A REMINDER OF BLESSINGS

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

“Yet I destroyed the Amorites before them, though they were tall as the cedars and strong as the oaks.
I destroyed their fruit above and their roots below. I brought you up out of Egypt and led you forty years in the wilderness to give you the land of the Amorites.”

“I also raised up prophets from among your children and Nazirites from among your youths. Is this not true, people of Israel?” declares the Lord.

Amos 2:9-11

This ends today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

Do you have a lot of routines in your life?

I think we all do.

You see, most of us are creatures of habit. We like structure to our days as it brings us comfort in knowing what we’ll be doing at any one particular time.

We have a time we get up and a time we go to bed. We have a time that we work in between as well as time we do other things in life like go to church, work out, spend time with family and friends, attend certain events, etc. We like to know what we’ll be doing and when we’ll be doing it.

Can you relate?

I know I can.

All this is well and good I guess but there’s one big problem that can come up when it comes to living a life dictated by routine and it doesn’t have anything to do with each day turning into “groundhog day”. The problem is that we can fall into the trap of losing sight of how blessed we are as we are in the midst of everyday schedule. And with that, we sometimes need to be reminded of the blessings God has given us.

As we look at our scripture passage for today, the last from Amos 2, we find the Israelites having lost sight of all the ways God had blessed them and their ancestors. Look again at these words here:

“Yet I destroyed the Amorites before them, though they were tall as the cedars and strong as the oaks. I destroyed their fruit above and their roots below. I brought you up out of Egypt and led you forty years in the wilderness to give you the land of the Amorites.”

“I also raised up prophets from among your children and Nazirites from among your youths. Is this not true, people of Israel?” declares the Lord.  Amos 2:9-11

Note the specific blessings God is mentioning here:

1. God cleared the way for His people to have a place to live.

“Yet I destroyed the Amorites before them, though they were tall as the cedars and strong as the oaks. I destroyed their fruit above and their roots below.”

After God delivered His people from the clutches of Pharaoh in Egypt, they were going to need a place to stay. The Amorites held onto a significant amount of land to the west and east of the Dead Sea and Jordan River. They greatly outnumbered God’s people and were greater warriors but the Israelites had God and that’s all they needed. The scriptures in Amos remind God’s people that He destroyed the Amorites, opening up the land for the Israelites.

2. God delivered the Israelites from Egypt and led them for forty years before giving them the land of the Amorites.

“I brought you up out of Egypt and led you forty years in the wilderness to give you the land of the Amorites.”

After a long period of oppression and enslavement, God saved His people from the Egyptians and set them on the path to inhabit and settle in the land He had promised them, the land He had initially promised Abraham. Initially, you’ll remember the exodus was only forty days but after a majority of the Israelites decided to not cross the Jordan after the report of spies sent into Canaan, essentially not trusting God in making their decision, God imposed a punishment of one year in the wilderness for every day the Israelites traveled to get to Canaan in the first place.

It was after this wandering that the Israelites crossed the Jordan under the leadership of Joshua and ended up residing in the land of the Amorites.

3. God blessed some of the Israelites to be His messengers.

“I also raised up prophets from among your children.”

The end of the Old Testament, from Isaiah through Malachi, is filled with books dedicated to prophets the anointed, chosen spokespeople for God Himself. God wanted to remind His people that He had given some of them the privilege to serve Him in a very important way as a messenger.

4. God provided opportunity for some of the Israelites to set themselves apart for Him.

“I also raised up Nazirites from among your youths.”

The Nazirites were arguably the most devout of the God believers, swearing a special vow of dedication and obedience to God. There were very stringent requirements which included not eating anything that came from the grapevine (Numbers 6:3-4), refraining from shaving their heads (Numbers 6:5), and staying clear of any dead bodies (Numbers 6:6-7) among a host of other things (more requirements found in the remainder of Numbers 6). The very opportunity to devote oneself to God in such a devout way was a blessing in its own right.

Now, the blessings of God included far more than just these four things but the Lord didn’t have to go on and on and on. His point had been made as He had blessed His people past and present.

So why did God have to make mention of these things?

Because the people of God had obviously taken His blessings for granted, living as if God had not done anything for them or their relatives. They had become indifferent to the gifts God had provided them, most probably because they had settled into a mundane routine of sinfulness, a sinfulness that we have already seen God call out in this chapter, highlighting the transgressions of Israel and Judah.

Friends, is God going to have to remind us of His blessings as He found Himself having to do for the Israelites of Amos’ time? Or are we going to commit ourselves to not only recognizing the ways He is blessing us in the now but recalling all the ways He has blessed us to get us where we are today?

The old saying goes like this:

“Count your blessings and when you get done, start counting them again.

We would all be well served to follow this sage advice and then give thanks for all He has done, all He is doing, and all He is yet to do. For in the end translation, we are all richly blessed, blessed more than we ever deserve by our God of mercy, grace, and love.

Praise Him today for that truth.

Amen

In Christ,

Mark
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