Amos 4:13-5:3

[0:00] And so last time we were in the book, last Wednesday night, we tried to finish and just couldn't rush through it all and kind of got stuck in verse 13 a little bit as the Lord is stamping his name upon what he's threatening to do to his people.

[0:21] After all five of those opportunities, they had to turn back to him, and yet they would not return unto him. Before these punishments that he sent out, he sent the preachers, and they rejected the preaching, and then he sent the punishments.

[0:35] They rejected the punishments. So, because that's the case in verse 12, prepare to meet thy God, O Israel. And now he's putting, by way of authority and by way of revealing his superiority and who he is saying this stuff, he throws some things out in verse number 13, where he says, For lo, he that formeth the mountains, and createth the wind, and declareth unto man what is his thought, that maketh the morning darkness, and treadeth upon the high places of the earth, the Lord, the God of hosts, is his name.

[1:11] And so, if you have any doubt about who's making these comments, and about who's threatening to do this, and about whether he's trustworthy or whether he's just blowing smoke, then he tells you, I'm the one doing this.

[1:24] The one that created, the creator. So, he uses creation as something to back up what he's saying. He's a God of creation.

[1:35] We looked at last week, he declareth unto man what is his thought, showing that God is a God of revelation. And so, that's another thing that sets him apart from everybody else, all the other supposed gods.

[1:48] He's the creator. There's only one. He's the one that reveals his thoughts to man. No other God does that. And we saw that in the book of Isaiah. Isaiah. And so, with those two things in place, there's a third one there.

[2:01] He's a God of, the last one I would say is a God of devastation, creation, revelation, and devastation. At the end of verse 13, he's going to make the morning darkness, and tread upon the high places of the earth.

[2:14] And it's a threat here. Now, last week, we ended on that phrase where he says that, Make it the morning darkness. And just very quickly, throughout some, reminded you of how he did that back in Egypt with a thick darkness that maybe felt was one of the plagues.

[2:31] It was obviously judgment. Even all the way, rewinding all the way back to Genesis chapter 1, where there was darkness upon the face of the deep and understanding what went on there. That was judgment.

[2:41] And then the future, looking forward to the second coming of Christ, it's in chapter 5. We looked at verses 18 through 20. It's a day of darkness.

[2:52] The day of the Lord is a day of darkness. Verse 20, Shall not the day of the Lord be darkness and not light, even very dark and no brightness in it? And so, this second coming is in chapter 8. It's in Zephaniah.

[3:02] It's in Joel. It's in many of the minor prophets and major. The second coming is a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of terror. It's a horrible thing. And he says, I'm going to make the morning darkness.

[3:16] And that's obviously a reference to his judgment. And so, we'll pick it up right here now toward the end of verse 13. And carry, get into the chapter 5, Lord willing, a good bit.

[3:27] So, treadeth upon the high places of the earth. You find that spot near the end of the verse. This is what God does. He treads upon the high places of the earth.

[3:38] Now, high places, in most cases in the Bible, are not just mountains, just generic mountains. But they're places of worship. They're often places of divining, of contacting otherworldly spirits, of seeking some revelation, or seeking some intervention, or just seeking some direction.

[4:00] It's a very common thing for the pagans to do this. I want to show you an example of this back in Numbers, chapter 22. Find Numbers 22. Do you remember Balaam and the king Balak, that when the Israelites were coming into his land, God was leading them toward the promised land.

[4:19] And they're coming through his land, and Balak goes and hires him a diviner, a man named Balaam. And he wants him to come and curse the people. And so, to do this, to seek some form of, some divination, some contact with something outside of this world, they go to a high place.

[4:41] Numbers 22, and look at the last verse of the chapter, verse 41. It's not just taking him up on a mountain where he can get a vantage point, but it's a high place of Baal.

[5:04] It's a place where there's altars built, where sacrifices are made, and where divination is attempted. At the very least, look at chapter 23, and verse 3.

[5:14] And Balaam said unto Balak, Stand by thy burnt offering, and I will go, peradventure the Lord will come to meet me, and whatsoever he showeth me, I will tell thee.

[5:26] And he went to a high place, and God met Balaam. So a high place is a place elevated, yes, but it's a place of worship, a place of divination.

[5:38] And you're close by, look at Deuteronomy chapter 12. The next book to your right, Deuteronomy chapter 12. The Lord knows that this is a practice of the people in the land of Canaan.

