Christ Church Washington D.C.

Brothers and sisters, confession of sin is not a mere formality. It is an act of truth in the sacred scriptures. When we say that we have sinned in thought, word, and deed, we are refusing to hide behind our excuses or appearances. We admit not only what we have done, but what we have left undone. We acknowledge that our love for our triune God has been partial, and that our love for our neighbor has been inconsistent.
And so confession humbles our pride. It interrupts our feeble attempts at self-justification, and it reorders our hearts towards the mercy of Almighty God. It is how we step back into the reality before the God who made the heavens and the earth. We do not confess to wallow in guilt, but to receive grace. And so honest confession clears the ground so that forgiveness may take root
of His name. Our sermon text on Thursday is from the prophet Amos, beginning in chapter 7. This is what the Lord told me.
He is so small. And the Lord relented concerning it. It shall not be, says the Lord. This is what the Lord God showed me. Behold, the Lord God was calling for a judgment by fire. And it devoured the great deep and was eating up the land. And I said, O Lord God, please cease. How can Jacob stand? He is so small. And the Lord relented concerning this. This also shall not be, said the Lord God. This is what He showed me.
And behold, the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in His hand. And the Lord said unto me, Amos, what do you see? And I said, A plumb line. And the Lord said, Behold, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel. I will never again pass by them. The high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste. And I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.
And Amaziah said to Amos,
But never again prophesy at Bethel, for it is the king’s sanctuary, and it is a temple of the kingdom.
And your sons and your daughters shall fall by the sword, and your land shall be divided up with a measuring line. You yourselves shall die in an unclean land, and Israel shall surely go into exile away from its land. This is what the Lord God showed me. Behold, a basket of summer fruit. And he said, Amos, what do you see? And I said, a basket of summer fruit.
This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight.
Amen. Please be seated. Grace, mercy, and peace be with you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. I have very much looked forward to being with you all and sharing of the famous hospitality in Christ Church, D.C. A delight to be with you representing the CREC on this Lord’s Day. People of God, evangelicals have a very conflicting relationship with symbols. Do they not?
We love our pumpkin pie. We love our 4th of July. And here we stand in D.C. whose very presence in the political landscape is one big titanic symbolic force. Monuments, road signs, buildings, the White House, all these things, they portray a certain power and gravitas, elegance, beauty, splendor, and on and on.
But the Bible is, from the beginning to the end, a very symbolic book because God is a lover of language and He is also a lover of symbols. The entire Bible is filled with them. And the purpose of biblical symbols is to whet our appetite or to build a certain literary appetite for literalness. Symbols prepare us for literalness.
Symbols are not opposed to history, but rather symbols strengthen our reading of history, of literal history. And if you happen to be somewhat allergic to symbols this morning, you’ll have an enormously difficult time reading through the prophetic literature of the Old Covenant Scriptures.
They have for quite some time divorced themselves from the sacred liturgy of the Old World. They have abandoned His covenant promise. Their worship is divorced from justice, but yet God, amidst all these things, promises a hope for a people. And He promises unto them through the great Davidic renewal that is sure to come in the life of Israel, specifically through David’s Lord, Messiah Jesus.
How does the prophet Amos communicate this grandiose message to the people of Israel living in this world, divorced from the worship of God, acting as if they are truly understanding and acting upon the liturgy, but in the reality are being rather hypocritical in their exercise of the liturgy of God.
Which symbolic language for the people of God? In chapter 7, as we read, he uses quite a bit of symbolism here, and he begins with a very famous symbolic note. He uses a host of locusts, and this becomes, not only in Amos, but in other prophetic books, one of the earliest and most striking prophetic images. Locusts in Egypt, of course, they were the great eighth plague in Egypt, and it was a plague literally.
Here, Amos is not merely speaking of locusts as agricultural pests. No, here, for Amos, locusts function as a sign of God’s covenantal and judicial warning to the people of Israel. Locusts function as God’s perfectly designed covenant symbol.
