The Message of Amos Quotes

“It is not a light thing for very religious people to accept that their religion itself is offensive to God!”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“Here is a very largely forgotten and yet most vital principle. It is certainly the case that the church is called by God to safeguard, publicize and transmit His truth (e.g. 2 Tim. 1: 13, 14; 2:1, 2); but it is equally the case that the truth is the safeguard of the church, both in the corporate sense of preserving the whole body and in the individual sense of guarding, defending and keeping each member.5 The life which walks in the truth is impregnable (cf. Jn. 8:31, 32, 34-36).”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“The verb possess signifies a conquest. The people of God demonstrate a superior power. But the conquest is followed by an equality of citizenship in that it is not their name but the name of their God by which the Gentiles are called. What the Old Testament thus saw in its own terms as military expansion, the New Testament, following the lead of Jesus who said, If my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight (Jn. 18:36), teaches us to see as the missionary expansion of the church. At the Council of Jerusalem James used this very passage of Amos as scriptural justification for the decision that the Gentiles were eligible for co-equal membership in the things of the Lord Jesus (Acts 15:12-19). Clearly, missionary expansion involves a submission followed by an equality.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“There is, then, one thing which the Almighty cannot do: He cannot bestow mercy on those who do not show mercy. Nothing is left for those who turn their faces away from the needy—or who exploit the needy for their own gain—than that God will turn His face away from them. This is the grim but biblically realistic truth of Amos 8:1—10. The plumb-line hangs vertical in the unmoving hand of God, a mute summons to eternal wrath to flash forth, terrifyingly, disastrously, unendingly against those who are pitiless towards the poor, the central evidence of false religion (cf. Jas. 1:27) and dead faith (cf. Jas. 2:14-”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“It is not just illogical that people should love mercy when they seek it from God for themselves and hate it when required to show it to others. The Scripture says that it is impossible. The unforgiving cannot be forgiven, the unmerciful cannot receive mercy.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“Jeremiah saw the Jerusalem temple subjected to this abuse: people confessedly finding peace with God and all manner of religious helpfulness there, but coming back unchanged, praying on their knees in the temple and preying on their neighbours everywhere else!”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“What are justice and righteousness? In 5:7 the turning of justice to wormwood indicates that justice is a word involving the treatment of other people: wormwood has to be tasted before it is known for the bitter thing it is. Justice, therefore, is right behaviour in relation to others, whereby they ‘taste’ or experience what is good and pleasant.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“But to whom was Amos speaking? Even the most casual reading of his book reveals his hearers as a church which had confused assurance with complacency. They not only professed salvation but also an unworried certainty of salvation (cf. 5:14, 18). As Amos looked at them, however, he saw a people who not only professed salvation but who exhibited a total lack of the sort of evidence which would make their profession credible.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“But see how he reverses what we often hear said: that by means of a new ‘blessing’ from heaven we are enabled to walk in holiness. We ever want the blessing first and the duty second, but Amos says that it is those who set themselves in the way that delights their God who receive life, power and grace from and in Him. Jesus put things the same way when He promised that those who hunger and thirst after righteousness would be filled (Mt. 5:6).”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“If we do not labour to establish justice in the gate, we shall be accused from this passage in Amos of a one-sided morality stopping short of the biblical concern for society, we shall be exposed, according to Amos 3:9-4:5, of playing around with a useless religion while society rots, and we shall find, according to Amos 6:3, that, while we have been unconcerned, other and sinister forces have been at work to enthrone violence and disorder.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“The point at issue is not the social injustice involved, that comes later, but the refusal to allow life to be governed by truth.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“Amos’ exposure of a religion which leaves life untouched could not have been more brilliantly accomplished. They go, they sing, they come away, and nothing, simply nothing has changed. Justice is still turned sour (7a, 12c) and righteousness is still overthrown (7b, 12b).”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“We cannot be wrong in supposing that at any rate the majority of those who flocked to Bethel, Beer-sheba and Gilgal thought that they were legitimate partakers of the promises of God. Amos and history unite to proclaim that of these the majority was wholly mistaken. In the bitter event they discovered that it was one thing to know a promise but quite another to be an inheritor of it; it was one thing to be around to hear the promise proclaimed but quite another to be able to register a valid claim to possess it for oneself.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“We have forgotten that our God can turn and become our enemy (Is. 63:10) and with all our talk of taking care not to fall into the power of Satan we have become blind to the much more dangerous possibility of falling out of the power of God.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“again the roaring lion is heard (3:8a), but it is not followed by the lion growling over its prey. The roaring lion has provoked the voice of prophecy (3: 8b).”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“When the grace of God reaches out to man its purpose is to make him truly human: as we would say, the purpose of God’s saving work is to make us like Jesus, the perfect Man.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“Three principles were held and acted upon: the primary importance of seeking material possessions (the sin of covetousness), the irrelevance of the rights of other people (the sin of indifference and oppression)9 and the unrestricted promotion of self-advantage (the sin of self-importance).”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“Thus in a nutshell Amos summarizes the Bible’s doctrine of the life of holiness as the life which loves and obeys the truth. But when the truth is no longer loved and is not kept by daily obedience its rejection is complete: and this is the charge levelled against Judah. God’s people have despised His truth.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“The one sin which runs like a devilish thread through the six aspects we have studied is the sin of self-pleasing: the self proudly trampling on others, intent on its own profit, sitting loose to troublesome obligations, indulging its secret motives, careless of all so long as it has its way, and bitter to the last against all who dare to say it nay! But the particular way in which this sin has been brought to our attention is its manifestation in the context of human relationships and its origin in ignoring the voice of conscience.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“Take it metaphorically, but ask what the metaphor means. ‘Threshing’ is what a man does to a thing, a grain crop, in order to extract his own profit from it. This is what Hazael did in Gilead. He treated people as things. But he found no sympathy, allowance or forgiveness in heaven.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“to force us to make our calling and election sure, to remind us that it is one thing to claim God’s promises but another to inherit them, and to teach, seven hundred and sixty years before a greater than Amos used the words, that many will call out ‘Lord, Lord’ only to hear the words in reply ‘Depart from me, you evil-doers’ (Mt. 7:22 f.).”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“Yet it is also true that the wrath of a sinhating God ought to be part of the permanent consciousness of the Christian, for God never hates sin more than when He sees it defiling the life of His people. The Fatherhood of God, the supreme privilege of our redeemed position, is also the ground of perpetual fear.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“Another way of stating the same truth is to say that the face which God turns to the world is predominantly one of mercy, that wrath comes, when it comes at all, late and overdue,”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“The question whether Amos was teaching that the Lord had decided to change His covenant purposes, or whether he was foretelling purgative judgments designed to sweep out of the covenant-people all whose profession was a pretence and whose lives did not show the marks of true membership, must be settled by the study of chapters 7-9.”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos

“First, Amos insisted that privilege brings peril (3:2). The claim of the day clearly was that privilege brings security. They had been privileged to have direct dealings with God”
― J. Alec Motyer, The Message of Amos