"On every page of the God-breathed writings are many thoughts that stretch out like long, clear arms of light across the darkness, discovering things otherwise hidden and illuminating wider areas than those of the immediate context. They are searchlights. I have selected one in each chapter of Scripture, for at least one central thought in every chapter should arrest the mind and affect the life," wrote G. Campbell Morgan, a skilled, wise, warm-hearted Bible teacher who conducted a classic 3-year study called Life Applications from Every Chapter of the Bible. Here is the fruit of that research—summarized, illustrated, and amplified with useful details—on all 66 books of the Bible.
Amos 1:3 "Thus says the Lord: 'For three transgressions of Damascus, and for four...'" The prophet Amos was a man of Judah sent by God to prophesy in Israel. He saw God judging not just Judah and Israel only, but all the nations. The first section of Amos' book contains 8 visions and pronouncements introduced by the highlighted three-and-four phrase. The language is figurative of divine patience and inevitable justice. Upon all 8 nations the wrath of God would fall, but not until their persistence in wickedness left no room for any other method of dealing with them. The "three transgressions" represent fullness of evil, but when that becomes "four," then that evil has passed beyond the bounds of divine patience. This is the way God deals with nations. When national sins become so complete that there is no room for mercy, the Lord's judgments fall on them in the interest of humanity as a whole. A careful reading of Amos' pronouncements against the nations shows that the self-centered national sins God proceeds against are of wrongs done to other nations.
Amos 2:12 "You gave the Nazirites wine to drink, and commanded the prophets not to prophesy!" The shock in this chapter is that Amos' list of 8 nations under God's wrath include Judah and Israel. Both had come to think of themselves as separated in some privileged way from the surrounding nations. In a sense they were right, but they had failed to understand that their privileges created greater responsibilities. The greater the light, the graver the responsibility to live by it and share it with others. Israel is at the end of the list, charged with injustice, greed, oppression, immorality, profanity, blasphemy, and sacrilege. The highlighted verse reveals the uttermost and basest element in their sin. Previous verses reveal that the Lord raised up prophets and Nazirites, men who by the purity of their lives testified against their nation's corruption. So determined had Israel's leaders become in their courses of evil that they had seduced the Nazirites from their vows and silenced the voices of their prophets. When a nation deliberately seeks to corrupt the pure and stop the teaching and preaching of God's Word, they are beyond the hope of recovery by mercy. The pressure of divine wrath becomes inevitable.
Amos 3:2 "You only have I known of all the families of the earth. Therefore, I will punish you for all your iniquities." This chapter moves from the section on dealing with the nations to just Israel. Amos delivers 3 messages, each beginning, "Hear this word" (3:1, 4:1, 5:1). The words highlighted are the Lord's opening indictment, which build on the last chapter's theme that divine privileges create responsibility. That is the sense of the word "therefore." Notice the superlative privilege preceding it: "You only have I known of all the families of the earth," reflecting a knowing of intimacy and closeness. Among no other people had God made Himself known like this, as described by one of the greatest sons of Israel: to the Israelites "pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, and the promises; of whom are the fathers and from whom, according to the flesh, the Messiah came, who is over all, the eternally blessed God" (Romans 9:4-5). People who spurn divine privileges, then and now, can therefore expect divine punishment for their sins. The false deduction too often made is if we are the privileged people of God, therefore we may look for His mercy. Amos reminds us otherwise, that we not fail in the responsibilities our privileges bring.
Amos 4:5 "[You] proclaim your freewill offerings, making them known." This chapter builds up to a dramatic summons in verse 12: "Prepare to meet your God." It is not a call to repentance, but to judgment because there had been no repentance. The highlighted verse illustrates one of the main problems: futile, self-centered worship. Freewill offerings, by definition, are not obligatory but spontaneous. Their distinctive value to God is when they reflect a heart of devotion to Him and Him alone. The people Amos is talking about were interested only in using God to draw attention to themselves by loudly making their contributions known to other people. Their motive was not love for God, but appearing as lovers of God to others. Such a motive spoils the gift in God's sight. That was the disqualifying element in the religion of the scribes and Pharisees, of whom Jesus said, "All their works they do to be seen by men" (Matthew 23:5). The light from this teaching is very searching. What does it shine on in our hearts? The clearest teaching of all on worship from the heart is by Jesus in Matthew 6: when we, for example, give to the needy and pray in secret before God alone, He will reward us.