[5:53] And so when he sends his people in there, before they ever get in there, he says, this is how I want you to handle these places of worship. And when you get into that land, I'm going to show you a place that you will worship me.

[6:06] And I'll put my name there. But here's how you handle it. Verse number 1, Deuteronomy 12, verse 1. These are the statutes and judgments we shall observe to do in the land which the Lord God of thy fathers giveth thee to possess it, all the days that ye live upon the earth.

[6:19] Ye shall utterly destroy all the places wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree.

[6:30] And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire. And ye shall hew down their graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place. Ye shall not do so unto the Lord your God, but unto the place which the Lord your God shall choose, out of all your tribes to put his name there, even unto his habitation, shall ye seek, and thither thou shalt come.

[6:55] And thither, meaning to that place, thither ye shall bring your burnt offerings, and your sacrifices, and your tithes, and etc. So the high places are to be taken away and removed.

[7:07] God is not going to be worshipped on those kind of places. They're not going to mimic the heathenistic rituals and worship ceremonies. They're going to do it his way. And so the Lord says when he comes back, he's going to tread upon the high places of the earth.

[7:22] There's a constant battle when you read through the history of the kings of Israel. And you've read your Bible, you've read through 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings, and 1 and 2 Chronicles.

[7:33] And one thing that you kept seeing was there was a king that was a good king, and he walked in the ways of David his father. Nevertheless, the high places were not removed.

[7:45] It shows up over, and then there's a good king that comes in and actually rids the land of all of this stuff, and cuts it down and does exactly what Deuteronomy 12 says. And the battle is when one king wipes it out and reforms the land and says, no, we're going to worship the Lord on his terms.

[8:01] It's going to be, we're going to keep Passover. We're going to do it down at Jerusalem at the temple. The next one comes on the scene and erects the altars again, and the pillars and the groves, and the worship begins again.

[8:13] And it's a constant battle of getting rid of these high places and then resuming worship under the next king. And I can't say for sure, but having read that, it seems as though God overlooked some of that when the king's heart was toward him and it was good that he didn't seem to curse or to do any kind of, I don't know, just destructive means to a good king, even though the high places still remained.

[8:42] It seems as though they were worshiping him in these high places and not Baal or other gods. But nevertheless, the word says what it says, and we understand the mind of God about these things.

[8:53] So he says he's the God that treadeth upon the high places of the earth. And so these are places of worship for the most part. And treading, I think it's not too complicated of a word.

[9:04] It's got several ideas to it. One of them is stomping, like treading out the grapes or the ox treading out the corn. He's kind of smashing, and Jesus Christ is likened to that in Isaiah 63 when he comes back and he treads the winepress of the wrath of God.

[9:20] And he says that he's trodden them all in his wrath and in his fury. And so there's that idea of stomping and destroying. It's also used to describe a marching army that is invading, maybe not even fighting, but they're treading upon the land.

[9:37] It's not theirs. It's someone else's. You get the idea. It's like being in a place you're not wanted. And that word is used to describe that. Similarly, in Isaiah chapter 1 and verse 12, the Lord says, When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand to tread my courts?

[9:55] And so God's not pleased with his people. They're a sinful people. And when they would even come before him in Jerusalem, he'd say, What are you doing here? You're not welcomed here. And he'd describe why in Isaiah 1 with their sins and so forth.

[10:10] So treading in this context refers to desecrating somebody's sacred places of worship. And God's going to tread upon the high places of the earth, whether he's welcomed or not.

[10:22] He is openly declaring that he alone will irreverently and unapologetically destroy all of the idolatry and the sites that man has consecrated to his devils.

[10:35] The Bible says that the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. And so God, the creator, has every right to come down and visit this place that he made and hand it over to man and gave him dominion over it.

[10:49] He has every right to come back and demand that this meets the criteria that he gave to man. If it's not up to his standard, God has every right to come down and destroy something.

[10:59] He has every right to rain fire and brimstone upon a couple cities and their villages around them when there's an abomination coming up before him. The earth is his and mankind and beast upon it.

[11:12] He was about to do that to the town of Nineveh had they not repented and cried to him. And the Lord has every right to do what he wants with his own. Any sign of sin, any sign of ungodliness or abomination, whether it happens in the moment here as he's preaching or when it happens in the second coming of Christ, that stuff's going to get dealt with.

