SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 9/21/2015
9:52 PM
My Worship Time Focus: Ultimate
Judgment
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Amos 4:12-13
Message of the
verses: “12 “Therefore thus I will do to you, O Israel; Because
I will do this to you, Prepare to meet your God, O Israel." 13 For behold,
He who forms mountains and creates the wind And declares to man what are His
thoughts, He who makes dawn into darkness And treads on the high places of the
earth, The LORD God of hosts is His name.”
These are two wonderful verses, verses that are surely
worth putting to memory as they are rich in meaning, speaking of who God is and
what He has done and what He can and will do.
I realize that God has formed the mountains and I know that He created
the wind, and I know that He knows my thoughts, although there are many times I
wish He did not know my thoughts, and I know that He makes dawn into darkness
and that He can and does tread on the high places of the earth, but it is good
to be reminded of these things. Amos
also tells Israel something that I don’t think that they wanted to hear when he
writes “Prepare to meet your God, O Israel.”
Perhaps this is why Dr. Wiersbe calls theses two verses the “ultimate
judgment” for there is no judgment like that one.
Now as we look at the last several SD’s from this fourth
chapter of Amos we saw a familiar phrase that is not present in this one: “yet you have not returned to Me,” and we saw
these different calamities that God had put them through, but now it is too
late for them as Amos tells them to get ready to meet their God. He sent all of those troubles to them to get
their attention, but they did not understand why those things were happening to
them, and perhaps we in America don’t realize why different things are
happening to us either. Repentance was
the answer for Israel and for America today.
Dr. Wiersbe writes “Prepare to meet thy God, O Israel’ (vs. 12) was not
a call to repentance but an announcement that it was too late to repent. The Lord of Hosts (armies) Himself would come
with the Assyrian hordes and take the people away like cattle being led to the
slaughter (v. 2). ‘There will be wailing
in all the vineyards, for I will pass through your midst’ (5:17 NIV).”
Now as far as the meaning to the praising that Amos did
in the last part of these verses it is a doxology, as he reminds us that our
God is the Creator who can do anything, including making the earth out of
nothing.”
Okay we have just ended our study of the fourth chapter
of the book of Amos and so to celebrate this I want to tell you a little humorous
story. There was a man who was speaking
to God one day telling Him that he could make a man without any problem in
doing so. God told him to go right ahead
and so the man went out and got some dirt to which God tells him that “you have
to get your own dirt.”
9/21/2015 10:10 PM
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