Do manufacturers add these warning labels because they are concerned for your health? Aside from warnings that government regulations require, like cigarettes might cause cancer, most of the time the warnings are because the manufactures are trying to protect themselves from a frivolous lawsuit. Some times the warning seems as frivolous as the lawsuit. A lot of products have labels warning us about something that you or any reasonable person would never do. For example, there is a baby stroller which has a warning label which says “Remove baby before folding.” There is a washing machine label that warns not to put a person in this washer. There is a vanishing fabric marker that tells you that it should not be used for signing checks or legal documents. There is even a warning for a Superman costume that cautions that wearing this costume does not enable someone to fly.
So, whether you read the warning label or not, what happens if you fold up a baby in a stroller? You can’t sue because you had been warned. In today’s lesson the Israelites had been given warning labels to as far back as Abraham, and they tossed them in the trash without stopping what they were warned not to do. What is God to do about their disregard of His warning labels? That’s what our lesson is all about today.
In Chapter 5 Amos held out hope for the people. He told the people to seek good and reject evil and if they did, perhaps God will be gracious and give them another chance. For the rest of our other lessons, Amos told them about all of the things which condemned them in God’s eyes. Amos wasn’t the only prophet to list Israel’s short comings. All through the history of Israel, prophets had given God’s warnings to the people only to have them swept under the rug. For us today, there doesn’t seem to be many prophets speaking to us, but that doesn’t mean that God doesn’t warn us in other ways. Will God ever draw that red line in the sand? Will God give Israel another chance? Let’s see what happens.
Amos 8:1 This is what the Lord God showed me— a basket of summer fruit. 2 He said, “Amos, what do you see? And I said, “A basket of summer fruit.” Then the Lord said to me, “The end has come upon my people Israel; I will never again pass them by. 3 The songs of the temple shall become wailings in that day.” says the Lord God; “the dead bodies shall be many, cast out in every place. Be silent!”
God underlined that condition by telling the people what? “I will never again pass by them.” What does that mean? Some scholars think that this “never passing by them” recalls how God led them - passed by them - through the wilderness. God was in full protection mode. He squeezed water from a rock and provided manna from heaven. Now, God will no longer be there to protect them. To prove it, God is going to step aside and let Assyria defeat Israel.
It's like me and my dog, FiFi. When I walk her, I pass by her and we establish a bond. As long as I'm passing by her - walking by her - I can protect her from the mean little Chihuahua down the street. When we are walking, we have established a relationship where she obeys me and I protect her. This bond is ruptured when FiFi bolts after a squirrel nearly pulling my arm out of it's socket. So God is saying, "Quit chasing squirrels - sins - and obey me."
When God threatened to stop helping Israel, the helping didn't stop the next day. There will be forty years before this prophesy will come true with the invasion of Assyria. God knows that no matter what warnings are given, no matter if God has promised to take action against their sin, the people were so bogged down in their sin, that they were not going to change. Forgiveness involved repentance and repentance wasn’t in their future. In the following war-free forty years, the people will remember Amos’ prophesy and say, “It's been forty years. See, nothing happened. We’re still God’s chosen people. This proves Amos misunderstood what God told him.” They will see no reason to do anything different from what they have always done.
The timing is interesting. The Israelites spent forty years in the wilderness because they failed to obey God and now there will be forty wilderness years before the end of Israel comes. Forty years seems long to us, but not to God. Just because things are carrying on for decades doesn’t mean that the end isn’t coming. Remember, the Titanic stayed afloat after hitting the iceberg, but eventually, it sank. The sinking was irreversible. Israel’s down fall was irreversible, too. God is really saying, “I’m calling it quits with my chosen people. I won’t act any longer like everything is going fine.” What’s going to happen on that day?
There will be a lot of corpses. Dead bodies will be every where they looked. The invading Assyrian army won’t show any mercy. The fresh field of promise that was Israel in the beginning was now a field of decaying bodies. The promise of Israel had turned into the stench of death.
There will be silence. That might be the scariest forecast. Remember when Military Circle first opened. The place was packed. Stores full of people buying shoes, clothes and jewelry. It was exciting to be there - a part of something alive and breathing. A couple of weeks ago, I went there and there weren’t any crowds. In fact there were only a few people wandering down the empty halls. Shops were closed. I missed the excitement of the bustling crowds. That is how Israel is described. The excitement was gone. The sound of life was replaced with the silence of streets without people.
The message is very clear. It was too late to change the future. Prophetic warnings were no longer a way to change behavior. There are some people where evil is so ingrained that the death sentence is inevitable. There are some acts so evil - like destroying a child - that even people who oppose the death penalty have second thoughts.
It’s like Amos was a doctor with a patient who has a terminal illness. There is nothing else that medical science can do and the patient will die in a couple of weeks. Just like that doctor will have a hard time telling this to his patient, Amos had a hard time telling Israel that their sin had resulted in a fatal cancer in their kingdom. The doctor’s job is to heal the body. The prophet’s job is to heal the soul. Neither one can easily accept the victory of death over their efforts. It’s hard on the doctor or prophet when he has to break the bad news. But, in their calling neither the doctor nor prophet were promised that their job would be easy.
Amos 8:4 Hear this, you who trample on the needy, and bring to ruin the poor of the land 5, saying, “When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances, 6 buying the poor for silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, and selling the sweepings of the wheat.
