He’s the King of Kings, Not a Drama Queen

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Turn with me to Amos chapter 5, toward the middle of your Bible. It’s one of those small books at the end of the Old Testament, if you’re not familiar with it, that we tend to overlook. I have a hard time watching television anymore.

Watch a lot of kids’ shows, and not because of Benjamin. I did that before he was born anyway. But I have trouble watching television.

I have trouble watching movies a lot of times because of the way they talk about God. I mean, there are other things that irritate me, but it boils down to the way that so much of the world talks about God. Two different shows that I remember watching years ago.

We thought about how bad television was in the 90s, and we look at it today. Wow, the 90s seemed like they were 100 years ago by that standard. I’m not here to preach about TV tonight, but I do remember a couple shows I watched years ago.

and some scenes have stuck in my mind about the way people talk about God. One scene, you see people on TV bargaining with God all the time. They do this, bargains with God.

God, I’ll do such and such if you’ll do this. If you’ll deliver this, I’ll do this or not do this. There was one show where the guy had made a bargain with God and it hadn’t worked out somehow.

Anyway, he looks at God and says, you sneaky little guy. Like God was the Keebler elf. And I remember being a child and it made me mad.

I told you all I was a weird kid. Told you all that this morning. There’s another show where the guy makes a deal with God to spare his brother’s life and he won’t fight with his brother anymore and finds out that somebody else had made a deal with God about his brother’s life so he can yell at his brother now.

And then his brother comes and apologizes to him. And the brother goes and he didn’t get the chance to yell at him and he’s upset and he looks up and says, well played, God, I’ll see you at Easter. You’ve got one on one hand talking about God like he’s the Keebler elf, you sneaky little guy.

You’ve got another on the other hand acting like he’s just playing chess with God, like God is his equal, and it just frustrates me. Not only because it dishonors the God that I know, the God that I’m learning more about, and the God that I love, but also it frustrates me for them because they’re missing out. so obviously don’t know that same God if this is the picture they have of God.

And I try not to get mad over things like that because, you know, you can’t expect the unbelieving world to act like believers do. It makes me even angrier, though, when we start to hear these kinds of things from people who profess to be believers. When people that call themselves Christians begin to impugn the character of God, that just kind of sends me over the edge.

There’s a magazine article, when I say over the edge, I don’t mean I’m going to hurt anybody. It just makes me really mad. About a year ago, there was a magazine article that went on for pages calling God a drama queen, calling God a drama queen, saying his reaction to sin is like the Italian woman who finds out her husband looked at another woman and throws dishes and breaks them and locks him out of the house for 40 days.

Says that the way God loves, he’s like the crazy uncle that everybody has and nobody wants to talk about, and you just assume your friend not meet him. He said all this horrible stuff about God, and you kept thinking he’s going to say, but, but, you know, that’s what I thought, but, but he never does. Continues the article talking about God being such a drama queen.

Goes on the next week, there was an uproar, understandably, from so-called fundamentalists. I just took it as people that read and believed the Bible would be offended. I didn’t think you had to have any particular label.

He goes on to defend it the next week by finishing the same points. I went to look up the article again before we left Oklahoma City, and they’d pulled it down off the website, not because he was wrong, but because he was tired of the mail he was getting. You still, you know, all these people rebut this with the Bible, and you still don’t get it.

And this wasn’t just some fringe lunatic. This was a respected Christian publication that published this, and it just made me angry. They’re talking about God like He’s not only like He’s a person, like he’s you and me, but like he’s a person like you and me, only crazy or out of control.

And it just, it bothered me. Because folks, that’s not the God I know. That’s not the God we know.

That’s not the God of the Bible. The God he’s describing is so foreign from the God of the Bible, it might as well be a six-headed purple alien. I mean, it’s not even a comparison.

And as I thought about that, I thought, you know, I’m mad at this guy, but so many people who profess to be Christians have this warped view of God, don’t know who God is, don’t understand the character of God. And as I say that, I’m not telling you I’ve got God all figured out. My head would have to be a lot bigger to be able to tell you that.

