God's Plumb Line

I invite you to take out your Bibles and turn with me to the book of Amos. And we're going to be tonight in Amos 7. Dale there, and then pass the rest around. There should be enough for everyone to have one.

The book of Amos is essentially the collection of sermons that were preached by the prophet Amos to the northern kingdom during their time of great prosperity because the Lord had seen that in their prosperity, the people of Israel had turned from worshiping God in the way that He had commanded them to worship and turned to worshiping idols.

And not only were they worshiping idols, but in their idolatry, they were behaving in their life, even outside of their religious life, they were behaving in ways that were ungodly and that were unjust and were unacceptable in His sight.

For those of you who haven't been with us, just as a way of reminder, this is during the time where the northern and the southern kingdoms were divided after the death of Solomon. There were two kingdoms that arose after his death.

The southern kingdom under Rehoboam had essentially tried to sustain what had begun under King David and then his son King Solomon and then tried to continue under Rehoboam. But one of the servants of Solomon, Jeroboam I, had led a rebellion and he had essentially established a kingdom to the north where 10 of the tribes had followed after him and those 10 tribes established what was called Israel and then the southern tribes established what was called Judah.

And there was a dividing line between the two and the people of Israel were worshiping at Bethel, which was not where they were supposed to worship. They were supposed to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which is where God had commanded them to go and to worship, but because they did not want to cross into the southern territory, they did not want to come and worship in Judah, they were worshiping at Bethel and in Bethel there was a golden calf that set up also at Gilgal, which is another place where they had set up a golden calf and there were priests to this false teaching, there were prophets to this false teaching and a man from the southern kingdom named Amos, who as we're gonna see this week, references himself as not a prophet or the son of a prophet, not denying that God had given him a word to speak, but essentially saying that he wasn't born into this as a job, he was just a farmer.

He was just a shepherd. God called him to this from obscurity and he left the southern kingdom, went into the northern kingdom and preached against their social injustice, their economic impropriety, their lack of love for their neighbor and especially the poor and their false worship and their lack of a desire to seek after God as he had commanded them to do.

In the first two chapters, he references all the other nations around that had all sinned, but he focuses primarily on Israel and chapters three, four and five, he begins with the terms, hear this word, three, four and five are essentially sermons that he preached, hear this word from God, hear this word from God, hear this word from God and three, four and five do that.

In chapter six, we begin to see the woes. At the beginning of chapter six, he says, woe to those who are at ease in Zion, those who have essentially given themselves up to pleasure, those who have given themselves up to comfort.

I talked about this on Sunday morning, those who were essentially lackadaisical or complacent in their looking at God. Boy, isn't that a real pointing at the way people are today, even to this very day.

People are very lackadaisical and are essentially at ease. Heard a pastor today, I was listening to him talk and he said, a lot of people just don't care. You start talking about heaven and hell and salvation and they, well, whatever, it's gonna, whatever's gonna, case or us or I, whatever will be, will be and they don't care.

Not a lot of concern. Well, in chapter seven, which is where we are tonight from chapter seven to the end, we begin a series of visions given to the prophet Amos and the Lord is going to show him through visions what is going to happen to Israel and over the next two weeks, we're going to try to close out the book by looking at these visions and seeing what it is the Lord wants to show the people of Israel and by extension, how we can apply this to ourselves as believers.

And essentially what one could say was in chapter seven, he goes from speech to sight because in the chapters leading up to this, it's been a series of speeches. Hear this word, hear this word. Woe unto you, woe unto you.

But now it's, I looked and saw this and he explains by vision what he's seeing. The Lord's giving him a vision to look at. And so we're gonna read chapter seven all the way through. It's only 17 verses here.

And then I'm gonna go back and give an explanation of the verses which we have the outline in your lesson and then we'll make application. So chapter seven, verse one. This is what the Lord God showed me.

Behold, he was forming locusts when the latter growth was just beginning to sprout and behold, it was the latter growth after the king's mowings. When they had finished eating the grass of the land, I said, oh Lord God, please forgive.

How can Jacob stand? He is so small. The Lord relented concerning this. It shall not be said the Lord. This is what the Lord God showed me. This is a second vision. Behold, the Lord God was calling for a judgment by fire and it devoured the great deep and was eating up the land.

