SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 10/30/2015
10:38 PM
My Worship Time Focus: I will Destroy
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Amos 9:5-10
Message
of the verses: “5 The Lord GOD of hosts,
The One who touches the land so that it melts, And all those who dwell in it
mourn, And all of it rises up like the Nile And subsides like the Nile of
Egypt; 6 The One who builds His upper chambers in the heavens And has founded His
vaulted dome over the earth, He who calls for the waters of the sea And pours
them out on the face of the earth, The LORD is His name. 7 “Are you not as the
sons of Ethiopia to Me, O sons of Israel?" declares the LORD. "Have I
not brought up Israel from the land of Egypt, And the Philistines from Caphtor
and the Arameans from Kir? 8 “Behold, the eyes of the Lord GOD are on the
sinful kingdom, And I will
destroy it from the face of the earth; Nevertheless, I will not totally
destroy the house of Jacob," Declares the LORD. 9 “For behold, I am
commanding, And I will shake the house of Israel among all nations As grain is
shaken in a sieve, But not a kernel will fall to the ground. 10 “All the
sinners of My people will die by the sword, Those who say, ’The calamity will
not overtake or confront us.’”
I want to repeat verse five from the
NLT “The Lord, the LORD of
Heaven’s Armies, touches the land and it melts, and all its people
mourn.” Dr. Wiersbe points out that we
see this phrase or name of the Lord as the Lord of Heaven’s Armies nine times
in the book of Amos. He then quotes one
of my favorite authors, A. W. Tozer who writes “The essence of idolatry is the
entertainment of thoughts about God that are unworthy of Him.” Israel created their own God and put them in
their own image and that is usually how it goes when idols are made. I have heard it over and over that it is man
who wrote the Bible, and it irritates me when I hear this. The reason that it irritates me is because
man would never write what is found in the Scriptures because of the sinful
condition of man. Man would never write
the truth found in Scripture because there is no real truth in the unconverted
man. That is what we read that idols are
made up by man to be in their own image.
We see in the first part of our
verses that Amos tells his readers how great God really is, the fact that He is
the Creator God who made the earth and all that is in it, and no idol could
ever do that. I have to tell you a
little joke that goes along with this.
There was a man who told God that it was not to difficult to create a
man and so God tells this man to go ahead and make a man. The man begins to get some dirt in order to
make his man and the Lord steps in and says to him “Get your own dirt.” We see that not only did God create the earth
and all we see, but He controls it also, even though at times we wonder what He
is doing when things don’t go the way that we think they should.
Amos tells his readers about how the
Lord brought up Israel out of Egypt, and He not only did this but He told
Abraham that He was going to do it four hundred years before He did it. God had claimed Israel for His own people,
and then Israel turned their backs on God, something that we see from the 28th
chapter of Deuteronomy that God said they would do.
Dr. Wiersbe concludes this section
by writing “But He is always the God or mercy (vv. 8-10), who will keep His
covenant with Abraham and his descendants and not destroy the nation. The nations would be sifted, and the sinners
punished, but no one of His true worshipers would be lost. It’s always the believing remnant that God
watches over so that they might fulfill His will on the earth. The self-confident sinners, who don’t expect
to be punished, are the ones who will be slain by the sword (v. 10).”
10/30/2015
11:00 PM
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