Saturday, September 19, 2015

Catastrophe (Amos 4:11)


SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 9/19/2015 11:00 PM

My Worship Time                                                                              Focus:  Catastrophe

Bible Reading & Meditation                                                 Reference:  Amos 4:11

            Message of the verses:  “11 “I overthrew you, as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, And you were like a firebrand snatched from a blaze; Yet you have not returned to Me," declares the LORD.”

            There is a calamity that happened that we are not sure what it was all about, perhaps it was the earthquake that Amos mentions in Amos 1:1 “The words of Amos, who was among the sheepherders from Tekoa, which he envisioned in visions concerning Israel in the days of Uzziah king of Judah, and in the days of Jeroboam son of Joash, king of Israel, two years before the earthquake.  Dr. Wiersbe says that perhaps “it may have been the devastating invasion of an army (2 Kings 10:32-33).”  “32  In those days the LORD began to cut off portions from Israel; and Hazael defeated them throughout the territory of Israel: 33  from the Jordan eastward, all the land of Gilead, the Gadites and the Reubenites and the Manassites, from Aroer, which is by the valley of the Arnon, even Gilead and Bashan.”  Even if we don’t know for sure what this calamity was we know for sure that it was from the Lord and it was terrible what happened for he compares it to what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah which is seen in Genesis 19:24-25, and we can also look at Deut. 29:23 “’All its land is brimstone and salt, a burning waste, unsown and unproductive, and no grass grows in it, like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the LORD overthrew in His anger and in His wrath.’”  Also we can look at Isa. 1:9 and 13:19 “Unless the LORD of hosts Had left us a few survivors, We would be like Sodom, We would be like Gomorrah.”  “And Babylon, the beauty of kingdoms, the glory of the Chaldeans’ pride, Will be as when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah.” 

            Now we want to look at the phrase “you were like a firebrand snatched from a blasé,” to see what this means. Dr. Wiersbe writes that this “suggests that the Lord intervened and saved them at the last minute (Zech. 3:2).  They had been burned but not consumed.  If so, then their ingratitude and hardness of heart was even more wicked.”   

9/19/2015 11:13 PM

           

No comments:

Post a Comment