Then I said, oh Lord God, please cease. How can Jacob stand? He is so small. The Lord relented concerning this. This also shall not be said the Lord God. The third vision, verse seven. This is what he showed me.

Behold, the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand. And the Lord said to me, Amos, what do you see? And I said, a plumb line. Then the Lord said, behold, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel.

I will never again pass by them. The high places of Isaac shall be made desolate and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste. And I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword. Then Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, sent to Jeroboam, king of Israel, saying, Amos has conspired against you in the midst of the house of Israel.

The land is not able to bear all his words for thus Amos has said, Jeroboam shall die by the sword and Israel must go into exile away from this land. And Amaziah said to Amos, O seer, go flee away to the land of Judah and eat bread there and prophesy there, but never again prophesy to Bethel for it is the king's sanctuary and it is the temple of the kingdom.

Then Amos answered and said to Amaziah, I was no prophet nor a prophet's son, but I was a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore figs. But the Lord took me from following the flock and the Lord said to me, go prophesy to my people Israel.

Now therefore hear the word of the Lord. You say, do not prophesy against Israel and do not preach against the house of Isaac. Therefore thus says the Lord, your wife shall be a prostitute in the city and your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword and your land shall be divided up with a measuring line.

You yourself shall die in an unclean land and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land. This is the word of the Lord. Very powerful prophecy. Chapter seven and as we'll see next week, chapter eight, just a powerful proclamation of judgment, a powerful proclamation of the reality of the situation that's being faced.

And to add insult to injury, you notice in verse 10, you have a guy come on the scene that you haven't seen. Amaziah the priest of Bethel. This is a false prophet coming to the true prophet of God saying you need to hush.

So not only is there this proclamation of judgment, but you have the very visible expression of the reality of what the people were saying. We don't wanna hear this negativity. We don't want a preacher who's just preaching negative.

We need somebody telling us it's gonna be all right. We need somebody telling us it's gonna be great. We need somebody preaching prosperity and hope and joy and blessings. We don't need this nonsense.

We need happiness and pleasure because everything's okay. So that's where we are. But I've broken it down into five parts. If you look at your outline, the intercession of the prophet is verses one through six, the plumb line of God, verses seven to nine, the complaint of the ungodly, verses 10 through 13, the authority of the prophecy, verses 14 and 15.

And then finally, the hatred of the prophecy, verses 16 and 17. So let's begin back up at verse one. And verses one through six, we have what I label the intercession of the prophet. Verse one, he said, this is what the Lord God showed me.

Behold, he was forming locusts when the latter growth was just beginning to sprout. And behold, it was the latter growth after the king's mowings. The king's mowings, does anybody's text say anything different than that?

Does anybody have a different translation? Does everybody say king's mowings at the end of verse one? The king's mowings is in reference to a specific type of tax that was taken by the royalty over all of the fields of the land of Israel.

When the fields were ripe for the harvest, the king got the first 10th or the tithe of what the fields produced. If you go back into the book of Samuel, you will see that this was one of the things that was promised whenever the people were calling out for a king.

The people said, we want a king like all the other nations. And what did Samuel say? Well, if you have a king, he's gonna take from your fields. He's gonna take from your children. He's gonna take your, you realize what it means to have a ruler?

He's gonna have authority over your goods. Well, in reference to this, after the king's mowings was the time when you got what was yours. So in a sense, in a people who were used to a tax system like this, this was the good time.

When you look out at your field before the king's mowings, you go, well, I'm not real excited yet because the king hasn't taken his part. Sort of like when you get your check and you look at the part that's before the taxes.

Nobody's excited about that part, right? You look at that, then you look at the gross and then you see the FICA and all that stuff that comes out and you look at the net and you say, well, the net's what I'm excited about.

Nobody goes home and look at what I grossed. No, look at what I netted because that's what I'm really getting to take home. So there's a sense in which that's what's being referenced here. There's this king's mowing that happened.

And so the people would go out after the king's mowing and say, well, this part's mine. I can sell what I need. I can eat what I need. I can barter with what I need. I've got mine after the king takes what's his.