My brain is not big enough to comprehend the character of God. But I do know some things about God because I know what the Bible teaches. And hopefully I’m learning more and more about God the more I study His Word and what He tells us about Himself.

But so many people that profess to be Christians have an idea about God that is foreign to what this book says. It’s a different God they’re worshiping. And when it’s a different God than the one true God, it’s, what’s the word, anybody?

Starts with an I, dull, idle. It’s an idle. It’s a false God.

We see it all the time in Norman. We work with a ministry that hands out food to, it’s not a soup kitchen, but they hand out a month’s worth of groceries to people that can’t make ends meet. And we do spiritual counseling with the people that come in.

And it’s open four hours a day. And in about a four-hour period, On a good day, we can talk to about two dozen people about the gospel. And the people from our church plant that go there to work, to volunteer, everybody that sits down with us hears the gospel and gets prayed.

And you’ll talk to people, and over 90%, almost everybody says, yeah, I’m a Christian, yeah, I’m saved. You start talking to them about what that means, though, and probably over 90% of them have no idea about what biblical salvation is. They think, you know, just hopefully I’m good enough, and God knows I’m not perfect, he’ll just let it slide.

Folks, that’s not the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible is, you know, the world wants to believe that he’s the Santa Claus in the sky, or he’s the senile old grandfather that just loves everybody, or he’s just their buddy that’s going to let everything slide and just do what they want. And, you know, it might be fun for them to think about God in that way, but, folks, the God of the Bible is so much more incredible and so much more amazing when we get to know him than anything we could have ever dreamed up.

We think if God was a certain way, that would just be awesome. But the God of the Bible is so much more incredible than anything that we could come up with. And I want to talk tonight about the characteristics of God.

And I don’t pretend that these five that we’re going to look at tonight are even scratching the surface. It’s just the very tip of the iceberg about who God is. But I want to look at what the Bible says about some characteristics of God and maybe correct some of our ideas.

Because I think even the most grounded Christians among us, sometimes we get these ideas that God is a certain way. And we have to come back to this book. This book right here is the North Star that brings us back into alignment with our thinking about God to make sure that we know the God that we worship.

Amos chapter 5. We’ll go ahead and read the passage and I’ll tell you about it a little bit. Amos chapter 5, starting in verse 4.

Amos says, For thus saith the Lord unto the house of Israel, Seek ye me, and ye shall live. But seek not Bethel, nor enter into Gilgal, and pass not Beersheba. For Gilgal shall surely go into captivity, and Bethel shall come to not.

Seek the Lord, and ye shall live, lest he break out like fire in the house of Joseph, and devour it, and there be none to quench it in Bethel. Ye who turn judgment to wormwood, and leave off righteousness in the earth, seek him that maketh the seven stars in Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night, that calleth for the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth. The Lord is his name, that strengtheneth and spoileth against the strong, so that the spoiled shall come against the fortress.

They hate him that rebuketh in the gate, and they abhor him which speaketh uprightly. For as much therefore as your treading is upon the poor, and ye take from him burdens of wheat, ye have built houses of hewn stone, but ye shall not dwell in them. Ye have planted pleasant vineyards, but ye shall not drink wine of them.

For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins, they afflict the just, they take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right. Therefore the prudence shall keep silence in that time, for it is an evil time. Verse 14, he says, He says, Seek good and not evil, that ye may live, and so the Lord, the God of hosts, shall be with you, as ye have spoken.

Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate. It may be that the Lord God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph. Well, you may think from that, what does that tell us about the character of God?

This is God’s word to the kingdom of Israel, and the reason it tells us about the character of God is because we can see God’s character. We can see who he is based on what he says he’s going to do. In the book of Amos, there are other passages in the Bible that we could look at to talk about the character of God.

But the book of Amos, Amos fascinates me as a person. When you look at his story, throughout the book in different parts, he talks about himself and his biography. And what we know about Amos is that he was a nobody.

