Fearlessly Courageous
Desk of Dennis Piller
6 21 2023
A Famine of Truth – Spiritual Truth
Amos 8:11 “Behold, the days are coming, says the Lord God, and I will send a famine in the land” I am reading a book by Dr. David Jeremiah where do we go from here?
I am rewatching Schindler’s List where they show the deprivation of those poor Jewish souls who were starved to death and gassed in Auschwitz. What a brutal experience. Can we even visualize being unbearable thirsty, hungry, and hurting all of the time emotionally, physically, psychologically, and spiritually?
How vulnerable and mentally unstable can one be?
When you look at our world today, they suffer from some of the same depravities.
Our present generation is famished.
We are starving for the truth, and hungry for hope.
Thirsty for the God-given message of scripture.
The prophet Amos says there will be a “famine of truth” in the last days. In 4:12 he says, “Prepare to meet your God oh Israel”.
The prophet Amos says there will be a famine of truth in the last days. In 4:12 he says, “Prepare to meet your God oh Israel”.
I grew up in a time of scriptures like this written on billboards or large rocks but now they’ve almost disappeared from our consciousness. People take offense at that message in the modern world. Interestingly, they did in Amos’s time too. They tried to drive him away. look at 7:12–13 “Get out of here, you prophet! Go on back to the land of Judah, and earn your living by prophesying there! Don’t bother us with your prophecies here in Bethel. This is the king’s sanctuary and the national place of worship!” He met their threats with this piercing prediction in Amos 8:11–12
“The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign Lord,
“When I will send a famine through the land—
not a famine of food or a thirst for water,
but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord.
12 People will stagger from sea to sea
and wander from north to east,
searching for the word of the Lord,
but they will not find it”.
“He was describing a deadly type of famine – a problem of the ears, and not of the stomach” We may be in the early stages of a hearing famine.
But this is not the only time that we hear of such predictions. The prophet Ezekiel declared in 7:26. “Disaster will come upon disaster; rumor follows rumor. They seek a vision from the prophet, while the law perishes from the priest
and counsel from the elders”.
The prophet Micah also warned in 3:6
“Therefore night will come over you, without visions,
and darkness, without divination.
The sun will set for the prophets,
and the day will go dark for them”.
In the New Testament, the apostle Paul says in 2 Timothy 3: 1–7
“But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, 4 treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— 5 having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.
6 They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, 7 always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth”.
Have you looked around you lately? Everywhere you turn there’s emotional famine, calamity upon calamity, rumor upon rumor, perilous times, and an acceleration of warning without the ability to absorb the truth. People are running to, and fro, seeking significance and satisfaction. But they have lost their appetite for the objective, infallible truth of God‘s word.
The Psalmist lamented in Psalm 74:19 ” Do not hand over the life of your dove to wild beasts; do not forget the lives of your afflicted people forever”. He is talking about the church. We are afflicted and in a spiritual famine of our own choosing.
Sadly, it is in the absence of God’s word. There are 6 billion people on the planet and 7.6 billion have access to the full Bible. It is never been more accessible. But what Amos was talking about in this famine…this loss of hunger for God and his truth. This is the self-inflicted famine spoken of in these scriptures.
A.W. Tozer wrote “The great people of the Bible and Christian history have had an insatiable hunger for God. He waits to be wanted. Too bad that with so many of us, He waits so very long in vain”
I hope you are thinking a little deeper today.
He is waiting for you! Honestly, Are you hungry?
Lauren Daigle Rescue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYR0xP1j4PY&list=PL3oW2tjiIxvTstLS9GlgaT_mqONT0WVDw
Excerpts are taken from Dr. David Jeremiah’s Book. Where do we go from here? Chapter 8 pg 157-160
