Amos 1:13-2.3

The book of Amos, chapter 1, beginning with verse 13, reading through chapter 2 and verse 3. Thus saith the Lord, for three transgressions of the children of Ammon, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof, because they have ripped up the women with child of Gileat, that they might enlarge their border. but I will kindle a fire in the wall of Rabah, and it shall devire the palaces thereof with shouting in the day of battle, with a tempest in the day of the whirlwind, and their king shall go into captivity. He and his princes together, saith the Lord. Thus saith the Lord, for three transgressions of Moab, and for four, I want to turn away the punishment thereof, because he burned the, bones of the king of Edom into lime. But I will send a fire upon Moab, and it shall devire the palaces of Cariof, and Moab shall die with tumult for shouting and with the sound of the trumpet. And I will cut off the judge from the midst thereof, and will slay all the princes thereof with him. Seth, and God blessed to us his. sacred and holy word this evening. Years ago, there was a newspaper headline article carried in the Pittsburgh papers, and the headline read thus, Irate father hurl’s baby out window. It seems that Fred Purcell of Brooklyn, New York, was so enraged at his estranged wife that decided to harm their child. And in his anger, he picked up his one year. old baby daughter who was in the room and threw her through a closed window on the fourth floor. Miraciously, her screams attracted the attention of a neighbor who happened to be walking just below and actually caught the child so that it did not fall to the pavement and get injured. Mr. Parcell was later arrested by the police trying to evade arrest by fleeing. What possesses a man who commits such a horrible crime against a helpless infant? How do you think God would view such displays of brutality toward a weak, defenseless little girl? Well, Amos doesn’t leave any doubt in our minds about that. How God views vicious acts. such as Mr. Parcells. Amos has various groups of nations paired together here who are charged with various crimes. It’s not a haphazard collection. The first group is Syria, which is represented by Damascus, and then Felistia, represented by Gaza. They were charged. with gross cruelty. The second pair, we talked about last week, where brotherly relationships were violated, Phoenicia, represented by Tahr, and Edom. But tonight, we have a third pair, the mistreating of Helpless, by Ammon and Moab. And that’s what we want to look at. Now slowly but surely, you’ll notice the Lord is circling. around the various nations surrounding Israel and Judah. Amos is particularly focused on the northern kingdom here of Israel, but he will also have something to say to the kings of Judah as well. He’s going to say something about Judah next, but then he’s going to get his main target, Israel, to follow in the next verses here in chapter. chapter 2 throughout this whole section amos is speaking about basic principles here of human conduct and it’s clear that god expects even the heathen who do not have his law to love their neighbors as themselves amman here is condemned for the ruthless slaughter of mothers and their unborn infants in verses 13 to 15 Now, the territory of the Amonites was situated north and east of the Dead Sea. The border of the northern kingdom of Israel would be connected with this. We might classify this as modern-day Jordan today if you looked on the map. The Ammonites were the descendants, you recall, of Lot’s youngest daughter. Lot himself. was the one who fathered the child. The child’s name was Ben Ami, and therefore we get the Ammonites or Ammonites from that particular name. It is a story that’s stained and blemished with incest and drunkenness and so forth. One of the ways that God punishes the sins of the father is that he visits them on their children. and sometimes what he does is we see that the children here are permitted free reign to their sinful activities and they become worse than even the fathers involved. That’s exactly what happened in the case of the Ammonites. They were very fierce, ruthless people who were bitter, opposers of God’s people. Constant enemies of the people. Just take a couple examples in Scripture. we have the eminites. Remember when Saul was first anointed to be king, and we find that the Syrians were troubling, or the Amonites were troubling, the Israelites then. And Nahash, the leader of their army, wanted to put out the right eye of all the inhabitants of Jabesh-Gilead as a term of surrender in 1st, Samuel 11, too. Remember, these are the people. that worship Molek, who was a, who was a, who was, and this involved gruesome, human sacrifices were the, evidently the idol would be heated up, be red hot and they would place their babies on that and they would be burned by sacrificing them their, to their gone. Terrible, gruesome things. Now, their crime is mentioned here in verse 13, because they have ripped up the women with child of Gilead that they might enlarge their border. The Amonites invaded the land of Israel, and particularly the land on the eastern side of the river of Jordan there. What we call Gilead is Ruben Gadd and the Hatt. half-tribe of Manasseh. And they committed these atrocities, ripping open pregnant women, slaughtering both mother and unborn child. What sadistic, you know, enjoyment that got here as they watched the women ride in pain and died and agonizing death. And if that wasn’t bad enough, they cut open their stomachs and chopped up the babies inside them, On top of it, act was criminal even by the most minimal standards of human decency. It was barbaric. It was cruel for them to do this. And yet it was done with a ruthless military purpose. The purpose was to eliminate the next generation as well as the present generation. As such would be the terror following these acts that women would not want to become pregnant. It would be better to be a live widow than a dead mother. Thus, the population of Ammon’s enemies would be reduced for the future. Common, maybe clever, military ploy at this point, population control. And all because they wanted to expand their borders. All because