He tells them when he goes, he says, I’m not a prophet, I’m not a priest, I’m not a son of the prophets. He had no theological training. He was not the great evangelist. He was not the great prophet of Israel.

He was, the Bible tells us, he was a farmer. He was apparently a sycamore farmer, goat herder. He was a farmer.

He was from the hills, not even a big town he was from. He was just basically, in his own estimation, he was nobody from nowhere. And God sends him, of all people, to go into the kingdom of Israel and to rebuke the king.

And this is after Solomon dies, Israel splits into two. The two southern tribes become the kingdom of Judah. The ten northern tribes become the kingdom of Israel.

And they were off and on. They were allied with each other. They were at war with each other, allied at war.

They couldn’t make up their mind. It was kind of a love-hate relationship between these two close countries. And Judah had some good kings and then some bad kings and some good kings and some bad kings.

Israel, from what I can tell, never had a good king in all of its time of existence. When the country split up, when they split into two, the southern kingdom got Jerusalem, and they got Solomon’s temple. And the people in the northern kingdom in Israel, they were still Jews, and so they said they were still going to go down to worship at the temple.

And the leader of the northern tribes who became their king was a man named Jeroboam. And he said, I don’t want them going to worship at the temple in Jerusalem because they’re going to have to pass through Judah and their territory, and their loyalty is going to be in Judah because that’s where they go to worship. And so he saw it as a means of political control.

He said, I don’t want them having anything to do with Judah. And so he put up these altars with these golden calves for the people to stay in Israel and worship. And one of these places was Bethel.

And the book of 2 Kings tells us that the king of Israel, the northern kingdom at the time of Amos, was a man named Jeroboam II. And it says it was about 200 some odd years after this first Jeroboam. And the book of 2 Kings tells us that he had continued in the era of Jeroboam I.

200 years later, they’re continuing the same evil religious practices, the idolatry, the false gods, these false altars. They’re continuing these things 200 years later, and he’s even built on that foundation. He’s taken it further.

And so Israel, at the time of Amos, has just wandered completely away from God. They’ve wandered completely toward these false gods. They’re worshiping anything and everything.

They have no concern about who God is. And as a result, the country has kind of descended into social chaos. Because since nobody cares about the one true God, they no longer care about what his word says.

And everybody, just like we see over and over in the book of Judges, everybody just kind of does what’s right in his own. And we see in what God tells Amos to tell this king, they’re abusing and neglecting one another, taking advantage of the poor, robbing each other blind. It’s just anarchy as far as the way people behave, as far as their morality.

And it’s because their hearts are far from God. And so God chooses this nobody from nowhere from probably a, most people believe that Amos was from the southern kingdom. So not only is he a nobody from nowhere, but he’s from the country they hate.

He’s from the other kingdom. He’s from the rival kingdom. God sends this nobody from nowhere to the other king that he’s not going to be inclined to listen to and says, I want you to take them a message.

And Amos’ message was a message of you’ve messed up and you need to turn and hope that God will have some mercy. And so Amos, as far as we can tell, takes his message to King Jeroboam, tells him about God and what God wants, and goes home. And his message to the people of Israel, to the king, to King Jeroboam, provides clues to us about who God is.

And I see five things that we’re going to get through pretty quick here about the character of God and who the one true God is. The first thing that we see in here in verses 8 and 9 is that our God is a God of sovereignty. Now, I’ve already answered the question.

When I say he’s a God of sovereignty, I’m not talking about what theologians call sovereign reprobation or fatalism, where he’s determined every single thing that will ever happen, and he’s chosen some people to go to hell before the foundation of the world. I’m talking about a God who is sovereign because he’s in charge. And my understanding of it from the Bible is that our God is so sovereign that he sovereignly chose to give man’s free will, and his sovereignty is not threatened by man’s free will because he’s that sovereign.

Start thinking about who God is and his characteristics too hard. It sometimes gives me a headache. It’s just so much to take in who he is.

But I do understand that when it comes to the universe and what will ultimately come to pass, God is in charge. God is not taken by surprise. He’s not caught off guard.

