#2- NOTE: I am aware that many folks would far rather a messenger of God use opportunities associated with key holidays [Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, etc.] for ‘feel good’ messages designed to delight the saints and to ‘lovingly’ woo the sinners.
God, on the other hand, has the divine prerogative of making clear to His messengers what HE would have them say during holiday seasons and all other times. Any genuine messenger of God will do as the LORD bids him do, not what will please the listeners.
And offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving with leaven, and proclaim and publish the free offerings: for this liketh you…
Amos 4:5
Once again Thanksgiving season is upon us here in America. It is a time for family gatherings, feasts and thankfulness. It is also a time for football games and getting out the Christmas decorations as many embrace the final months of the year with an unrelenting swirl of breathless activity. The church calendar will be full as well, with Thanksgiving fellowships, Christmas plays and/or cantatas and New Year’s Eve watch night services. It is not really surprising that many remnant believers will be happy for the season [remember: Christ is the reason for the season!] to end. One wonders how the Lord Himself feels about all of this. Perhaps our passage holds a clue.
Amos 4:4-6
4 Come to Bethel, and transgress; at Gilgal multiply transgression; and bring your sacrifices every morning, and your tithes after three years:
5 And offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving with leaven, and proclaim and publish the free offerings: for this liketh you, O ye children of Israel, saith the Lord GOD.
6 And I also have given you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and want of bread in all your places: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the LORD.
Approximately one-hundred fifty years after Israel split into two separate kingdoms, God sent Amos from Judah to the northern kingdom to speak out boldly against the syncretistic ‘worship’ being embraced and promoted there. After the kingdom split into two parts, those in the north no longer had access to the Temple in Jerusalem, with its God-ordained sacrifices and offerings. To compensate for this, they began to include idols of bulls in their ‘worship of Jehovah’ at Bethel and elsewhere. They developed their own priesthood as well.
While all of this may seem to ‘make sense’ under the circumstances, it violated a key element of the worship in Jerusalem: that there was only One Redeemer by which fallen men could come to God. That Redeemer was represented ONLY through the priesthood and the sacrifices and offerings made there at the Temple in Jerusalem. The bullocks, rams and other sacrificial animals only represented God’s Redeemer, Jesus Christ. To add other sacrifices that were NOT ordained by God and another priesthood that was NOT ordained by God was to create counterfeit Redeemers, false Messiahs…false Christs.
It was this syncretism that drew out the fiery anger of the LORD. This is what underlies His strong sarcasm in verse four of our passage:
Come to Bethel, and transgress; at Gilgal multiply transgression; and bring your sacrifices every morning…
But then, in the following verse, we hear the LORD continuing to confront them with their hypocrisy. He says:
And offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving with leaven, and proclaim and publish the free offerings: for this liketh you, O ye children of Israel
Here the LORD is castigating them because they delighted in having their ‘thanksgiving’ feasts and sacrifices, going on blissfully ignoring His serious controversies with them. Every time they laid a sacrifice upon the altar before one of these golden calves, they were sullying Christ, God’s Son. Every drop of the blood of those sacrifices was an affront to Christ. Every voice raised in supposed ‘thanksgiving’ was a mockery of genuine thankfulness for the precious sacrifice of God’s Son. In a sense, the LORD God literally cringed at every sacrifice, every offering of thanksgiving that did not arise to Him through the blood of His own Son. And He still does…He still cringes at all these false sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving.
What are you trying to do, brother Parker, ruin our ‘Thanksgiving?’ Why do you always have to bring God into every holiday, as though it really matters to Him what we do at Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas or Easter? He has clearly let us ‘do our own thing,’ adhering to time-honored traditions, now for many generations! Either say the nice things we want to hear, or just leave us alone!
By the time Amos was sent to Ephraim, they had been practicing their ‘time-honored traditions’ for one-hundred fifty years. They were deaf to the words of any genuine messenger sent to them from the LORD. Their mixture of Truth with error was embedded in their culture, and they just did not want to hear from anyone suggesting that they were offending God. They not only had their own priesthood, but their own ‘prophets’ as well. These ‘prophets’ said to them what they wanted to hear. They were literally heaping to ‘themselves teachers, having itching ears.’ [2 Timothy 4:3]
But, pay particular attention to the LORD’s emphatic indictment of them in verse six:
…yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the LORD…
Amos was commissioned by the LORD to say these heart-searching words to those in the northern kingdom no less than five times! But, they continued to go on with their syncretism until the LORD took away the entire northern kingdom approximately sixty-five years after Amos warned them. All the while they continued on, figuring that they were ‘God’s people,’ and that fanatics like Amos were just wrong about what they thought God wanted them to say.
How would we respond if the LORD sent unto us an ‘Amos,’ challenging our mixture of true thankfulness and so-called ‘Thanksgiving?’
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