As I continue reading Amos, I have to say, I'm loving every word of it. It really reveals so much more about God to me that I didn't know about before.
So today's post is on chapter 4.
"Israel has not returned to God"
One question stood out to me as I read verses 4-5, 'had The Lord given up on trying to get Israel to turn back to Him?
It's kind of like us, when we give up on trying to change someone, we're like 'fine, go do what you want'. Is that what God doing here?
I definitely do not know exactly what God's intentions were here, but I can say I'm sure that it wasn't God giving up in His people.
I think that maybe God was trying a different approach to get Israel's intentions, He was telling them personally what they were doing, where they were going wrong, so maybe they would open their eyes & see themselves drowning in this sea of sin.
We would normally expect God to tell His people not to sin, but here He was telling them to sin, because He probably knew that this would help them realise they were sinning & turn away from it.
Here we are once again reminded how unpredictable God is & how amazingly He works in our lives.
Throughout this passage, the only thing I could see was God wanting to see His people turn from their sin & back to Him.
Especially with the repetition of "yet you have not returned to me" in verses 6-11.
As I thought more about it, isn't that basically what God's been doing since The Fall in the very beginning?
For so long, God's been trying to redeem His creation that turned against the Creator Himself.
This really made me realise, when we normally think of God's salvation & redemption of mankind, we normally only think of the cross.
We normally only picture that one day Jesus hung on the cross for us, or those 33 years Jesus came down to earth for us. We only think of God saving us in that instant when Jesus overcame death.
But what I came to realise throughout the desperation of this passage is that the picture of God's redemption on mankind is so much bigger.
Yes, when Jesus died on the cross for us, it was such a great event & we are eternally grateful for that. But in reality, God has done SOOO much more than just send His son to die on the cross for us.
Picture the cross. It's one of the greatest examples we know of God's love for us. It's God Himself sacrificing His one & only son for us. It's God, allowing Himself to die so He could overcome death for us. Now isn't that a bit too much God has done for us when we deserved nothing from Him.
Now think about this, since the very beginning, when sin entered the earth, God has CONTINUALLY tried to help His people overcome their sinful desires and turn back to Him.
Not only that, He's had to face our rejection, our stubbornness, our ignorance. He's had to have the grief of punishing us because we're unwilling to turn from our sin. But still He's never given up on us, even though we're still going against Him. He's been persistence with his love even though we've been persistent with our sinful lives.
He's been trying so hard like this for thousands of years.
Now doesn't that make the whole redemption story seem so much larger than we may have thought it to be already? As we read through Amos 4, we can get a taste of how much rejection God faced from His own people, but how hard He still kept trying to being them back.
At the same time, it may seem like God is a complete failure for 'losing control' of His people.
But think about it this way, couldn't God so easily change our minds to see Him as so much better than sin so that we would so easily turn to Him?
Well a relationship isn't one if it's one sides right? Both peers need to be contributing. Here it's the same idea. It just wouldn't work if God made us see Him as everything we've wanted.
He's created a choice for us.
Sin or Him.
He created it so that we may choose Him over sin to reaffirm our relationship with Him, so that it is genuine.
Knowing this, we can know that sin wasn't made for us to indulge in, it was made so that we may choose Him over it.
In verse 12, the words "prepare to meet your God" were quite compelling to me. There are only two sides of God you'd meet. Either His judgmental side in our sin, or Him welcoming us into eternity with Him. Here, most definitely, He was telling them to prepare to meet Him for judgement.
But why meet Him? Hadn't He already punished them enough?
It really shows that God is a personal God, He makes Himself available to us eve though He is God.
"Prepare to meet your God"
One day we will all meet Him.
How we prepare to meet Him determines what the outcome of meeting Him will be. Do we want to see God disgusted with our ignorance & love for sin, or do we want Him to look past it all & welcome us with arms wide open because we chose to do out best to love Him?
The last verse, 13 is a great reminder of God's greatness & for us to remember who God really is, not some God that's desperate for our live, but the God who "forms the mountains, creates the wind".
So I hope we may remember how much God actually did for us, so that we may be ignorant no longer & strive to live our lives the best we can all for Him.
And I also hope that we may prepare ourselves for the glorious moment when He comes to take us to heaven one day.
Godbless~
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