[11:35] He's going to stomp it out. You better believe he's going to come and tread some things out because it's the Lord's. Now, not only is the earth the Lord's, but you know what else belongs to the Lord?

[11:48] You do. Because you are bought with a price. Yes, therefore, glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's.

[12:00] And so if he owns you like he owns, like he claims to, if you've been bought with the blood of Jesus Christ, then God forbid that inside this heart is some high place that gets set up where I secretly, where I, when nobody's looking, worship some other gods.

[12:21] We'll put some other things before him. God forbid there's high places in my heart that God will have to come by and tread down and destroy. The Bible talks about men being lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God.

[12:38] That needs to be put down. That needs to be wiped out and ripped apart so that God can have the place he deserves. The Bible describes men as being a lover of money or greedy of filthy lucre.

[12:51] That needs to be put down. The Bible says that men are lovers of praise, the praise of men, more than the praise of God. That's a high place. That's setting up an altar in your heart saying, oh, I love when they talk good about me.

[13:06] I love when they compliment me. I love when they tell me how good a job I did or when I just get recognition, I just bask in it. And I want people to know that I did that.

[13:18] I did that. I hear it in me. I hear it in others. When you do something, you do it well, and somebody shows up and compliments it or notices it, and it's like, I really want them to know that I'm the one that did it.

[13:36] And so the way we act is to say, yeah, I was really working hard on that, and I just got it. And we find a way to make sure, oh, did you do that?

[13:47] To get the praise of men. To get the praise. That needs to be put down. Remember 2 Corinthians 10, verse number 5, the Bible says, casting down imaginations and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.

[14:08] High things can get lodged in your mind, and they can get lodged in your heart. And so God, when he comes back, he's going to destroy that stuff, and it would be wise of us to consider it well and destroy it in our lives.

[14:24] Coming to the very end of the verse, look at verse 13, the very last thing he says is, the Lord, the God of hosts, is his name. Now when you see those capital letters for Lord, you're looking at the name Jehovah.

[14:41] As it is written in the Hebrew, we're not going to get into all of that, the tetragrammaton, and it's a rather waste of time to study this thing out too far.

[14:52] I got on a wormhole with it last week, and it didn't get me anywhere, and it just kind of got me angry. So the Lord, the God of hosts is his name, the Jehovah, the I am, and the Bible has his name, and whenever it's translated, it's translated as the four letters, as J, H, V, H, with the vowels, comes out Jehovah, in your English Bible.

[15:18] It's been quite popular lately to say, no, that J should be a Y, and so it should be Y-H, W-H, and then they come up with throwing some vowels in that to Yahweh.

[15:30] And if you've heard the name Yahweh, and people talking Yahweh, you will not find that in the King James Bible one time. So that's not a word that ever comes out of my mouth. I'll refer to Jehovah once in a while, because that's the name that comes out of this Bible.

[15:44] But you have to understand a little bit about languages, and this is where we're not going to go too far with it, but there's a big fuss about it, and it's kind of, some of it's humorous to think the Jehovah's Witnesses, they planted their flag on the name Jehovah.

[16:00] And then modern scholarship comes around with saying, no, that's not it at all. It's much closer to Yahweh, and so now all the new translations, ESV, put out Yahweh all through that thing, and they pretend that you're doing a dishonor to God, into the holy name, by not translating it, or transliterating it technically.

[16:20] And let me give you just a little thought here, that just how foolish, it's almost laughable, this thing here. But here's what one guy says about this name. In the oldest available Bible manuscripts, the Tetragrammaton is used in reference to the almighty God, the creator of all the universe.

[16:41] Now, just put a little asterisk by here, it's just this guy's statement. Because of a misguided Jewish superstition, and the church's determination to hide that name from Bible readers, many translators began replacing it with the title, Lord, in capitals, each time it appears in the old manuscripts.

[17:01] So, we're accused of trying to, the church is trying to hide it, which is just stupid. So basically, here's this conclusion. Each time you see the word Lord in capitals, you know that you can pronounce the name of God there, if you so wish.

[17:18] Whether you use Jehovah, Yahweh, Yewah, or Yehovah, or any other language translation in popular use today, is not the point.

[17:29] But the main point is that our creator has given us his name to use, probably more than 7,000 times in the scripture, and to refuse to use his name is like a slap in his face.

[17:41] It is disrespectful. Now, some would argue that the Jews would not translate it out of respect, and some of that goes into the traditionals.

