'For thus saith the Lord unto the house of Israel, Seek ye Me, and
ye shall live: 5. But seek not Beth-el, nor enter into Gilgal, and
pass not to Beer-sheba: for Gilgal shall surely go into captivity,
and Beth-el shall come to nought. 6. Seek the Lord, and ye shall
live; lest He break out like fire in the house of Joseph, and
devour it, and there be none to quench it in Beth-el. 7. Ye who
turn judgment to wormwood, and leave off righteousness in the
earth, 8. Seek Him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and
turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day
dark with night: that calleth for the waters of the sea, and
poureth them out upon the face of the earth: The Lord is His name:
9. That strengtheneth the spoiled against the strong, so that the
spoiled shall come against the fortress. 10. They hate him that
rebuketh in the gate, and they abhor him that speaketh uprightly.
11. Forasmuch therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye
take from him burdens of wheat: ye have built houses of hewn stone,
but ye shall not dwell in them; ye have planted pleasant vineyards,
but ye shall not drink wine of them. 12. For I know your manifold
transgressions and your mighty sins: they afflict the just, they
take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their
right 13. Therefore the prudent shall keep silence in that time;
for it is an evil time. 14. Seek good, and not evil, that ye may
live: and so the Lord, the God of hosts, shall be with you, as ye
have spoken. 15. Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish
judgment in the gate: it may be that the Lord God of hosts will be
gracious unto the remnant of Joseph.'--AMOS v. 4-15.
The reign of Jeroboam II, in which Amos prophesied, was a period of
great prosperity and of great corruption. Amos, born in the Southern
Kingdom, and accustomed to the simple life of a shepherd, blazed up in
indignation at the signs of misused wealth and selfish luxury that he
saw everywhere, in what was to him almost a foreign country. If one
fancies a godly Scottish Highlander sent to the West end of London, or a
Bible-reading New England farmer's man sent to New York's 'upper ten,'
one will have some notion of this prophet, the impressions made, and the
task laid on him. He has a message to our state of society which, in
many particulars, resembles that which he had to rebuke.
There seems to be a slight dislocation in the order of the verses of the
passage, for verse 7 comes in awkwardly, breaking the connection between
verses 6 and 8, and itself cut off from verse 10, to which it belongs.
If we remove the intruding verse to a position after verse 9, the whole
passage is orderly and falls into three coherent parts: an exhortation
to seek Jehovah, enforced by various considerations (vs. 4-9); a
vehement denunciation of social vices (vs. 7, 10-13); and a renewed
exhortation to seek God by doing right to man (vs. 14, 15).
Amos's first call to Israel is but the echo of God's to men, always and
everywhere. All circumstances, all inward experiences, joy and sorrow,
prosperity and disaster, our longings and our fears, they all cry aloud
to us to seek His face. That loving invitation is ever sounding in our
ears. And the promise which Amos gave, though it may have meant on his
lips the continuance of national life only, yet had, even on his lips, a
deeper meaning, which we now cannot but hear in it. For, just as to
'seek the Lord' means more to us than it did to Israel, so the
consequent life has greatened, widened, deepened into life eternal. But
Amos's narrower, more external promise is true still, and there is no
surer way of promoting true well-being than seeking God. 'With Thee is
the fountain of life,' in all senses of the word, from the lowest purely
physical to the highest, and it is only they who go thither to draw that
will carry away their pitchers full of the sparkling blessing. The
fundamental principle of Amos's teaching is an eternal truth, that to
seek God is to find Him, and to find Him is life.
But Amos further teaches us that such seeking is not real nor able to
find, unless it is accompanied with turning away from all sinful quests
after vanities. We must give up seeking Bethel, Gilgal, or Beersheba,
seats of the calf worship, if we are to seek God to purpose. The sin of
the Northern Kingdom was that it wanted to worship Jehovah under the
symbol of the calves, thus trying to unite two discrepant things. And is
not a great deal of our Christianity of much the same quality? Too many
of us are doing just what Elijah told the crowds on Carmel that they
were doing, trying to 'shuffle along on both knees.' We would seek God,
but we would like to have an occasional visit to Bethel. It cannot be
done. There must be detachment, if there is to be any real attachment.
And the certain transiency of all creatural objects is a good reason for
not fastening ourselves to them, lest we should share their fate.
'Gilgal shall go into captivity, and Bethel shall come to nought,'
therefore let us join ourselves to the Eternal Love and we shall abide,
as it abides, for ever.
