In this episode, embark on an introspective ride aboard the Bible Bus as we explore the historical context and prophetic warnings from Amos Chapter 6. Be inspired by the faithful resilience portrayed in real-life testimonies from regions like Afghanistan and Iran, where faith triumphs despite challenges. Explore the consequences of indulgence and moral decay, reflecting on their relevance to the present day. Connect with a community dedicated to deepening their understanding of the scripture and serving local churches around the world.
The foundation, ye saints of the Lord, is laid for your faith in God.
SPEAKER 04 :
Welcome aboard the Bible Bus. I’m Steve Schwetz, your host on Through the Bible. Our teacher, Dr. J. Vernon McGee, leads us through Amos chapter 6 this time on our five-year journey through the whole Word of God. So go ahead and grab your copy of God’s Word and find your seat on the Bible Bus. And as you settle in, let’s visit for a couple minutes with Through the Bible’s president and my friend Greg Harris. So Greg, thanks for coming in. And what good news do you bring us today?
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, it’s… You know, I’m laden with good news, Steve. You are, and good tidings. And good tidings. And I love it. I mean, if you think I sound happy and Steve sounds happy, it is because we’ve talked about this. This is a highlight of our schedule, is to come in here, and we walk out of this studio more excited, more committed about what God’s doing. And so we’re being blessed. We hope you’re enjoying and along for the ride, but we do. have a lot of good news to share. Now, today, we want to talk about a very exciting trip that a couple of us made to Turkey. And there’s actually a newsletter article written by one of our great team members, Nathan Bugbee. And we were teasing him. He didn’t mention I was on the trip. That’s fine, because I actually left early. My schedule was really tight. We were actually there to celebrate the completion of the five-year Turkish Program and television.
SPEAKER 04 :
Right. Significant milestone. And we do try to go with our ministry partners when they do complete that milestone and finish a five-year program to really celebrate because it is a celebration of a significant amount of work that hopefully with the Lord’s provision will play out literally for decades to come.
SPEAKER 03 :
Absolutely. These are major pieces of work. You’re talking about something like 1300. It varies by language. It goes up mostly up by about five or 10 percent. But you’re talking 13 or 1400 30 minute television programs dubbed into the Turkish language. And and so I had a very tight schedule. I was able to come in for a few days, celebrate with the team. But then Nathan stayed a few days more and they did a whole conference with the people that are doing follow up. I’d love for us just to take a minute. And Steve, you’ve experienced this all over the world. When we talk about our ministry, we tend to focus on the flinging of the seed, right? The broadcasting or the digital. But so much of the powerful work is the personal engagement that these teams have.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, and to follow that flinging the seed analogy, it is the harvesting and the bringing it in and nurturing the crop, if you will. You see these folks spring up, and how that’s done, we partner with local people, with local churches, and our goal is not to take away from local churches but to build up those local churches, both in their biblical understanding of Scripture, that it would be proper, but also to bring them new people who are in the fellowship and want to share in community a church.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, all of our follow-up and engagement efforts, whenever there is a church, in some hard parts of the world there are no formal churches, but we always are pointing people to good Bible-teaching churches. Now, this article, which we really encourage you to sign up for our newsletter, it’s very easy. Just go to our website, ttb.org, and you can follow the prompts to sign up, or you can call 1-800-65-BIBLE. I’m doing what you normally do right now. Why am I here? I don’t know. We could discuss that later. Well, let me read this letter.
SPEAKER 04 :
That just defies my existence in this program. It’s an amazing letter. This is from a woman in Afghanistan. I was an active civil society participant and artist for many years. From 2019 until the fall of the republic, I engaged in activism, singing songs to advocate for rights and protection. Through your Farsi programs, I have accepted Christ as my Savior. Despite ongoing challenges, my faith in Jesus serves as a light in the darkness. I now pray with confidence, trusting God to heal my children and provide for us. I firmly believe Jesus Christ is not only the Savior of souls, but also the healer of bodies. Although our lives are under constant threat, my hope and faith in Christ strengthen me to stand firm in the face of adversity.
SPEAKER 03 :
Wow. I mean, that is from anywhere on Earth. That’s a powerful testimony. But from Afghanistan.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
Such a tough place. And some of you may have picked up. She said Farsi, which also is known as Persian. Yes. Which is generally associated with the country of Iran. Yep. And one of the amazing things God did, we were broadcasting radio into Iran and we said, no, we want to go toward television. Well, the television satellite footprints are huge. They often cover a quarter or a third of the earth. And we started getting huge response from our Persian broadcast from Afghanistan. And what we realized is that Dari, the language, is a dialect of Persian. And we have thousands of viewers in Afghanistan. Pretty cool.
