Disease, Death, and Defenselessness

“‘I sent among you a pestilence after the manner of Egypt; I killed your young men with the sword, and carried away your horses, and I made the stench of your camp go up into your nostrils; yet you did not return to me,’ declares the Lord.”

Amos 4:10

It is a difficult thing to come to terms with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as he reveals himself in his word. So often I’d much rather paint a caricature of him and get to know the idol I’ve fashioned in my own image. My idols, even the ones I call Yahweh, are always much easier to accept, much less demanding, and are always neatly under my control.

The God who actually exists, however, is difficult to accept, very demanding, and never under my control. He says some things that I wish he wouldn’t say. He does some things that I’m not sure I can wrap my mind around. The prophet Amos gives us some examples.

It is striking to think that God is the one who openly declares to his people that he sent them pestilence. He did that to them. Their disease came from him, and he has no hesitation in owning up to that fact. He does not say that he allowed pestilence to come to them through some other source. If the pestilence had been a letter, God’s name would have been just above the return address.

And if that weren’t difficult enough, God goes on to say that he killed young men among his people. He actively did that. It was his sword wielded by his own hand that fell over these boys barely turned men, robbing mothers of their sons and stripping fathers of their heirs. God actively carted off their horses, perhaps a reference to the decimation of their armies. God inflicted the camp of the people with such disease that they literally stank. I mean, really, God? It’s bad enough that you did all those things, but then you have to go and admit it openly and get it recorded in a book that you’ve sovereignly determined to stand as your word for all time? This is going to be a PR nightmare to take care of, especially by the time the 21st century rolls around and ultra-civilized Westerners read these words. Surely you of all people realize that, don’t you?

Then, like salt in an open wound, God has the gall to say, “[Y]et, you did not return to me.”

My arrogance screams in indignation, “Well, what did you expect, God? You send them disease, kill their sons, rob them of their security, and cause their camp to stink, and then you actually expect them to return to you?”

And God answers my indignation: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (Job 38:2-7).

And if I were wise, I would respond along with Job: “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know…. [T]herefore, I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:3, 6).

Only when I’ve accepted the fact that God is God and I am not, that he is as sovereign over his creation as a potter is sovereign over his clay pots, am I in a position to truly consider what God might be doing when he sends disease, kills children, and destroys armies.

There were calls reverberating behind each of these actions. He was inflicting pain in order to communicate a message. Succinctly put, his call might be stated this way: “Return to me.”

“Well, you’re God for goodness sake! Can’t you find some other way of getting your message across?” There’s my arrogant indignation again.

He had tried to talk to them through other means already. “I… destroyed the Amorite before them, whose height was like the height of the cedars and who was as strong as the oaks; I destroyed his fruit above and his roots beneath. Also it was I who brought you up out of Egypt and led you forty years in the wilderness, to possess the land of the Amorite” (Amos 2:9-10). He had saved them with his mighty right hand from slavery and provided them with everything they needed in the desert and then gave them a land that had belonged to others. He was speaking to them through those actions, too. He was calling them, wooing them, to himself, to trust him, to remain faithful to him, to not turn aside to any other gods, yet that’s exactly what they did.

So it seems, with intense love, not wanting his people to continue prostituting themselves with other lovers who he knew could not satisfy, God saw how necessary it was to up the ante, to speak through other means. “Return to me!” he cried out to them with the fall of every sick person, with the death of every son, and with the loss of every horse.

Yet they did not hear, and they did not return to their God and king.

Imagine a father whose daughter has willingly plunged herself into drug addiction. Imagine she steals from her parents to pay for the drugs, and when that’s not enough, she sells her body to get more money for her next high. Imagine the father pleading, with tears in his eyes, for her daughter to stop destroying herself and to come home. Imagine he buys her a car so she’ll have means to get to and from a steady job that he’s willing to help her find. And imagine she sells the car for more drug money. Would he be cruel to change his tone? Would not the most loving thing be to force her into some type of rehabilitation program, even if it’s expressly against her will?

Yeah, but striking people with disease? Killing their children? Ruining their ability to defend themselves? Isn’t that a little overkill, God? It’d only be overkill if the problem weren’t really all that serious. But remember what we’re dealing with. We’re talking about a group of people to whom God has revealed himself who are actively running away from him, the only source of good and light and hope that exists in this universe. There’s a word for such behavior. It’s called suicide, and in the case of God’s people, we’re talking suicide on a societal scale. The stakes could not be higher. On the line is the eternal souls of the bride of God’s only Son. They are trading eternal joy in the presence of the Father, with the Son, filled with his Spirit, for eternal suffering away from him and hope and life forever. And God can’t stand the thought. He loves the bride of his Son with a fierce love, and for their good and his glory he means to have them for his Son.

No, I’d say disease and death and defenselessness are not an overreaction, no more than the removal of a limb stricken with gangrene is an overreaction.

We get it if we reduce the situation to human terms. Why can’t we get it when it comes to talking about how God deals with his children? Probably it’s because we like being the adults in the scenario but not the children. Tough love is great when we’re the ones having to deal it out on those who don’t deserve it, but as soon as we’re the ones in need of a tender kick in the pants, somehow the cry “Unfair!” surges up within us and pours out over our lips, and ironically, it’s right then that we are more like children than we are willing to admit.

How intensely we need our entire worldview reworked so that we might see things from God’s perspective instead of only being able to grasp what’s happening around us from our own perspective. Are we any different from the three-year-old who is incapable of understanding why his mother won’t let him eat all the cookies in the jar? What we need is a supernatural wisening up, a God-wrought maturing such that we are able to begin to not only understand but to revel in the fact that God is God and knows better, which, of course, only begins with a deep-seated, joyful fear of God.

So God, with no apology, makes statements that sound ludicrous to our human, worldly, immature ears: “I sent among you a pestilence…. I killed your young men…. [And I] carried away your horses.”

And instead of responding with indignation at God’s accusation that even all that still did not cause us to return to him, perhaps, if we had ears to hear and eyes to see, we’d respond more like Job, get on our faces, and finally repent—the very thing God wanted from us in the first place. He desires our nearness to him that much. But do we hear him calling?