A FAMINE FOR THE
WORD OF LIFE
Dr. W.A. Criswell
Amos 8:11
1-11-81
10:50 a.m.
It is a gladness for us and our dear First Baptist Church in
Dallas to share this hour with the uncounted multitudes of you who are watching
on television and listening on the two radio stations that bear it. The
message today is the last in the series on bibliology. Next Sunday we
begin the series on God: theology proper. The title of the sermon next
Sunday morning will be God and the Reasoning Mind; then the next Sunday,
God and the First Universal Fact; then the next Sunday, What is Wrong
With Being an Atheist? The next Sunday, He That Cometh to God;
the next Sunday, Is There a God Who Cares About Me? The next one, The
Abounding Grace of God; and the last, The Unfathomable Mystery of the
Trinity. That will be the series, the doctrinal series; the “theology
proper” on God. Then, that will be followed by the series on Christology,
the series on Jesus our Lord.
Today at this hour, the last in the long series on the Bible
itself, on Bibliology, the message is entitled A Famine For The Word of Life.
In Amos, the prophet Amos, chapter 8, verses 11 and 12:
Behold the day is
come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine
of bread, not a famine of thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the
Lord:
And they shall
wander from sea to sea, and from North even to the East, they shall run to and
fro to seek the Word of the Lord, and shall not find it.
A Famine For The Word Of God; Amos was a country
preacher. He lived in Tekoa, which is by the Dead Sea, in the wilderness
of Judea. And God sent him to the Northern Kingdom of Israel, to Bethel,
the capital, the king's court and the king's chapel. And there he delivered
the message of the Lord. The land trembled under the weight of his
words. You could not imagine a deeper contrast between what Amos was
preaching and the estate of the nation. He was preaching judgment, and
the nation was at it highest zenith of prosperity and national strength.
Uzziah was king of Judah, the Southern kingdom; one of the
wisest and ablest administrators Judea ever had. He reigned for fifty-two
years. Jeroboam II was king of Israel, the ablest general Israel ever
had. He reigned for forty-one years. The kingdoms were stable and
those leaders had brought their people to a national affluence never seen
before. They had recreated the Solomonic glory in Judah and in
Israel. The people were marvelously and aboundingly blessed. Amos refers
to the fact that they have summer homes and winter homes. He refers to
their ivory palaces; he speaks of the ivory couches upon which they rest.
He describes the unbounding, overflowing optimism of the nation, “Tomorrow will
be a better day than today!”
And “the Day of the Lord,” which Amos says is a judgment of
God, the Day of the Lord, to them was one without evil or interference from
heaven. All of that in 760 BC and, in 722 BC, a few years later, the
nation was destroyed forever! Never was there a prophet again in Israel,
and never did the nation rise anymore.
As I think of the abounding optimism and blindness of those
people to the judgments of Almighty God; as I think of them and their
illimitable prosperity and optimism, I think of America and America's leading,
far-famed liberal preacher, Harry Emerson Fosdick, in the thirties. I
went to hear him in New York City. He was riding the crest of liberal,
theological popularity: “No more war—never! No more bloodshed—never!
The millennium is at hand; peace and prosperity are becoming universal.”
That was the preaching of Fosdick and all of the little Fosdicks who followed
after him in their pulpits. That was in the thirties; and in 1939, Hitler
unleashed his dogs of war on the whole world and bathed the earth in human
blood. That is the judgment of Almighty God!
So in the days of Amos, when the nation was at its highest
peak of prosperity, and strength, and stability, God took that country preacher
in the wilderness of Judea and sent him up to Bethel, and there he delivered
the Word of the Lord. And as he preached, he delivered four judgments of
Almighty God. The first is found in Amos, chapter 5, verse 27,
"Therefore will I cause you to go into captivity beyond Damascus, saith
the Lord, whose name is The God of Hosts." And he repeats that
judgment in the seventeenth verse of the seventh chapter: "…And Israel
shall surely go into captivity forth out of his land." The first
judgment of Almighty God upon Israel is that, they will go into slavery, into
exile and into captivity.
