The End

Daily Devotional • December 8

A Reading from Amos 7:1-9

1 This is what the Lord God showed me: he was forming locusts at the time the latter growth began to sprout (it was the latter growth after the king’s mowings). 2 When they had finished eating the grass of the land, I said,

“O Lord God, forgive, I beg you!
    How can Jacob stand?
    He is so small!”

3 The Lord relented concerning this;
    “It shall not be,” said the Lord.

4 This is what the Lord God showed me: the Lord God was calling for judgment by fire, and it devoured the great deep and was eating up the land. 5 Then I said,

“O Lord God, cease, I beg you!
    How can Jacob stand?
    He is so small!”

6 The Lord relented concerning this;
    “This also shall not be,” said the Lord God.

7 This is what he showed me: the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand. 8 And the Lord said to me, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “A plumb line.” Then the Lord said,

“See, I am setting a plumb line
    in the midst of my people Israel;
    I will spare them no longer;

9 the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate,
    and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste,
    and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword.”

Meditation

Amos here lays out further features of God’s judgment on Israel. He articulates, in a striking exchange with God, the way divine mercy and truth relate, stretching at times but never breaking. In a way that reminds us of Abraham’s intercession for Sodom, three times Amos pleads for mercy on Israel in the face divine judgment, and three times God “repents”—a word that mixes a sense of regret and comfort both, of sorrow that leads to some resolution, here on God’s part. But what resolution? This is not about God “changing His mind.” It is about how God fulfills His deepest (and hence, from our perspective, complex) desires. As with Abraham, the passage through divine relenting does not in fact alter the end of divine judgment.

For, in v. 7 God shows Amos the famous plumbline set in Israel’s midst: the measure that is true and displays Israel’s life vividly, now judged by God clearly. The “end” is the utter destruction of Israel’s religious and political leadership. Mercy along the way does not alter the end towards which Israel is hurtling. 

Two things can be said about Amos’ vision. First, it is a showing forth of God, and only secondarily a prediction of the future. Amos reveals the divine structures of time and how God is shaping it; this is less about pointing to this or that event. This makes it profoundly important that we meditate on these visions—we live within the same grand shape of time as the Israelites.

Second, we can see how the small mercies of God are nonetheless a part of an exorable movement to complete God’s plan. Everything moves to its end. Hence, the end is our measure, what theologians call the “final cause” of our lives. But what is that end? Ephesians 1:12  tells us that it is to be the “praise of God’s glory.” This is thus the plumbline of Israel’s life too, and everything in her life, in the life of the nations and of the Church that does not move to this end is removed and remade. Amos’ vision tells us what to pray for in God’s time: a stretching that allows us to repent, reform, and live to see the unbreakable gift of the End.  

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Daily Devotional Cycle of Prayer
Today we pray for:

Ephraim Radner

Website

The Rev. Ephraim Radner, PhD is Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology at Wycliffe College at the University of Toronto. The author of over a dozen books, Dr. Radner was previously rector of the Episcopal Church of the Ascension, Pueblo, Colorado. His range of pastoral experience includes Burundi, where he worked as a missionary, Haiti, inner-city Cleveland, and Connecticut.