they wanted more territory, we’re told. So they exterminated the Gileadites. The population. The punishment here is that God being the God of the, he was a father to the fatherless and the defender of the widows, here is going to punish them for this wicked behavior. The tempest and the whirlwind are symbolic of divine wrath. He talks about the war here. There’s some type of military activity that’s going to take place to bring them down. God is stirred, to anger. by this evil they’ve done. So he comes in judgment, just like a tornado, which leaves destruction in its path. Rabah, which today is modern Ammon in Jordan, the nation’s capital, would be burned down for this crime. The kings and the princes of the nation would go into captivity. Balas was Amon’s last king. I don’t know if you recall, but he’s mentioned in Jeremiah 40, verse 14. He was involved in. murderous plot against Gatelaya. Gatelaya was the man, the Israelite, that was placed in charge of Judah in the southern kingdom after the Babylonians had conquered Israel the first time. And he was supposed to sort of like be governing over the Jews that were the remnant that were left. Bayliss was involved in the assassination. fascination plot which murdered Gatelaya. Well, this provoked Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, and he sent his general against the eminites, and the country was put to the sword. The city’s burned with fire. He really did a number on them. He destroyed their chief city, Rabah, and carried off Baylis and his nobles into captivity. We see here the random slaughter of helpless victims is not going to be overlooked. by God. We also see here Moab is condemned for the desecration of the honored dead. Moab, that’s taken up here in verses 1 to 3 of chapter 2, was a small state lying directly east of the dead sea. It was sort of sandwiched between Ammon and Edom, which have also been mentioned in this chapter. The moabites were. also the descendants of Lot, this time by the eldest daughter. Same process by incest and drunkenness. The Moabites were antagonistic toward Israel down through the years. Balak, you remember the king of Moab hired the false prophet bail that he might curse the Israelites when they were first going to go into the land. And when God prevented that, then, of course, Balak followed Balam’s suggestion. sent the Moabite women into the camp of the Israelites, engaged them into sexual activity, seduced the men, and got them involved in idol worship. And God sent a plague that destroyed 24,000 Israelites at that time. Interestingly enough, Ruth came from Moab, married Boaz. From that line came David, and eventually, of course, Christ came from that line. line. The crime of Moab consisted of the desecration of the remains of the royal dead. Odd, isn’t it? Amos evidently knew here of some type of ray or war. This is, you know, like front page news of what the Moabites did on this occasion, and everybody knew about it, where they broke into the tomb of a former king of Edom and burned his bones of the point where they turned in the lime. This is about as much as you can burn it. The calcium in the human body can be turned into lime or calcium oxide by burning it enough. The remains of the king were held in high steam in those days. If you were a king, usually you got royal treatment on the burial and so forth in biblical times. It was the destruction of what was held sacred in pretextual. precious in the eyes of the Edomites that God was provoked anger about. It was a senseless crime. It didn’t benefit the Moabites to any extent. It simply was increased the agony of defeat for Edom. We read the word of God, I suspect it. Mohab had many scores to settle with Edom. And their actions indicate a sort of natural. Revenge, a rubbing of their noses in the dirt when they got the upper hand. Their crime boils down to this ruthless retribution and retaliation. This is the crime. The punishment, of course. And here again, we might be surprised. The more you read the Bible, sometimes God surprises us. Here God actually takes Edom’s side against the Moabites. I remember Edom was mentioned before as being under the judgment of God. We’ve read about it. that earlier. But here in this case, it’s the Moabites because of the way they treated the Edomites that are going to get punished. God isn’t going to let any of them get away with these bad behavior. And so the matter is so irrevocable that Moab’s sentence here is going to be severe. Sin has sort of a boomerang effect and non-more so than revenge. Moab here is marked off for a slaughter. This addiction came true when Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, devastated Moab in its royal palaces at Kkiroth. God takes note of the revenge factor and he judges. Even at the time of war, he’s taking note of the revenge factor. Now, here’s the account, and again, we might think, well, what does this have to do with us today? I suppose you haven’t burned any king’s bones to lime. I doubt you’ve ripped anybody open lately, have you? Pregnant women. But my friends, think about this. There is but a small step between the atrocities here of the barbaric ammonites and the civilized people’s actions in Europe and the United States with regard to abortion. Right now, in the last several years, there’s been around 1 million abortions per year. Down 500,000, by the way, or half a million, let’s say, over a period of time has come down, actually, in the amount of abortions that have taken place. What was considered brutal in Amos’ day is now considered state of state of art and birth control today. What was the fourth transgression of the Ammonites and was the one that pushed them over the edge and God’s judgment fell is happening in the abortion clinics of our own day. Many today do not see this crime for the cruel murder that it is. It is called pro-choice today instead of ruthless slaughter or brutal murder. There’s no shame anymore. Few would even blush to say that they’ve been to an abortion clinic. I just had an abortion or something of that nature. It’s no big deal for most people today. Civilization has made such great giant steps forward. Now we’re more efficient in our killing of the unborn. A