–Louis L’Amour  (Reilly’s Luck)

       “The Lord is my light and my salvation— whom should I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life— of whom should I be afraid?”
                    –Psalm 27:1 (HCSB)
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     The 19th-century writer, Barton Bouchier, said:  “God’s own people–his chosen–he led through the wilderness; and this because ‘His mercy endureth forever.’  It is one of the Lord’s sweet truths that so perplex those that are without, but which are so full of consolation to his own children, that the wilderness and mercy are linked together by God in indissoluable union here.”  The next portion of Psalm 136 looks at the history of Israel and God’s mercy/love, but when reading think of your own history.

          10 — To Him who struck Egypt in their firstborn, for His mercy endures forever;
          11 — And brought out Israel from among them, for His mercy endures forever;
          12 — With a strong hand, and with an outstretched arm, for His mercy endures forever;
          13 — To Him who divided the Red Sea in two, for His mercy endures forever;
          14 — And made Israel pass through the midst of it, for His mercy endures forever;
          15 — But overthrew Pharaoh and his army in the Red Sea, for His mercy endures forever;
          16 — To Him who led His people through the wilderness, for His mercy endures forever.  (NKJV)

     We have a history.  It includes the Old Testament, but the crucial point is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  “Skeptics can argue about the miracles of turning water into wine or feeding the five thousand, but somehow the body of a crucified rabbi disappeared, and his followers were willing to die for the historical fact of the Resurrection.  Without that historical grounding our faith makes no sense.”  (William J. Petersen)  
     As the Lord was with Israel in guiding and protecting them, we too can be assured that He will do the same for us.  Why?  Because His mercy endures forever to His children.  If you are sinking into the slough look up and see that His arm is outstretched; reach out and take hold of it and let Him pull you to safety.  If the way in front of you seems overwhelming be assured He is there to divide the sea if necessary.  George Wood states, “Likewise in your life, He thrusts aside whatever would prevent His purposes from being attained.  In His time, He removes them all.”  Our hope is in Him, therefore we should trust and obey Him.
     God is willing and able to show His love toward His people, and that includes you and me.  His love, His mercy is everlasting and we place our hope and faith in that fact.  Think of the amazing power of God in keeping Israel, then look at your life and see how God has brought you forward to this day.  That phrase, “His mercy endures forever,” includes not only the past, our history, but it points forward to a grand future.  This phrase should give “us strength for the present and hope for the future.” (Petersen)  
     Have you found yourself in a wilderness?  Look at how God kept His people during those forty years.  Thirsty–the rock spewed  forth water and the bitter waters became sweet.  Hungry–food was provided daily.  Look at the clothes of the Israelites, they didn’t wear out.  Yes, there were problems, yes, there was punishment, punishment that brought death to those without faith.  But He kept His people through all the trials, troubles, and turmoils of the wilderness and He is doing the same for each one of us.  Petersen writes, “Let’s face it, our love does not endure; His does.  Because of this, we can confidently hope in another resurrection–our own.”

               “I love to tell the story of unseen things above,
               Of Jesus and his glory, of Jesus and his love.
               I love to tell the story because I know ’tis true;
               It satisfied my longings as nothing else can do.”
                        –A. Catherine Hankey

                    –Isaiah 1:6 (ESV)
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         “Alas, sinful nation, A people laden with iniquity, A brood of evildoers, Children who are corrupters! They have forsaken the Lord, They have provoked to anger The Holy One of Israel, They have turned away backward.”   –Isaiah 1:4 (NKJV)

         “Doom! Sinful nation, people weighed down with crimes, evildoing offspring, corrupt children! They have abandoned the Lord, despised the holy one of Israel; they turned their backs on God.”   –Isaiah 1:4 (CEB)