Amos 5:18 "Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord!" This chapter and the next utter two great woes that reveal two different classes of people, both wrong in their attitude. The first group is obviously conscious of the evil times in which they were living and eager for the day of the Lord, thinking it would bring better times for them because they maintained the external observances of their religion. God's Word to them is, "Let justice run down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream. I hate, I despise your feast days.... Thought you offer Me burnt offerings ... I will not accept them" (verses 24, 21-22). Expecting favor from God when one's life is out of harmony with His principles of righteousness and justice is foolish and wicked. The glorious hope of the righteous "will be darkness and not light" (verse 18) if it is wrongly interpreted and does not produce the character in accord with that hope.
Amos 6:1 "Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, and ... secure in the mountain of Samaria!" This is the second of the stunning woes, revealing an attitude entirely different from the self-deceived religious people of the previous chapter. Its secret is declared in the words "woe to you who put far off the day of doom" (verse 3). These irreligious people perhaps realized that the day of the Lord will be a day of judgment and wrath, but did not believe it was near. They did not expect to be involved in its calamities so they cared nothing for its principles. Therefore they gave themselves up to a life of sensuality, which Amos pictures in a timeless way. They stretched themselves out on couches, gave full satisfaction to their appetites, amused themselves with music, sought exhilaration in drink, and did not concern themselves with the ruin of their people. That is the more common attitude toward the subject of a coming day of God. Among such people "the name of the Lord is not to be mentioned" (verse 10). The New Testament describes them as "mockers ... who walk according to their own ungodly lusts" (Jude 18). Amos proclaims that being at "ease in Zion" or "secure in the mountain of Samaria" is catering slavishly to material wants but ignoring true spiritual needs. It is the very essence of evil to break the laws of God and corrupt one's life because divine judgment is assumed to be distant or non-existent. Against all such attitudes and activities is this clear word from God: Woe.
Amos 7:15 "The Lord took me ... and the Lord said to me, 'Go, prophesy.'" In these last 3 chapters we have the third phase in the ministry of Amos. It consists of 5 visions regarding divine judgment: of locusts, fire, a plumb line, a basket of fruit, and the Lord Himself in a temple setting. The first two reveal judgment threatened yet mercifully restrained. "Oh Lord God, forgive, I pray! Oh, that Jacob may stand, for he is small," intercedes Amos, and the Lord responds, "It shall not be" (verses 2-3, 5-6). The third vision, however, reveal the hopeless failure of the nation and consequent inevitability of punishment. When Amos delivers that message, a government official interferes and orders him to leave. Amos responds with the highlighted verse to declare his authority for his mission: he was called and sent by God. Sometimes the people God calls come from unexpected backgrounds, as Amos honestly explains here: "I was no prophet, nor the son of a prophet, but I was a shepherd and tender of fruit trees" (verse 14). The important thing is when a man knows he is called and sent by God, he will be bold. Training is crucial, but sometimes God does it Himself, and training is never a substitute for calling.
Amos 8:11 "I will send a famine ... of hearing the words of the Lord." In this chapter Amos describes the vision of a basket containing summer fruits. It reveals the ripeness of Israel's sin for a harvest of divine wrath. In an impassioned address Amos denounces the greed and cruelty of the businessmen "who swallow up the needy and make the poor of the land fail" (verse 4). They themselves would be swallowed up by the curse of an unusual famine: "of hearing the words of the Lord," not of God's Word itself. This is the curse of deafness to God's Word, which is the death of spiritual sensibility. It is not a case of God withholding His revelation, but of people being in such a state that they do not hear the words. They still need what only God's Word can supply and therefore hunt to satisfy their souls, "but shall not find it ... and shall faint from thirst" (verses 12-13). Here we have an explanation of the feverishness and restlessness of human life. Men and women wander and travel, seeking for any and every new sensation to satisfy their deepest inner cravings, but all to no purpose. Only the words of God can meet the need, but when there is a famine of hearing them, the end is destruction.
