Amos 4:6-13, Prepare to Meet Your God

You’ve seen the signs along the highways, the billboards someone paid to put up, saying, “Prepare to Meet Your God!” They are intended as warnings to passersby, but without any context we are left to question what the intent is. There was no question as to intent when Yahweh spoke this through Amos the prophet.

4:6 “I made you hungry in all your cities, and brought scarcity in all your places, yet you did not return to me,” declares Yahweh. 7 “I also withheld the rain from you when there were yet three months to the harvest; I would send rain on one city, and send no rain on another city; one field would have rain, and the field on which it did not rain would wither; 8 so two or three cities would wander to another city to drink water, and there was never enough; yet you did not return to me,” declares Yahweh.

9 “I struck you with blight and mildew. The locust devoured your many gardens and your vineyards, your fig trees and your olive trees, yet you did not return to me,” declares Yahweh. 10 “I sent among you a pestilence like the one I sent on Egypt. I killed your young men with the sword, and carried away your horses, and I made you smell the stench of death, yet you did not return to me,” declares Yahweh.

11 “I overthrew some of you, like when God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and you were as a brand plucked out of the burning, yet you did not return to me,” declares Yahweh.

12 “Therefore I will continue to judge you, O Israel, and because I will do this to you, prepare to meet your God, O Israel!”

13 For behold, He who forms the mountains and creates the wind, and declares to mankind what His thought is, who makes the morning darkness, and treads on the heights of the earth—Yahweh, the God of hosts, is his name!

It is natural when we experience deprivation of our basic needs to become desperate in our search for resolving this. If you were an Israelite, it should have led you to seek Yahweh your God for provision. But Israel has become hardened in her unbelief. Neither famine, nor God’s withholding rain from some and not others, nor destruction of her vegetation, or even destruction of some of her cities has moved Israel to repent and come back to God.

God had even, at times, sent a deliverer to snatch a remnant of people like “a brand plucked from the burning” city (see 2 Kings 13:1-9), but to no avail. No one paid attention to the real cause of their deprivation, God Himself.

And so, as Amos announces, Yahweh’s judgment is coming, and they must prepare to meet their God, not in a pleasant way, but in a most fearful way. When He made a covenant with Israel God had spelled out the consequences of Israel failing to comply with the covenant stipulations. In Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 and 29, He laid out the blessings for obedience and the curses for disobedience. The curses were in ascending order of severity, with the final and ultimate discipline being expulsion from the land. This was the promise from God.

And look who this God is! He is the one who created the mighty mountains and the powerful winds. He is the one who teaches humans their own thoughts. He is the one who can turn light into darkness and has powerful control of the heights of the earth. His name says it all. He is Yahweh, the God of heaven’s armies. You don’t want to meet Him in this way.