The second judgment of God upon Israel, denoted by the
prophet Amos, is found in the seventh chapter and the verse: “And the high
places of Isaac shall be desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid
waste; and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with a sword.” [Amos 7:9] The first judgment of God is
Israel shall go into captivity. The second judgment of the Almighty is
desolation and waste. The third judgment of Almighty God is found in
chapter 8, verse 3, “And the songs of the temple shall be howlings in that day,
saith the Lord God: there shall be many dead bodies in every place; they shall
cast them forth with silence.” The first judgment, slavery and exile; the
second judgment, waste and desolation; and the third judgment, death on every
side; dead everywhere! And those few who still remain cast forth the dead
bodies in astonishing silence.
The fourth, and the last judgment, is in an altogether
different category. The first of slavery, the second of desolation, the
third of death; then the fourth, climactic:
Thus saith the
Lord, I will send a famine in the land,
not a famine of
bread or thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord.
They shall wander
from sea to sea, from the north to the south, they shall run to and fro to seek
the Word of the Lord,
and shall not find
it.
[Amos 8:11-12]
What do you think about that? Do you think in a
judgment of Almighty God, of slavery and of desolation and of death, that the
climactic and awesome and final one would be a judgment of famine for the Word
of God? What do you think about that? We cannot but pause before
it. In Psalms 74, verse 9, the lamentable cry of the Psalmist Asaph:
"We see not our signs: there is no more any prophet: neither is there any
among us anymore that knoweth how long.” What an awesome judgment it is
among a people when God doesn't hear, when God passes us by. One of the
solemn refrains in Amos—you will find it again and again—in chapter 7, verse 8,
"I will not again pass by them anymore." You will find it
again, typically so, in chapter 8, verse 2: "I will not again pass by them
anymore."
Do you remember the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven? That
judgmental note, “ta, ta, ta—TAH!” Do you remember that? And all
through that Fifth Symphony, that resounding judgment? It sounds to me,
like Almighty God, “da, da, da—DAH!” That's exactly the way it is with
the Lord God about Israel. “I will not pass them anymore. There will be
no more prophets. There will be no more answers from heaven. There
is no Word of God anymore.” What an awesome judgment!
When Saul went to the witch of Endor—a thing interdicted in
Israel on the pain of death—when Saul went to the witch of Endor, he begged for
the rising up of the dead prophet Samuel. And out of deference, in a
judgment upon Saul, God raised the apparition and the spirit of Samuel.
Do you remember the cry of Saul? Great God, what a cry! He said:
I am sore
distressed; and the Philistines make war against me,
and God has
departed from me, and will not answer me, and there is not any prophet
—and there is not
any word from heaven—
and I don't know
what to do.
—And Samuel's
voice—
Because of your
disobedience God hath judged you. And tomorrow, at this time, you and
your sons will be slain.
And all Israel
will be handed over into the hands of the Philistines.
[1 Samuel 28:15-19]
Can you imagine a cry like that? "I am sore
distressed and I am pressed on every side and God has departed me! And
there is no answer from heaven and I don't know what to do! And I don't
know where to turn."
The final and climactic judgment from God, upon Israel;
could we pause and look at that just for a moment? The first judgment was
slavery, and exile, and captivity; but what are slavery and exile and captivity
if God is with us? John, the sainted apostle, was exiled to the barren,
rocky island of Patmos, there to die of exposure and starvation. But
while he was on the Isle of Patmos, he heard a great voice, as of a trumpet,
and he turned to see the voice that spake unto him. And there stood, in
all of His iridian glory, the raised and immortalized, Lord Jesus. And
when he fell to His feet as dead, the Lord put His right hand upon him as He
had many, many times in His flesh, and said to him: "Fear not, fear not, I
am He that liveth and was dead. And behold, I am alive forevermore and I
have the keys of hell and of death." What is exile, or slavery, or
captivity, or imprisonment if God is with you? It is being without God
that makes slavery an awesome judgment from the Almighty. The second one
was desolation—waste, loss. But what are fire, and flood, and desolation,
and loss, if God is with us? Job sat in an ash heap and cried so
pitifully and piteously. "Naked came I forth from my mother's womb
and naked shall I return hither. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken
away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." What does it matter if fire,
or flood, or waste, or disaster, or destruction takes away everything we
posses. If only God is with us.
