Ripe for Judgment
3/30/26 Bible Thought (Amos 8)
Main Idea: The climax of judgment is separation from God.
A Look at the Text:
In the penultimate chapter of Amos, we see through a picture of summer fruit that Israel was “ripe for judgment.”[1] Their end had come. God was going to bring destruction upon them for their many sins from idolatry to greed.
Darkness was forecasted, lamentation and mourning were on the horizon, but possibly worst of all there was going to be a famine of God’s Word:
“Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord God, “when I will send a famine on the land— not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord” (Amos 8:11).
The people, exiled, would wander and not find the Word of the Lord (Amos 8:12).
Surely this was a reasonable sentence, for the people consistently rejected His Word. Prophet after prophet was not heeded. They came with conditional warnings, but God’s wayward people wouldn’t listen. If they would have simply returned to Yahweh, they could have been spared. Yet they refused.
If they weren’t going to listen, then certainly they didn’t need to hear anything new. They had to first get their hearts right and submit themselves to the Word of the Lord, but they weren’t willing, and so God’s sentence was final.
Bringing it Home:
The thought of God distancing Himself is horrifying, but at the end of the day, it was really just God giving the people what they wanted. They consistently rejected His Word, so He would stop wasting His breath.
C.S. Lewis once offered a similar perspective:
There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it.
Those who consistently reject God will one day be given what they’ve asked for. To those who refuse the gospel, “They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might” (2 Thess. 1:9). People who harden their own hearts will find them hardened by God. After hearing “Go away!” enough times, God will acquiesce.
Those who consistently reject God will one day be given what they’ve asked for.
But we needn’t be separated from Him. Christ bore the forsakenness that we deserve for our sins upon Golgotha’s hill (see Matt. 27:46). We must merely turn to Him who was the final revelation of God (Heb. 1:2), the very Word of God (John 1:1, 14), before it is too late.
Challenge:
Do I heed the Word I already have?
[1] John H Walton, Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary (Old Testament): The Minor Prophets, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, vol. 5 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009), 79.