set of crude swords being used by soldiers. We’ve got modern scientific tools and instruments from the medical field used to do the slaughter of the infants. It’s not now necessary to rip open the pregnant woman and destroy the young. And this murder, we’re told, and it’s looked upon in our society in many cases. as a sensible policy for birth control. After all, you have to limit the size of your family. How you get to care for that extra child, we’re told. Surely, we’re told, a teenage pregnancy is too much trauma for a young girl. An abortion allows you more options for family planning, we’re told. There was a professor at the UCLA medical school once asked his students this question. Here is the family history. The father has syphilis. The mother has TB. They already had four children. The first is blind. The second has died. The third is death. The fourth has TB. The mother is pregnant. The parents are willing to have an abortion. If you decide they should, what do you think? Well, most of the students agreed, well, yeah, you ought to get an abortion. He said, congratulations. You just killed Beethoven. 75 years ago, we saw the atrocities that took place under the Nazi Holocaust when we went into those concentration camps during the end of the war. People could not believe what was taking place there. Life first lost its value, and few people perhaps know this, when Nazi Germany, first legalized abortion. That was like step one. Later they reason, well, it’s better if the deformed and retarded children don’t live, so they began to eliminate them. And then those even with such mild handicaps as bedwitting, misshaping ears, learning disabilities, even if you were born deaf, you could be put to death. Finally, it was deemed better for the nation just to eliminate. ethnic groups such as gypsies and Jews and so forth, and they began to be eliminated. There are similarities between contemporary America and Germany. We began sliding when we devalued life by legalizing abortion in 1973. And since that time, even though abortions have been slowly ticking down, 61 million babies have been killed. By the way, this is from the CDC and from another group that actually called abortion clinics and say, well, how many abortions did you have this year in collected information? That doesn’t tell us about all the illegal abortions or the ones that perhaps didn’t even get reported. This is all that we know about. 61 million. Since then, infant side, child abuse, the experimental experimentation with the flesh and organs of the infants are taking place. Now we have the ideas, some have suggested, well, when the baby is born, we’ll set the baby aside, and then the mother and the doctor will decide. whether to have the baby live or not. Here in our own state, it wasn’t that many years ago, about seven or eight years ago, I think it was. You’ll recall that in Philadelphia, in April of 2013, the abortionist Kermit Gausdell was, was convicted on three accounts of the deaths of three newborn babies in his abortion clinic that he killed after they were actually born. Goss now routinely delivered live babies and then ended up their, ended their lives, were severing their spinal cords with scissors. The grand jury reported and reportedly estimated hundreds of babies had been put to death in this manner at his Philadelphia abortion clinic. The grand jury report in January 2011 said this, Gaus now had a simple solution for the unwanted babies he delivered. He killed them. He didn’t call it that. He called it insuring fetal demise. The way he ensured fetal demise was by sticking scissors into the back of the baby’s neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called that snipping. You know, the media didn’t want to cover this. They tried not to cover it. The Christian organizations were outraged, and they were outraged, and they were. We’re all over the internet on this issue, and it was quite amazing. One reporter who sat through the whole trial, J.D. Mullane said this. Gawes now pulls the curtain back from the inherent violence of abortion. You can’t sit in that courtroom and learn about what abortion does to the unborn child and to the mother in many cases. You can’t sit there day after day and week after week and listen to that testimony and not be changed and not have a change of heart or at least reconsider your position. It was moving to this person. The hear all that was taking place. My friends, we shouldn’t think we’re that far advanced from the Ammonites back in the day. The second thing I’ll mention tonight. and I’ll make this brief, is this issue with regard to Moab and revenge. When we consider the background for the desecration of the tomb and the burning of the lime to lime of the bones of the Edomite king, it may have stemmed from a coalition of Israelites and men of Judah and the Edomites who defeated Moab in Second King’s chapter three. And since he couldn’t vanquish the whole coalition, the king of Moab determined that at the very least, when he got the opportunity, he was go after the king of Edom. He was not going to get away to unscate. Mo had a score to settle with Edom. Thus, the indignity is done to the corpse of this Edomite king. I’ll be brief here, but revenge is forbidden to us. It’s always, as I said, a boomerang effect. You can’t help it realize if you get involved in this, it’s always going to come back and haunt you. The day Moab opened the Edomite tomb of this king, it signed its own death warrant. And God sets himself against the vengeful, and therefore forbids his people to take vengeance into their own hands. Romans 13 tells us we are to step aside. We’re to let God do this. It’s his business, his responsibility, his right. It is not ours. Don’t get in his way. Don’t intrude into his office. Let the Lord do what is right and even the score. In fact, what the scriptures tell us to do is something that’s perhaps shocking to most people, overcome evil by doing good to your enemies. That’s pretty amazing, isn’t it? Defeat them by kindness, not by means of burning hatred. That’s how Romans 13 ends with that teaching before us by using that approach and dealing with revenge. Well, let us close with a word of prayer tonight.