Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Introduction to Amos Chapter Five


SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 9/22/2015 10:07 PM

My Worship Time                                                                           Focus:  Introduction to Amos 5

Bible Reading & Meditation                                                            Reference:  Amos 5:1

            Message of the verse:  “1 Hear this word which I take up for you as a dirge, O house of Israel.”

            In chapters 5-6 we see the lamentations that Amos speaks of, something we discussed as a part of the outline for these two chapters.  Dr. Wiersbe actually calls his fourth chapter “How To Avoid The Storm,” and it covers the first seventeen verses of chapter five, while verses eighteen through the end of chapter five we will look at when we get to the fifth chapter of Dr. Wiersbe’s outline and commentary for Amos.

            Now what we will be looking at in these fourteen verses is the prophets third message and as this first verse tells us it is a funeral dirge that the Lord is giving for them as they are about to be destroyed.  The verses that ended the fourth chapter of Amos and these verses that begin chapter five are very sobering verses and they can probably be applied to different nations as they sin against the Lord, but we see from the four times that Israel is mentioned in these first four verses  that they were originally met for Israel.  Wailing and lamentation goes on in the houses of Israel as seen in verse sixteen:  “Therefore thus says the LORD God of hosts, the Lord, "There is wailing in all the plazas, And in all the streets they say, ’Alas! Alas!’ They also call the farmer to mourning And professional mourners to lamentation.”  I was just thinking about how the Egyptians mourned their first born when the Lord destroyed all of them as the last plague that was done to Egypt by the Lord, and now we see that Israel is going through the same thing as they committed the sins that caused God to judge Egypt for which was mostly for idolatry.

            It was a pattern for the nation of Israel to hire professional mourners when a person died, but there will be so many killed that they will not have enough professional mourners to do all of the mourning, and in verses 16-17 we will see that they will call the farmers and the workers to help them out with the mourning.

            Dr. Wiersbe writes “However, Amos weaves into his lamentation three pleas to the people, urging them to return to the Lord.”  We will begin to look at these in our next SD on the book of Amos.

9/22/2015 10:37 PM

 

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