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Articles, Bible studies, and sermons that contain Amos 5:18:
Amos 5:16-20
Excerpted from: Self-Government and Responsibility (Part Three)Amos is describing an unrelenting awareness of pressure that people are feeling as the Tribulation develops. The people are in a situation like all of us have experienced at one time or another in the course of a bad dream. You are lying on your bed, soundly asleep. Your mind is going at 60 miles an hour, as they say. You find yourself in this dream, almost as if you are surrounded on every side. There is some pressure visible or invisible to you (at least in the dream). It might be a lion. It might be a bear. It might be a man with a rifle or a shotgun or a knife pursuing you. The animal is pursuing you and you lack the strength to do anything. It is as if you are running through a lake of molasses. You can hardly pick up your feet and this thing is terrorizing you. You know that at any second it is going to come down on you and you are going to lose your life.
That is the kind of situation Amos is talking about here. Wave after wave of distress, of intense pressure is coming upon people. He describes it as being as if you are out for a walk when suddenly a lion confronts you. What do you do when you are confronted by a lion? You get out of there as fast as you can and you run! Finally, you breathlessly get to the place where the lion is no longer chasing you. You feel as though you have escaped him. You begin to let down your guard. Then there is a bear and the bear takes off after you. You run and run and run again. Maybe this time you climb a tree or something. You are barely out of the bear's reach. He is pawing away at you until he finally gets tired of the game and leaves the area. As you come down out of the tree, you spot a little cottage or something over there. You feel that if you can just get inside of that, you are going to be safe. You go inside, shut the door behind you, heave a sigh of relief, lean against the wall in exhaustion...and a snake comes out and bites you. Your place of safety turns out to be fatal.
Amos 5:18-19
Excerpted from: A Place of Safety? (Part 1)It is almost as if Israel is left without a future. Indeed, unless God intervened, there would be no future for Israel. There would be no future for mankind. That is how bad the times are going to be.
Can you imagine how terrifying that would be? If you are in a place where a lion is—you are out of your element; you are in the lion's element. He has the advantage, he is on home territory, and you are in his territory. You are the stranger. You are the intruder there. All by itself that is enough to give a person a feeling of insecurity and then comes the roar of a lion—your hair stands up on end, your loins begin to quake. "Where was he? Where is he now? Is he creeping up on me? There he is! RUN. . .(pant, pant, pant, pant)." You know, you are just out of breath. "Oh I escaped him, I escaped him." And just as you feel safe again. . .
If that is not bad enough—if a lion is not bad enough—how about a bear? Think you can outrun a bear? A bear can run much faster than you can, especially after you just escaped from a lion. "I'll go up a tree." A bear can come up after you—all several hundred pounds of him, if he wants to. Well, you escape the bear and then. . .
That is not a very happy picture. I think that God is trying to draw our attention to the kind of times that are coming. They will be unrelenting in their terror—to such an extent that unless He intervened—"no flesh would be saved alive." Now we have to put ourselves into this. Is God able to protect us in a time like this? Yes, he can.
Amos 5:18
Excerpted from: The Covenants, Grace, and Law (Part 23)Do you desire the Day of the Lord? I think you should. But that has to be understood properly. We should want the return of Christ. But here he says, "Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord!" These people understood that the Day of the Lord was, in its overall sense, going to be something good. But the question is, "Were they prepared for the Day of the Lord?" That is a very important question, and the truth was that they were not.
He wants those of us reading this to desire the Day of the Lord in the right way, but He wants us to be prepared for the Day of the Lord as much as we possibly can. It is going to be then:
That is, just one calamity after another. It looks as though you escape one thing, and you get into a worse calamity. The Day of the Lord is going to be a time of unending catastrophe and trouble.
ArticlesClouds (Part Three): The Revealing of Christ
Clouds (Part Three): The Revealing of Christ
Do You Desire the Day of the Lord?
Is All Fair in Love and War?
Power Belongs to God (Part One)
Prepare to Meet Your God! (Part Seven): The Prophesied Blow Falls
Prepare to Meet Your God! (Part Seven): The Prophesied Blow Falls
The End Is Not Yet
The End Is Not Yet
The Goodness and Severity of God (Part Two) (2)
Unity and Personal Responsibility
What Is the Book of Revelation?
BookletsPrepare to Meet Your God! (The Book of Amos) (Part Two)
Prepare to Meet Your God! (The Book of Amos) (Part Two)
EssaysWhy Is Hope Delayed?
SermonsAmos (Part Nine)
We Give Our Heads and Hearts
Amos (Part Nine)
Don't Be Indifferent
Don't Be Indifferent
Dire Predictions
Lamentations (Part Three)
The End Is Not Yet
Lamentations (Part Two)
The Book of Joel (Part One)
The Goodness and Severity of God
Don't Be Indifferent
Unity and Our Responsibilities
Power Belongs to God (Part 1)
Lamentations (Part Two; 1989)
Amos 5 and the Feast of Tabernacles
Preparing for Bad Times (Part 2)
Don't Be Indifferent (1995)
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