REFORMED CHURCH, BELLVILLE: SUNDAY 4 NOVEMBER 2001: EVENING SERVICE

REFORMED CHURCH, BELLVILLE: SUNDAY 4 NOVEMBER 2001: EVENING SERVICE

Our help is in the Name of the Lord,
Who made heaven and earth.
Beloved, grace and peace be to you from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ, through the mighty working of God the Holy Spirit.
AMEN.

Psalm of praise: Psalm 34:2,6.

Prayer

Psalm 27:4.

Scripture reading: Amos 5.

Text: Amos 5:4.

For thus says the LORD to the house of Israel, "Seek Me that you may live."

We all know that there are always people who are able to deceive others, because they pretend to be what they are not. We others must accept that they are honest, because we cannot see into their hearts.

There is, however, one place where nobody can dissemble successfully. That is in pretending to worship God, while you are inwardly dishonest about your belief. Nobody can deceive the Lord; everyone who pretends in this way to believe, is punished by the Lord.

In this sermon we will consider two matters:

1.         The dirge

2.         The announcement of grace

1.         The dirge

If we were to give a title to the first couple of verses in this chapter, we could call them: a dirge about a young woman.

There is a great deal of tension in these first few verses:

On the one hand there is grief, for it is truly a dirge.
At the same time it touches upon something beautiful, for it deals with a virgin in her youth and untouched beauty.

To understand this portion of Scripture, we must bear these two matters in mind throughout.

A dirge tells of misery and suffering.

This passage is a sad song which tells of a beloved person snatched away by death, and of her surviving kinsfolk, who now sing this dirge.
This elegy or dirge tells, on the one hand, of the pain and longing of the loved ones who are still alive.
On the other hand it tells of the beautiful things they remember, and which have, irrevocably, passed as far as this life is concerned.

The Lord intends this image to be taken seriously and unambiguously.

To this end He employs the image of a virgin. A lovely young woman.
This young woman symbolises the blossoming of life.
She represents vitality, the power of life.
She also represents beauty and purity and everything fine.

By this image the Lord depicts His people, Israel. The image of the virgin tells, with respect to Israel, of a nation in the early years of its history -it is still a young nation.

But this virgin of whom the dirge of the Lord speaks is lying on the ground. Her soul has been torn from her.

That is why it is written here that "... she has fallen, she will not rise again ...". She has been struck down by an enemy.
The sombreness of the image is intensified by the addition of the words "... on her land."
It is on her own land, her own home ground, that the enemy struck her down.

Thereby the Lord prophesies that the same place where this virgin lived in happiness and prosperity will drink up her blood in its soil.

The Lord emphasises what this virgin experienced in some detail:

There was none to raise her up.
She lay neglected, bleeding to death on her own land.

The people listening to this prophecy understood the image very well.

They were the virgin.

And the Lord prophesied that an enemy would come to attack them on their own home ground, and very many of them would be killed.
The enemy would utterly destroy them, so that they would no longer exist as a people.

They heard more in the words "... There is none to raise her up..." than we hear.

In those words they heard that the Lord could raise someone from the dead - also a people.
Only - in this case the Lord did not do so! They thought of the prophecy of Hosea (6:2):

He will revive us after two days;
He will raise us up on the third day,
That we may live before Him.

They thus clearly heard that the Lord confirmed in these words that He would forgive their sins when they repented, and that He would even raise them up after the enemy had struck them down - if only they believed. That was the crucial requirement: they had to worship the Lord alone, and, furthermore, their worship had to be sincere. But they would not listen.

That is why it is stated emphatically in verse 3 that it is nobody other than the Lord GOD who prophesies these things, and then the violence of the enemy attack is depicted:

The city which goes forth a thousand strong, will suffer such defeat and losses that they will have a hundred left;
The city which goes forth a hundred strong, will have only ten left.
The defeat would be bloody and totally destroy Israel.

Such is the result of God's wrath upon those who leave Him or who worship Him with a mere pretence of sincerity.

2. The announcement of grace

The Lord never merely calls someone to account and then pronounces judgement. God is a God of love, and His grace is so abundant that He is always prepared to forgive the sinner who turns away from wrongdoing.

For that reason the prophet pronounces not only judgement, but also grace.

There is a very sharp turn in the prophecy, because verse 3 still tells of killing and death, and then verse 4 announces:

Seek Me that you may live.

If we read the passage in this way, it becomes clear that the Lord wished to move the people towards repentance by announcing imminent judgement.
He wanted the violence which the prophet foretold to cause a turnaround in them, and that the people would then worship Him with true dedication.
Therefore, the awakening call: Who seeks me, will live; he will not need to die.

There is clearly in these words the inference that the Lord is prepared, in His sovereign providence, to defer His judgement, or to withdraw it entirely, if the people should repent.

One could probably say that the Lord would be prepared to defer judgement if the people repented of their sins, because the Lord did so in the case of Nineveh.
Verse 15 also says something in this regard. Amos stated the matter rather tentatively, because he knew that his people were very stubborn.
As it happened, the people did not listen, so the judgement proceeded.

