By R. Loren Sandford
What’s coming in the next few years? There’s bad news and there’s good news. The prophet Amos in ancient times brought a set of indictments against Israel that read very much like the sins of America and the Western world.
1. They rejected God’s law (Amos 2:4). In many ways too numerous to list here, so have we.
2. They believed in lies concerning false gods and demonic philosophies (2:4). The list of deceptions in modern times is long and spans a range of doctrines and philosophies, from open theism taught in the church to post-modernistic philosophy dominant in the world around us. The former denies the foreknowledge of God and, by extension, the fullness of His sovereignty; the latter writes God out of the equation altogether. And those are just two examples.
3. They had fallen into an economic self-focus that led to abuse (2:6-8). This is the America and the West that I have known all my life. Even in the church we have been obsessed with material prosperity and a focus on self.
4. Sexual immorality and perversion ran rampant. This occurred in more forms than Amos mentioned in this passage (see 2:7). The same is true today.
5. They had become arrogant in a way that led to abuse of those who stood before God in humility (2:7). Many Christians in America are increasingly viewed as a threat to society because we who stand on the Word refuse to join the approval of practices the culture regards as normal and acceptable. When in our history, until recent times, was it ever possible to lose a job over the issue of sharing your faith openly?
6. Their polluted and compromised devotion to God led to pressure on the Lord’s devoted ones to compromise (2:12). And so it is today.
What is sown must be reaped. "Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap" (Gal. 6:7). This principle applied under the old covenant, and it applies under the new. Judgment, the reaping, begins in Amos 2:14 and reads very much like the current state of America and the West.
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