Amos 9:9 "...yet shall not the least kernel fall upon the earth." In this chapter we have the last of the prophet's visions of judgment. It is an awesome vision of the Lord at the altar of burnt offerings, and the stroke of His judgment is seen to be irresistible, yet reasonable and precise. The house of Israel was to be sifted "among all the nations like grain is sifted in a sieve, yet shall not the least kernel fall upon the earth." This is always so: the judgments of God never involve the righteous with the wicked in punishment and destruction. In the process of that judgment the righteous do suffer, but God works that suffering out for their good. Amos concludes on this note with a message of hope that is quoted in the New Testament when the first church council realized that Israel's Messiah, descended from King David, is also the Savior of the nations: "Simon [Peter] has declared how God ... visited the Gentiles to take out of them a people for His name. And with this the words of the prophets agree, just as it is written [in Amos 9:11-12]: 'I will rebuild the fallen booth of David and ... will set it up so that the rest of mankind may seek the Lord, even all the Gentiles who are called by My name, says the Lord who does all these things" (Acts 15:14-17). Amos' declaration that "not the least kernel shall fall upon the earth" assures us that in all the terrible and fiery judgments made inevitable by human sin, nothing of real worth will be destroyed. As was said of the Messiah, when He thoroughly clears His threshing floor, He will gather His wheat into the barn—every precious grain, but the useless chaff He will burn up with unquenchable fire (Matthew 3:12).
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| How Amos (around 765 to 750 B.C.) relates to other prophetic writings and historical events. |
Jonah 1:3 "... but Jonah rose up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord." The prophet Jonah had exercised his office with good effect in dark and difficult times in Israel's history. We are told specifically that because of "the Word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which he spoke by his servant Jonah the son of Amittai, the prophet," King Jeroboam II had his borders restored as an act of mercy from the Lord (2 Kings 14:25-27). The book of Jonah, however, opens with the Lord telling Jonah to go to Nineveh to preach against the great city's wickedness, but he flees in the opposite direction. Why? He tells us later in his own words to the Lord Himself: "I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity" (Jonah 4:2). Jonah fled because he knew God well. His dereliction of duty did not come from ignorance of God, but rather from accurate understanding. He knew if he went to Nineveh, warned the people about God's coming judgment on their wickedness, and they repented, God would spare Nineveh. Jonah did not want God to do that because the cruelties emanating from the capital city of the Assyrian Empire had been particularly brutal. He had no pity in his heart for any of the people who lived there. He was in complete sympathy with the righteousness of God proceeding to punish the wicked, but he had no sympathy with divine compassion. Therefore he fled. The book bearing Jonah's name goes on to reveal that a passion for righteousness making God's servants vindictive and incapable of forgiveness, even in the case of those as cruel as Nineveh, puts them out of fellowship with God, yet God will go to great lengths to make things right.
Jonah 3:1 "The Word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time." Those are words of pure grace, which is the central theme of Jonah. One might think that when a prophet of God breaks down to the point of withdrawing from his work and declining to deliver a divine message because he did not desire results from it that would conflict with his own notions of justice, that prophet would be forever disqualified from service. But it was not so in the mind of God. He did not cast away His servant because of this failure, but gave him a second chance. How many today who have been called to deliver the Word of the Lord would still be doing it apart from this patient and perfecting grace of God? In hours of failure and deflection, the Lord leads through dark and dismal experiences in which we can find Him anew, and out of the very belly of the pit we cry out to Him. Then He delivers us. That itself is wonderful, but all the more so in Jonah's case because this prophet was again entrusted with God's Word and sent forth to deliver it. 
Jonah 4:9 "It is right for me to be angry, even to death!" These are the last recorded words of Jonah, and they are startling. God gave him his second chance and he obeyed, going to Nineveh and delivering the divine message. The result was exactly what he expected: the people genuinely repented so God's judgment on the great city was, for a time, averted. Jonah was angry, still characterized by a lack of compassion, but is that the end of the story? Hardly. There are two things to be said. The first is that God has the last word in this book, gently talking with Jonah, listening to his complaints, and reasoning with him so he could see he was foolishly and selfishly showing more compassion on a temporary plant than needy human beings and animals. The second is that Jonah humbly presents himself in this unfavorable light to teach us to be in sympathy with the heart of God. The book of Jonah rebukes the spirit of vindictiveness and reveals divine grace, especially in the One who said of Himself, "a greater than Jonah is here." The Lord Jesus Christ was and is in perfect sympathy with both the righteousness and compassion of God. We are not and therefore need the warning of this book and also its encouragement.
