Day 193: The Plumb Line Punch Line (Amos 7)

The Lord God showed me this: He was forming a swarm of locusts… (Amos 7:1)

The Lord God showed me this: The Lord God was calling for a judgment by fire… (Amos 7:4)

He showed me this: The Lord was standing there by a vertical wall with a plumb line in his hand. The Lord God asked me, “What do you see, Amos?” I replied, “A plumb line.” (Amos 7:7-8)

Through the Bible: Amos 6-9

A joke often has three parts, three scenes, or three characters. A cowboy, a gangster, and Mother Teresa walk into a bar. A rabbi, a priest, and a Baptist preacher are playing golf. You know how this goes. The comedian will tell something about the first two scenarios to establish the joke. You know that the third scenario is going to be the punch line. What you expect gets turned on its head when the third story has a twist.

Jesus often used the same structure in His parables. The Good Samaritan was the third traveler to come upon the man who had been beaten and robbed. The third servant was the one that buried his talent in the ground. The third denial was when the rooster crowed. The punch line is always the third time.

This is how Amos 7:1-9 is structured. Only its no joke.

In the first scene, God showed Amos a terrible plague of locusts that swarmed just as the spring crop began to sprout. It was devastating, and Amos begged God to relent. “Oh Lord, please forgive!” he pleads. “How will Jacob survive since he is so small?”

God relented: “It will not happen,” he said (Amos 7:3).

In the second scene, God showed Amos a judgment by fire so terrible that it dried up the oceans and scorched the whole earth. Once again, Amos begged God to relent: “Lord God, please stop! How will Jacob survive since he is so small?”

And God relents. “‘This will not happen either,’ said the Lord God” (Amos 7:4-6).

So now you are ready for the third scene. The third time is going to be the punch line, the twist ending, the thing we aren’t expecting that’s the point of the whole story.

In the third vision, Amos saw God standing by a vertical wall holding a plumb line. Keep in mind that God has already shown Amos a plague of locusts and an apocalypse of fire. So when God says, “Now what do you see, Amos?” Amos seems a bit nonplussed.

“Ummmm, a plumb line?” he says.

And God says,

“Behold, I am setting a plumb line
    in the midst of my people Israel;
    I will never again pass by them;
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.”

Notice that Amos doesn’t say, “Lord God, please stop! Not the plumb line! How will Jacob survive since he is so small?” I mean, compared to locusts and fire, a plumb line doesn’t seem so scary.

But consider what the plumb line represents. A plumb line consists of a heavy weight (called a plumb bob) attached to a string. The bob aligns itself perfectly with the center of the earth. A builder can hold the plumb line next to a wall and judge whether the wall is perfectly vertical. If it isn’t, he tears it down and starts over. Otherwise, anything he tries to build will eventually come crashing down on its own.

In Amos’s day, Israel was no longer standing straight and true. In ways that might not be visible to the naked untrained eye, Israel had veered off course, and no one seemed to have noticed. So God said, “Therefore, I will no longer spare them.”

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.” (v. 9)

When God judges us, He doesn’t always do so in an epic, earth shattering way. He won’t always strike you with lightning or drop a house on you or hit you with a life threatening diagnosis. Instead, he may just measure you against the perfect plumb line of his word and say, “Nope. Not straight. Not true.” And then he will withdraw His protection from us.

The tragedy is that we miss that most subtle judgment. We can breathe a sigh of relief that the hurricane weakened just before landfall, or that the tornado jumped over our house at the last minute. But the worst judgment is to be left to our own devices. It is for God to see that our lives are in danger of toppling over because we are no longer measuring ourselves against the requirements of His law, and then God allowing us to fall. This was what Paul wrote about in Romans 1:

²⁸ And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. ²⁹ They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, ³⁰ slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, ³¹ foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. ³² Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them. (Romans 1:28-32)

Beloved, the most devastating judgment is the most subtle. Worse than any locust plague or natural disaster is the reality that when we live as though we don’t want God to have anything to do with our lives, God gives us what we want.

Remember the punch line of the plumb line, dear brothers and sisters.