Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadPaul Kretzmann Commentary - Amos 5:13 - 5:27
(Show All Books | Show All Chapters)
This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
Woe upon Fools and Hypocrites
v. 13. Therefore the prudent shall keep silence in that time, for it is an evil time, and when things have reached such extremities as here pictured, all admonitions are futile. Still the love of the prophet for his people and his desire to further their welfare in every possible way causes him to address them once more.
v. 14. Seek good, and not evil, that ye may live, for there lies the way to true life; and so the Lord, the God of hosts, shall be with you as ye have spoken, that is, by following His will and not by a mere external membership in the Church of Israel.
v. 15. Hate the evil and love the good, Cf Rom_12:9, and establish judgment in the gate, so that justice would truly be administered in all cases brought to trial; it may be that the Lord God of hosts, in that event, will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph, to the few of the northern nation who would be left after the punishment now impending.
v. 16. Therefore the Lord, the God of hosts, the Lord, the one and only true God, saith thus, Wailing shall be in all streets, mourning on account of the chastisement which has come upon them for ignoring the appeal of the prophet; and they shall say in all the highways, expressing their grief in open lamentations, Alas! Alas! And they shall call the husbandman to mourning, to join in the death-wail over some relative, and such as are skilful of lamentation, the professional wailing women, to wailing, so that the entire country would resound with cries of grief.
v. 17. And in all vineyards shall be wailing, instead of the shouts of joy formerly heard there; for I will pass through thee, saith the Lord, with His visitation of wrath.
v. 18. Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord! believing that their external communion with the Lord's people would save them from the judgment which was to strike the heathen. To what end is it for you? What result would it have for them? What good would it bring them?. The day of the Lord is darkness and not light; it would bring to willful sinners destruction and not deliverance.
v. 19. As if a man did flee from a lion, and a bear met him, so it would be with those who desired the day of the Lord's judgment, or went into the house and leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him. Hoping to escape the one calamity, the wicked Israelites would be overtaken by another.
v. 20. Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness and not light? full of tribulation and misery; the day of the Lord is darkness and not light; it would bring no deliverance to those who trample justice and right beneath their feet; even very dark, and no brightness in it? not a ray for the willful transgressors. Therefore even the feasts of the people would avail them nothing under the circumstances as here presented.
v. 21. I hate, I despise, your feast-days, as the Lord calls out to them, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies, by taking pleasure in the odor of the offerings brought by them.
v. 22. Though ye offer Me burnt offerings and your meat-offerings, as they still continued to do in their effort to have the Lord accept their outward worship, I will not accept them; neither will I accept the peace-offerings, or thank-offerings, of your fat beasts, since their entire service was hypocrisy.
v. 23. Take thou away from Me the noise of thy songs, as He contemptuously calls their congregational singing; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols, of the harps and other instrumental music used in public services.
v. 24. But let judgment, the just punishment of the Lord, run down as waters, in a great and consuming flood, and righteousness, namely, that of the divine justice, as a mighty stream.
v. 25. Have ye offered unto Me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness, during the journey from Egypt to the Promised Land, forty years, O house of Israel? Even at that time the people were guilty of idolatry, and since then they added to their guilt.
v. 26. But ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch, the war-god of the Moabites and Ammonites, and. Chiun, a star-divinity, your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves. Even in the wilderness the children of Israel, as Ezekiel also shows, did not quite discard their idolatry, but carried their idol-pictures along with them and thus provoked the Lord,
v. 27. Therefore will I cause you to go into captivity beyond Damascus, in the power of a mighty Eastern nation, saith the Lord, whose name is The God of hosts. The last words were employed by Stephen in his powerful rebuke of the Jews after his arrest, Act_7:43, in order to show that idolatry had ever been in vogue among the people in spite of all the efforts of the Lord to stamp it out. The modern idolatry in high places is just as persistent and apparently cares as little for the admonitions and rebukes of the Bible.