The Logic of the Absurd Text: Amos 6:12-14
Introduction: Arguing with Gravity
There is a kind of rebellion that is not merely wicked, but is profoundly stupid. It is the kind of rebellion that tries to argue with gravity, that spits into the wind, that saws off the branch it is sitting on. It is a rebellion against the very nature of reality, against the grain of the universe as God made it. When a society gives itself over to this kind of madness, it is a sign that judgment is not just coming, but is already well underway. The lights are on, but nobody is home. The inmates are running the asylum, and they are busy rewriting the laws of physics to suit their delusions.
This is the condition that Amos confronts in the northern kingdom of Israel. They were fat, prosperous, and secure in their sins. They had convinced themselves that their military victories were the result of their own strength, and that their perversion of justice was a sophisticated new form of governance. They were celebrating their own cleverness while standing on a trap door, and the prophet Amos is sent by God to point out the creaking of the hinges. He does this by holding up a mirror to their behavior, showing them an absurdity so stark, so self-evident, that even a fool should be able to see it. But they could not. Spiritual blindness is a powerful anesthetic.
The questions Amos asks in our text are designed to shock them back to reality. Do horses run on sheer rock cliffs? Does anyone try to plow a granite boulder with a team of oxen? The answer, of course, is a resounding no. Only an idiot would attempt such a thing. It is contrary to the created order. It is an exercise in futility and self-destruction. And Amos's point is devastatingly simple: your system of justice and your arrogant self-reliance are just as insane. You are attempting to build a kingdom on principles that are fundamentally at war with the world God made. And a world at war with its Creator cannot stand.
We must not read this as some ancient history lesson about a corrupt nation far away. We are swimming in the same sea of absurdity. Our own culture celebrates what God condemns and condemns what God commands. We have men pretending to be women, we call the murder of the unborn "healthcare," and we have redefined righteousness as the enthusiastic approval of every form of rebellion. We are trying to run horses on rocks, and we are proud of the broken legs. Therefore, the warning of Amos is a direct broadside against us. When a nation's public life becomes a theater of the absurd, God is preparing to bring the curtain down, and He will not be using a gentle hand.
The Text
Do horses run on rocks?
Or does one plow them with oxen?
Yet you have overturned justice into gall
And the fruit of righteousness into wormwood,
You who are glad in Lo-debar
And say, “Have we not by our own strength taken Karnaim for ourselves?”
“For behold, I am going to raise up a nation against you,
O house of Israel,” declares Yahweh God of hosts,
“And they will press down on you from Lebo-hamath
To the brook of the Arabah.”
(Amos 6:12-14 LSB)
The Unnatural Rebellion (v. 12)
Amos begins with two rhetorical questions that expose the sheer irrationality of Israel's sin.
"Do horses run on rocks? Or does one plow them with oxen? Yet you have overturned justice into gall And the fruit of righteousness into wormwood," (Amos 6:12)
The created world has a certain grain to it, a givenness. Horses are for fields and roads, not for cliffs. Oxen are for soil, not for solid rock. To ignore this is to court disaster. You will destroy the animal and accomplish nothing. It is a fool's errand. Amos is saying that Israel's entire social and judicial system is just such a fool's errand. They have taken the very things God designed for health and blessing and have turned them into their opposites.
Justice, mishpat in the Hebrew, is the foundation of a healthy society. It is the skeletal structure that allows a nation to stand upright. When it is administered impartially, it produces the "fruit of righteousness," which is peace, stability, and flourishing for all. But Israel has "overturned" it. They have taken this life-giving medicine and turned it into "gall," a poison. They have taken the sweet fruit of a righteous order and made it "wormwood," a plant known for its noxious bitterness. Their courtrooms, which were meant to be fountains of life, were now dispensing death. Their laws, intended to protect the weak, were now instruments for the powerful to crush them.
This is what sin does. It is de-creation. It is an assault on the goodness of God's world. God created justice to be a blessing, and man in his rebellion twists it into a curse. We see this everywhere today. God created sex for the glory of marital intimacy and the blessing of children. Our culture has turned it into a toxic sludge of pornography, promiscuity, and gender confusion that leaves a trail of broken hearts, diseases, and dead babies. God created authority to be a shield for the innocent. Our culture has turned it into a sword for the corrupt, a tool for political persecution and ideological enforcement.
When you fight against the created order, you are not fighting against an arbitrary set of rules. You are fighting against reality itself. And reality always wins. You cannot make poison into food simply by relabeling the bottle. And you cannot build a lasting society on a foundation of injustice, no matter how many Supreme Court decisions you hand down to ratify it.
The Arrogance of Empty Victories (v. 13)
Next, Amos identifies the source of this madness: pride. They were drunk on their own success.
