September 14, 2026
by Kirk Irwin
As we walk this journey through the Minor Prophets, as has been stated in the blogs and from the pulpit, it will be full of statements of judgement and severe imagery of consequences mixed in with God’s gentle grace throughout. Amos is no different.
Remember, the office of Prophet is always present til the Day of Christ’s return. And before we jump to our feelings of superiority or “I’m glad that’s not me/us” we need to remember–as Clinton reminded us in his opening blog for Amos–that we all must deal with our “planks”. We as followers of Jesus do not fall far from the tree of disobedience.
“Where were you?”
As I read through this long passage in Amos 4 & 5, I was struck by how some of the verses reminded me of God’s response to Job in the final chapters of Job. These are some of my favorite passages in the Bible. As the story goes Job is tested by God through Satan and loses just about everything but his life. When Job laments and asks God, “Why?” several friends come to try to comfort him and fail rather miserably. The last chapters of Job are God’s response to him and his friends. In these chapters God asks Job impossible questions to answer because the answer is clearly obvious, “I am God.”
Here in Amos we have echoes of those same questions in 4:13:
13 For behold, he who forms the mountains and creates the wind, and declares to man what is his thought, who makes the morning darkness, and treads on the heights of the earth— the Lord, the God of hosts, is his name!
And in 5:8
8 He who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning and darkens the day into night, who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out on the surface of the earth, the Lord is his name;
Can you hear God’s voice in these two verses, similar to the book of Job, chapter 38?
4 “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
5 Who determined its measurements—surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
Although God asks a question, He is actually making as clear a statement as He does in Amos–“I am God.” We need to respond as Job did in chapter 40:4–“Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth.” It is very human to respond with a “Why” as Job did, but it is very god-like for God to respond “Because”. Everything ends with God.
Many of the Israelites in the time of Amos were not responding as Job did, which is why God sent His prophets with judgement. This leads me to my second observation.
Seek - Live
Three times in chapter 5 of Amos God uses the words concurrently, “seek” and “live”. In chapter 5 verse 4 God personally states–“Seek me and live”. In verse 6 Amos states–“Seek the Lord and live”. And Amos repeats similarly in verse 14–“Seek good, and not evil, that you may live”.
These statements only make sense if you are convinced of the first point. If everything depends on God–even life and death–then He knows what is good and right. This reality wasn’t new to the Israelites. It was founded in the very first documents of the nation of Israel in Deuteronomy, written by the Law-Giver, Moses’ hand. Deuteronomy 30 says:
15 “See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. 16 If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God[a] that I command you today, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his rules,[b] then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to take possession of it. 17 But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, 18 I declare to you today, that you shall surely perish. You shall not live long in the land that you are going over the Jordan to enter and possess. 19 I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, (emphasis mine)
But, you may ask, doesn’t it say in the Bible that no one seeks God? Why, yes, it does, you are correct. The Apostle Paul in Romans 3 summarizes a series of verses - mostly from the Psalms this way:
“None is righteous, no, not one;
11 no one understands;
no one seeks for God.
12 All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
no one does good,
not even one.”
You may have noticed God is asking us to do something that is not possible for human beings. And you would be correct. At this point we are in the same place the Disciples were in Luke 18 when they asked incredulously, “Who can be saved!?” By this same token we might ask, “Who can then seek!?”
But he said, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.”
God never demands something of someone that would not be possible for them to do. He always provides a way. In this case, He fulfilled the impossibility of seeking Him, and the impossibility of salvation by doing it Himself. I Thessalonians 5:9 says:
For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ
It was not an empty call when God told the Israelites through Amos to seek Him. They need only realize their inability to do so and He would have done the rest. The problem was they were seeking other things, including the lie they could seek life themselves.
What IS obedience?
So, what was it God was calling the nation of Israel, through Amos, to do? What then is obedience?
Obedience is living the way we were created to live. Obedience is embracing our true meaning as creatures of the Creator. With the Fall and the subsequent aftermath humanity falsely chose to break that reality and drop God completely from the equation. We thought we could seek life and meaning ourselves–the creatures trying to live as Creator. Absolute foolishness.
When God points this out in the judgments we have seen in Hosea and see now in Amos He isn’t being mean, He’s telling us what is true and real. God is saying, “Seek me, and see and have life!” It only seems mean because it is true, but as mentioned above God doesn’t just tell us the truth, He acts with grace. And that is the reality of the Gospel, the work of Christ:
John 1:4, “In Him was life, and the life and the light of Men.”
John 6:33, “For the bread of God is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
John 10:10, “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.”
I am obedient to God when I realize I can’t love my wife the way He does. When I get to that place I can then wash the dishes in the sink, feed our cats when it’s supposed to be her turn, or make her dinner the way she likes it (usually Asian). But even in those activities they still aren’t enough, because it is the Gospel that fuels everything in those acts–even the inadequacies. And that is where God wants us when He says to the Israelites–and have to us–“Seek me and live!”
In John 11 when Jesus encountered Martha, after her brother Lazarus died, he told her, “I am the resurrection and the life”. This reality was only a threat to those opposed to life. In fact, we know as the story goes that Jesus allowed those adversaries to usher Him into death. They sought death, they got death. But this particular death led to the moment that revealed the overturning of the world–or you could say the “righting” of the world. Jesus said He is resurrection before He said he is life. So when God tells Israel to seek Him as the source of life, He is telling them to seek resurrection.
The last line of writer Wendell Berry’s poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” ends with “Practice resurrection”. Berry knew that the emergence of Jesus from the tomb was not just powerful in that historical moment, it was also something that needed to be habitually acted upon. When we seek Jesus we necessarily seek His resurrection and as a consequence we get life.
“Seek me and live”!