A Turkish woman in a hospital in Konya, ancient Iconium—where
Paul preached on his first missionary journey—a Turkish woman, in that
hospital, was singing this song:
Trample upon me,
yea, tread on my head.
Consume me with
terror, Thou judge of the dead.
If only, O God, I
thus, Thee may know.
And Thee once
behold, while I tarry below.
Throw me like
Abraham, unto the fire.
Like Moses,
withhold from the land I desire.
If only, O God, I
thus, Thee may know.
And Thee once
behold, while I tarry below.
Hang me like
Jesus, upon the rude tree.
Or a beggar, like
Lazarus, through life I would be.
If only, O God, I
thus, Thee may know.
And Thee once
behold, while I tarry below.
[Author unknown]
It is nothing if God is with us. The last judgment was
death; but what is death if we have the promise of the presence of God standing
by? When they stoned Stephen, he looked up into heaven. And there
when heaven opened, he saw Jesus the Son of God, standing on the right hand of
glory ready to receive His first Christian martyr. Everywhere in the
Bible, universally without exception, Jesus is always seated on the right hand
of the Majesty on high. In that one place He stands. Why? To
receive His first Christian martyr into glory; what is death if God is there?
If the Word of the promise of the sacred page is with us to comfort and
strengthen our souls? I don't know a more sublime passage of human
literature then the last words of the apostle Paul wrote to his son in the
ministry, Timothy, “I am ready to be offered up, the time of my departure is at
hand.” Nero's executioner's ax is waiting at the Mamertine prison door.
I fought a good
fight, I have kept the faith, I have finished my course:
Henceforth there
is laid upon me a crown of righteousness,
which the Lord…
will give to me: not only to me, but to all those who love His appearing.
[2 Timothy 4:7-8]
It is a triumph: our greatest and finest hour of victory
will be that day when the trumpets blow on the other side of the river and
God's saint has gone home. What is it to die if God is with you?
Death is grim, and fierce, and awesome, and terrible only if God isn’t near; if
there is no word from heaven; if there is no promise from above; if there is no
assurance, that a quiet, sweet, welcoming hand is extended to us beyond the
darkness of that deep and midnight grief. And that is the tragedy
that is overwhelming our modern world. We have turned aside from the
Word, which is the Living Water of life and have hewn ourselves our cisterns—broken
cisterns that can hold no water. We have exchanged God for a textbook on
humanism. We've turned aside from the living Word of the living God, and
have followed blind, and adventitious, and fortuitous systems.
Our prophets today are not Moses, and Paul, and John.
We have exchanged them for Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx, and Sigmund
Freud. More and more, our entire world is swept away by the textbooks of
humanism, false intellectualism, pseudo-science, secularism, materialism, all
of the things that grip our modern life—leaving God out of the equation; and we
see the evidence of it on every hand.
Out of our daily newspaper, I read this: a man is
criticizing another man for quoting from the Bible. And he says quoting
from the Bible, to substantiate his position is idiocy, “That is a grievous
mistake; research would have shown that the Bible was written at unknown times,
by unknown authors, and assembled in the fourth century at Nicaea. And
the writings of the Bible can be given no historical credence today. To
believe in Christ as to actually having existed, one is to believe that these
late writings are divinely inspired. That is a gulf you can bridge.
Surely, we can forget the myths and legends of the Bible, or merely accept them
as such.”
And swept away by the liberal, theological position of the
academic community, ministers of the gospel stand in the pulpits and refer
never at all to the Holy Word of God. I copied this from the Dallas
Morning News, “Ministers of the gospel got a suggestion from editor, Ernest
Joiner in the Ralles Banner, who had bought a Bible. ‘It cost
$14.95,’ he wrote. ‘It has seven hundred seventy-three thousand, six
hundred ninety-two words in it, and it is such interesting reading. We
are considering asking ministers of our acquaintance to base a Sunday sermon on
it one day, when there is a lull upon it in a congregation from an overdose of
economics, labor, statistic, soil conservation, politics and a lagging
subscription campaign.’”
