Unbending Plumbline of His Righteousness — E.A. Johnston

Amos and the Burden of Repentance

I have a message today, friends, from the book of Amos, that is a burden upon my heart. The name Amos means a burden, and the prophet Amos was called by God to carry a burden as he served as God's preacher, to preach God's message to the backslidden people of God, to repent and turn back to God, or else face their destruction because the people had forgotten God.

Israel’s False Conception of God

Oh, well, you say, what do you mean, preacher? How could have Israel forgotten God when they still performed their religious duties to God? I answer you, friend, that Israel had forgotten the living God of the Bible and lived unto themselves and served a God of their own imagination.

As they backed away from God, they backed away from their concepts of God until they turned Him into a God that served them, instead of being a people under His rule and under His authority whom they obediently served, and because of their conceit and because of their false concepts of God, and more importantly, because of their disobedience to God and their sins against God, then God determined to hold them up to His unbending law and all its straightness, strictness, and severity, and God sent a prophet among them with a vision of God with a plumb line in His hand to measure His people against His standards and to prove to them how far they had strayed away from Him.

The Plumb Line in Amos’s Vision

Our text today, friends, is found in the book of Amos. You can turn in your Bibles there now, friends. We will be in chapter 7 and in verses 7 through 8. The title of my message today is, The Unbending Plumb Line of His Righteousness.

Here now is the word of God and may His Spirit attend the reading of His holy word. Thus He showed me, and behold, the Lord stood upon a wall made by a plumb line with a plumb line in His hand. Let me pause here, friends, to say, notice, it is not some little God standing there or namby-pamby little Jesus up on that wall, but the Lord, the Lord in all His reign and sovereign authority, is the one standing atop that wall doing the work of a carpenter.

Christ’s Righteous Standard

A carpenter will measure boards with a tape measure before cutting them. A carpenter will drop a plumb line alongside a wall he has just put up to test its straightness. I believe my Bible says Jesus was a carpenter's son who labored as a carpenter, isn't that so?

I believe, friends, that the reigning Lord Christ still holds a plumb line in His nail-pierced hand. He holds that unbending plumb line of God's unyielding word and God's unchanging character. He holds that unbending plumb line of His righteousness up by the side of the crooked structures God's people have built by calling them churches.

As He holds that holy plumb line over those rotten foundations of self-serving institutionalism, He reveals them for what they are, mere cathedrals of glass built by man for the glory of man. I think the prophetic words found in the next verse of our text as seen in verse 8 tell it like it is.

God’s Refusal to Pass By Israel

And the Lord said unto me, Amos, what seest thou? And I said, A plumb line. Then he said, Then said the Lord, Behold, I will set a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel. I will not again pass by them any more.

I will stop there, friends. The plumb line was to serve as the measure of Israel's sin, to reveal how far she had gone astray. And the plumb line that the risen Savior, Carpenter Jesus, holds in His hand is a measure of the churches of America's sins, to reveal how far she has gone astray as well, and what God did in judgment to Israel by first removing His presence from them and then by destroying all that held dear to them is a two-fisted scenario playing out in this nation of churches today because our sins, we are under His remedial judgment, and we are experiencing in our churches across this land the withdrawn presence of God because the Lord Jesus stood on our broken down walls of pride and ambition with His unbending plumb line in His righteous hand, and He has measured the deformity and has announced to us as well, I will not again pass by them any more.

Conformity, Compromise, and Coming Judgment

That's where we are today as a backslidden people resolved to remain in our rebellion while we experience the withdrawn presence of God and while we await the destroying hand of God upon this godless nation of ours.

The church sleeps upon her two pillows of conformity and compromise atop the wall she has built and continues to build and expand her already bulging campuses with crooked yardsticks and warped measuring lines all upon a moldy, rotten foundation that is ready to give way beneath us until the whole false facade comes crashing down.