He’s the creator, the sustainer, and the king over the whole universe. He’s the one living and true God, and like him and beside him there is no one. He’s a God of sovereign.

It says in verses 8 and 9, Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night, and calleth the waters of the sea, and poureth them out upon the face of the earth. The Lord is his name, that strengtheneth the spoiled against the strong, so that the spoiled shall come against the fortress. He talks about Orion and the seven stars, and these were constellations that back before they had the wonders of magnets for their compasses or before GPS.

And thank God for GPS sometimes, because I don’t know how to read the stars, and most of the time you can’t see them in the city. But they had the stars to look to navigate before they had all these wonderful modern conveniences. And whether they’re out on military maneuvers or trading with another country or they’re traveling to visit loved ones, people were out in large, vast stretches of wilderness for long periods of time, and they had no way to know where they were going other than looking at these stars to figure out which way they were going.

I know people did it for thousands of years. I don’t even pretend to understand work. But they did.

They looked to Orion. They looked to this other constellation, and they put so much faith and trust in those things because those were steady, those were stable, and those gave them a clear indication of where they were going. And what Amos is saying here is you put so much faith and trust for not only your livelihood but your life getting out of the wilderness in these constellations, in these stars.

Why not look at the God who put those stars there in the first place? They thought they had everything figured out. They could do whatever they wanted.

They could live however they wanted, and they had the world figured out. They knew how to get from one place to another. They knew how not to get lost. And he’s saying the very God you’ve rejected is the one who hung those things in the first place.

So he reminds them what they put their faith and trust in. God could take away like that. It says he turns the shadow of death into the morning and makes the day dark with night.

I don’t know about you. I assume I know about you that you couldn’t do this either. But I can’t imagine how long I would have to work out to try to move the sun.

Even if you could get close to it because of the heat. I couldn’t, you know, there’s no amount of gym work that’s going to help to move the sun or the things that determine the time of day or orbits of everything. And yet God, it says, can turn the day into night and the night into day.

Our God is in charge of everything. He calls the waters of the sea and pours them out upon the face of the earth. He’s in charge of where the sea goes.

He’s in charge of where the land goes. Folks, we live in the most powerful nation on the face of the earth, and we can’t even keep our rivers from overflowing. And yet God’s in charge of how far the sea is.

We serve an incredibly powerful God. Why would we want to give him up for some Keebler elf that they talk about on TV? Some senile person who lives up there.

Why would we give up the God we serve for that? Our God is incredible. And it says he strengthens the spoiled against the strong, so the spoiled shall come against the fortress.

The strongest people that had come against Israel, God could overthrow in a minute. And Israel, with all of its strength, God could overthrow in a minute and hand it over to their enemies. And he had, at times before, to get their attention.

Amos points out to the people that God is in charge of this. He makes the rules and we abide by it. I need to move on.

Verses 10 and 11 tell us that not only is our God a God of sovereignty, but he’s a God of omniscience. It says, They’re talking about their relationships with other people. The people in Israel that were still following God, that they rebuked the evildoers at the gates.

They spoke righteousness. He said the people hated them. God even knows what’s on our hearts.

I don’t even understand what I’m thinking or feeling all this. There are times that I think we’re all that way. We’re so confused by emotions and thoughts and all these things.

But God knows what’s on our hearts. God knows what’s on our minds when we don’t even. He knows everything that we see and think and feel and hear.

And nothing about this is outside of his grasp. As I said before, nothing has ever caught God off. Probably the most cataclysmic event that’s happened in human history from a biblical perspective was the fall, when Adam and Eve rebelled against God and took that fruit and ate it.

Because at that point, death entered into the world and sin, and it’s been passed to every member of the human race as a result, the book of Romans tells us. Folks, God was not taken by surprise by that. God knew that was going to happen, and God had already planned for Christ to come and deal with the penalty.

Jesus coming to the cross was not even a plan. With God, there’s only plan A. He knows everything.

I’m so fascinated by this point, I think, even more than any of the others we’ll talk about tonight, because it’s so hard for me to imagine that God is able to know everything. try to grasp that for a second. We can’t even grasp the concept that he can know everything, let alone know everything.

