Since the beginning of sin it has been man’s nature to fall away from God. If it were not for God’s persistence and mercy, none of us would have a chance. If we go back to the Garden of Eden, we see Adam and Eve, God’s people, in the garden. A paradise set up for them both with everything they would ever want or desire. That’s the funny thing about us humans, even when we have everything, we want more. What an awful selfish existence. So here we have Adam and Eve in Paradise, and God comes to make a covenant with them. He says, in His distinct, loving voice, “You will have all you ever need, and in return all I ask is that you not take of the tree of knowledge of good and evil”. Adam and Eve agreed and lived in wonderful communion with God. As you know the story of the beginning, Eve is tempted by the serpent and partakes in a meal that she probably regretted for a long time thereafter. Bringing the fruit to her husband both of them breaking the covenant that God had established with them found themselves naked. And they hid themselves.
God has, since the time of the garden, in efforts to keep a link with His people, established different covenants throughout the Bible and throughout history. Over and over again, God’s people prove that His covenants are alike with His curses, conditional. God sets up a covenant with His people and the people rejoice. But soon something begins to happen, His people begin to become proud, they boast that they have a covenant with God and they begin to adopt the “once saved - always saved” mentality. By doing this they wander away from what God has asked or wanted and begin to embark in immorality and syncretism. You are probably sitting there wondering what in the world syncretism is and why in the world is he using big old words like that. Let me start with the easy question. Syncretism is like a big pot of stew. You start out with what God asked for, say the potatoes, and then you add things that other religions might offer or things of the world, say carrots and onions. What you get when the pot stops simmering is something that God never intended. The potatoes have absorbed the flavor of the carrots and onions and now takes on a taste of it’s own. Now you asked why am I using big old words like that, and the answer is equally as simple, it’s what my entire sermon bases around. There you happy?! Now you know what my whole sermon is about before I have even started, I guess you can all go home now.
We serve such a great God, even when we have such a hard time following Him, He goes far out of His way to bring us back. The Hebrew language has a word that brings this into focus. The word is “Nabi”, and what it is, in short means prophet. The word itself means “one called by God” or “one with a vocation”. God has these prophets, or “Nabi” to communicate with the people who have gone astray, to bring them home and to give them chance after chance.
Many people get the impression that the God of the old testament is a mean and ruthless God. I hope to convince you of just the opposite. The answer is quite logical, seeing that we have the same God today that the Israelites had when they were being led out of Egypt and the same God that guided Jesus through His life. So what is the difference then? Why is it that God would ask Abraham to sacrifice his son or why would God find it necessary to destroy all life on the planet and spare but one family. To sum it up, God meets us where we are, but He doesn’t stop there, He cleans us up and takes us home.
In the time of Abraham (Abram as he was called at the time of this event) paganism was predominant throughout the land. And this paganism wasn’t unique to just the heathens. God’s people, His chosen were guilty of syncretism. That’s right, here’s that lovely word I used earlier, syncretism. You see it was a popular belief that sacrificing your first born would get you in good with the gods. Seeing that Abram came from a pagan background and seeing that God meets us where we are, God asked Abram to sacrifice his only son. Now the really neat thing is, that we might just see one lesson while there are other lessons for us to learn. The most commonly accepted lesson is that God was teaching Abram faith, and that means a lot to us today, but the most important key to understanding the Bible is understanding context. If you lose the context you lose the meaning of whatever it is you’re reading. You have to first understand what it meant to the people of the time before you can start applying it to your own life. What did Abram learn from this whole ordeal? When God stopped him from sacrificing his son and provided an offering for him, He was telling Abram, “Hey, you shouldn’t be sacrificing your children, that’s not what I asked for.” And once again you see the practices of the world embraced in a way that God never intended.
Getting back to God warning His people through prophets. If we look at Jonah, he was called to bring a message of destruction to a people who didn’t even know God. We all know the story of Jonah and how he ran away, the point I want to make is that when he did deliver the message of destruction to the people, they were so impressed that what they were doing was wrong that they repented and avoided sure destruction. Remember what I said earlier? That God’s promises and threatenings are alike conditional. This is something that is very eye opening to those who think that they are in God’s favor, and very encouraging to those who seem to be destined for sure destruction. Another point to get is, it’s always dangerous to interpret prosperity as God’s divine blessing. In other words, just because you got the nicest car at school or all your school loans are paid off and you don’t have the school financial services calling you every other day to remind you to pay up, doesn’t mean that these are blessing from God. In fact they could be tell tale signs of just the opposite. Much of the time when we are blessed with the things of this world our spiritual life often is suffering, from the distraction of it all.
