Preparing To Meet God

Be Prepared

In the 1960s and 70s I was proudly a part of the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts of America. This was long before the 2010 embrace of homosexuality that led to the implosion of the organization as I knew it, with bankruptcy, dwindling membership, and billions of dollars in ongoing lawsuits and compensations.

Despite that ongoing failure, the once-proud body still retains the official motto, “Be Prepared,” introduced in 1908 by the organization’s founder, Robert Baden-Powell. Be Prepared is a two-word motto that expresses widely applicable wisdom, and it came to me this week as I was reading the prophet, Amos, and ran across the following line.

Prepare to meet your God, O Israel!
– Amos 4:12b, ESV

This prophetic line comes toward the end of Amos, chapter four. It is a summary statement from God in the midst of a blistering, judgmental outpouring unleashed against the ten tribes of the northern kingdom of Israel. God iterated through multiple examples of judgment against a repeatedly disobedient people, warning them of his awe-inspiring, corrective power that was about to befall them.

Prepare, indeed.

For behold, he who forms the mountains and creates the wind,
    and declares to man what is his thought,
who makes the morning darkness,
    and treads on the heights of the earth—
    the LORD, the God of hosts, is his name!

– Amos 4:13, ESV

The call to preparedness in Amos is the only place in all of scripture that we find this ominous, weighty call from God. There are similar admonishments admonishments in other places, but none so direct and blunt as this one. It is a call appropriate for today, and I say this not as an admonishment to the world. Long-time readers of my work know my view on that. The world is the world and will do what the world does. No, I see this admonishment as appropriate to those who call themselves God’s people, the church, the body of Christ. Prepare to meet your God.

The call from God is not a call to a joyful time of worship, or to a peaceful encounter with the Almighty. This call is closer to a terrifying legal summons. Just prior to telling the northern kingdom to get prepared, God unleashed the recounting of a series of disasters he had sent upon Israel, disasters designed to shake them to attention: famine, drought, blight, locusts, plagues, and military defeats.

Following each recounting, God repeated some form of the refrain “Yet you have not returned to me.” Like the current, western church, Israel refused to repent of their wickedness. When God’s people ignored judgment after judgment, God essentially said, “I’m done. The ‘shots across the bow’ are over. Now you will face me directly.” God’s patience had run out.

Meeting God

Judgments

Like Amos, other prophets warned the nations to prepare themselves for “resetting” encounters with God. These are the “brace yourself” messages. A similarly unsettling flurry of such declarations is found in Ezekiel.

And you, O son of man, thus says the Lord God to the land of Israel: An end! The end has come upon the four corners of the land. Now the end is upon you, and I will send my anger upon you; I will judge you according to your ways, and I will punish you for all your abominations. And my eye will not spare you, nor will I have pity, but I will punish you for your ways, while your abominations are in your midst. Then you will know that I am the LORD.
– Ezekiel 7:2-4, ESV

Is that it? Is he done? Oh, no, not even close. That’s just two verses. The rest of the chapter is filled with things like:

• Thus says the Lord God: Disaster after disaster! Behold, it comes. (v. 5)
• An end has come; the end has come; it has awakened against you. Behold, it comes. (v. 6)
• Your doom has come to you. (v. 7)
• The time has come; the day is near, a day of tumult. (v. 7)
• I will soon pour my wrath upon you, and send my anger against you. (v. 8)
• My eye will not spare. I will not have pity.
• Behold the day! Behold it comes! Your doom has come.

The message continues with this tone for another seventeen verses. The summary of the message for them and for those of us today is this:

I will punish you according to your ways, while your abominations are in your midst. Then you will know that I am the LORD, who strikes.
– Ezekiel 7:9b, ESV

Sometimes the “meet your God” messages were on behalf of God’s people, messages delivered to other nations. For example, God had this message for the Egyptian army of Pharaoh Neco:

The swift cannot flee away,
    nor the warrior escape;
in the north by the river Euphrates
    they have stumbled and fallen.