[17:52] It goes pretty far. I'm not even necessarily believing all of that. But here's something I want you to think. If, if, if using Lord is a slap in God's face, and disrespecting him, but you have permission to say Jehovah, or Yahweh, or, Yewah, Yewah, or Yehovah, or, as he says, any other language translation in popular use today, what if you're not pronouncing it right?

[18:26] Like, what if you don't have the right one? Isn't that kind of a slap in the face, or disrespectful to pronounce somebody's name wrong all the time? Do you not get fed up when somebody pronounces your name wrong?

[18:37] You correct them right away, and if they continue to do it, what do you think? Is God going to say, oh, it's okay, because you're trying your best to use my holy name that I did not, apart from the King James Bible, I did not, through Hebrew and through its transliteration into other languages, give you clear understanding to scholars of what it should be.

[19:01] I have a problem with somebody saying something so stupid as that, pretending you can just make up whatever representation you want, and that's respectful to God. My take on this, and it's just small, but my take that the name of Jesus came through with the J-E on the front of it, and the name Jesus means Jehovah saves, and in your Bible, you've got a lot of Jewish names that have a J-E on them, a lot of them, and that's Jehovah as a prefix to their name.

[19:34] You may even be familiar with Joshua one time being called Jehoshua. It's not Yehoshua. You're not going to see all these descriptions, and you're not going to see all these guys that want to make Yahweh the name go back to their Bibles and actually be consistent with that, with all the Hebrew names.

[19:53] In other words, they're hypocrites. They don't really believe it has to be or should be. They're against what it is written here in the King James Bible, and they're going to make the change. They don't fuss over all the other proper names in Hebrew, and there's, I couldn't even tell you how many there are.

[20:10] The towns, Bethlehem and Shechem, or of all the men, and even names of the Bible of Hosea or Jeremiah, they're not fussing over all those. Do we know for sure that we have the correct vowels and the correct, they don't mess with any of that.

[20:24] It's just this supposed name of God that they want to get all excited about, and then change in your Bible and get rid of the term Lord. A side note here is I grew up under the King James Bible.

[20:35] I've been saying Lord and reading Lord, and thus saith the Lord all my life, and that just fits, and that just works, and it just is, it's smooth, and it's right, and it's clean, and it's pure, and to take that away and say, thus saith Yehovah, and to start some kind of thing like that all the way through, you're going to jack up your Bible pretty bad.

[20:55] I did this today. I looked up the name Michael, my first name, Michael, and I looked it up in other languages of the world, and I was shocked to see that there was five dozen different versions of Michael in the different languages of the world.

[21:15] In Hebrew, it's Mikael, Mikael. In French, it's Michel. In Italian, it has an extra E on the end. I don't know if it's Michele, something like that.

[21:28] Spanish, it's Miguel, and then some spellings have a M-I-K-K-E-L, or M-I-C-H-A-L, or M-I-H-A-L-Y. So how do I know which one?

[21:39] You know why? I have an English Bible, and Michael in English is M-I-C-H-A-E-L, and the name of the Lord, the name of God, the name in the Old Testament, as it comes into English, is J-V, or J-H-V-H.

[21:57] How do I know that? Because I have faith in my King James Bible. I know that wouldn't stand up against the scholars, they'd roll their eyes, but I have confidence in this book. And so, this is where Dr. Ruckman would say that the English corrects the Hebrew, or the English corrects the Greek.

[22:11] If you don't know which Greek manuscript, or what it should say, right there it is, in the present, preserved words of God. Now, I don't want to get on to this, I went too far, and I even want to go there, so, sorry.

[22:24] Alright, verse 13, the Lord. There's Jehovah's name, but it's pronounced as the Lord, or presented as L-O-R-D. The God of hosts is his name.

[22:36] So he's the God of hosts, he's Almighty God, elsewhere he's Most High God. It seems to me that he was going to refer to himself like this when he's asserting his dominance and his power.

[22:49] The phrase, the God of hosts, is only in your Bible nine times, and I find it interesting that seven of those are at the prophet Amos. Only two other times is in Jeremiah.

[23:03] Those are the only two prophets that say the God of hosts. I wonder, and this is just me wondering out loud, I can't prove this, nor do I even try to, but the Lord, the God of hosts, is his name.