And here in our passage, as you heard from our lesson this morning, you can already see that Amos is functioning very much like a mediator on behalf of the people of Israel. He is what theologians call a covenant prosecutor. He is mediating on behalf of the people. He is pleading before God on behalf of the people of Israel.
He is a protection of God Himself. And if the people do not turn back to Yahweh God, judgment will come. They will be symbolically devoured by the judgment of God, which leads us to conclude that a nation or a people who fail to turn from their evil ways to the great God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will indeed receive God’s locusts.
They receive the blessings of God. They receive the renewal of God’s mercy upon them. And we saw in that first set of imageries that Amos’ petition is answered. And we see here in our text that God relents of the disaster He would bring to the people. But then the prophet continues and he uses another rich symbol in verses 4 through 6. This, of course, is a much more common image to our Western eyes.
The image of a fire. The fire here, of course, will destroy the crop at a symbolic level. It is going to signal drought. It is literally going to destroy everything they have produced. But at a symbolic level, it signals that the people of Israel are dry. There is no flourishing. There is no joy. There is no delight in their worship. And all these symbols, as they are hearing from the lips of the prophets, function,
as a kind of apocalyptic sign. If the people depend on the land to produce and to flourish, these images are precisely the kinds of images that they would never wish to hear from the lips of the prophet. And now we begin to see that the locust and the fire that Amos is building, what we might call a prophetic case against the people. And the symbols are just piling up.
God, of course, as we know through the Scriptures, in Hebrews in particular, He is a consuming fire. And so for us, the lesson is we don’t want to be on the side of His wrathful display. And so how does Amos pray? There is a kind of liturgical, prophetic repetition taking place. The same language is used. He says,
And what happens again for the second time? The Bible says that Yahweh relents. God’s relenting, by the way, is always in the context of His covenant with His people. It is conditioned upon the people’s response unto Him. God makes promises conditioned on the people’s obedience. If they obey, He relents. He removes the locust. He removes the fire that He has promised to come upon the people.
And then comes the final image, a very unique ancient one, the plumb line. And the plumb line, of course, it’s a builder’s tool that is used to measure whether a building stands perfectly straight, whether a wall stands perfectly straight, or whether there are flaws in the measurement. And here, what the plumb line signifies as this great prophetic imagery, it signifies the standard by which God judges the people.
Objective covenant standard. This is how God measures His people and determines how far off they are from His covenant promises. When God measures Israel, what does He see? What does He conclude? When He measures Israel against that standard, He finds her absolutely crooked in justice, crooked in worship, crooked in all her ways.
And now He announces judgment. Rather than further delay, rather than offering more apocalyptic images, God now announces judgment. And by this third symbol, again, third is kind of a new creation here. He is this third symbol here. The judgment has reached its apex, its cumulative effect. And by the third symbol of judgment, God’s long-suffering is coming to an end.
There is a finality to His judgment signs and symbols. And you will note that by the third symbol, the prophet Amos no longer intercedes here. Israel has warned God long enough. I’ve had the joy of traveling to a host of CREC churches in my term as presiding minister. And I know for a fact, whether here in D.C. or in Tokyo, Japan, or in Pichilemo, Chile,
or doing an exceptional work among our CREC congregations. But brothers and sisters, do not squander God’s kindness. Do not. We must not think that we are too great to fall. We may believe, even this morning, we may believe sincerely that we possess every spiritual privilege, but when the Lord lovingly applies His plumb line and measures whether we are
straight or crooked, when He applies the plumb line to the culture of this congregation, what will the Lord of glory, what will He find among you, brothers and sisters? What will He find? What will it reveal among you? Will it reveal a culture of confession? Will it reveal that our confession is real? Or will it reveal that we have been kneeling in vain? Will it reveal that our confession is merely spoken but not lived out?
We are in covenant union with Jesus Christ. And this is part of His family program for our congregations, not only the CRC, but in every other denomination out there. But this is part of His family program to our congregations. The Lord is testing, and His testing is not His intrusion. When Jesus Christ tests His people, it is because we belong unto Him. He only tests those whom He loves. He only enters into union with Him.
