their border."

Case #2: Amos 3:6 

Does disaster come to a city unless the Lord has done it.

Case #3: Amos 2:9 

Yet it was I who destroyed the Amorite before them, whose height was like the height of the cedars and who was as strong as the oaks; I destroyed his fruits above and his roots beneath.  

All jokes aside Amos definitely isn't your warm and snuggley God of comfort and hope book. It's a: quit oppressing the poor, withholding justice, living in idolatry, hypocrisy and corruption or distruction will come. 

Which we can apply to ourselves today. When we live for ourselves, making decisions out of selfish ambition the byproducts of that are hypocrisy, decite and oppressing those weaker than you.

So after page after page of destruction, you have page after page of promises and reminders of His love. 

He who made Pleiades and Orion and turns deep darkness into morning and darkens the day to night. The Lord is his name. Amos 5:8

But let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like and ever flowing stream. Amos 5:24

I love this verse so much. When I read it I knew that I chose wisely with Amos. This is my battle cry for my family, that we aren't blind followers of the masses.

But the Lord took me from following the flock. Amos 7:15

A long one but a good one. 

11 “Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord God, “when I will send a famine on the land—not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, to seek the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it. 

This imagery came from a Scott Erickson painting that I love and immediately thought of when I read this verse. 

I will plant them on their land and they shall never again be uprooted. Amos 9:15

From being cut off and uprooted earlier in the chapter to later the promise of never being uprooted can be confusing but I think it boils down to that weeds in your life must be pulled out before anything good can grow.