A good example of this I’ll give you. It’s a little difficult to talk about, but when this idea of omniscience really stuck in my mind was a couple years ago. I’ve mentioned to a couple of you that Benjamin is actually our third child.

Christian and I lost two children before he got here. That’s why we’re so attached to him. Other than the fact that he’s our child, we should be attached to him anyway.

We are attached to him probably overly, and so is my family. And we lost one child, Jordan, at about three or four months in a miscarriage. And we lost our second son, Joseph, at nine months.

I mean, he was ready to come. We went in for a routine doctor visit. And we’ve gotten better with it, but it’s still hard for me to talk about it until it’s hard for you to hear.

But we were taken totally by surprise. I mean, we were. And in the days after that, I mean, we had some of the most brilliant medical minds in the state of Oklahoma dealing with Christian through the pregnancy.

She’d gone to some of the best specialists that they have in the state. Nobody could figure out what was going on, why this happened, because he was perfectly well-developed. We had the autopsy done, and people from the University of Oklahoma were, I mean, scientists and really smart people that I can’t even pronounce their names, let alone, I mean, their titles, their fields of study.

I can’t pronounce them, let alone master them. But these smart people, people that are smarter than I’ll ever think about being, looked into this and never could figure out from a medical standpoint why this happened. When we were in the hospital waiting for her to give birth after we found out she was still born, it seems like all the preachers I knew from the area showed up and talked with us and prayed with us.

Some of the most brilliant men that I know, some of the most brilliant men of God, some of the people with the closest walk with God that I know, and from a spiritual standpoint, this could just happen. So between medicine and spirituality, the most brilliant minds, and I don’t include myself in that, but the most brilliant minds in the state of Oklahoma on this one matter, trying to figure out why it happened, making some sense of it, and nobody can. Still to this day, we probably never will know until we get to it.

And that bothered me for a long time. And a few weeks after that, the thought occurred to me, God was not taken by surprise. And that impressed me.

It didn’t make me angry with God. I don’t think he did it. I think it’s one of those things that just happens as a consequence of living in a fallen world.

But that impressed me when I thought this brilliant meeting of the minds in two different fields could not figure out. These people that, I’m not talking about the preachers, but the doctors think they’re so smart, and medicine’s a science, and we just know so much more than we ever used to, and all these brilliant minds can’t figure out what happened. God was not taken off guard by this.

Folks, that impresses me, that the biggest mysteries we have in our lives are not a surprise for you. They’re not a mystery for you. God knew Joseph before he was ever conceived.

God knew Joseph when he was in the womb. God knows Joseph now, and he knows the reason for what happened. And you know what?

in the midst of our sorrow, God already knew Benjamin, and he knew the joy that would come. Folks, our God is so incredibly smart and so incredibly intelligent. Why would we give that up, the God of this world?

He’s not only a God of sovereignty and a God of omniscience, but he’s a God of holiness. Verses 12 and 13 says, For I know your manifold transgressions and your mighty sins, and they afflict the just and take a bribe, and they turn aside the poor in the gate from their right. Therefore, the prudent shall keep silence in that time, for it is an evil time.

This is where told you, God is upset with them because of the way they’ve been treating the poor. And they’ve been treating one another. And we just know from reading other passages in the Bible that when people got away from God, chaos and anarchy and repression were just the immediate result, just a cause and effect.

This happens and that happens. When we divorce any society, any family, any church from God, chaos and sin, it just spirals out of control. And that’s what had happened.

God saw that sin and said, no, this is not okay with me. God is completely and utterly good, and He’s righteous, and He’s just, and everything that He does is true and pure. He does not share our wickedness, our fallen ways.

When we think, okay, it’s just a little white lie, when we think, oh, it’s just this one time, when we think, oh, it’s just a little bit God will overlook it, God does not participate in those things with us. He doesn’t look at it the same way we do. And what to us is just a tiny, minuscule sin?