Read those verses a couple of times.  The NIV translates the first word as “Woe.”  Woe to us if we do not recognize the meaning when God uses this term.  I am borrowing heavily from Ray Stedman this morning.  The words that he writes regarding this Scripture, the condition of Israel at the time, and thus we can easily take it and apply it to our country and our individual lives.
     “Every breath we breathe is by the mercy of God.  Everything comes from His providing hand.  But man ignores and turns his back upon all that, and then goes about saying that only man matters.  That is incredible blindness.” (Ray Stedman)  Let’s view this verse a little closer, bring it home.  Israel is infected with sin, a fatal virus.  If we thought COVID or polio or smallpox was bad–sin is much more terrible for it not only destroys lives and nations, but also destroys souls.  People try to disregard sin as archaic, old-fashioned, but it is real.  “There is a taint, a poison, spread throughout the whole human world, that causes even our efforts toward good to merely create new problems.” (Stedman)  We want our way–self-centeredness, selfishness.
     Sin brings a heavy burden, not only upon the individual, but also upon a nation.  Just look at the problems our country is facing and it has divided the nation, the creation of another problem.  The burden is heavy–child abuse, domestic violence, divorce, human-trafficking, drugs, abortion, and on the list goes.  People think they have the solution, and they do if they turn to Christ.  But instead they think that man is all-knowing and can solve the problems that come about because of sin.
     We bow to the steel monoliths, the technological advances and say, “Look at us!  Aren’t we something!” and we cannot come to an agreement that sin is the problem.  Man is unable to solve the problems that are caused by sin.  We see in the verse above that man passes on “their evil tendencies to the next generation.” (Stedman)  Stedman continues to say, “There is a strange conspiracy, prevalent in politics and education, to keep God out on the fringes of life, to never mention His name or acknowledge His presence.  Any effort to insert Him into public affairs meets with tremendous resistance.  People have turned their backs on the living God, and do not like to acknowledge that He has any part in human affairs.”
     Resisting God, rebelling against His laws and commandments, and forsaking His name and will have caused them to actually blaspheme the King of heaven.  Man has spurned and abandoned, even to the point of despising Him.   Isaiah says that “they turned their backs on God.”  “People are alienated from God and therefore from each other.  History confirms that when you lose God, you lose man as well.” (Stedman)
     Verse 5 shows the utter foolishness–the stupidity of mankind.  “Why do you invite further beatings? Why continue to rebel? Everyone’s head throbs, and everyone’s heart fails.” (1:5, CEB)  How many times does God have to strike us to get our attention.  I used the illustration many times:  A person runs as hard as he can to get out of the room and smashes into the wall, knocking himself silly (more silly).  He gets up, moves slowly back across the room and runs again, smashing into the wall.  We who are watching are perplexed at what is taking place, as is God who watches our silly actions against Him.  The man pulls himself together, gets ready to run, when someone taps him on the shoulder and suggests, “Why not try the door?”  What a suggestion!  What a solution!  Then why do we not turn back to God?  What a solution!  We have turned our backs on the Lord; sooner or later, He will turn His back on us.

                    –Psalm 25:7 (HCSB)
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          2.16 — To deliver you from the immoral woman, from the seductress who flatters with her words,
            .17 — Who forsakes the companion of her youth, and forgets the covenant of her God.
            .18 — For her house leads down to death, and her paths to the dead;
            .19 — None who go to her return, nor do they regain the paths of life–  (NKJV)

     Last week we looked at the “evil man” and today we turn our attention to the “strange or immoral woman.”  The ESV translates it as the “forbidden woman.”  She flatters with her words, or uses “smooth words” (ESV).
     There are two kinds of adultery described in the Bible:  physical and spiritual.  Idolatry is spiritual adultery, the worship of the created rather than the Creator.  Spiritual adultery is manifested by the love of material things of the world:  pleasures, comforts, riches, power.  Beasley informs us that the “Love of the things of the world is opposed to the love of the Father.”  Another aspect of spiritual adultery is in the “smorgasbord” approach to knowing God.  All ways, all religions do not lead to God.  False doctrine is then a form of spiritual adultery.  I like the way Bob Beasley puts it:  “It’s as if they were in front of a salad bar, i.e., ‘I’ll take some love, but I’ll pass on wrath.  Mercy is nice, but I don’t want any holiness.'”  Pick and choose Christianity is spiritual adultery.  If not careful, “It is God who is first forsaken, then forgotten in the beginning of wickedness, forgotten in the hardened practice of it.” (Jermin)
     There is also the way of the “immoral woman” who wants “to lead God’s children away from the path of life.” (Wiersbe)  Instead of the perverse words like the evil man, the adulteress uses flattering words.  Warren Wiersbe says, “flattery isn’t communication, it is manipulation; it’s people telling us things about ourselves that we enjoy hearing and wish were true.  The strange woman knows how to use flattery successfully.”  She is a person without respect to God, to her husband, or those she is trying to seduce.
     Both, physical and spiritual adulterers have forgotten the covenant of their God.  Samuel Miller gives two-warnings:  1) “the unstopping, short character of sin; she who wrongs her husband will be seen universally wronging God; 2) the recuperative history of the lost.  Man who walks into the lure of this woman is in danger of losing his life and his soul.  The path is downward, downward to the Pit.  It is interesting, but the writer of these words, Solomon knew of this danger yet did not heed.  “Lust and idolatry were the spiritual adultery into which they entrapped the once wise king.” (Fausett)
     Warning flags should be raised and heeded.  Notice that death is mentioned twice:  temporal death and eternal death.  There is an additional warning to those who continue to walk in this way–they do not regain the paths of life.  !!!  flags of warning.  The early Church father, John Chrysostom, stated, “It is as hard to restore a lustful person to chastity as it is to restore a dead person to life.”