We must also remember always that not all the people were idolaters. Not all were totally bad. There were still some who served the Lord with true dedication. Think of the time when Elijah complained to the Lord that he was the only believer left. The Lord then told him that he was wrong: there were still seven thousand who had not bowed before Baal. True believers there will always be, even if they are sometimes very few indeed.

This announcement of grace was for these individual believers an anchor to which they clung in those difficult times: they must just continue to seek the Lord, and then the Lord would see to it that their lives were secure!

The pronouncement of judgement may be considered from various points of departure to which we should direct our attention.

One aspect was undoubtedly that of the individual believers who realized that, even should the people as a whole suffer the judgement foretold, there would still be reason for the individual to turn to the Lord. Every person who repented, would enjoy the grace of the Lord.
You should note the abundance of the grace of the Lord: notwithstanding this situation of unbelief and false faith, there is the call to repentance, so that the Lord may grant them life.

"Seek Me," says the Lord.

"Seek Me" has a number of meanings.

It could mean that you need advice, and then approach the Lord.
It could also mean that you approach the Lord so that He can teach you about something. An example of this is e.g. in Gen. 25:22 where Rebecca approaches the Lord about the unborn children fighting one another inside her.
The expression "Seek Me" is also used to refer in general to your devotional exercises.
It could also mean that you have a soul-felt desire to be with the Lord, and that you honour the Lord in obedience and love

In our text it has all these meanings. All these things mentioned the Lord associates with the promise of life. The people must therefore worship the Lord wholeheartedly - at every level their religous practice must be beyond reproach - then the Lord will give life.

There were still some people of Israel who went to Bethel and Gilgal to worship there.

But true worship this was apparently not.
These were more probably customary get-togethers or family gatherings than for the worship of God.
That is why the Lord tells them to stop their outward forms of worship.
He does not seek outward show or pretense in worship.
They must worship with sincere dedication, then they will live.

The people had started to become irreligious, and did not serve the Lord as befitted believers. Judgement therefore came upon the people as a result of their unfaithfulness. The pronouncement of judgement followed.

And when they nevertheless persisted, they were indeed punished.
The enemy came upon them, killing many and carrying off others, and completely devastating their land.

Here the Lord reveals something of which we should take note:

We must not dissemble or become hypocritical, nor should we persist in sinning - these things lead to punishment.
The Lord made it quite clear that the announcement of judgement was intended to lead his people to repentance.

The intention was that they should seek him.
Let it be so with us.

We will always have the problem of disobedience, but this depends on what causes it and of our attitude towards it. There is, after all, a great difference between:

the times you really fall into sin (unpremeditatedly),
and the times you enter into wrongdoing with open eyes.

It should be added that the true believer always experiences remorse for his sins.

He feels unhappy about doing things associated with the devil.
He wants to seek the Lord and serve Him.

It is quite clear that such people are enemies of sin, even though they sometimes commit transgressions. For them there is the hope that the Lord will renew them.

The hope in this entire matter is contained in the redemptive ministry of the Lord Jesus. Here the prophecy of Hosea is relevant:

He will revive us after two days;
He will raise us up on the third day,
That we may live before Him.

The Lord Jesus will enter the realm of death.
There He will do battle with death, and rise on the third day.
He will then give us life.
This is precisely what He did when He was on earth.

The life which the Lord promises, is indissolubly bound up with the requirement that we must seek Him.

We must also seek Him in our Redeemer, Jesus Christ.
We must also seek Him in faith in the atoning ministry of the Lord Jesus.
Our faith in and true worship of the Lord leads to life.

Think of life with the Lord: as the Book of Revelations describes it, there will be a new heaven and a new earth. On this new earth there is a city, the most beautiful city built of the costliest materials ever.

Those who are on that new earth can do no sin.
They can do nothing wrongful, because they are perfect - the Lord has transformed them so that they became perfect.
Nor can they die, because death has been excluded from that place.
There the glory of the Lord shines all around us for ever.

These words of our text contain the prospect that the life which God gives us leads eventually to our being in the presence of God. The life bestowed by God ultimately transcends this time-bound earth.

Consider that the judgement of God has always meant temporal as well as eternal death for those who weakened and degenerated.
And consider that those who loved God, and sought Him, crossed over from this life to life eternal.

Where do we stand?

Am I one who has surrendered to the degeneracy of unbelief?
Or am I perhaps one who merely pretends to believe, but inwardly remains cold towards the Lord?
Do I strive to believe truly and sincerely?

Seek the Lord, and live.

AMEN.

Closing prayer.

Closing Psalm: 89:10.

The Lord bless you, and keep you;
The Lord make His face shine upon you,
And be gracious to you;
The Lord lift up His countenance on you,
And give you peace.
AMEN.

Rev. M.J. du Plessis,
Reformed Church, Bellville,
4 November 2001;
Scripture quoted from NASB.