He turns the hearts of those whom He loves and cherishes and has placed His covenant affection upon. What God is doing among us, even here today in D.C., is a gracious examination, aligning His people with truth. Because He is a gracious God, He aligns you with truth rather than leaving you to your self-deception. And this is a fitting message for us during this Lenten season as we examine not only our own hearts, but the life of our congregation as you
joyously await the arrival of your new pastor in a few months. And amidst all these images, as Amos has developed this remarkable covenantal argument, amidst all these images we have a very unique interlude in our passage. And what we see in Amos 7, we see now an exchange between Amos and Amaziah, the priest of Bethel, a very unique one here. And the reason this exchange, we might say this political exchange takes place, is because
as you may have noticed, Amos has just announced something very hard for religious leaders to accept. He has announced that they are under the judgment of God and that those symbols are a preparatory judgment for the literal judgment that is to come. And he has said something hard. God himself has measured the nation. He has measured its ecclesia, its church, and he has found them crooked.
And it is very true that nothing is harder for a devout people to hear than that their very religion has become offensive to God. Instead of hearing those delightful words, well done, my good and faithful servant, here Israel receives these words, I am offended by your crooked service. And Amaziah wants Amos out of his way, as you have heard, read.
Amos is kind of a pre-John the baptizer, and wherever he goes, he causes havoc among the religious hypocrites. He is kind of a pre-John the baptizer. And this is what Amos tells to the priestly office of Bethel. Amos, in response to the priestly offense towards Amos, he says, Go, you seer! Flee to the land of Judah. This is what sell. There eat bread, and there prophesy, but never again prophesy at Bethel.
This is what they’re saying to Amos. For, he says, it is the king’s sanctuary. It is the royal residence. Don’t you see, Amos? You have violated holy ground with your message. Who do you think you are to proclaim all these covenant symbols against us? We are God’s holy people. How dare you act as if you are a discerner of the hearts of men, especially holy men? Now, what does Amos do here? How does Amos respond?
What does he say? He doesn’t retreat, I can assure you of that. What does he do? He stands on the authority of his vocation, on the authority of his calling. Because for Amos, it doesn’t matter how many degrees the bishops of Bethel have. It doesn’t matter how many scrolls these priests of Bethel have written for the New York Times.
Amos has no interest in a seat at the table of the priestly elite. None whatsoever. Because Amos knows his calling. He was called by God for his assignment. And he certainly does not need the approval of the ecclesial establishment of the ancient world. He even says, I was not a son of a prophet. Look at my calling. I was a sheep breeder. I was a tender of sycamore.
I was just minding my own business. And then I received a direct mandate from God in verse 15. Go prophesy to my people, God said to me. You see, a true prophet fears God more than earthly institutions. He fears God more than institutions. His credibility comes from God. His credibility does not rest in credentials granted by the sanctuary, but it rests in obedience granted by him.
Heaven. Granted by heaven. And here Amos’ speech moves the plumb line closer. You oppose me, Amos says, then I will move God’s discernment even closer. He is going to look even deeper. He is going to take his heavenly magnifying glass and look even closer at your transgressions. It no longer measures only thrones and temples. Now it measures men.
The issue is now no longer is Israel upright, but the issue is, as Amos declares, are you upright? We have declared that corporately you have been led astray, but now are you upright? And you see the plumb line never changes its principle. It’s applied again and again in the same measure. God’s standard is no respecter of persons. God’s standard measures kings and priests and pulpits and pews and churches and consciences alike.
Prophecy always lands not in abstraction but in the life of a man before the face of God. Or as my old professor John Frame would say, theology is the application of the Word of God to all areas of life. Theology does not remain in the world of abstraction, brothers and sisters. No, it enters and dwells and abides directly with you. It reads your heart. It reads your frames. For He is the Creator of all things.
And now the spotlight shifts to Amos himself, revealing the anatomy of what it means to be a true servant of Yahweh. And Amos defends to the accusations placed against him are four words. Not I, the Lord. Not I, the Lord. In our passage, he denies any kind of natural qualification that would have made him worthy to address the people through these symbolic riches. He denies career ambition. He denies self-appointment.