That day is the day of the Lord GOD of hosts,
    a day of vengeance,
    to avenge himself on his foes.

– Jeremiah 46:6, 10a, ESV

Theophanies

Sometimes, the encounter with God is not an occasion for judgment, but the encounter still calls for preparedness. We have records of God instructing his people to make preparation to meet Him, not for destruction, but because his holy presence requires such preparation.

When the people of Israel were camped at the foot of Mount Sinai, following their release from Egyptian slavery, they needed to prepare themselves for a meeting with the pure and holy God.

The LORD said to Moses, “Go to the people and consecrate them today and tomorrow, and let them wash their garments and be ready for the third day. For on the third day the LORD will come down on Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people.
– Exodus 19:10-11, ESV

Meeting with God, in the event described above, required days of physical, mental, and spiritual preparation. The people had to wash their clothes and set boundaries around the mountain so they wouldn’t be destroyed by God’s sheer holiness when it came upon the mountain.

What I find a sobering and somewhat unsettling thought is that the same God indwells me through his Holy Spirit. That fact, alone, should result in approaching my daily living much more soberly, with constant awareness that I walk with the same holy God.

We must never lose sight of the reality that God is holy and pure while we are so far from that. You may recall how, in an earlier encounter with God, Moses was instructed to keep his distance and to remove his footwear, because the very ground on which he stood was holy.¹

A Future, Final Reckoning

When we move to a New Covenant context, we move from the concept of nations facing direct geopolitical disasters, to individuals, each moving toward a final judgment.

And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.
– Hebrews 9:27-28, ESV

What is apparent in the verses above is that some will arrive at the final judgment with Christ and others without him. The former are prepared. The latter are not. Jesus spoke multiple parables wherein he urged people to anticipate his coming, to be prepared, awake, and looking for his arrival.

The Takeaway

Returning to Amos and his warning, “prepare to meet thy God,” such calls are almost always looking at the collision of human sinfulness with divine holiness. When humanity is submissive and compliant toward God, the meeting involves cleansing. When we are stubborn and resistant, the meeting involves unpleasantries that adorn our pathways.

Like the people Amos addressed, many in the church are playing “fast and loose” with God. In this instance, the Israelites weren’t necessarily abandoning God for idols. They were intensely religious, going to their altars to offer their sacrifices, singing their songs, performing the rituals. Their hearts, however, were detached from God. They tolerated injustice. They ignored and even oppressed the poor. They assumed the performance of their habitual acts of worship absolved them of their oversights.

When we, the body of Christ, reach that point, the warning from Amos to prepare to meet our God transitions from important to urgent. Not heeding the warning threatens to slide us into a posture of complacency toward spiritual matters.

Casual Grace

Dietrich Bonhoeffer coined the famous phrase “cheap grace” in his book best known as The Cost of Discipleship.² Today, I find it more appropriate to think of it as “casual grace.” This is the prevalent view that God is something like a passive, indulgent parent. “Oh, well. Kids will be kids.” In this view, because of God’s grace, he just lets things slide, and sin doesn’t really matter all that much.

Romans chapters five and six are a cruise missile aimed directly at such thinking. When we minimize the holiness of God, we lose our attitude of reverence toward him and our faith becomes dull.

God does not owe us a warning, but he provides warnings throughout scripture. The fact that God says to his people, “Prepare! Brace yourselves,” confirms that the doorway to repentance is open, and the church of today needs to avail itself of the opportunity to pass through that doorway.

It is dangerous and foolish thing for any individual or nation to ignore, refuse, or oppose the God of creation. He made all things, He knows all things, and He judges all things. “The LORD, The God of hosts, is his name.”

1. Exodus 3:5
2. Bonhoeffer, D. (1995). Discipleship (B. Green & R. Krauss, Trans.; G. B. Kelly & J. D. Godsey, Eds.). (p. 43). Fortress Press. (Original work published 1937)