Oh, they stole a bag of flour from their neighbor. I bought groceries in a while. I don’t know what a bag of flour costs, but it’s not an astounding amount.

I should know that. I used to do all the grocery shopping. I don’t know what it costs, but it’s not that much.

Just a little sin. They stole a bag of flour from their neighbor. It’s not that big a deal, but to God it’s a very, very.

. . Because when you take total purity and you introduce just a tiny speck to it, it’s no longer total purity.

When, if we were to take a piece of cloth and we were to bleach it as white as white could be, as white as we could get it, and then in the middle we were to put just a tiny, small, light gray dot which would show up in such contrast, white around it, that it would be all we would see. With God’s purity, one little speck of wickedness is a very big deal. God said, this is just a little sin to you, but to me, it’s serious, because he’s a God of holiness, and our God doesn’t mess around with sin. To him, it’s a big deal, and the world wants to believe in a God that just brushes sin off like it’s nothing until they’re the ones that are wrong.

Folks, our God is a God of holiness that says this is not okay ever. Why would we give him up for a God that sometimes overlooks the wrong? And his holiness causes him to be a God of justice.

We’re going to skip back to verses 5. I’ve got 5, 6, and 7 here. But seek not Bethel, nor enter into Gilgal, and pass not into Beersheba.

For Gilgal shall surely go into captivity, and Bethel shall come to naught. Seek the Lord, and ye shall live, lest he break out like fire in the house of Joseph, and devour it, and there be none to quench it in Bethel. Ye who turn judgment to wormwood and leave off righteousness in the earth.

Folks, he talks about Bethel here. When I said that Jeroboam I set up those altars, Bethel was one of them. And Gilgal, if I remember my history correctly, Gilgal is where Saul disobeyed God by refusing to deal with all of the Amalekites.

And the prophet Samuel had to come and set things right. And Beersheba was a center of pagan worship also. And he tells them, don’t even go near these places because God is going to bring about judgment on these places because of what they’ve done.

When God is a God of holiness, it means he takes sin seriously, and God is also a God of justice, which means he takes it so seriously that he deals with it. He doesn’t just overlook it. He’s a God of justice, and he does not allow sin to go unpunished.

He does not compromise. He does not relax his standards. Folks, he’s filled.

Look anywhere in the Bible. He’s filled with wrath toward wickedness. And folks, rightfully so.

Because any time we sin, any time we sin against one another, We’re sinning against him. We’re breaking the law. We’re disobeying and rebelling against the one who has given us.

He says this sin has to be punished. He says he’s going to break out like fire in these places. There’s a lot of scary imagery in the Old Testament prophets when God calls some place to repent.

He always seems to warn them. But I read the book of Nahum, chapter 1. Nahum is the one, the prophet that went to Nineveh after Jonah had left, and they had repented and turned back to God.

Eventually, they went back to their pagan worship. And Nahum went sometime later and said, okay, God’s calling on you again. And you read chapter 1 and God tearing down the mountains and fire and the judgment that God is going to bring on wickedness one day.

And folks, the sad thing is he’s just in doing. I mean, the sad thing from a human perspective is that he’s justified in doing because he’s a holy God and we’ve rebelled against his love, disobeyed. It says, as a matter of fact, this passage, I’ve got it printed here in Nahum, God is jealous and the Lord avenges.

The Lord avenges and is furious. The Lord will take vengeance on his adversaries, and he reserves wrath for his enemies. The Lord is slow to anger and great in power and will not at all acquit the wicked.

The mountains quake before him, the hills melt, and the earth heaves at his presence. Yes, the world and all who dwell in it. Who can stand before his indignation?

Who can endure the fierceness of his anger? His fury is poured out like fire, and the rocks are thrown down by fire. Folks, our God is a God of justice, and one day the things that have been done wrong will be set to right.

It’s good news for us that have been wronged, but considering we’ve all done wrong, it’s also a sobering thought that God is Augustus. And he says, on these places that have forsaken him, he will break out like fire. And folks, if we left it there, I could understand a little bit why the world chooses to be deluded into believing in any one of these false gods that