Amos' Expectation: God’s People as Family

By Pastor MikeThe prophet Amos, speaking for God, addresses both Israel and Judah as the “family” (God ) brought up out of Egypt. While Amos himself never uses the word “covenant”, he uses “covenant language” throughout his writing. When he writes “You only have I known” he is not merely speaking of God’s knowledge about the people of Israel, for certainly that would not be limited to Israel, he is using covenant relationship language. He knows them intimately because he is in a covenant relationship with them. As he writes to the family of Israel he anticipates a future family of God— a family where God’s people would be known fully as God’s very own sons and daughters.

I have a friend who has built a successful business employing several hundred people in three countries. He tells the story of how his daughters, when they were younger, would visit him at work. While he was in meetings, they would sit in his office and rummage through his desk drawers, play tic-tack-toe on his whiteboard, and draw pictures on his calendar. There are employees who have been with him from the start and worked hard to make the company what it is today, yet not one of them would be comfortable sitting at his desk doing the things his daughters do. Why? They are employees, and not daughters!

Because of Christ, we receive an invitation to God’s family—to actually become his sons and daughters. What was merely anticipated by prophets of old is now fully realized in Christ. The Apostle John wrote it like this, “Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12).

The message of Amos is a message of punishment and judgment for sin. Amos remembers that it was God who called the family of Israel out of slavery in Egypt (3:1). Now, because of their unwillingness to repent and return to God they are to be punished for their sin, humiliated and sent into exile. Despite this message of judgment, Amos offers hope. Hope because there will come a day when God will “bring (his) people Israel back from exile” (9:14).

The message we have been entrusted with is also a message of judgment for sin. Only our message is that judgment for sin was made by Christ, who “himself bore our sins in his body on the tree (cross), that we might die to sin and live to righteousness” (1 Peter 2:4). This is why Romans 8:15 can declare, “For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’”

Spend some time today thanking God that he has adopted you into his family as his son or daughter.

Read Romans 8:1-39.