God's Plumbline
On Sunday evening, 2nd June, Rev James Maciver preached on Amos 7:7 – end, ‘God’s Plumbline.
Who would want to be a prophet of God in Amos’s time? It was a period of great decline and apostasy in Israel. Many had adopted the awful lifestyle of the Canaanites which, despite the fact that it was so characterised by idolatry and departure from righteousness, they believed to still be serving the Lord.
Against this backdrop, the reader gets a strong sense of Amos as isolated in his status as a prophet of the Lord. He is told by Amaziah to take himself off to another land to do his prophesying, that he is no longer welcome there.
The imagery of the plumbline is applied here to illustrate the testing of uprightness. God set his plumbline to show the crookedness of the generation, and the reason why he would no longer take pity on them.
There are two things to emphasise in connection with our relationship with God:
- Redemption
- The Law
This is the order, too, in which they must be seen. It is well worth noting that God set Israel free prior to giving them the Law. From that, and his dealings down through the ages with his people, we can safely conclude that he always puts salvation first. Therefore, he measures his people against the fact that they have been redeemed, and given the Law; here he is – effectively – asking what they have done with these two privileges.
Holiness is not merely a requirement of the Law, either, but of the Gospel, which requires us to emulate God in his holiness. It is against this standard that the Lord will set our present life, and measure us according to the plumbline of his own uprightness.
It hardly needs saying that we all fall short. However, John Newton summed up our striving very effectively as follows: ‘Yet, though I am not what I ought to be, nor what I wish to be, nor what I hope to be, I can truly say, I am not what I once was’.
Mr Maciver went on to consider the passage from two perspectives, beginning with what faults this plumbline of God’s reveals.
In verses 10 – 11 of this passage, it reveals a distortion of the truth, as exemplified by Amaziah. In his desperation to be rid of Amos, he misrepresents him to the king, suggesting that the prophet is trying to foment rebellion and incite the people to treason.
Let us retrace our steps, all the way back to Eden, and that first distortion of the truth. Adam and Eve were created truth-tellers, but fell for the serpent’s lie and so became liars themselves in the process – a trait they passed down to the entirety of the human race without exception. Only Christ became human without this, or any other, sin. That is why we need his grace, to cleanse us from within.
The ninth commandment tells us not to bare false witness against our neighbour, but there is little hesitation before doing so in our own day. Indeed, Isaiah might well have been speaking about the present age when he said that ‘truth is fallen in the streets’.
Such a state of affairs is born of a hatred of the truth. We see this manifest in verse 12, when the priest of Bethel is against Amos, who is God’s mouthpiece. It is a solemn thing, but this priest is effectively telling Amos to withdraw God’s truth from their temple. This is sadly relevant to the present day, when we see religious leaders depart from the truth themselves in many ways, and lead others with them.
We hear very frequently, too, that God’s message ‘doesn’t belong here’. In situations like that, there is a temptation – as there must have been for Amos – to buckle under the pressure, to refuse to put yourself through the ignominy and hatred meted out to those who speak God’s truth.
It shows, doesn’t it, the relevance of the Old Testament for our own situation now?
Secondly, Mr Maciver considered what the passage tells us about the faithfulness of Amos as God’s prophet. He counters Amaziah’s threat by saying that his words are not actually from himself, but are of the Lord. It is reminiscent of Peter’s assertion in Acts 4 that the apostles had no choice but to speak in the name of Jesus, despite being charged not to do so. Our own mandate in the Great Commission, is just the same.
In verse 17, Amos, having listened to their threats, responds with ‘thus saith the Lord’. He does this to focus their attention upon the source of his words; he counters Amaziah, therefore, with the truth itself
Of course we don’t have to – and should not, anyway – speak the truth in a harsh or condemnatory manner. It is the privilege of the Christian to show forth the Saviour’s love, and yet not to compromise the truth.
Indeed, the word used for ‘preach’ in verse 16, carries with it the connotation of dropping gently – like rainfall, or even dew. We ought, therefore, to denounce sin in this same way, with gentleness and compassion.
Amaziah’s story is a tragic one – like that of all who hear the word of God and yet refuse to accept it as the truth. All the souls in hell at this moment have to live with the eternal regret of not heeding the word of God when it was put to them. God measures our lives according to the truth that he has given us, and we have no excuse for failing to heed the call of salvation.
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