Amos 9

When the Day of the Lord comes, nothing remains the same. His wrath falls upon sin and destroys it, along with all sinners who cling to it. His grace and mercy build up those who seek His glory.

The final vision for the Northern Kingdom is God Himself standing inside the paganized temple at Bethel. His Name was called there in vain, but when He does appear, it is for wrath upon those who rejected His Covenant. Whether Samaria liked it or not, the Covenant of Moses as originally published applied to them. Having defiled it with these temples, merely a sharp political move, those who worship there would not survive. The Lord speaks to His own wrath, commanding the temple be knocked down on the heads of those who worshiped there. The few who escaped would be taken by the sword. No matter where they flee in this world or the Other, there is no place where God cannot pursue them.

Samaria had forsaken not merely their peculiar national deity, but this is the very Creator of all things. The earth cannot bear His Presence, and Heaven can hardly contain Him. The Northern Kingdom had made themselves so pagan, they were no different in God’s sight than the most remote Gentiles of the earth. He who called the nations to move here and there upon the face of the earth could as easily wipe them off the earth. So the sinners of Israel would be destroyed, but the House of Israel would remain, populated by a righteous remnant, whose population would be swelled from among the Gentile nations of the earth.

All nations would be sifted as grain, and nothing fruitful would be lost. Those who trust in their own wisdom and talents would be destroyed. What Amos says next was taken by the Samaritans as mere political statement, but he’s not talking about some mere earthly kingdom of David. He prophesies the Lord would build a new Kingdom of the Spirit, a Messianic promise of the future Davidic Realm in the hearts of men. It would be everyone from the human race who embraces this Messiah. What the Law had symbolized in earthly terms was a divine blessing on Life in the Spirit, an outpouring of richness too great to measure. No one will be able to take them from that spiritual land of Eternity.

A Just Mind

It’s all in your mind.

What’s the difference? Why would God spare my neighborhood where there aren’t all that many people, and trash some really fine Christian neighborhoods with massive hail storms? It’s not as if they had better insurance; some of them were actually less well off than we. I don’t know all the answers, but I know something about how God works in this world.

Given what I’ve encountered, and the reactions of Western Christians in general, and American Christians in particular, it’s that Western mindset. You would think I’d get tired of harping on this, but the problem stands like a vast mountain of falsehood, and things won’t get better until people see it for what it is. My spirit cannot rest so long as I keep encountering the spiritual ignorance.

You cannot hope to gain a full measure of God’s blessings on this earth without that Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) mindset. That’s the intellectual background of the Bible, the culture God designed Himself as the only way He would reveal Himself to the world. So long as you adhere to a Western epistemology, you cannot fully engage the moral fabric of His Creation.

No, I do not suggest God requires you go back and get an degree in ANE thinking. But it does take some effort to overcome Satan’s greatest achievement to date, which is Western Civilization. So long as your mind unconsciously clings to this Western culture as His way of doing things, you cannot hope to understand what it means to follow Christ. Jesus was an ANE man, and His mind is freely available to those who really want it, but you have to embrace His viewpoint on this realm of existence. If you aren’t a mystic, you aren’t really a Christian.

To fully harvest the blessings of God’s Laws on this earth, you have to have a lawful mind, and embrace the Ancient Hebrew intellectual approach to things.