Amos 5

These are troubling times that we are living in. What does God require of His children? He requires them to be fair to all people. He requires them to be merciful to all people. He requires them to be humble realizing that He alone is good, He alone is in control and without Him we can do nothing BUT with Him all things are possible. He will not tolerate making money a god. All things belong to Him, all things. Seek good and not evil! Seek Him and live!

3 For thus says the Lord God:

"The city that goes out by a thousand

Shall have a hundred left,

And that which goes out by a hundred

Shall have ten left to the house of Israel."

4 For thus says the Lord to the house of Israel:

"Seek Me and live;

6 Seek the Lord and live,

Lest He break out like fire in the house of Joseph,

And devour it,

With no one to quench it in Bethel—

7 You who turn justice to wormwood,

And lay righteousness to rest in the earth!"

8 He made the Pleiades and Orion;

He turns the shadow of death into morning

And makes the day dark as night;

He calls for the waters of the sea

And pours them out on the face of the earth;

The Lord is His name.

9 He rains ruin upon the strong,

So that fury comes upon the fortress.

10 They hate the one who rebukes in the gate,

And they abhor the one who speaks uprightly.

11 Therefore, because you tread down the poor

And take grain taxes from him,

Though you have built houses of hewn stone,

Yet you shall not dwell in them;

You have planted pleasant vineyards,

But you shall not drink wine from them.

12 For I know your manifold transgressions

And your mighty sins:

Afflicting the just and taking bribes;

Diverting the poor from justice at the gate.

13 Therefore the prudent keep silent at that time,

For it is an evil time.

14 Seek good and not evil,

That you may live;

So the Lord God of hosts will be with you,

As you have spoken.

15 Hate evil, love good;

Establish justice in the gate.

It may be that the Lord God of hosts

Will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph.

18 Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord!

For what good is the day of the Lord to you?

It will be darkness, and not light.

20 Is not the day of the Lord darkness, and not light?

Is it not very dark, with no brightness in it?

23 Take away from Me the noise of your songs,

For I will not hear the melody of your stringed instruments.

24 But let justice run down like water,

And righteousness like a mighty stream.

25 "Did you offer Me sacrifices and offerings

In the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel?

26 You also carried Sikkuth your king

And Chiun, your idols,

The star of your gods,

Which you made for yourselves.

27 Therefore I will send you into captivity beyond Damascus,"

Says the Lord, whose name is the God of hosts.

The NKJV Study Bible says this: The term virgin of Israel depicts the nation as a young maiden, cut off from her life before it had really begun. On her land is a reminder that the land had been God's gift to Israel. By their faithlessness, the people had turned God's gift into the place of their death and burial. Rather than saving Israel, its armies would themselves be decimated. The house of Joseph here refers to the whole nation. This Hebrew verb, SEEK, can be correctly translated "to inquire of," "to ask," and "to seek." The term conveys the idea of "going to see" in the sense of personally verifying something said, or "searching for," in the sense of pressing for an answer to a question. Amos encourages his audience to seek life in the living God, not in dead idols. On several occasions, the Israelites were encouraged to seek God by preparing their hearts for God through humble repentance. One of Amos's primary responsibilities as a prophet of God was to announce the "day of the Lord," the time of God's judgment of wicked Israel. Idolatry, perhaps more than any other sin, was the reason for this impending punishment. One of Israel's idolatries was astral worship. Far from being deities, Amos asserted, the constellations also were God's creations. The God who created and sustains the processes of all the universe surely can bring His judgment to bear, even upon the strong of the earth and their fortresses. Taxes were collected in kind from those with few resources of silver and gold. To take grain taxes from the poor was to put them at risk of starvation if the harvest had not been bountiful. Yet the rich and powerful had sufficient resources to build luxurious houses of hewn stone for themselves. God promised that the rich would not enjoy their luxury stolen from the lifeblood of the poor and powerless.
Israel's leaders did not sin incidentally or furtively; they sinned brazenly and habitually, as though God had never revealed Himself and His standards of justice and mercy. Worshiping in the Lord's name, the Israelites invoked the Lord's presence with them in their spoken prayers and blessings. If they began to live as God had taught them in the Law, He would indeed be with them. The popular theology of Amos's day apparently looked forward to the day of the Lord as the time of Israel's restoration to military, political, and economic greatness, perhaps to the greatness of the reigns of David and Solomon. Amos declared such hopes futile, even pitiable. What the people looked forward to as a day of light and triumph would rise upon them instead as a day of darkness and ruin. God had promised that if the Israelites honored Him with their lives, He would savor, accept, and regard Israel's sacrifices and hear their words. By stating He would no longer accept Israel's sacrifices or listen to them, God was rejecting Israel's worship as hypocritical, dishonest, and meaningless. After dismissing Israel's empty worship as noisy and tumultuous, God called for the honest tumult of the rolling waters of justice and the perennial stream of righteousness, the only foundation for true praise and worship of the Lord.
The true believer in the Lord understood, without question, that any gods made by human hands were not gods at all. 2 It was the boast of Israel's elite that no other nation was greater than they were. Their boast came back upon their own heads. You who put far off the day of doom refers to those who insisted that Israel was too strong for destruction to fall upon the nation any time soon. The upper classes of Israel were so engrossed in their own privileges and luxuries that they cared nothing for the affliction of their fellow Israelites, though it was their transgressions that had caused it. Luxurious palace strongholds represented both the pride of Jacob in their own strength and the oppression of the powerless, whose stolen wealth had financed the construction of these palaces. People who had not believed that God would come in judgment would now be afraid of what further disaster He might bring upon them. Amos hoped to get the people to see the moral impossibility of Israel's perversion of justice. Israel's pride in its military strength would be its downfall. God's punishment of Israel would fit its sin of pride. As the Israelites reckoned that they had extended their borders by their own military strength, God would allow them to be harassed and defeated from border to border. God would allow Israel to be defeated in battle; they would realize that their own strength was puny indeed.