God Next Warns of His People Oppressing Others
In Amos 4 this is pursued in a still more precise manner. “Hear this word, ye kine of Bashan, that are in the mountain of Samaria” (vs. 1). The reference is to those that dwelt at ease and are self-indulgent in Israel, the figure being taken from the herds which grazed on the rich pasture lands coveted by the two and a half tribes on the eastern bank of the Jordan. This soon leads to unfeeling indifference and oppression of others; and so the prophet proceeds to charge them: “Which oppress the poor, which crush the needy, which say to their masters, Bring, and let us drink” (vs. 1). Intense selfishness is here laid at the door of Israel. It was the time of their most flourishing state politically, not of their real honor and glory, which was under David and Solomon. But after the rent from Judah, it might outwardly seem to man that Israel was a highly favored people. Alas their independence was coeval with their apostasy. They had abandoned the true God, they had set up the calves at Dan and Bethel. They were under the self-asserting government of Jeroboam, whom God had allowed to succeed as a scourge to the guilty house of David. But His eye was in no wise unobservant of their ways. Yet the very fact that He noticed oppression of the poor and other effects of their intense selfishness shows the low condition of Israel.
A Dismal Fall When His People Sink to the Level of Men or Gentiles
This I cannot but think an important principle. Suppose the church of God were occupied with rectifying the squabbles of such as did not know how to behave themselves, with frauds in business, or such like faults, moral or social—would it not indicate an exceeding low state? For, properly speaking, these are the mere evil ways of fallen men. What normally belongs to the church or the Christian, while passing no evil by, is to judge spiritual defilement according to God, offenses against the holiness and the truth of God, indifference as to such evil, or connivance with it in others. Natural conscience takes no cognizance of all this, and of course they are outside the province of human law. Not that these evils of a spiritual nature are not very real and profoundly bad before God, and even more destructive to the soul than moral ones (for these are at once discerned and would trouble all save for the time the guilty actors); but doctrinal evil is subtler and taints the spirit and conduct of man insensibly. Hence it is worse than practical evil, although they are both of them inconsistent with Christ. Still it is clear that, where Christians go astray, the evil is naturally apt to be more of a spiritual kind—as that of the world is of a coarse and open sort.
The Old Associations of Divine Favor Now Devoted to Idolatry
The very fact, therefore, that God here charges upon Israel habits and practices which might be found among the heathen is a flagrant proof of the degraded state into which His people had fallen. He must judge: “The Lord Jehovah hath sworn by His holiness, that, lo, the days shall come upon you, that He will take you away with hooks, and your posterity with fishhooks. And ye shall go out at the breaches, every cow at that which is before her; and ye shall cast them into the palace, saith Jehovah” (vss. 2-3). It is borrowed from helter-skelter confusion among cattle. The last phrase is rather “Ye shall cast yourselves to the mountains of Monah,” meaning perhaps Armenia. He does in His government notice, as He always must, the evil of His people that affronts and grieves Him. He shows further that, as there were such fruits, there was a stock and root also. Their practical evil sprang from idolatrous rivalry of Himself. “Come to Bethel and transgress; at Gilgal multiply transgression” (vs. 4). These names, of such striking association with God, the places where God had manifested His grace and character of old, were now converted each into a focus of corruption. It was at Beth-el where their father Jacob had first seen the vision of God; at Gilgal the reproach of Egypt was rolled away forever from the sons of Israel on their passage of the Jordan after they had left the wilderness behind. But now, alas, God was degraded as far as the will of man could in Beth-el, as the people degraded themselves in Gilgal. The true glory of Israel had departed for a season.
The prophet then mockingly bids them come to their haunts of idolatry, but in such terms as to intimate the contrariety to God. “And bring your sacrifices every morning, and your tithes after three years: and offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving with leaven, and proclaim and publish the free offerings: for this liketh you, O ye children of Israel, saith Jehovah” (vss. 4-5). It was dismal, the mingling of heathenish will-worship with the relics and reminiscences of Jehovah. It is bad enough to be careless and unfaithful in the true worship of the true God; it is the gravest insult to mingle nature worship or false gods with the true, keeping up a measure of imitation, but with marked departure from the revealed ritual.
Hence Successive Chastenings: Now They Must Meet Himself
Such was the state of ruin in which Israel now lay, and the Lord shows how He had smitten them with one affliction after another to rouse them from their self-will to feel His dishonor. “And I also have given you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and want of bread in all your places: yet have ye not returned unto Me, saith Jehovah. And also I have withholden the rain from you, when there were yet three months to the harvest: and I caused it to rain upon one city, and caused it not to rain upon another city: one piece was rained upon, and the piece whereupon it rained not withered. So two or three cities wandered into one city, to drink water; but they were not satisfied: yet have ye not returned unto Me, saith Jehovah. I have smitten you with blasting mildew: when your gardens and your vineyards and your fig-trees and your olive-trees increased, the palmerworm devoured them: yet have ye not returned unto Me, saith Jehovah. I have sent among you the pestilence after the manner of Egypt: your young men have I slain with the sword, and have taken away your horses; and I have made the stink of your camps to come up unto your nostrils: yet have ye not returned unto Me, saith Jehovah” (vss. 7-10).
Thus far they had been incorrigible; even though, as they are reminded, He had overthrown some of them as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah. “And ye were as a firebrand plucked out of the burning: yet have ye not returned unto Me, saith Jehovah” (vs. 11). Now He takes a new method and more ominous than any blow. They must meet Himself. “Therefore thus will I do unto thee, O Israel: and because I will do this unto thee, prepare to meet thy God, O Israel. For, lo, He that formeth the mountains, and createth the wind, and declareth unto man what is His thought, that maketh the morning darkness, and treadeth upon the high places of the earth, Jehovah, The God of hosts, is His name” (vs. 12)
It Is Judgment, Not the Gospel
It is the strange habit of some to apply this text to a soul which is under the hand of the Lord when brought to believe the gospel; but it is evidently a threat of final judgment. Fully as we may desire to own the exceeding breadth of the divine word, we should not blunt the keenness of its edge in this way. It is excellent to guard one’s spirit from the least approach to a captious or critical tone in one’s thoughts of the use of scripture made by any simple mind; but we should not confound grace and judgment, or the day of Jehovah with the gospel call to the sinner. There is no lack of suited appeals. There are abundant examples in point. How much more blessed to take those which are intended as a call to mercy, than to turn such a summons of God as this to meet His judgment into an invitation to hear His message in the gospel now! However, this by the way.