Just typical! And God looks down upon this world and
there is a judgment day coming. I have quoted from an evangelist, the
most famous that ever lived, Billy Graham. I am quoting from an agnostic,
H. G. Wells; from an atheist, George Bernard Shaw; and from the most
distinguished journalist in the world today, the British Christian, social
critic, Malcolm Muggeridge.
Billy Graham: “Man is on a collision course, probably
heading into a third world holocaust, which might well, destroy humanity
between now and year 2000.” The agnostic, H. G. Wells, the brilliant,
English historian and social critic: “The end of everything we call life
is at hand and cannot be evaded.” I quote from George Bernard Shaw, the
Irish dramatist and essayist. At the close of his life—he died in 1950—at
the close of his life, he wrote, “The science to which I pin my faith is
bankrupt. Its counsels, which should have established the millennium,
have led directly to the suicide of the human race." And last from
Malcolm Muggeridge, "We live in a world of scientific achievement and
gross materialism. We have sown the wind of egotistic humanism, and God
help us, we are reaping the whirlwind." As though, as though the
scientific advancement that bring to us the gadgets we enjoy in life could save
us. As though the psychoanalytical processes and approaches of a Sigmund
Freud could save us. As though all of the changing of the political
machinery of capital and labor in Karl Marx's Das Kapital could save us!
Our world is increasingly bankrupt as we grope with super military
leaders, and totalitarian dictators, and a thousand other panaceas that lead us
into ultimate, abysmal despair.
What we need, in the face of the famine for the Word of God,
is to rediscover the word and the message of the prophets and the apostles of
the Lord God for our souls, for our lives, for our houses and homes, for our
nation, for the nations of the world, for the peoples of all
humanity. And what a glorious vista of hope that such a thing could
ever be: a return to the Word and the message of the Lord.
Do you remember reading in the life of good king
Josiah? In repairing the temple, Hilkiah, the high priest and Shaphan the
[scribe] came to the king and said, "We have found the Word of the Lord,
we have found the Book of God!" [2 Kings
22:10]. And it brought a great revival that spared Judah
from the awesome judgment that fell upon Jeroboam.
When I was pastor in Oklahoma, Governor Marlin, erected a
marvelously impressive bronze statue in his home city of Ponca City. It
is of a glorious, pioneer woman. And standing there looking at that
remarkable piece of sculpture, your heart could not but be moved as looking at
that pioneer woman. On one hand, she is holding the hand of a child and
with the other hand she is cradling the Word of God. This is our hope,
this is our salvation, this is our promise, this is the way; as God says,
"You will hear a voice from behind you saying, This is the way, walk ye in
it."
Whether it is the living Word, “Christ,” or whether it is
the living Word, “The Bible,” both are called the Word. And when I exalt
the living Word, I glorify the written Word. If I dishonor the written
Word, I do disparaging disgrace to the living Word. Lord God, send us an
abounding manna from heaven. Not a famine for the Word of life, but angel’s
food, God's revelation, our hope and promise, now and forever. May we
stand together?
Dear God, in a day of the clamorous voices of ten thousand
false philosophies, a humanism that blots Thy name out of the very life
of a nation; of a secularism and materialism that lives as though God didn't
exist and this world would last forever. O Lord, in the midst of the
darkening clamor, may we hear the voice of the Lord, written on the page.
Dear Lord, listening, may God find a responsive heart; may it be a new day for
us—a glorious beginning again.
While our people pray and stand before God, in this
quietness of this moment of appeal, in the balcony, round to the throng on this
lower floor, a family you, a couple you, or just one somebody you, giving your
heart to God, deciding for Christ, coming in to this dear church. And
welcome! Of the multitude of you, who on radio and on television, have
listened to this message, may the famine of the bread of life be turned into
the bounding abundance of God feeding us, the Lord caring for us, the Lord
saving us. And you there where you are, to give your heart to God, your
life to Christ; welcome! And on this lower floor and in the balcony here
in this sanctuary, down one of those stairways, down one of the aisles,
"Here I am pastor, and here I come." And bless you already here
at the front.
Thank Thee, Lord, for the answered prayer and the sweet
harvest that You will give us now, in Thy wonderful and saving name, amen.
While we sing and while we make appeal, "Here I am
pastor." Our men welcome you; angels welcome you, come.
