Carried away as with a flood.
A man in earnest is always graphic. If he be also inspired he can afford to be explicit. In this passage Amos is both. The words were spoken before the convulsions they foretell, and written after some of them had occurred. But the descriptions of events, transpired between the speaking and the writing, have no flavour of an ex post facto deliverance. There is a bare record of the original verbal utterance without the attempt to write into any part of it details of what meantime had become history. Such an apologetic device, suicidal in any case, is a thing to which a man who is God's mouthpiece could not and needs not stoop.
I. THE EARTH TREMBLING WHEN GOD SWEARS. "For this" (verse 8), i.e. the oath of God, and its purport. That oath means a catastrophe on the way in the shock of which the earth would tremble. The very utterance of it was a cause of trembling. "He uttered his voice, the earth melted." His word is a word of power. It operates in the physical forces, and shakes the whole frame of nature. In the poetic language of the psalmist, "the voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars," "shaketh the wilderness," "divideth the flames of fire." In the world of matter, as in the world of spirit, the great ultimate force is the word of God.
II. THE CREATION SUFFERING IN THE SUFFERINGS OF MEN. Man sins, and the earth is smitten. It was so at first with the ground. It was so at the Deluge with the lower animals and plants. It is so here. The universe is one throughout, and all its parts are in closest connection and interdependence. "Not a leaf rotting on the highway but is an indissoluble part of solar and stellar worlds" (Carlyle). Our life, our animal spirits, our reason itself, have fundamental and probably undiscovered relations with the sun and moon and stars. Relations so intimate may be assumed to be mutual, and we need not be surprised if we find casualties meant primarily for either extending to both.
III. GOD'S JUDGMENTS, LONG MENACED, TAKE THE INCREDULOUS BY SURPRISE AT LAST. (Verse 9.) The antediluvians were no better prepared for the Flood by their hundred and twenty years' warning. They absorbed themselves in their work and pleasure, and knew not till the Flood came (Matthew 24:38). So with the Sodomites, warned by Lot (Genesis 19:14); and the inhabitants of Jerusalem at its capture, warned by Christ (Matthew 24:33). Warning is thrown away on unbelief, and its end is always a surprise. In this case the sun would set at noon. The end would come untimely. In the midst of days and prosperity Israel would be cut off. There would be no anticipation, no fear, no suspicion even, of such an event. So with the ungodly at last. The judgment will surprise them and look untimely, but only because their incredulity will be unconquerable.
IV. RETRIBUTION CLOSELY ADJUSTED TO THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF THE CRIMINAL. (Verse 10.) Sinners are smitten in their joys. The covetous in their possessions, the luxurious in their luxuries, the revellers in their revelries. When sackcloth and ashes are substituted for "ivory couches," and baldness for hair fragrant with the chief ointments, when howls rend the throats till lately melodious in song, the stroke is identified as that of One who never "beats the air." The fly of judgment, selecting infallibly the sore spot of the sufferer, reveals its mission as from God himself. The joys in which the sinner is smitten are, moreover, those most closely connected with his sins. God's stroke is as obviously righteous as appropriate. Falling on the sins that provoke them, God's judgments are self-interpreting. Israel's luxurious appliances were simply plunder, the wages of iniquity, sometimes even the price of blood. Hence God singles them out for special attack, and will plague Israel rigorously in every pleasure that has its root in sin.
V. THE FINALITY OF GOD'S RETRIBUTIVE ACT. The rule is that judgment is more severe in proportion as it is long delayed.
1. It makes an end. The sun goes down, and ends the day of life. After that nothing can come but night—the night of death. Destruction for sinners of Israel, destruction for all such sinners while the world stands, is the Divine provision. When the last measure of retribution is executed, the last shred of the sinner's good has been torn away.
2. That end unspeakably bitter. The wine cup of God's fury is necessarily a bitter draught. There is wounded dignity in it, and wasted mercy, and outraged love, and all ingredients which are gall and wormwood in the mouth. They are digging for themselves Marah pools no branch can sweeten, who "heap up wrath against the day of wrath," etc.
3. That bitterness the bitterness of utter desolation. "And make it like mourning for an only one." That is bitter mourning indeed. The loss of an only one is total loss, including our all. It is irreparable loss, for the dead cannot come back. It is loss not physical merely, nor sentimental merely, but loss wringing the heart strings, and leaving us with the very jewel of life torn from its setting. Such is the mourning in which unforgiven sin is expiated at last. It is heart agony, unrelieved, unmitigated, and never to end. "Son, remember;" "There shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth;" "Their worm dieth not, and their fire is not quenched."