[23:18] Instead of the God of hosts, that only shows up nine times, you're familiar more with the Lord of hosts. That shows up over 200 times. And I wonder out loud, is the Lord of hosts a contraction of the Lord, the God of hosts?

[23:35] And it's contracted throughout the Bible where it shows up 200 sometimes. Maybe, maybe not. I don't know. Let's move on. Chapter 5. We've got to go. Amos chapter 5.

[23:45] Hear ye this word which I take up against you, even a lamentation, O house of Israel. A lamentation. Now we're going to get a lamentation. Lamentations are pretty common in the Bible.

[23:59] And it's an expression of deep grief and sorrow. It's a very passionate mourning. It's venting the anguish that's on the inside of you.

[24:10] You lament over something. It could be the loss of a loved one, like several times the loss of a leader, a king. I remember David crying over Saul and Jonathan when they died.

[24:22] There's a very common thing then, even more so, would be to bewail the judgment of God against the sins of his people Israel. You're familiar with the book of Lamentations, the Lamentations of Jeremiah.

[24:36] There are five Lamentations there. And four of them are 22 verses. And it's a whole other thing to consider with the Hebrew Alfred. It's a very interesting study. He's called the Weeping Prophet.

[24:48] And so, the Lamentations of Jeremiah is the one you're more familiar with than any, but they're all over the Bible. And so now, this is Amos' Lamentation. And in this chapter, he's lamenting the fact that Israel is fallen, that Israel is decimated.

[25:02] Verse number two says, The virgin of Israel is fallen. She shall no more rise. She is forsaken upon her land. There is none to raise her up. For thus saith the Lord God, the city that went out by a thousand shall leave a hundred.

[25:16] And that which went forth by a hundred shall leave ten to the house of Israel. Amos is lamenting the vision that he has.

[25:28] You have to remember that. This is a vision. He's a prophet. He's what they call in the Bible a seer. He is seeing something that God is showing him of this place. And he's seeing them destroyed and decimated.

[25:41] He's seeing the population wiped out. And he's mourning this outwardly and openly to the people if they would listen. A lamentation of a prophet.

[25:56] It's got to be weird. Because the nation is not seeing this. The people are not sensing this or feeling this. They're in prosperity.

[26:08] Overall, they're stable. Their government's stable. Their economy's stable. They're doing very well. They're prosperous and living no trouble. And then Amos comes on and starts preaching against them and hollering at them and running his mouth and saying this, this, this, and God did this to you.

[26:24] But you won't. Then this is what he's going to do. And then he starts lamenting their condition, and what he sees by way of vision, he's putting out there and telling them, but they don't see it.

[26:36] They don't get it. When Amos sees this, when he sees what God's going to do to them, it causes him to, number one, to preach. It causes him to go proclaim the word of the Lord to this people.

[26:52] And secondly, it causes him to lament the situation, to mourn over the future state of what is going to happen to this place. That's not too much different than coming to church and the preacher goes on and on about, don't fall in love with this world or the things in the world.

[27:16] And then you sit there and say, we're doing just fine. I'm doing just fine. I'm in good health. I have a good job. I've got a good pension coming to me or I've got retirement saved up and it just doesn't really equate to you because you're not seeing what God said and you're not putting your heart and your mind on that.

[27:42] Preacher says, don't fall in love with this country because the preacher knows what God says about a nation that forgets God. But you don't see it.

[27:55] You look around and you say, we're stable. We're fine. We're healthy. We're strong. We're free. And Christians all over this land have swallowed a bunch of false hope and imagine everything's going to be all right and sing their songs, God bless America.

[28:14] Stand beside her and guide her. Is that even true in your lifetime? God guiding this land? I'm not trying to be ugly.

[28:24] I'm telling you the truth. You need to think about that stuff if you haven't already. Let's take a different look at it. Another moment to consider if you were like Amos, you could see the future, so to speak.

[28:39] Would it cause you to preach? Would it cause you to lament? Do you not know the future, the eternal future of your lost family, of your coworkers and friends that aren't saved, that don't care about the Lord, that don't come to church, they don't care, they don't want Him?

[28:57] Do you not know, based on the Word of God, what their future holds for them? Does it cause you to preach the gospel to them? Does it cause you to lament? I don't mean like put dust and ashes on your head and sit out in the street corner and I'm talking you can get on your face before God and cry out to Him over their souls.

[29:20] That's something that you and I can do. That knowledge should affect us. That knowledge affected Amos and he preached and he lamented.

