Amos - The God Of Justice - Preach The Word

THE GOD OF JUSTICE
David Legge
whose shall those things be which you have provided?'. If you're here tonight and
you're not saved, you need to sit up - and I know I'm preaching primarily to
Christians, but this is all applicable to you: judgement day is coming! You will give an
account to God, and God, though He is a loving God, and He sent the blessed Saviour,
the Lamb of God to Calvary, and He suffered in your place and bore your shame and
took your hell and your wrath to forgive you - if you will not repent and believe the
gospel, you will have that wrath visited upon you for all eternity! Yet the church is
guilty, like Laodicea who had to answer to God, this sovereign God, in Jesus Christ -
that Judge-Priest who we see in the opening chapters of the book with flaming eyes of
fire, x-ray eyes, with feet of brass, judgement feet - and He's walking as a Judge-
Priest in the midst of the candlestick lampstands representing those seven churches of
Asia, and what is He doing? He's assessing them, He's weighing them, and He is
saying this: 'Let him who has ears to hear, hear what the Spirit says to the church' -
like Amos, 'Hear this word!'. God is roaring like a lion - do you hear Him? Laodicea
said: 'I am rich, and have become wealthy, and have need of nothing', and Jesus said,
'You do not know that you are wretched, miserable, poor, blind and naked'.
God will judge those, Amos teaches, who use violence and injustice to gain
possessions and power, verse 10. In verse 11 we read that Israel would fall to an
enemy, and of course that happened in 722 BC when the Assyrians came. They might
be resting on their ivory beds in their expensive mansions, their summer houses and
their winter houses would be stripped from them, and they would be led off as
prisoners of war. The wealthy would have no houses at all, though they had many;
and their man-made religious security in Bethel, where they had set up their own
religious denomination, if you like, it would be obliterated. Imagine what is happening
here - it's tantamount to what Isaiah said in Isaiah 63:10, listen: 'They rebelled and
grieved His Holy Spirit; So He', God, 'turned Himself against them as an enemy, and
He fought against them'. There would be little left of Israel, verse 12 shows us: 'As a
shepherd takes from the mouth of a lion two legs or a piece of an ear, so shall the
children of Israel be taken out who dwell in Samaria'. Remember who the lion is here,
it is God - and in the book of Exodus the law laid down that if a shepherd lost an
animal, he had to pay for that animal. The only way he could get out of paying for it
was to prove that it had been killed by a wild beast, and he did that by bringing home
some of the parts that were not devoured - so he would have had to get from the
teeth of the lion an arm or an ear or something like that. Amos is saying: 'God is
roaring against His people as a lion, and the nation will not repent, they will not listen
- and soon there would be none left but a remnant'.
Now I'm going to make a statement - and you don't have to agree with it, but I
believe it's true. From human perspective - mark now, from human perspective - the
church is only ever one generation away from extinction. From human perspective the
church is only ever, in any locality or geographical location, one generation away from
extinction. Someone has said: 'The church that marries the spirit of the age will be a
widow in the next'. If she will not hear God's voice, if she will not walk with God, if she
will not agree with God, it is probable that she, in that geographical location, is
heading for extinction. I know Jesus said: 'I will build my church, and the gates of hell
shall not prevail against it' - but let me tell you this: the churches of Asia Minor that
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