So it was a good time in the land, especially in time of prosperity because even though the king took a hefty tithe, they still had a lot. And they were still very, for the most part, they were very prosperous.

But the promise of God is that he's going to send locusts. That after the king has taken what's his and the people are ready to gather what's theirs, it's gonna go away. It's gonna go away by the swarm of these little animals.

Now, I never lived an agrarian lifestyle. I never lived on a farm. I grew up in a modern sort of home. My father worked in an industrial plant, made cans. My stepmother was a hairdresser. So I lived in a home that was basically a non, nobody had a, if we planted things, it's because we wanted to do something different, you know, plant a tomato bush or, we had chickens.

And I remember we'd go out and collect the chicken eggs and that was nice, you know, but we didn't have to. Because if we wanted eggs, we'd go down to the store and buy eggs. The reason why we had chickens, because we wanted them.

The reason why we plant a tomato or something like that is because we wanted to. But people who live an agrarian life, who rely on this, things like locusts are a terrible thing. Any type of animal that can come in and destroy all that you've worked for, all that you've been waiting for, this is a terrible thing.

This can be utterly devastating to their livelihood. And God said, this is what's gonna happen. He was forming locusts. He was preparing them to come in and take away all that was theirs. Now, I do want to make mention is John Calvin takes a sort of a metaphoric approach to this passage.

That the locusts here represent the armies of Assyria. That when the people were at their most prosperous, after the King's mowings, that the armies of Assyria would come in and lay them to waste. Maybe.

I'm not gonna argue with, you know, J .C. He's a pretty smart guy. Yeah, we're in a good relationship. I can call him that. He's dead, so he don't care. But, you know, Calvin had an idea that this may be metaphoric, and that's possible because we know that what is being promised is there is coming the Assyrian army who's gonna come in and wipe out Israel.

But there's also the fact that this could simply be a promise of judgment that they're going to lose their prosperity by way of some natural disaster. And the locusts coming in, the grasshoppers coming in and destroy it, that's a natural disaster which would lay to waste much of their prosperity.

But then in verse two, we see the prophet begging God not to do it. Even though Amos, you know, maybe, I think sometimes we get a wrong view of the prophets. I think sometimes we see these prophets as just sort of hard men who just sort of like, you know, just angry, hateful, vengeful men.

These are, you know, these are men who are, they love God, and they want to see people repent. And so he goes on behalf of these people who are evil, and he's been preaching about their evilness, but he goes to God and asks for a reprieve.

He says, it says, when they had finished eating the grass of the land, I said, oh Lord, please forgive. How can Jacob stand? He is so small. So Amos calls out to God and says, please God, not yet. Don't bring the destruction yet.

And we see in verse three, the Lord relented concerning this saying it shall not be. Now, in some translations, the word repent comes into play. And I do think that that is miscommunication of what the Hebrew is trying to say.

When God holds back judgment on behalf of the calling out of one of his prophets or the repentance of a people, that is God's prerogative to do. And it does not mean that God didn't know he was going to do it.

It doesn't mean that God in some way didn't see that one coming, you know. God knows everything, and he knows exactly what everyone is going to do. And so the idea of repentance, I think sometimes makes us think of a mistake.

Because if we repent, it's because we did something we shouldn't do, or we're going to do something we shouldn't do. So I don't think that the word repentance is the best way to express God's action in this situation.

So I do think that that's a time where I don't think the translation gets it close enough. I think the ESV does a better job of saying he relented, simply that he was ready to cast this judgment down.

Sort of think of like Nineveh. In 40 days, you will be destroyed. And then the people repent and God is saying, well, good, you heard the warning, you repented. And so now I don't have to do this. I gave you this opportunity to repent and you did it.

And so I can hold back the promise of judgment that was coming. Well, in this case, you don't have the people repenting, but you got one man standing in the way. He's saying, God, please don't. Please give them another chance.

Give them another day. Give them another hour. Give them more time, Lord. They're so small. Just hold back your judgment on them. Now think about Moses. You remember when Moses was up on the mountain and the people of God made that golden calf?

And God said to Moses, he said, you know what, I can destroy every one of them and start over with you. I could just wipe them out and we'll start the nation of Moses. You're a descendant of Abraham. We'll just start over and you'll be the new Noah.