Who is he directing this prophesy to? Those who trample the needy and destroy the poor. If you look at these three verses, the people doing the trampling and destroying are merchants - guys running the Food Lions and Walmart stores. This is following this business about summer fruit and wasted farm land. What Amos talks about now is the “why” that brings on the silence. Every thing described in these verses has to do with sins in doing business. Business men took advantage of the poor and needy to improve their bottom line.
What is the first thing they are guilty of? Getting the new moon and Sabbath over. What’s this all about? The “new moon” reference concerned religious holidays where work stopped and everybody came to the temple for a festival. The Sabbath was the one day a week where the Ten Commandments said all work stopped and your attention was only focused on worshiping God. In both festival celebrations and the Sabbath, shops were closed down. Shop owners were acting like hypocrites by attending the temple while all the time wishing that they could be back in their shops making money. They couldn’t see that they were actually being given an opportunity to join with their fellow Israelites in recognizing God’s many gifts including the shops they ran. They only saw an unproductive day without profit.
When the shop owner bought produce from the farmer when they came into town, the produce would be put on one side of a scale and weights called shekels were put on the other side of the scale. Later on the shekel would become a unit of money, but it this time it was only a measurement of weight. The crooked shop owner would use shekels that weighed more than a shekel should. This way it took a lot more produce than it should to match the enlarged shekels. The shop owner got more than he really paid for. This is pretty close to putting your thumb on the scale isn’t it?
Besides increasing the profit margin, what else did the merchant use his extra money for? To buy slaves. A poor family came in to buy food and they didn’t have the money to pay the shop keeper’s price. Hungry children were at home crying because their tummies were empty. What could the poor man do? For inflated priced corn, the shop keeper would let them have corn in exchange for them selling themselves into slavery. Sometimes, he would loan the poor guy the corn in return for collateral which could be his sandals. If he didn’t pay up in a certain amount of time, he became a shoeless slave. If the shop keeper wanted to take the slaves himself, he got a worker for nothing. But, in most cases, the shop keeper sold the slaves to some rich guy for silver worth a lot more than the corn he gave the poor family. These guys were very creative when it came to taking advantage of the poor.
What about a poor family who had just had enough money for a bushel of grain? The shop keeper was ready to take advantage of him, too. Our scripture says that they sold the poor man what as grain? Sweepings. Here is what was meant by sweepings. When the grain was threshed what was left was good grain and chaff. All of the nutrients were in the grain. The chaff was good only for burning or compose. The good grain went to the rich guys who could pay top dollar for premium grain. What they sold to the poor was a mixture of grain and chaff. It was garbage because it filled their stomach but didn’t feed their body.
What do you think of a person who would sell a mixture of grain and chaff as all grain? Pretty despicable guy, huh? Even today, there are foods sold that claim to be a certain grain, but a percentage of wood pulp is included. Just think about it. When you eat some cereals, you are eating saw dust. Maybe they got their idea from reading Amos.
Amos 8:9 “On that day”, says the Lord, “I will make the sun go down at noon, and darken the earth in broad daylight. 10 I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all our songs into lamentation; I will bring sackcloth on all loins, and baldness on every head; I will make it like the mourning for an only son, and the end of it like a bitter day.-10
In verses 7 and 8, Amos quotes God as saying, “Shall not the land tremble on this account and everyone mourn who dwells in it.” This is really part of the discussion in verses 9 through 10. What will cause land to tremble? An earth quake. Remember, when we started Amos we were told that his prophetic mission started two years before the quake. It is now mentioned again as something that is going to happen in the future. This earth quake is more than what happens regularly in California. This quake was brought by God for a specific purpose. The land will be flattened. All of this will happen because of Israel’s failure to take God seriously. Amos is implying that the foundation of evil was so strong in Israel that it will take an earth quake to break it down.
We know some historical facts. A major earth quake took place in 760 B.C. and Amos started his mission two years before that or 762 B.C. In these verses a total eclipse is mentioned. Astronomers know that a total eclipse occurred in that region on February 9 784 B.C. and a near total eclipse on June 15, 763 B.C. If the 762 B.C. date is accurate then the eclipse of 763 is probably the one Amos is talking about. This brings up a problem. We know that Assyria invaded Israel in 734 B. C. And Israel ceased to exist as a nation in 722 B.C. This means that the judgement was nearly 40 years later. This sure doesn’t look like an “on that day” event.
Amos didn’t know when Israel would cease as a nation. Maybe he saw in the eclipse and darkening sun as a sign of worse things to happen. Verse 10 talks about what worse things? Things that will turn cheerful happy festivals into times of misery. Happy times would be replaced with times of mourning and lamenting. The loss will almost be unbearable like the loss of an only child. It will be like the bitterest day you have ever lived.
On festival days light was celebrated - the light of God’s truth, the light of life itself. Because of their abuses the nation will be plunged into darkness. A day of light will become a day of darkness. A darkness that shuts out the light of God. All symbolized by the eclipse. Israel had never learned that you can’t celebrate the light and live in darkness.
Any warning labels you need to read? What ever you do, don’t tear the label off of your pillow. I don’t know what will happen, but it must be like an eclipse because I don’t own a pillow that is missing that label. It seems like everything is going to have some kind of warning label. There is one thing for sure that should have a warning label - the Bible. And it should say “Failure to love the Lord with all your heart could lead to your spiritual ruin” or “Failure to love your neighbor as yourself could lead to your eternal death.” I wonder if having a label like that would adjust our attitude?
Prayer: Lord, give us the wisdom to recognize your warning labels and the strength to do something about them. Amen.
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