hich He has not
forgiven, and will punish.

Amos heaps image on image to deepen the impression of terror and
confusion. Everything is turned to its opposite. The solid land reels,
rises, and falls, like the Nile in flood (see Revised Version). The sun
sets at midday, and noon is darkness. Feasts change to mourning, songs
to lamentations. Rich garments are put aside for sackcloth, and flowing
locks drop off and leave bald heads. These are evidently all figures
vividly piled together to express the same thought. The crash that
destroyed their national prosperity and existence would shake the most
solid things and darken the brightest. It would come suddenly, as if the
sun plunged from the zenith to the west. It would make joy a stranger,
and bring grief as bitter as when a father or a mother mourns the death
of an only son. Besides all this, something darker beyond is dimly
hinted in that awful, vague, final threat, 'The end thereof as a bitter
day.'

Now all these threats were fulfilled in the fall of the kingdom of
Israel; but that 'day of the Lord' was in principle a miniature
foreshadowing of the great final judgment. Some of the very features of
the description here are repeated with reference to it in the New
Testament. We cannot treat such prophecies as this as if they were
exhausted by their historical fulfilment. They disclose the eternal
course of divine judgment, which is to culminate in a future day of
judgment. The oath of God is not yet completely fulfilled. Assuredly as
He lives and is God, so surely will modern sinners have to stand their
trial; and, as of old, the chase after riches will bring down crashing
ruin. We need that vision of judgment as much as Samaria did when Amos
saw the basket of ripe fruit, craving, as it were, to be plucked. So do
obstinate sinners invite destruction.

The last section specifies one feature of judgment, the deprivation of
the despised word of the Lord (vs. 11-14). Like Saul, whose piteous wail
in the witch's hovel was, 'God ... answereth me no more,' they who paid
no heed to the word of the Lord shall one day seek far and wearily for a
prophet, and seek in vain. The word rendered 'wander,' which is used in
the other description of people seeking for water in a literal drought
(iv. 8), means 'reel,' and gives the picture of men faint and dizzy with
thirst, yet staggering on in vain quest for a spring. They seek
everywhere, from the Dead Sea on the east to the Mediterran