Because you remember that's what he did with Noah. He put Noah and his family on that boat and he wiped everyone out and he started over with Noah. And Moses was there on that mountain and God gave him the same opportunity.

He said, I can wipe them all out and we'll start over with you. And it wouldn't have been nothing for God to start over with Moses. He could have had another big group of people. Not too long. God can make a family big in no time.

Just look around. In our church, we can prove that. God can extend a family, right? Yeah, we see that all around us. But what did Moses say? No, forgive them. He cried out for forgiveness for the Israelite people.

He cried out for forgiveness and God on behalf of his intercession held back that judgment. Isn't it amazing to think that there is probably today judgment that is held back on our own land because there are people who are standing in the gap praying for our nation?

That, exactly. And so we see here the power of the prophet, the power of his prayer, not circumventing God's sovereignty. Don't ever think it's circumventing God's sovereignty. This is all part of his plan.

God uses the prayers of his people as part of his divine decree. He decrees what's going to happen and he decrees the prayers that go along with it. And Amos is being used by God as part of the plan. And so Amos calls out for intercession.

Please God, don't. And God doesn't. And then they see the same thing again in verse four. He sees another vision. This is what the Lord showed me. Behold, the Lord was calling for a judgment by fire. Not locusts this time, but fire this time.

And it devoured the great deep and was eating up the land. Then I said, oh Lord, please cease. How can Jacob stand? He is so small. Same thing. The Lord relented concerning this. This also shall not be said the Lord God.

The Plumb Line of God’s Righteous Standard

But verse seven, something changed. In verse seven, the Lord demonstrates that there was coming a day when there would be no more relenting. There will be no more. There's sort of like when you're filling up a cup and eventually it starts to go over the sides of the cup and spill out.

Well, the people of Israel had been filling up the cup of God's wrath. They had been filling up the cup of God's indignation and it's about to spill over. So in verse seven, this is what he showed me.

This is the third vision. Behold, the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand. I was looking forward to this one. I wanna ask by a show of hands, how many of you know what a plumb line is?

Wow, okay, how many of you don't know? The people who didn't raise your hands, okay. All right, that's fine, because I had to look and I do woodwork, but I have not used one because I've never built a structure.

I do woodworking on a very small scale, but a plumb line is used for determining something that is straight with the ground and you use gravity. And if you've ever seen, I could draw maybe a little rudimentary picture of one.

It usually looks something like this and has a string attached to it. You know, now some of you might know, if you see this, it's a little metal, looks like almost like a top, has a string. And when you let it down to the ground and you hold it up high, gravity forces it to stop and you've got now a straight line.

And you can hold that up to a door jam or to the corner of a wall. And you can tell whether or not that wall is straight with the ground simply by virtue of how gravity works. And so verse eight, and the Lord said to me, Amos, what do you see?

And I said, a plumb line. Then the Lord said, behold, I am setting a plumb line. In the midst of my people, Israel, I will never again pass by them. The high places of Isaac shall be made desolate. Sanctuary shall be laid waste.

I'll rise against the house of Jeroboam with a sword. So what's the plumb line represent? The plumb line represents God's standard of righteousness. God's standard of righteousness is absolutely straight.

Absolutely straight. There's no crooked, there's no slanted edges or oblong beams or warped wood in God's standard. You know what we call the Bible? There's a term we use for the Bible. The term is canon.

You guys familiar with that term canon? You've heard me say the canon of scripture. The word canon means a measuring stick. It means something that you put up against to measure to make sure that something is right.

The canon of scripture is what we measure everything against. We measure all truth against the Bible. We measure all of our opinions and all of our will against what the Bible says, because it's the truth.

It's the line. God has a standard of righteousness and he's held it up to Israel and he has seen them wobbling. He's seen them crooked. He has seen them not holding his standard of righteousness for too long.

As I was thinking about this and I was writing and I was just sort of working this into my mind, I think about the fact that if I were measured against God's plumb line, I too would be way off. The only person in the history of ever who stood up to that plumb line is Jesus Christ.

He's the only one who has not had a crooked way left or right. He is the only one who from the bottom to the top, from birth to death has lived up to God's perfect standard. And that's the beauty of this because it reminds us of who our standard bearer is.

