Prepare to Meet Your God
If you look at the written text of Amos chapter four in many English translations, you will notice the pattern that is evident in the text. Seven proclamations end with the phrase, “Declares the LORD.” Five of them, beginning in verse six, also have the phrase, “Yet you did not return to me,” just before, “Declares the LORD.”
Each of those five paragraphs recounts an act of God’s discipline: Famine (verse 6), drought (verses 7 and 8), crop diseases and locusts (verse 9), pestilence and war (verse 10), and acts of God (verse 11). These were all meant by God as “wake-up calls” to the nation. The right response at any and every point would have been to return to God in repentance and faith. But, as the text tells us repeatedly, they did not return to God.
The chapter closes with this dire warning: “Prepare to meet your God, O Israel.”
Their refusal to return to God and meet Him as a God of grace and mercy, at whose feet they would find forgiveness and restoration, meant that they would meet Him at a throne of just wrath and judgment. This principle is still in play today. We can turn to Christ in repentance and faith and find forgiveness and a welcome into the family of God. We can be like the Prodigal Son where the Father runs to meet us and restore us to our place in the family, our sins forgiven and forgotten.
Or we can do as the Israelites of Amos’ day and refuse to return. If we choose that path, be aware that our refusal to come to God doesn’t mean that we won’t stand before Him. It is just that we will stand before Him at the Great White Throne of Judgment. If you reject the grace of God in Christ, prepare to meet your God.
This was the text from which I preached my first sermon, it is a sobering passage! Thank you for sharing this message.