But he has still another to teach us; namely, the awful power which we have of resisting God’s efforts to draw us back.  ’Our wills are ours, we know not how,’ but alas! it is too often not ‘to make them Thine.’  This is the true tragedy of the world that God calls, and we do refuse, even as it is the deepest mystery of sinful manhood that God calls and we can refuse.  What infinite pathos and grieved love, thrown back upon itself, is in that refrain, ‘Ye have not returned unto Me!’ How its recurrence speaks of the long-suffering which multiplied means as others failed, and of the divine charity, which ’suffered long, was not soon angry, and hoped all things!’ How vividly it gives the impression of the obstinacy that to all effort opposed insensibility, and clung the more closely and insanely to the idolatry which was its crime and its ruin!  The very same temper is deep in us all.  Israel holds up the mirror in which we may see ourselves.  If blows do not break iron, they harden it.  A wasted sorrow—­that is, a sorrow which does not drive us to God—­leaves us less impressible than it found us.

III.  Again the mood changes, and the issue of protracted resistance is prophesied (vs. 12, 13).  ‘Therefore’ sums up the instances of refusal to be warned, and presents them as the cause of the coming evil.  The higher the dam is piled, the deeper the water that is gathered behind it, and the surer and more destructive the flood when it bursts.  Long-delayed judgments are severe in proportion as they are slow.  Note the awful vagueness of threatening in that emphatic ‘thus,’ as if the Prophet had the event before his eyes.  There is no need to specify, for there can be but one result from such obstinacy.  The ’terror of the Lord’ is more moving by reason of the dimness which wraps it.  The contact of divine power with human rebellion can only end in one way, and that is too terrible for speech.  Conscience can translate ‘thus.’  The thunder-cloud is all the more dreadful for the vagueness of its outline, where its livid hues melt into formless black.  What bolts lurk in its gloom?

The certainty of judgment is the basis of a call to repentance, which may avert it.  The meeting with God for which Israel is besought to prepare, was, of course, not judgment after death, but the impending destruction of the Northern Kingdom.  But Amos’s prophetic call is not misapplied when directed to that final day of the Lord.  Common-sense teaches preparation for a certain future, and Amos’s trumpet-note is deepened and re-echoed by Jesus:  ’Be ye ready also, for ... the Son of man cometh.’  Note, too, that Israel’s peculiar relation to God is the very ground of the certainty of its punishment, and of the appeal for repentance.  Just because He is ‘thy God,’ will He assuredly come to judge, and you may assuredly prepare, by repentance, to meet Him.  The conditions of meeting the Judge, and being ‘found of Him in peace,’ are that we should be ‘without spot, and blameless’; and the conditions of being so spotless and uncensurable are, what they were in Amos’s day, repentance and trust.  Only we have Jesus as the brightness of the Father’s glory to trust in, and His all-sufficient work to trust to, for pardon and purifying.