He was no professional prophet. He was no guild member. He was no seminary graduate of prophetic schools. He was a shepherd. He was a farmer. He was a man who was content with ordinary labors. And then God interrupted his labors and he says, the Lord took me. He was seized from the pasture. He was apprehended by heaven. He was drafted into service. This is an authority from outside his life.
He rearranged his life and rearranged his calling. He became what he never planned to be and would never have chosen. And this is why, saints of Christ’s church, this is why Amos does not bend when he is pressured. This is why you ought not to bend when you are pressured. When human authority calls you and commands you to be silenced, the man and the woman remembers, I did not put myself here. I was placed here.
I have a vocation from God to obey. I have a word from God to speak. I have a work from God to do. And the man of God, the woman of God, the child of God stands firm because he stands where God has put him. And now the prophet shows us why the plumb line matters. God measures. Yes, he does indeed measure. But God is also, he waits. He also waits.
And over time, indeed, what we love becomes what we are. And in chapter 8, Israel came with baskets of fruits celebrating blessing, prosperity, and identity as God’s covenant people. Their songs were right. Their liturgy was intact. They spoke the right words from the outside.
And so hear me carefully. Hear me carefully, brothers and sisters.
God’s delays are cultivation. Let me phrase it this way. Don’t waste God’s patience. Don’t waste God’s long-suffering towards you. Today, Amos says, it’s still spring. The line is still correcting. The line is still adjusting. The line is still discerning your heart, discerning the hearts of this congregation. The fruit is still forming.
None. Here we are in this place. D.C. is filled with monuments. All of them are meant to be symbols of permanence, are they not? But yet none are immune. None of them, none of the walls of this city are immune to the plumb line of God. You are not immune to God’s discerning ways. And I know God is doing a great work here, but do not, I urge you,
do not grow weary in well-doing. Do not become complacent while God gives us symbol after symbol and we look over them. Do not treat God’s symbols, His images as unimportant. Be delighted when God refines you. Rejoice together that He is forming something new in your midst. So how shall we then live? We must love God’s symbols rightly.
Love His symbols rightly. When God gives us His Word, when God gives us His Word, we honor it. When the Lord Jesus gives His body and blood, we eat and drink by faith. When the Lord Jesus forms this community of love and joy and peace here, treat the household of faith as the place of hospitality, as the place of festivity. Press on out living the culture of heaven in the midst of this congregation. Love God’s symbols. Receive them.
Sing them. Love them. Cherish them. Absorb them. Make them yours. But then we must welcome the plumb line into our own lives. Let us spend from this day until that glorious Easter Sunday when the champagne bottles burst open. Let us spend the remainder of this Lenten season contemplating who we are, contemplating our weaknesses, contemplating our needs, contemplating our hunger for self-importance.
And to nail these things, the cross of Jesus. Because only our Lord Jesus Christ can raise us from our sense of self-worth and give us His worth. Welcome God’s plumb line. But finally, we must also refuse the kind of performative religion that in many ways permeated the religious culture of Israel throughout the prophetic writings.
Your calling to worship the triumphant God on this day is far greater than anything that happens in this town. It is far greater than anything that happens in this town. We stand where God has placed us. We sing loudly on Sunday because we will sing forever. But we surely cannot sing loudly on Sunday and live crookedly on Monday. We cannot offer.
This performance, because we are not performers. We are participants in God’s sacred song. And for us, that means fathers, stand where God put you. Mothers, stand where God put you. Pastors, ministers of the gospel, stand where God has put you. Magistrates, stand where God has placed you. Because when the plumb line drops, only what stands by divine commission will endure. So live straight under the plumb line.
Soft under the warnings, quick to repent, bold in your calling, joyful in true worship. Because the Lord of the harvest will gather what has been grown and blessed are all those who are ripened unto God’s righteousness. Let us pray together. Our Father and our God, we pray, O Lord, that you would hear us.
That our voices would join the voices of angels and archangels and all the company of heaven. We pray that you would hear us, that you would smile upon us, and that you would bless us for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.