Known by God. Guilty Before God.

September 8, 2026

by Richard Brashear

There is something uncomfortable about realizing a sermon is not for them

 It is for me.

That is the turn Amos makes in the opening chapters of his book.

Amos starts by naming the sins of the nations around Israel. Damascus. Gaza. Tyre. Edom. Ammon. Moab. Then, at the beginning of Chapter 2, Judah. You can almost hear Israel saying, “Yep. Get ’em, Amos.”

Then, like a nasty plot twist in a mystery book, Amos turns toward Israel.

“For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment” (2:6).

Suddenly, they are not sitting in the audience anymore.

They are the ones being confronted.

And honestly, that is where this passage gets uncomfortable for me, too.

“Known by God” Is Not a Shield for Sin

God does not let Israel forget who brought them there.

He destroyed the Amorites before them. He brought them out of Egypt, walked them through the wilderness, and gave them the land. He even raised up prophets and Nazirites from their own sons (2:9–11).

Then comes the line: “You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities” (3:2).

Known by God does not mean protected from God. It means we do not get to receive His mercy and then live as though it changes nothing. 

We still do this. We think knowing the Bible and showing up at church somehow covers the life we actually live. 

It is easy to hear a hard message and immediately think about who else needs it. I know because I have sat through sermons and thought of three people who needed the message more than I did. 

I did it again while writing this. I started making a list of people I should send it to, and I had to stop. That reflex is pride. I was finding a way to keep the Word from speaking to me. 

This passage in Amos is hard. It is gut-wrenching.  And it will not let me hand it off. Amos puts my name on the warning, too.

If God has made Himself known to us, then how we treat people we would rather overlook, how we handle money, and how we respond when the truth becomes inconvenient are not side issues.

They are evidence that we have truly heard Him. 

Busy Altars Are Not Proof of Faithful Lives

Amos does not stay polite. He names what was happening.

Israel was not just drifting. They had taken shamelessness as far as it would go. 

They were selling people. Poor people. For silver. For a pair of sandals. They ran over anyone who could not fight back and made sure the hurting never got a fair shot. A father and son used the same girl, dragging God's name through the dirt. They took a poor man’s coat, the one they were supposed to give back by night, and stretched out on it beside every altar. Then, in God’s house, they drank wine bought with fines squeezed out of the poor (2:6–8).

What the heck?

Then they shut out the voices God had sent. They made the Nazirites drink wine and told the prophets, “You shall not prophesy” (2:12).

In today’s terms, they did not merely ignore God’s messengers. They tried to silence them. 

Church kept meeting. The nice houses still looked nice. But God says they “do not know how to do right.” They had piled violence and theft inside the walls they were proud of (3:10).

Then God does something publicly humiliating to Israel. He tells Ashdod and Egypt to come up on the hills around Samaria and look. Come see the mess. Come see the people getting crushed in the middle of the city (3:9).

God thought it looked so bad that even the pagans should come and stare.

The danger is a church that looks busy while we protect what God has already called wrong. We can love worship more than a hard word. We can look faithful and still avoid the people who would cost us something. 

The awkward neighbor with too many cats and a funny-smelling living room. The needy coworker. The person at church who takes more than they give.

It is easier to look faithful than to actually help.

Sometimes the issue is not time. It is image. We worry what it will look like if we get close to the poor, the lost, and the messy. We call that wisdom. A lot of the time, we are just protecting how we look.

A church can become a well-lit room where everyone knows the songs and no one asks who is getting crushed outside the door.

What truth would I rather not hear this week?

Who am I not reaching out to because I am afraid of how it looks?

Israel had not stopped worshiping. They had simply learned how to worship without letting worship change them.

Hearing God Is Not the Same as Listening

Amos asks a string of questions that all have the same obvious answer. Two people do not walk together unless they have agreed. A lion does not roar without prey. A snare does not spring without a reason. A trumpet does not blow without warning.

Then Amos asks, “Does disaster come to a city, unless the Lord has done it?” (3:6).

Amos is not saying that every tragedy we experience can be traced to some specific sin. He is talking about the judgment God has announced against Israel. God is not caught off guard. He has spoken, and judgment is coming.

“For the Lord God does nothing without revealing his secret to his servants the prophets. The lion has roared; who will not fear? The Lord God has spoken; who can but prophesy?” (3:7–8).

The picture of judgment is heavy. God will press them down as a cart loaded with sheaves presses into the ground. Their defenses will fall, their strongholds will be plundered, and what is left of Samaria will look like a piece of an ear snatched from a lion's mouth (2:13–16; 3:11–12). The altars of Bethel will be cut down, and the winter houses, summer houses, ivory houses, and great houses will come to an end (3:14–15).

This is not God losing His temper.

It is God keeping His word.

He had spoken. They had been warned. They chose not to listen.

God’s Word is not given so we can admire it, explain it, or hand it to somebody else. He has spoken, and we have a choice. 

Will we listen?

Israel heard the warning. They just did not want what it meant for them. 

But the story does not end with judgment.

The same God who spoke through Amos later sent Jesus. He was sold for silver, rejected, beaten, and crushed under the judgment our sin deserved. On the cross, He made a way for mercy. 

The resurrection means judgment does not have to be the final word.

In Christ, God does not merely expose our guilt. He bears it. 

That is why Hailey Hutcheson’s song, Splinters, kept coming to mind as I read Amos. In the first verse, she talks about staying on the narrow path and carrying our “wooden beams” because Jesus carried the scars for us. Jesus carried the weight we could not. Following Him will still cost us something, not because we must earn His mercy, but because His mercy changes us. 

That is the opposite of a faith that keeps the altar busy while the poor are sold and the prophet is told to stop talking. Amos asks whether we want a faith that actually changes us, or a faith that only looks faithful from the outside.

The question is not whether God has spoken.

He has.

The question is whether we will listen.