[29:32] That knowledge ought to cause us to preach and it ought to cause us to plead with God to grant them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth. Take a look, we're almost done here, but go to Acts chapter 20.

[29:45] Acts chapter 20 and this is the Apostle Paul's ministry. When he's about to leave some people and move on, he wants to remind them that he gave it his all and for several years he poured himself into preaching to the lost.

[30:07] Acts chapter 20, look at verse 19. He's leaving these people for a while. He says, Serving the Lord with all humility of mind and with many tears and temptations which befell me by the way or by the lying in the way to the Jews and how I kept back nothing that was profitable unto you but have showed you and have taught you publicly and from house to house testifying both to the Jews and also to the Greeks repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.

[30:39] And then later in the chapter, verse 30, he says also, no, verse 31, Therefore watch and remember that by the space of three years I ceased not to warn everyone night and day with tears.

[30:55] So Paul's preaching was of necessity. He said, I kept back nothing that was profitable unto you. You needed to hear this. You needed the gospel of Jesus Christ, repentance toward God.

[31:06] And I didn't keep it back from you. His preaching was also marked by his sincerity and his passion and his weeping over the souls. Look at Romans chapter 9, just a little bit to your right.

[31:18] His own kinsmen, his own flesh and blood. The Apostle Paul shows us how to respond when you know something.

[31:30] When you get a vision from God, so to speak, when the Word of God declares the future. The reaction is to preach and to lament or to pray, however you want to consider it.

[31:43] Verse 1, I say the truth in Christ, I lie not, my conscience also bearing me witness in the Holy Ghost, that I have great heaviness and continual sorrow in my heart.

[31:56] For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen, according to the flesh. and he goes on from there. These Jews he cared about.

[32:08] In chapter 10 and verse 1, his heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is that they might be saved. The man preached and the man shed tears. He had great heaviness and sorrow in his heart for that people.

[32:22] A real burden for them. Where's that coming from? So it's almost mimicking and mirroring this lamentation, this prophet that preaches and they won't hear and he's pleading with them with everything inside of his being to see them, hear the word of God and to seek to the Lord.

[32:40] The parallel is pretty easy to make and it's also pretty easy to ignore. It's probably easier to ignore and just to go on with your day and well, they won't come to church or they won't read that track and you just drop it.

[32:57] So Amos back there, he doesn't just drop it. He cries out and laments and he pens it down and he shows that he sees it, he believes it and he's crying out and venting his anguish over what's going to happen to these people.

[33:13] And we've got to stop here but we're going to get into some stuff here where he calls them now to seek the Lord in Amos chapter 5 and the solution to all their problems and all of our problems seek the Lord.

[33:27] And so Lord, we'll get into that next week. So, kind of a hodgepodge today from thing to thing here with the name of Jehovah and the name of God there and lamentations and even backing it up into the high places.

[33:42] But there's a lot to discuss in this little minor prophet. A lot of little bits of truth and the more we cover them the more you'll understand the things as you read your Bible through. Especially these Old Testament passages.

[33:53] Not all of it rings true with the society and culture that we live in. So, praise the Lord for some insight into this text. Let's pray and then we'll be dismissed. And I want to remind you Sunday we will be taking an offering up for our missionary family that comes here.

[34:09] So, be prepared for that if you're able. Let's be dismissed. Father, thank you for your words. I thank you Lord that you've retained them in a perfect presentation. A way that we can trust that we have every word.

[34:22] that it's right. That we don't have to go to scholars or go to somebody who's going to confuse us or somebody smarter than us. Lord, you're smarter than us and you're holier than us and we just put all our faith and trust in you completely.

[34:35] And so, thank you for this book. Thank you for the study of Amos and for the light that we get through it. Lord, please challenge our hearts to be concerned about the lost, to be concerned about the condition of our friends and family and to not let it bypass us and not to get busy among other things.

[34:51] Help us, God, not to love this world or this nation. Help us to love you and put you first and realize that we're to be busy about your kingdom and the kingdom of God and seeking to bring souls into the spiritual kingdom before eternity gets them.

[35:07] God, bless as we go and be with us, be with this church family, be with those, we pray, that weren't able to be here tonight and please bring us back this weekend. Bless the missionary couple and family that's with us and help us to be a blessing to them and we ask these things in Jesus' name.

[35:21] Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen.

[35:46] Thanks.