Amos 5:1-3 - Homiletics

Israel's elegy.

It is poor work singing the things that might have been. It means sweet dreams dispelled, fair hopes blighted, and human lives in ruins. Yet such is the prophet's task in this passage—writing Israel's elegy among the graves of her dead millions. He had been denouncing nameless woes against the rebellious people, Here he changes his tone to that of a mournful spectator of accomplished ills. In imagination he throws himself forward out of the sinful present into the calamitous future, and in accommodation to the change of scene his denunciation becomes a dirge. It is a natural transition, and at the same time a new form of appeal. When ears become inattentive, the skilled musician will vary his tune. We have here—

I. A BROKEN IDEAL . The things that might have been with Israel were far enough from existing facts. The Israel of God's ideal was:

1 . A holy people. ( Exodus 19:6 ; Deuteronomy 28:9 .) Theoretically they were, as the word "holy" means ( Deuteronomy 7:6 ), a people separated from men, and sin and sot apart to God. But the fair ideal of their national life remained an ideal and nothing more. The reality never reached it, never approached it. They connected themselves freely with heathen men and heathenish sin. They at times outdid the nations ( Amos 2:6-9 ) in avarice, injustice, spoiling the poor, abominable rites, and every nameless infamy.

2 . An unconquered people. This is the force of the expression "virgin (of) Israel." God was to champion their cause, and to fight for them as his loyal people ( Deuteronomy 1:30 , etc.). If, and so long as he did so, they would be invincible. But they never claimed his help on the appointed terms. His promise was doubted ( Deuteronomy 1:32 ) and its conditions disregarded, with the inevitable result that it failed of fulfilment in many a critical time. Israel, theoretically "the unconquered," was practically the often vanquished, the twice carried captive, the soon-to-be-destroyed. God's help comes surely, but comes only where there is attention to the conditions on which it is offered and given.

3 . A prosperous people. Palestine, their national inheritance, was the very garden of the earth; unique in the combination of the highest agricultural capacities, with the finest commercial situation. The prosperity of an industrious, peaceful nation in it was, so far as favourable circumstances went, a foregone conclusion. But war had devastated, and mildew blighted, and drought laid bare its fertile fields. God saw his gifts abused and made the ministers of sin, and he was driven to destroy these in their hands. When temporal good begins to be made the occasion of moral evil, our tenure of it will soon end.

4 . A happy people. A people prosperous, strong, and pure, could not but be happy as well ( Psalms 144:15 ). And such was Israel in the Divine ideal ( Deuteronomy 33:29 ). But the actual misery experienced was as complete as the theoretical happiness revealed. Happiness is nowhere so impossible, misery nowhere so intense, as with a people who have fallen beneath themselves. In proportion as the former might have been, will the latter be.

II. AN ANTICIPATIVE DIRGE . Prescient of coming evil, the prophet's lamentation becomes a funeral song.

1 . A nation made shipwreck is a sight for tears. It is the destruction of magnificent possibilities of good. It is the failing of a tremendous reality of evil It is the ruin of most precious interests on a gigantic scale. If one soul lost is the occasion of grief to pure spirits and a travailing Saviour, what must the calamity be when multiplied a millionfold ?

2 . When the wicked fall the trust mourners are the righteous. Not the heathen who had seduced them, not the remnant of apostate Israel that might escape, but the prophet of God, who had kept himself unspotted in the midst of national corruption, was the tearful mourner by the ruined nation's grave. The wicked are too selfish to care for any sorrows but their own. They are as the wolves, which would make a prey of the dead one's remains, rather than any mourning for his fall. God and the God-like alone truly mourn when the wicked perish.

3 . A prophetic sight of his own epitaph ought to stay the hand of the suicide. Men supposed to be dead have lived to read their own obituary notice. It has enabled them to see themselves for once as others see them. And it ought to have a practical influence for good. Israel, reading beforehand the inscription on their own tomb, might have been warned away, if anything could have warned them, from the course in which they were rushing on. It showed them what was coming, and how it was being brought on, and how it looked, whether as a morality or a policy, in enlightened eyes. An adequate idea of sin must include its end and issues and place in history, and this it was in Israel's power to learn from Amos's prophetic wail.

III. AN INSPIRED COMMENTARY . An act of God is an expression of his way. The way of God is a revelation of his purpose. All three are along the lines of the just and fitting. Now:

1 . Adequate punishment means practical extermination. Sin is an infinite crime, merits an infinite punishment, and failing this will receive a punishment exhaustive of the criminal's good. The proverbial question, "Wherefore doth a living man complain?" ( Lamentations 3:39 ), is an understatement of the case. While a field, or a blessing, or a living man remained, Israel had not been punished as it deserved. When body and soul have been both destroyed, there will still be no more than justice done. If our sin have not its punishment in Christ, then that punishment must be utter destruction.

2 . When wrath smites many, mercy spares a remnant. Nine-tenths were to be destroyed. The thousand should become a hundred, and the hundred ten. Neither the strength of the great nor the insignificance of the small should avail them for escape. With perfect impartiality, all should be made to suffer proportionally. Yet decimation was to stop short of utter extinction. A tenth part (see Isaiah 1:9 ; Isaiah 6:13 ) should be spared. This less guilty remnant, taught and chastened by the judgments which swept away the bulk of the nation, might form the nucleus of a new and better Israel. When judgment has destroyed the "bread to the eater," mercy often steps in and saves a "seed to the sower." There is seldom a deluge without its ark and its Noah family, the conditions and materials of a fresh start for the reduced.

3 . Israel decimated is Israel still. The remnant would retain the national name, and with it the covenant relation and privileges to which the name referred ( Genesis 32:28 ). Toward the Gentile Church, for its sin "cast down but not destroyed," the same gracious policy was announced ( Isaiah 54:7-10 ). While a Mephibosheth remains the royal line of God's anointed is not extinct. Chastisement makes a chaos only to bring out of it the young world of a new life and a new hope ( Psalms 89:30-33 ).