"You who are glad in Lo-debar And say, “Have we not by our own strength taken Karnaim for ourselves?”" (Amos 6:13 LSB)
There is a bitter irony here that would not have been lost on the original hearers. The name "Lo-debar" literally means "nothing" or "no thing." They were rejoicing in nothing. They were celebrating a thing of nought. It was a real place, a town they had likely recaptured in a recent military campaign, but Amos uses its name as a divine pun. Your great victory, the thing you are so proud of, is literally nothing in the eyes of God.
"Karnaim" means "two horns," a symbol of strength and power in the Old Testament. So they are boasting, "Have we not by our own strength taken the 'two horns' for ourselves?" They were attributing their military might to their own tactical genius and the strength of their own right arm. They had forgotten that it is God who gives victory. They had forgotten that their strength was a borrowed thing, a gift from the very God whose laws they were trampling underfoot.
This is the essential lie of secularism. It is the lie that man is the master of his own fate, the captain of his own soul. It is the anthem of "Invictus" sung on the deck of the Titanic. When a nation forgets God, it must necessarily attribute its successes to itself. And when it does that, it becomes puffed up, arrogant, and blind. It begins to believe its own press releases. Our own nation is filled with this boasting. We rejoice in our GDP, our technological prowess, our military might, our "progress." We think we have taken "Karnaim" by our own strength. But God looks down and sees that we are rejoicing in Lo-debar, in a thing of nothing. Our accomplishments are a bubble, and our pride is the pin.
A man who believes his strength is his own is a man who cannot be corrected. He sees no need for repentance because he sees no one to whom he must give an account. This is the deadliest spiritual state. It is the pride that comes before the fall, and Israel was strutting right on the edge of the cliff.
The Inevitable Consequence (v. 14)
Because God is a just God, this state of affairs cannot last. The Lord of Hosts, Yahweh Sabaoth, the commander of heaven's armies, now delivers His verdict.
"“For behold, I am going to raise up a nation against you, O house of Israel,” declares Yahweh God of hosts, “And they will press down on you from Lebo-hamath To the brook of the Arabah.”" (Am. 6:14 LSB)
Notice the direct, personal agency of God. "I am going to raise up a nation." The Assyrians, when they came, would be nothing more than the axe in God's hand (Isaiah 10:15). God is sovereign over history, over the rise and fall of empires. He moves nations like pieces on a chessboard to accomplish His purposes. Israel thought they were strong, but God was about to summon a nation that would make them look like children.
The judgment would be total and comprehensive. "Lebo-hamath" was at the far northern border of Israel, and the "brook of the Arabah," likely the Zered River, was at the far southern border of the northern kingdom. God is saying that the entire nation, from top to bottom, from one end to the other, would be crushed. There would be no escape. The oppression would be relentless and thorough. The very strength they boasted in would be shattered, and the land they thought they had secured would be overrun.
This is a terrifying principle, but it is a righteous one. When a people uses God's blessings to rebel against Him, He will use a pagan nation to discipline them. He will take away the prosperity that made them proud and the security that made them complacent. He is not a sentimental grandfather in the sky who simply winks at sin. He is the Lord God of hosts, and His justice will roll down like waters, and His righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. And sometimes, that stream is a flood of judgment.
The Gospel According to Amos
The message of Amos is a hard one, but it is not without a gospel hope. The very severity of the judgment points to the holiness of God, and it is in the holiness of God that our salvation is found. The same God who hates injustice and arrogance with a perfect hatred is the God who loves righteousness with a perfect love.
In the cross of Jesus Christ, we see this reality in its sharpest focus. At the cross, the ultimate injustice was committed. The only truly righteous man was condemned by a corrupt court, and the Author of life was put to death. The fruit of righteousness was nailed to a tree and made to be wormwood. This was man's greatest act of turning justice into gall.
But in that same act, God was performing the ultimate act of justice. He was pouring out the full measure of His wrath against sin upon His own Son. The judgment that Israel deserved, the judgment that we deserve for our own pride and our own perversions of justice, was absorbed by Christ. He was crushed for our iniquities.
Therefore, our only hope is to abandon our own strength. We must stop boasting in our Karnaim, our pathetic little horns of power. We must confess that all our victories are Lo-debar, a thing of nothing, apart from Him. We must flee from the coming wrath and take refuge in the one who bore that wrath for us. We must come to the God who raises up nations to judge, and find that He is also the God who raised up His Son from the dead for our justification.
When we do this, He does not just forgive our sin. He begins the work of re-creation in us. He takes the gall of our hearts and turns it back into justice. He takes the wormwood of our rebellion and makes it bear the fruit of righteousness once more. He teaches us how to live according to the grain of His universe, not against it. He teaches us that true strength is found not in taking horns for ourselves, but in bowing the knee to the one who wears the ultimate crown, Jesus Christ, the Lord God of hosts.