Saturday, June 19, 2021

Mining the Minors: Amos (20)

“Teachers told us
the Romans built this place.
They built a wall and a temple on
an edge-of-the-empire garrison town.
They lived and they died.
They prayed to their gods
but the stone gods did not make a sound.
And their empire crumbled
’til all that was left were
stones the workmen found.”

— Sting, All This Time

One of my favorite songs ever recorded by the ex-singer of The Police makes the point that empires rise and fall while the natural world goes about its business. “All this time, the river flowed endlessly to the sea,” goes the chorus. Being English, Sting singles out the Roman Empire, but he could as easily have written about those of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Medo-Persians or Greeks.

Or, frankly, the Americans.

The details of empire-dissolution differ but the story is always the same in its broad strokes. One of the more common features of an empire on its way downhill in the express lane is that the vast majority of its citizens never see their civilizational doom coming. The end comes fast, and the cognitive dissonance of going from head to tail in a moment is too much for most people to bear.

At any rate, it turns out Amos is saying something similar to Sting, only he got there more than 2.5 millennia earlier; and, naturally, there is a Major Character in Amos who doesn’t even rate a speaking role in All This Time, but who makes all the difference to both the past and future outcomes of the empires of this world, since he is directly involved both in building them up and chopping them down.

Amos 5:8-9 — All This Time

“He who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning and darkens the day into night, who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out on the surface of the earth, the Lord is his name; who makes destruction flash forth against the strong, so that destruction comes upon the fortress.”

Three Reasons to Seek the Lord

If we remember the earlier verses of chapter 5 which we looked at last week, we will understand v8 is not introducing a new subject, but rather expanding on Amos’s appeal to Israel to “Seek the Lord and live.” The religious routines carried out in Bethel and Gilgal would be of no help in the day of trouble. The spiritual history of Beersheba would not translate into a source of present-day power for those in Israel who thought to seek help from afar off. The “gods” celebrated in the temples of Israel were unable to save, and Amos predicted they would shortly be carted off to Assyria along with their worshipers.

In fact, this is the third reason Amos has given Israel to seek the Lord:

  1. The first was the futility of the alternatives (v5). The wooden gods of Israel, the offerings made to the queen of heaven, the Asherah poles and whatnot would be no more effective than the stone gods of the Roman contingent in England during the days of the Empire.
  2. The second was the certainty of judgment if Israel does not seek God (v6). If they do not repent, says Amos, the Lord will “break out like fire in the house of Joseph”, and the fire would devour, with none to quench it.
  3. The third reason is the superiority of the Lord (v8), demonstrated by what he has made and the order he sustains in the universe.

The Pleiades and Orion

Verse 8 takes us back to the very first chapter of Genesis: “He who made the Pleiades and Orion” reminds us of the words “And God made ... the stars.” These heavenly bodies were made “for signs and for seasons”. The star of Bethlehem was a sign to the magi, and they followed it to find the Christ. For thousands of years, men have seen other signs in the stars too, some more genuine than others.

But, as Genesis states, it is also true that different stars appear in the sky at different times of the year due to Earth’s revolution around the Sun. The stars and constellations mark seasons. In our northern hemisphere, both Orion and the Pleiades are winter phenomena. We can view them from October through April.

Job refers to these same star clusters in his ninth chapter to make the point that man cannot possibly contend with the God who made them, a passage of scripture which was surely familiar to the religious leaders in Israel and perhaps to the people as well. Perhaps even more familiar would be God’s rhetorical question to Job in chapter 38, “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion?” Amos is saying something similar here: the God of Israel operates on a level that no other putative “god” can possibly claim.

Deep Darkness into Morning

Commentators part ways on the correct interpretation of a phrase the ESV translates as “deep darkness”; in Hebrew, literally “death-shadow”. Barnes says the shadow of death is “the darkness of the grave”, “no mere alternation of light and day”. Most commentators, however, do in fact see it as a reference to the regular cycle of night and day brought about by earth’s rotation at the Lord’s design, probably because Amos continues with “he darkens the day into” not the grave, but “night”. One must remember that the blackness of night could easily become a time of genuine terror for the ancients in a way it is has not really been since the invention of the electrical grid. It should not surprise us to find the ordinary operations of changing day-into-night and night-into-day described in hyperbolic language, if that is indeed the case here.

Again, Amos is echoing Job, which reads very similarly: “He uncovers the deeps out of darkness and brings deep darkness to light.” “Deep darkness” is indeed used in Job to describe the sense that one is dying, but does not in most Old Testament instances refer to the grave itself, as can be seen in Psalm 107, where the prisoners who cry out to the Lord are delivered from their fear. Interestingly, Jeremiah also employs the phrase figuratively to refer to the darkness of God’s earthly judgment, specifically the judgment of exile.

While I prefer to read the phrase literally, there is no reason the figure cannot reasonably be understood on multiple levels, as all the above interpretations are basically valid ones. In any case, Amos has moved from describing God’s creative acts to one or another major operation with which God is credited as accomplishing on a regular basis, whether it be daily or at important periods in human history, and perhaps also in individual lives. So, whether the intended contrast is between night and day, between terrified unknowing and spiritual illumination, or between exile and peaceful blessing, once again, this incredible power sets YHWH apart from all other would-be gods.

The Waters of the Sea

While I also prefer to read these next two expressions (“sea” and “earth”) in their most literal senses, they too may be understood on multiple levels. Again we are dealing with a continuing operation over which God is uniquely sovereign. Some see in this description the water cycle of evaporation / condensation / precipitation. If that is all Amos means by “who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out on the surface of the earth”, it would be an impressive enough statement about God. That the oceans of the planet are taken up into the sky, purified and returned to the earth as rain is an astounding thing to contemplate, requiring power and wisdom on an unimaginable scale. For yet a third time in the passage, we encounter similar language to that of Job.

A second interpretation, and one favored by the Pulpit Commentary among others, is that this is a reference to the Genesis deluge. However, there is a third legitimate possibility. The words “sea” and “earth” have consistent figurative meanings in scripture which may be relevant here. The word “earth” is often used in a local sense, simply meaning “land”, in most cases referring specifically to Israel (as in Isaiah 1:2 and chapters 24-27). By way of contrast, the four great beasts of Daniel 7 symbolize kingdoms or empires, and come up “out of the sea”, meaning the mass of Gentile nations, a figure similarly employed in Revelation. A God who possesses the power to “pour out” the nations of the world in judgment on Israel may well be in view.

Who Makes Destruction Flash Forth

The God whose regular operations Amos has described here is vastly more impressive than some minor local deity such as those worshiped in Bethel and Gilgal. Barnes refers to him as “the great First Cause” and Ellicott as “the supreme universal Lord”. Remember the disciples’ awe that “even the winds and the sea obey him”. And if God can create and sustain the world around us, we can surely credit him with the ability to bring down the greatest empires in history (“who makes destruction flash forth against the strong, so that destruction comes upon the fortress”).

The God who gave us the stars, night and day, and the water cycle is at work in history doing as he pleases, and as Sting observed in All This Time, the orderly operations of nature are a vastly bigger and more impressive enterprise than building up or destroying human societies, which come and go in decades and centuries, rather than existing in apparent perpetuity like nature.

Empires, no matter how awe-inspiring, are just as cyclical as the rotation of the earth or the conversion of salt water into potable. We may look to the human condition, fate or circumstance to explain their rise and decline, but ultimately it is God who props them up or brings them down.

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