SPEAKER 04 :
Such an encouragement. How about this next one from Iran?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, from Iran, and it’s the same program. I have followed you for quite a while, and I have learned so much. I live in a small village and have shared the gospel with my husband, children, friends, and neighbors. Now we gather one day each week and talk about a portion of the program while having a time of prayer and worship. Thank you for your teaching that gives me the knowledge and courage to continue. That’s a church. It’s a home group at a church. It’s amazing. And you guys, this is what the Holy Spirit is doing. When we talk about home groups and things like that, all we’re really doing is following the leadership of the Holy Spirit and trying to just organize behind him a little bit.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah. We’ve got time for one more. Hossain in Afghanistan. Every time I read the Bible and I come across a new problem, your teaching answers it before it is completely formed in my mind. God’s Word is alive, and I’m grateful to hear you explain it. I rarely have to tell people about Jesus. They ask first. I have given out Bibles, and many have believed.
SPEAKER 03 :
Steve, that’s amazing. We have so many other letters, but we are out of time, so let’s pray. Father, we praise you for the work you’re doing all over the world in so many media and so many languages. We pray your word would continue to deeply impact people’s lives. In Jesus’ name, amen.
SPEAKER 04 :
Let’s turn to Amos 6 and go through the Bible together with Dr. J. Vernon McGee.
SPEAKER 01 :
As we have warned you before, The ride on the Bible bus through Amos is a rough ride. He gets right down where we are. And I have another very wonderful letter here. I wouldn’t have time to share with you about one man telling about how he says, you stepped all over my toes. But he says, I keep listening because the toes will heal up. Well, we feel like that we’re not doing it. All I’m trying to do is just to say what is sheer, that is to give the interpretation and the application of the Word of God. I consider that that’s my job. I’m not attempting to soar to the heights of eloquence. and convince you what an orator I am, nor am I attempting to convince you that I’m intellectual. I may not succeed either way, even if I tried, but we’re not interested in that. Now, we come to the sixth chapter. And when we come to this chapter, this is the last chapter in this present series that we had at the very beginning, the judgments on Judah and on Israel. And beginning with chapter 7, it will be visions of the future. And that will take us through the book of Amos. We’ll move a little faster through that section. But now we’ve come today here to chapter 6, and it’s the last in this series of three chapters. In chapter 4, it was… God punished Israel in the past for iniquity. And chapter 5, God will punish Israel in the future for iniquity. And now in chapter 6, Israel admonished in the present, that is, in Amos’ day, to depart from iniquity. Now, he begins by giving one of these woes. He is not the prophet that majors in the woes. You find them in several of the other prophets that we’ve studied, and you find them in the book of Revelation. Now, here is a woe, W-O-E, and it also means W-H-O-A, means to stop, look, and listen. Because this is something that is important. It’s like the word, therefore. He used that in the last verse of the last chapter. Therefore will I cause you to go into captivity beyond Damascus. That therefore is always an important word, as we’ve said. Someone wrote me, said that their preacher says that when you come to a therefore, you should see why it’s therefore. And that is a very good explanation of it. And the word woe is one that ought to draw our attention. “‘Woe to them who are at ease in Zion.'” and trust in the mountain of Samaria, who are chief of the nations, to whom the house of Israel came. Now, actually, the northern kingdom, in grave danger, engaged in sin, was taking it easy. And it was something that they were saying, I think, to each other. The common greeting at departure years ago was, well, take it easy. Well, today it is, have a good day. I take it that it means practically the same thing. And that’s what they were doing. Woe to them who are at ease in Zion. And they were sitting in the lap of luxury in a day of affluence. And we’ve been doing that, actually, since the Depression and World War II. As a nation, we have been in the same condition, sitting in the lap of luxury and in a day of affluence. Now, he goes on here to say, you trust in the mountain of Samaria. That’s where they kept the atom bombs. They felt that Samaria was the capital of the northern kingdom. Ahab and Jezebel lived there. And that was where the palaces of ivory were. And it was a place that could be defended. wall around it. It sits lonely on a hill, and this had become a very important city, so much so that when the Assyrians destroyed it, Herod later on rebuilt it. Herod was quite a builder. You’ll find that he built all over Palestine. He built Caesarea, built it right from ground up. But in Samaria, he rebuilt it because it was such a marvelous location. Now, all of this luxury