Christ is the one. He is the perfect one. He is the one who held that line, not me. And he holds it in my place. But the people of Israel, God has said, you have been crooked. And because of your crookedness and I have given you time and he's shown us already, I've given you time after time after time.

And yet you continue to get more crooked. And so destruction is coming. You will no longer stand. And he says, and this is the thing in verse eight, he says, I'm setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel.

I will never again pass by them. Remember we talked about this a few weeks ago. When God was going through Egypt on the night of the 10th plague, which was the death of the firstborn, the Bible says he passed over or he passed by the people of Israel and he executed judgment on the people of Egypt.

But the people of Israel, God passed them by or passed them over. Not anymore. Judgment is coming home as it were. He will no longer pass them by. The judgment, the cup runneth over the cup of his wrath.

And so this is the promise of the prophet Amos. You people of Israel should repent because God has filled his cup of wrath and it is about to pour out upon you because of your crooked ways. And what is the response?

Well, verse 10, Amaziah the priest of Bethel sent to Jeroboam king of Israel. This is not the first Jeroboam. Remember this is Jeroboam the second saying Amos has conspired against you in the midst of the house of Israel.

The land is not able to bear all his words for thus Amos said, Jeroboam shall die by the sword and Israel must go into exile away from his land. Well, do you think the king was happy with that? I'm gonna go ahead and guess no.

The king would actually employ prophets whose job it was to tell him everything was okay. He would employ men who would prophesy good concerning his life. And you say, well, that seems kind of foolish.

Why would anybody just hire somebody to tell him everything's going to be okay? Well, I mean, look around at a lot of the churches. I mean, every Sunday people go and they give large amounts of money to produce large cathedrals or places that simply tell you everything's gonna be okay.

And they cry out peace, peace when there is no peace. It says, the Old Testament scriptures tell us that that's what the false prophets did was they proclaim peace when there was no peace. So that's this guy, Amaziah.

It doesn't say a lot about him. There's other Amaziahs in scripture. This is the only time we see this particular guy. And it's a very unique situation. He's a priest of Bethel, which means he's a golden calf priest.

It's a false priest. And he hears the true preaching of God's word. He goes to the prophet and he says, you need to hush. This is what we see in verse 12. And Amaziah said to Amos, oh, seer. By the way, the word seer there is not a term of endearment.

Normally, the more endearing term would be a prophet of God, but to call someone a seer was a derogatory way of identifying someone, essentially trying to put Amos in his place. You're not one of us. You're not one of the elite.

You're not one of the true prophets. You're a seer. I thought years ago, this may be somewhat kind of off the subject, but it just reminds me. Years ago, I was invited to speak at a funeral and the guy who was the head preacher there met me and introduced himself to me and I introduced myself to him.

And he asked where I went to school. And so I told him, well, I went to Jacksonville Baptist Theological Seminary. And he literally, I've never had this happen. He literally turned his nose up and walked away.

I've never seen somebody literally turn their nose up, but he literally did. He, oh, and he walked away. I don't care. I mean, really, I wouldn't tell the story if it bothered me. But that's sort of the situation here.

You're not one of us. You're not one of the elite. You're not one of the prophets. You're just a seer. Go home. Nobody wants to hear what you have to say. You're not one of the true prophets. If you were, you'd be out there by that golden calf.

Amaziah said to Amos, oh seer, go flee away to the land of Judah and eat bread there and prophesy there, but never again prophesy at Bethel for it is the king's sanctuary and it is the temple of the kingdom.

Go home. Then Amos answered and said to Amaziah, I was no prophet, nor a prophet's son, but I was a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore figs, essentially agreeing in a sense with him. I wasn't brought up in a prophet's house and I didn't go to prophet's school.

I don't have a degree that says, Amos, prophet of Judah or prophet of Israel. I was a herdsman. I was a dresser of sycamore figs. I was living my life and God got me. I didn't have anything to do with this.

This was all God's idea. As we said, verse 15, but the Lord took me from following the flock. This is a great just reminder of the sovereignty of God. The Lord got me. You know, you think about Jonah as he tried his best to get away from God.

