SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 10/13/2015
11:02 PM
My Worship Time Focus: Woe to the
Impudent
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Amos 6:8-14
Message of the
verses: We are going to break up
this section as we follow the outline by Warren Wiersbe who breaks this section
up into five sections, so I am not sure how many we will do in each given
night, but we will try and move through this in a way that will help us learn
what Amos is saying to the children of Israel, and also see how we can figure
out how this can affect our lives for the glory of Christ.
8 The Lord GOD has sworn by Himself, the LORD God of
hosts has declared: "I loathe the arrogance of Jacob, And detest his
citadels; Therefore I will deliver up the city and all it contains.’” “8 GOD, the Master, has sworn, and solemnly
stands by his Word. The God-of-the-Angel-Armies speaks: "I hate the
arrogance of Jacob. I have nothing but contempt for his forts. I’m about to
hand over the city and everyone in it’ (Message).”
We can see by this verse that the Lord is making a promise
that He will keep, and I know that God does keep all of His promises, but we
can see that God means business with the statement that He makes in this
verse. He not only is displeased, to say
it mildly but He hates their forts as the Message says, or their citadels as
the NASB says. I believe that He hates
the false worship that is going on in those places.
Dr. Wiersbe writes “The phrase ‘pride of Jacob’ (KJV)
says ‘excellency of Jacob is used in Psalm 47:4 to mean ‘the Promised Land.’” Dr. Wiersbe writes an endnote here: “The phrase is used in Amos 8:7 to refer to
God Himself, but that can’t be the meaning here. The Jews prided themselves that their God was
the true and living God, even though they often indulged in the worship of
idols. They were also proud of the
temple in Jerusalem (Ezek. 24:21). They
might have been proud of God, but God certainly wasn’t proud of them!” We continue with Dr. Wiersbe’s quote: “God abhorred the very land of Israel, the
land He had given to His people for their inheritance.”
The problem with the people of Israel is that they were
not worshiping the Lord in the way that He had prescribed them to worship Him,
and thus because of the covenant that He had made with them when they came out
of Egypt He had no other choice but to keep the curses of that covenant and
bring destruction on them. They on the
other hand were proud of their worship and the buildings that they brought
forth their false worship. In our study
of Revelation 17-18 we saw a similar thing happen to the people who were in a
sense worshiping the Babylonian system and were so dejected when the Lord
destroyed it, and the same will be when God uses the Assyrians to destroy
Israel along with all of their false places of worship.
Dr. Wiersbe concludes his introductory commentary on this
fourth main point by telling us what lies ahead in our study of this section of
Amos, verses 8-14 of chapter 6. “These
impudent people, who rejected God’s warning, would one day face three
judgments.” Those judgments are Death
(vv. 9-10), Destruction (vv. 11-13), The prophet argues from the order of
nature (v. 12); and Disgrace and defeat (v. 14).
10/13/2015 11:24 PM
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