Retrieving the Lamb: Amos 3:11-15
If we worship a generous God, how can we justify hording His blessing? If I do not earn God’s love, yet He blesses me anyways, how can I justify demanding others to earn my love? It’s not a case of giving everyone what they want; it is genuine concern about people’s ability to meet their needs for life. Everyone needs food, water, shelter, clothing, sleep, relationships, and God. How can I be more concerned about my prosperity than other people’s ability to meet their daily needs?
God sends a stern message through Amos. In it, He compares the aftereffects of His judgment to retrieving a lamb after a lion has torn it to shreds. It is quite the graphic image.
Amos would understand this analogy as a shepherd. When a predator claims an animal under the care of a shepherd, the shepherd would try to produce the remains as evidence to the owner. In this way, the owner of the herd would know the shepherd wasn’t stealing the sheep. Amos no doubt tracked down devoured sheep to find the remnants of the kill. He could greatly identify with this image.
God’s plan is like this scenario. The Assyrians will conquer the northern kingdom. When they do, the Hebrew people will be dragged away. Like torn shreds of a devoured lamb, they will be scattered across the Assyrian kingdom. At the same time, the Assyrians will bring foreigners into Israel and resettle it. This is how the Samaritans – mentioned in the New Testament – came into existence. The Samaritans were offspring from the people who immigrated into Israel and mixed with the native population of Samaria after the Hebrew people emigrated out of their land under Assyrian rule.
Why does this happen? Once more we see God’s issue with a society designed to trickle wealth upwards. God takes issue when people have multiple homes in different locales when there are poor who cannot find shelter. God takes issue when people spend fortunes to find, hunt, or buy ivory just to decorate their homes while the poor are forced to live in a system keeping them poor.
It isn’t necessarily the wealth with which God has an issue. The problem is when our desire for wealth becomes more significant to us than our care for our fellow human beings. It is not our wealth that is the issue, it is the condition of our heart. Ultimately, it a worship issue. How can we worship a generous God, yet create systems reinforcing poverty? How can we worship God and claim to become more like Him while treating others like resources to be spent?
I keep returning to the teaching of Jesus from Luke 12:48. To whom much is given, much is required. If we know God and acknowledge His blessing in our life, should we not be willing to be a blessing into the lives of others? If we worship a generous God, how can we justify hording His blessing?
