V THE DAY! THE DAY!: THE TEXT:-"Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord: to what end is it for you? the day of the Lord is darkness and not light."—Amos 5:18. "THE day!" "The day of the Lord!” “The day of the Lord is darkness and not light.” These are ominous words and strangely modern as they drift across the twenty-seven centuries that lie between. They were uttered by Amos at a critical hour in the history of Israel. It was a time of impending national danger. He himself tells us that the vision came "two years before the earthquake," and at once you realize that he is thinking not so much of any quaking of earth as some great cataclysm of the nation. The truth is that the storm of war was about to break over Israel. Amos knows that it must come. His own heart tells him so. His God tells him so. Events tell him so. The signs have been ripening these many years. The sound of the conflict is already in his ears. It is coming in the marching hosts of Assyria, who have long been preparing for the fray. Already the force of their mighty hand has been felt in the West, and Amos, who knew how to read the signs of the times, knew that it meant the day of sorrow for Israel, an Israel who by her sin deserved the wrath and the justice of God. Besides, it was not Israel alone that would be involved. Once the blow was struck it would smite the whole circle of nations-Syria, Philistia, Phoenicia, Edom, Ammon, Moab,north, south, east, west, the rage of battle would spread. And before he announces what the doom of Israel would be, he takes a few moments to make it clear why the sword of justice would fall on the nations round about. There is something tremendously modern about this, something that silences all the boast about the progress of our civilization. Syria will be punished, says the prophet, because she has been guilty of wanton cruelty in war, cruelty that Amos can only compare with the driving of sharp and heavy threshing boards over the ripened corn; Philistia and Phoenicia will be punished because of their heartless slave-trade that stirred the indignation of God; Edom will be punished because of her pitiless and untiring hatred of Israel, a hatred that was nursed by day and nourished by night; Ammon, because of their unspeakable barbarity to women in a war whose only justification was the extension of territory; Moab, because of the insolence with which she desecrated the holy places of the land and insulted the pieties universally cherished toward the dead. The world around Israel was a hard and cruel world that trampled remorselessly upon the fundamental sanctities of life and liberty, and to a man of the spirit of Amos it seemed only right that they in turn should be trampled under the iron heel of the Assyrian horde. THE CASE OF ISRAEL Up to that point the nation listened with delight to their prophet. The doom of the other nations satisfied their complacent and vindictive spirits. Let it fall; they deserved it; it could not come too soon. The day! The day! Would that it were here! they would welcome it. These decadent and barbarous nations must go down! The day! The day! But swift as lightning Amos turns upon them. They too shall be caught in the storm. They thought themselves guiltless but they were not. They boasted of their pedigree as the chosen people of God. They gloried in a sort of Divine right that sheltered them. They regarded themselves as the called of God and therefore exempt from His wrath. Their land was prosperous and they took their prosperity as a sign of the Divine favor. But their life was reeking with sin. They had trampled upon the poor; they had laid heavy burdens of taxation on the people; they had turned the sanctuaries into places of lust and merchandise; they had poisoned justice at the fountains of the nation; they had developed a class of the rich and powerful that ruled the nation with an iron hand. For all this the day of reckoning would come. It would be a day of destiny. It would be the awful havoc of war. warns them that (5:3) "The city that marched forth a thousand Shall come back with a hundred, And the city that marched forth a hundred He |