The exhortation is next enforced by presenting the consequences of
neglecting it. To seek Him is life, not to seek Him incurs the danger of
finding Him in unwelcome ways. That is for ever true. We do not get away
from God by forgetting Him, but we run the risk of finding in Him, not
the fire which vitalises, purifies, melts, and gladdens, but that which
consumes. The fire is one, but its effects are twofold. God is for us
either that fire into which it is blessedness to be baptized, or that by
which it is death to be burned up. And what can Bethel, or calves, or
all the world do to quench it or pluck us out of it?
Once more the exhortation is urged, if we link verse 8 with verse 6, and
supply 'Seek ye' at its beginning. Here the enforcement is drawn from
the considerations of God's workings in nature and history. The shepherd
from Tekoa had often gazed up at the silent splendours of the Pleiades
and Orion, as he kept watch over his flocks by night, and had seen the
thick darkness on the wide uplands thinning away as the morning stole op
over the mountains across the Dead Sea, and the day dying as he gathered
his sheep together. He had cowered under the torrential rains which
swept across his exposed homeland, and had heard God's voice summoning
the obedient waters of the sea, that He might pour them down in rain.
But the moral government of the world also calls on men to seek Jehovah.
'He causeth destruction to flash forth on the strong, so that
destruction cometh upon the fortress.' High things attract the
lightning. Godless strength is sure, sooner or later, to be smitten
down, and no fortress is so impregnable that He cannot capture and
overthrow it. Surely wisdom bids us seek Him that does all these
wonders, and make Him our defence and our high tower.
The second part gives a vivid picture of the vices characteristic of a
prosperous state of society which is godless, and therefore selfishly
luxurious. First, civil justice is corrupted, turned into bitterness,
and prostrated to the ground. Then bold denouncers of national sins are
violently hated. Do we not know that phase of an ungodly and rich
society? What do the newspapers say about Christians who try to be
social reformers? Are the epithets flung at them liker bouquets or
rotten eggs? 'Fanatics and faddists' are the mildest of them. Then the
poor are trodden down and have to give large parts of their scanty
harvests to the rich. Have capital and labour just proportions of their
joint earnings? Would a sermon on verse 11 be welcome in the suburbs of
industrial centres, where the employers have their 'houses of hewn
stone'? Such houses, side by side with the poor men's huts, struck the
eye of the shepherd from Tekoa as the height of sinful luxury, and still
more sinful disproportion in the social condition of the two classes.
What would he have said if he had lived in England or America? Justice,
too, was bought and sold. A murderer could buy himself off, while the
poor man, who could not pay, lost his case. We do not bribe juries, but
(legal) justice is an expensive luxury still, and counsel's fees put it
out of the reach of poor men.
One of the worst features of such a state of society as Amos saw is that
men are afraid to speak out in condemnation of it, and the ill weeds
grow apace for want of a scythe. Amos puts a certain sad emphasis on
'prudent,' as if he was feeling how little he could be called so, and
yet there is a touch of scorn in him too. The man who is over-careful of
his skin or his reputation will hold his tongue; even good men may
become so accustomed to the glaring corruptions of society in the midst
of which they have always lived, that they do not feel any call to
rebuke or wage war against them; but the brave man, the man who takes
his ideals from Christ, and judges society by its conformity with
Christ's standard, will not keep silence, and the more he feels that 'It
is an evil time' the more will he feel that he cannot but speak out,
whatever comes of his protest. What masquerades as prudence is very
often sinful cowardice, and such silence is treason against Christ.
The third part repeats the exhortation to 'seek,' with a notable
difference. It is now 'good' that is to be sought, and 'evil' that is to
be turned from. These correspond respectively to 'Jehovah,' and 'Bethel,
Gilgal, and Beersheba,' in former verses. That is to say, morality is
the garb of religion, and religion is the only true source of morality.
If we are not seeking the things that are lovely and of good report, our
professions of seeking God are false; and we shall never earnestly and
successfully seek good and hate evil unless we have begun by seeking and
finding God, and holding Him in our heart of hearts. Modern social
reformers, who fancy that they can sweeten society without religion,
might do worse than go to school to Amos.
Notable, too, is the lowered tone of confidence in the beneficial result
of obeying the Prophet's call. In the earlier exhortation the promise
had been absolute. 'Seek ye Me, and ye _shall_ live'; now it has cooled
to 'it may be.' Is Amos faltering? No; but while it is always true that
blessed life is found by the seeker after God, because He finds the very
source of life, it is not always true that the consequences of past
turnings from Him are diverted by repentance. 'It may be' that these
have to be endured, but even they become tokens of Jehovah's
graciousness, and the purified 'remnant of Joseph' will possess the true
life more abundantly because they have been exercised thereby.