                    –Numbers 11:10 (NLT)
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Amos, after his words to Amaziah, receives another vision, that of the summer fruit.  This is the ripe fruit, the final harvest of the year.  The prophet announces, “the end has come.”  What normally would be a time of thanksgiving “would be turned to wailing because the harvest would be death.” (NKJV Study Bible)  Lloyd Ogilvie says, “Israel’s sin had ripened and spoilage was inevitable.”

        8.1 — Thus the Lord GOD showed me:  Behold, a basket of summer fruit.
          .2 — And He said, “Amos, what do you see?”  So I said, “A basket of summer fruit.”  Then the LORD said to me:  “The end has come upon My people Israel; I will not pass by them anymore.
         .3 — And the songs of the temple shall be wailing in that day,” says the Lord GOD–  “Many dead bodies everywhere, they shall be thrown out in silence.”
         .4 — Hear this, you who swallow up the needy, and make the poor of the land fail,
         .5 — Saying:  “When will the New Moon be past, that we may sell grain?  And the Sabbath, that we may trade wheat?  Making the ephah small and the shekel large, falsifying the scales by deceit,
         .6 — That we may buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals–even sell the bad wheat?”

     Gary C. Cohen writes, “He is not portraying people who merely break the Sabbath, but rather loathe the Sabbath–loathe it perhaps partly because they do not want their souls and spirits turned to God, which would make them feel guilty over their sins.”  Woe, when this occurs, the end is come.  In the words of Peter C. Craigie, “One can in fact practice evil so persistently that a death sentence is inevitably proclaimed.  There does actually come to a point at which all excuses are useless:  the death sentence is proclaimed and nothing can change it.”  
     “Sin” is a word that is uncommon today.  It is wrong to say that a person has sinned or is living in sin.  “Guilt”, “shame” are words that are now forbidden in modern usage.  Yet it is guilt and shame over sins that bring conviction thus bringing people to ask God for forgiveness.  “The frightening thing,” according to Ogilvie, “is that it is possible to resist the overtures of God’s love so long that our wills can become hardened.”
       Instead of a harvest of produce, “there will be instead, many dead bodies with the shock of dead silence.” (Garner)  This is an indictment against those who “swallow up the needy,” by false measures and mixing the sweeping of the threshing with the grain.  Add to that the deplorable practice of selling people into slavery.  No longer is Amos saying, “Seek the Lord and live,” now he can only say, “It’s too late; you must die.”
       The words of Jeremiah are clear, “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” (8:20, NKJV).  Too late, too late–there comes a time when God’s patience runs out, the scales are full, judgment is now coming.  The nation will reap what they have sown.  Warren Wiersbe puts it solemnly, “People would be so overwhelmed that they would be unable to discuss the tragedy.  Silence would reign in the land.”
       Israel had gotten to the point where they viewed God and the worship of Him as an inconvenience to their daily business.  Many want to sleep in on Sunday morning with the excuse that it is their only day to do so.  Others have ball games to attend (and that is a blight in our country, substituting children’s games for worship in God’s house).  Excuses, all sorts of excuses–maybe we are to the point like Israel, where all the excuses will be worthless.  I remember my Mom having to work at a grocery store on Sunday back in the day when most businesses were closed on the Lord’s day.  She related to me of the times people would say to her as she checked out their groceries, “It’s a shame that you have to work on Sunday.”  She would smile at them and reply, “Someone has to wait on the people who come to shop after church.”
       It is not only “remember the Sabbath Day and keep it holy,” it is allowing “things” to become more important than God.  It is putting God on the back burner, or even taking Him out of our lives.  Be careful of saying “No,” to God too long!  “Evil is not a light matter, something to be played with casually; its end is death.” (Craigie)