Next we move on to Amos and his “spiral homiletic”. Amos had a very encouraging message. I’m sure he was greeted well when he showed up in these different cities with his message of doom and destruction. The fact that makes Amos’ message unique is his audience. Amos gives his “doom” message to all the cities surrounding Israel and Jerusalem, and he works his way around and around, until, sure enough, surprise, surprise, the message comes home.
You see God had set up a covenant with His people and they had become so enmeshed in the heathen cultures and practices that God found it necessary to do something. This shows you how much of a loving God the old testament has. God would give them chance after chance to repent and return, there is nothing more God would rather than for us to repent and return to Him, but the fact is we are so stubborn! While it’s true that God never forces Himself on people, He doesn’t give up easy. It takes a lot to get God to stop trying.
Anyway back to Amos. Here in contrast to Jonah’s case, we have God’s people instead of heathens who have never heard of God. So one might expect them to be even more anxious to repent and come to God, but they don’t. In fact they’re surprised that they are even doing anything wrong and refuse to repent. This is such a sad story, and it’s not unique, there are a couple of other places we can look in the Bible that we’ll find the same thing happen. When you come to a point that you don’t feel like you need to repent, watch out! You’re in dangerous territory, this is the neighborhood of the unpardonable sin.
Like I said there are other places in the Bible where we find people who don’t think they need the Lords message. Lets go to the time of Jesus. Turn with me in your Bibles to John 1:11, “Even in his own land and among his own people, the Jews, he was not accepted. Only a few would welcome and receive him. 12. But to all who received him, he gave the right to become children of God. All they needed to do was to trust him to save them.” Jesus came to the Jews, He did His best teaching the truth in love, but the people were stubborn. They know so well what the scriptures said and what to do to get to heaven they missed it when the truth was standing right in front of them! Ellen White says that they knew that Jesus was the Christ and yet they were so embedded in their pride, so embedded in their ways that they crucified their LORD anyway.
Sometimes it seems hard to understand how they could have been so bull headed, how they could outrightly murder the son of God for bringing a message contrary to what they believed. A message of love and looking at the heart in contrast to salvation by works.
Before this sermon is over there is one more illustration I would like to use. Let’s turn in our Bibles to Revelation 3:14, in my Bible the text is red, so that means Jesus Himself is doing the talking. “14 And unto the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write; These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God;15 I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.16 So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. 17 Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked: 18 I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire, that thou mayest be rich; and white raiment, that thou mayest be clothed, and that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear; and anoint thine eyes with eyesalve, that thou mayest see.19 As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent.20 Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” As many of you know, we are the church of Laodicea, the church of the last day. How many of you are embarrassed with this description? Jesus said we are half hearted about our good works and we are content with our spirituality. It wouldn’t be so sad if it wasn’t true. So many of us “last day” Christians are just too tired, too busy, or even not interested. We have the final message that people need and yet we don’t give it to them, we deprive them of what they need the most, the truth.
When I was back in grade school some of my friends would say that they couldn’t wait until the time of trouble, they looked forward to running through the woods trying to escape the police or whoever. They would imply that when the time of trouble came that they would know to get ready. If I asked them why they didn’t feel they needed to get ready now, they would say “I feel comfortable with my spiritual life”, exactly like the book of revelation prophesized. I like to ask myself the question sometimes when I might be struggling in my spiritual life. What if we were in the end times and every time we have a chance to witness for God we are put on the stand to choose for or against Him. Every time we loose our temper for others to see, every time we cheat, every time we curse, every time we sin we are denying God, just like the Pharisees did, we know fair well who God is, and yet sometimes it’s as if we don’t know the man. You probably might say, “I thought we aren’t saved by our works” which is true, there are two things that I have found works good for. One is keeping us connected with God, much like in a relationship, you won’t survive if all you do is say you love your girlfriend/boyfriend. The other thing works do is witness for God. When we do things for others they see God through us. And when we are living the Christian life, we don’t deny God but invite Him in to sup with us.
If there is something we learned from history it’s that history repeats itself. The Bible is filled with all sorts of stories of people acting like they don’t know God, and history repeats itself today. So when we are faced with the decision, do we deny Him or do we accept Him in when he knocks. The savior is knocking, won’t you open the door?