God gave him his first submarine ride, right where he had to be. You know, you ain't gonna get away. When God's got it on his mind, you know, you're going where he says. And the Lord took me from following the flock and the Lord said to me, go prophesy to my people, Israel, now, therefore, hear the word of the Lord.

So this is the response Amos gives. The response of Amos to get out of town is let me prophesy over you. Let me prophesy about you specifically. And this is where it gets ugly. And it does get a little ugly.

As he says, you say, do not prophesy against Israel and do not preach against the house of Isaac. Therefore, thus says the Lord, your wife shall be a prostitute in the city. He said, why? What does that mean?

When things have absolutely gone to absolute and utter destruction and there is nothing to subsist by, you will do whatever is necessary to survive. Your wife is going to be put out as a prostitute because there is gonna be nothing left for her to survive.

That's pretty harsh. Your sons and daughters are even worse. They're gonna die by the sword. And your land, remember, he's speaking directly to Amaziah. This is no longer directed at Israel as a nation.

This is a man. The man who is preaching falsely and pushing God's true prophet out, he says, your land shall be divided up with a measuring line and you yourself shall die in an unclean land and Israel shall go into exile away from its land.

You are going to be divided from your land. It's gonna be taken away from you. It's gonna be given away. You're gonna die in a pagan land and you're gonna lose everything you have. Not just Israel, you, Amaziah.

That's a powerful proclamation. And you know, it doesn't say it, but I'm gonna add a thought. I imagine Amaziah's response was hot. I imagine it was prideful, arrogant, haughty derision. I ain't listening to you.

Happens all the time. The pastor, the preacher preaches God's word. He begs people to come and lean upon Christ and find in him a savior and bow the knee to him and find a Lord and a shepherd. And people say, ha, I ain't listening to you.

We say, but hell is the reward of the wicked. It is the wages of sin and Christ provides salvation to all who will come to him in faith. And the unbeliever says, ha. And they run off to the false teacher who says, you're fine, you need nothing, eat, drink and be married.

Just make sure you talk, that's right. Well, let me give you the answers here at the end for the application and then we'll draw to a close. There's a few things to think about as part of what we've learned tonight.

The first thing, intercession. Intercession is when you go on behalf of someone else and normally it's a way that we refer to praying. Intercession is a means God uses in establishing his sovereign decree.

We should never think that God doesn't use prayer as part of his decree. I think sometimes those of us who believe in the sovereignty of God and his control over all things start to think that our prayers don't have any point or our prayers aren't a part of the, they are, they're absolutely necessary.

He tells us to do this because he uses them as a means in bringing about his will. So we never forget that, that our call to pray is necessary. It's part of his plan. The second thing, complaints against hard preaching often come from religious people.

I heard a little amen in there. I think that, yeah, don't you agree? Hard preaching, you know, the people who tell me the most that my preaching is too hard are other preachers. They just say, you know, that's, people don't wanna listen to that, religious people.

Third, the vision of the plumb line is a reminder of God's standard, which is perfection. This is a good reminder for all of us because when you start trying to think that you're going to get to heaven or you're going to please God by your works, you start looking at that plumb line and remind yourself just how far you off and that'll have you tie closer to Christ.

That'll have you lean closer to Christ. And finally, this is something for you to think about. I put these last discussion questions on here for you to take home, think about it. And if you have someone, maybe a home where there's several people and you wanna have a discussion, here's a question.

Why should we not be surprised by government opposition to God's people and His word? Because that's what we see here. Amaziah wasn't just a priest, but he was a figurehead for the government. He went to the king and he went to tell the prophet, we don't wanna hear this.

We only want people who are going to prophesy good and not evil. Oh boy. Yeah. Well, let's, absolutely. Let's pray. Father, I thank you for your word. I thank you for the truth. And I pray, Lord, that we've been faithful to the truth tonight.

I pray that I've been faithful as a teacher. I pray that it'll be used to encourage your people. And I pray that we would never forget our call to intercession, to intercede for one another, to intercede for our church, to intercede for our nation, Lord.

And we pray, Lord, also, that even though many in the religious world will tell us not to preach hard, that we should never shrink back from reminding the world that hell is real, heaven is real, sin is real, and Christ is the only one who can do anything about any of those.

And help us, Lord, to look to him. And it's in his name we pray. Amen.