and the fact that they had the atom bomb, they felt secure. They felt that they were well protected. Woe to them who are at ease in Zion and trust in the mountain of Samaria, who are named chief of the nations to whom the house of Israel came.” And they were recognized in that day among the nations. They belonged to the United Nations, and the Northern Kingdom had a great deal to say. So that now he says to them in verse 2, he says, “…pass unto Calna.” Now, Calna is actually one of the cities… that was in the intersection of the Tigris River and the upper Zab River. And Nineveh was there, Kalna was there. It constituted a great center. And he says, “…pass unto Kalna and see.” And from there go to Hamath the Great. Well, Hamath is the chief city in Syria. You’re coming south now. Then go down to Gath. Now, Gath was in the south. It was the leading city of the Philistines. Are they better than these kingdoms? Are their border greater than your border? In other words, go look at these nations. Why do you think that you are superior to these nations? You’re not superior. You’re engaged in the same sins they are, and your responsibility is greater. They have no revelation from God, but you do have a revelation from God. Now, he mentions the three national sins of that nation, and these are the three sins that brought the northern kingdom down. It brought the southern kingdom down. It brought Babylon down. It brought Egypt down. It brought Greece down. It brought Rome down. And it has brought many great nations down. So that these three sins are national sins, and they’re sins that God will judge nations relative to. Now, number one is in verse 4. I probably should read verse 3. “…ye that put far away the evil day, and caused the seed of violence to come near.” In other words, they say, yes, a day is coming But it’s not near. We don’t need to worry about it. Remember, that was the thing that Hezekiah said to Isaiah when he told him judgment was coming on the southern kingdom and they’d be carried into captivity. And Hezekiah says, will it be in my day? And Isaiah said, no, it won’t be in your day. And even Hezekiah, who was a great king, he said, well, then that’s all right. A great many of us have passed on to our grandchildren a debt and a nation that is in trouble today. I used to worry about my daughter and the day she’d live in. Well, I don’t worry too much about that now. But I do worry about that little grandson and the world that he’s moving into and the world that he’ll be living in. The evil day is coming. Now, what are the three sins that destroy a nation? Number one, verse four, that lie upon beds of ivory and stretch themselves upon their couches and eat the lambs out of the flock and the calves out of the midst of the stall. Now, sex and gluttony. are the two sins that are mentioned here, and they’re sins of the flesh. And so I have them labeled gluttony in my notes. I would like to change that to the sins of the flesh, gluttony and sex. Those are the two things that are mentioned here. Now, that lie upon beds of ivory. Now, Samaria, Ahab and Jezebel had built there An ivory palace. That has been thoroughly excavated, and they have found many very fine, delicate vessels that were in the rubble and the ruins of that great palace there. And it represented the life of the upper class in that day. They lie upon beds of ivory. They all had king-size beds. And they were taking it easy. And it suggests sex, by the way. Stretch themselves upon their couch. That was the thing that they were engaged in. It is a thing that has been said in our day. Someone has answered the woman’s lib movement by saying the woman’s place is in the kitchen and in the bedrooms. May I say to you, it’s an awful thing to say because I totally disagree with that. But it’s the color and complexion of our nation today. Now, I could give you quotation here after quotation. that I have. But I’m not going to do that today. I call attention to one. I took out a Life magazine, and it gave a picture of Washington, the capital. And this was many years ago, under administration in the early 60s. And it says, talking about the social life. It’s when they get together, and all they talk about is who is going with whose wife. And who is being unfaithful to his wife and drinking. And that was amazing to find that in Life magazine of that day. And that was many years ago. Well, you wonder what it is today. And it hasn’t any reference to any particular party. It just means the whole kitten caboodle there are given over to this type of thing. I think more attention is probably paid in Washington to sex. than any of the problems that you and I have today. When these lawmakers get on television, they become very serious. But their social life, now that’s not true of all of them, of course, but the social life in Washington must be very corrupt today. Now, no nation has ever been able to survive that type of thing. Rome, probably the greatest of all nations, and the one nation that will come back. It will come back in the last days. Antichrist will put it back. But why did it fall apart? No enemy outside destroyed Rome. It was like Humpty Dumpty. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. And all the king’s men, all the king’s horses can’t put it back together again. But why did it fall? Well, Gibbon in his decline and fall of the Roman Empire mentions this as being the destruction of the family was one of the important things. When immorality came in, then the nation began to go down. Now, that’s number one. Number two is, verse 5, that chant to the sound of the harp. and invent to themselves instruments of music like David. Now, they came up with a lot of new tunes in that day. You may think hard rock music and rock and roll is something new, and jazz. My, they had it back in that day. And music, the character of music, can destroy a nation. And friends, as far as I’m concerned, we’ve arrived there. Now, I know I sound like a square. I’ll get many letters on this that what a backward fellow I am. Well, I am. And somebody’s going to say, you don’t know anything about music. I sure don’t. I know whether I like it or whether I don’t like it. And a lot of it I don’t like today. And I just don’t listen to it. The chant of the sound of the harp. In other words, the music no longer was used as it was in David’s day. And David was a genius. But his music was to praise and glorify God. But now they had also geniuses in their day. But they were not writing music to praise God. And for the glory of God, it was, of course, that which would take people away from God and the worship of God. Now we come to the third in verse 6. that drink wine in bowls, not just in little glasses, but in bowls. They were really alcoholics that drink wine in bowls and anoint themselves with the chief ointments, but they are not grieved for the affliction of Joseph. Now, they drink wine in bowls and they anoint themselves. You see, in that day, there was a great deal of attention spent on the matter of getting the right kind of ointment for your underarms. I don’t mind mentioning it because they mention it on TV all the time now. And in that day, it was pretty important that you use the right kind of spray and the right kind of deodorant. But it’s drunkenness that was destroying the nation. Now, these were the three sins. And now I’m not going over it. I went over it some time ago. That drunkenness is the thing that is destroying our nation today, as well as these other sins. And we’re not getting by with it. And today it’s becoming an alarming sort of thing. I was amazed that a few years ago, that one of the distilleries had an advertisement about the young people drinking. And they said they were concerned about it. It says teenager. Now, I’m reading from an advertisement of a distiller. Teenagers, especially in a group, are often tempted to do things they might not do on their own, like taking a drink when they know they shouldn’t. We’re sure you’re concerned about this problem. Imagine a liquor maker telling me and you that they think we are concerned because they are. Why don’t you quit making this stuff? But you won’t have to worry much about it if you’ve shown your youngster over the years that your ideas about drinking are healthy and mature. Well, now, what are healthy and mature ideas about drinking? It’s drinking, isn’t it? That’s what they have in mind. They’re surely not running an advertisement on prohibition. May I say to you, this is what destroys nations. These are the three great sins. that have brought great nations down. And I just don’t think we’re the exception to the rule as a nation. It’s enough to break any person’s heart when you see what’s happening in this great nation of ours today. And we try to explain it away by saying that we now are civilized. We today have a new morality. We have grown up. We’ve got rid of the old Puritan notions And by the way, the Puritans and the pilgrims founded a great nation. Are we the sophisticated and suave folk? Are we going to keep it that way? Are we losing it today? May I say that this message of Amos was fulfilled in his day. The northern kingdom went into captivity. It was destroyed. These are the sins that brought it down. Maybe it does have an application for today. Until next time, may God richly bless you, my beloved.
SPEAKER 04 :
What was true in Amos’ day is just as true for us today. Nations are in rebellion against God. But take heart. A day is coming when every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. You know, we love to share resources from Dr. McGee that explain how you can know Jesus Christ as your Savior. You can click on How Can I Know God in our app or at ttb.org, or we’ll gladly send a couple to you when you call 1-800-65-BIBLE. Now, for those who are ready to dive deeper into God’s Word, why don’t you sign up for our free monthly ministry newsletter? As Greg and I mentioned earlier, this month’s issue includes pictures and more stories from the recent trip to Turkey. Get it by mail or e-mail. Just let us know your preference by visiting ttb.org or calling 1-800-65-BIBLE. Thanks for your continued company on the Bible Bus. I’m Steve Schwetz, and I’ll meet you back here next time.
SPEAKER 02 :
All to Him I owe. Sin had left a crimson stain. He washed it white as snow.
SPEAKER 04 :
Through the Bible exists to take God’s whole word to the whole world. And we invite you to stand with us with your faithful prayer and financial support. Where will God’s word go today?
