The American Wisdom Series

Presents
Pamphlet #4046

My Note: Seek the Lord; not the church!  Ref. Scripture Amos 5:4-5

"A Bethel is a church, maybe even your church!"

Scripture: Amos 5:4  ¶For thus saith the LORD unto the house of Israel, Seek ye me, and ye shall live:
5  But seek not Bethel, nor enter into Gilgal, and pass not to Beersheba: for Gilgal shall surely go into captivity, and Bethel shall come to nought.
6  Seek the LORD, and ye shall live; lest he break out like fire in the house of Joseph, and devour it, and there be none to quench it in Bethel.

H1008 á?éú?àì be?yth-'e?l bayth-ale' From H1004 and H410; house of God; Beth-El, a place in Palestine: - Beth-el.

Christians are wandering from one church to another today, and not finding the truth from the Word of God taught.

Amos 5:3
For thus saith the Lord GOD; The city that went out by a thousand shall leave an hundred, and that which went forth by an hundred shall leave ten, to the house of Israel.
"That went out" means "that goeth to war"! And the war is that great "spiritual battle" of these end times when the king of Babylon comes against our people and few are left standing (spiritually), for but few shall have put on the full Gospel Armor to be able to withstand the fiery darts and the sword of the Wicked one (Eph. 6:16). How does one acquire the Gospel Armor? By going to church and listening to preachers?!!!! No, by seeking the LORD through His Word!

Thus we have the great message of Amos chapter five written to the virgins of Israel showing them the difference between wisdom and foolishness along with the incriminating evidence of the perversion in our land, pestilences and plagues which do come as a result of spiritual famine and departing from the wisdom of His Word! (See structure on page 1237 of the Companion Bible for complete structure.)

Seek ye Him (vs.4)
Seek NOT Beth-el (vs.5)
Seek the LORD (vs.6)
Seek Him (vs.7)
Let's begin with the promise from the LORD, YHVH, to His children and how it is He says they may receive Eternal Life.
[4] For thus saith the LORD unto the house of Israel, Seek ye me, and ye shall live:
Do you go to church? Have you wandered around from place to place and tried many different churches, seeking for the "true church"? Don't you know that if you are a Christian you ARE the church (look up "church", i.e. "ekklesia")? Christians make up the body, the congregation, the temple of Jesus Christ. However, it is written in this Book of Amos that the famine of the end times is for the hearing of His Word (Amos 8:11) and he is about to confirm that by explaining that the Bethels (houses of God) have become Beth-Avens (houses of emptiness) because the Word of God is NOT taught there line by line, in proper context and structure so that it can easily be understood . But even if you did find a church or group that teaches the Word of God, and there are some, it is still that WORD which is truth, not the church! You see, no church (Bethel) can sanctify you, but ONLY His Word, the Truth! John 17:17" Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth." So you do not have to "go anywhere" to Seek the Word of the LORD. Just ask the Holy Spirit for guidance and take the "little book" and eat ye all of it (Ezek. 2:9 - 3:3). Or... you can run around like a foolish virgin, like a chick with her head cut off

Live Link to- The famine is coming, in fact it is already here.
Amos 8:12
And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the LORD, and shall not find it.
Do not seek Bethel! If you truly seek Him, He is in the "volume of the Book" (Heb. 10:7)!
Seek Him there!
Amos 5:5
But seek not Bethel, nor enter into Gilgal, and pass not to Beer-sheba: for Gilgal shall surely go into captivity, and Bethel shall come to nought.
Beer-sheba means "well of seven" or even "well of covenant" for it is where Abraham made a covenant with the Philistines not to come against each other. Abraham gave Abimilech seven lambs as a witness to the transaction. Also, "Gilgal shall surely go in to captivity" reads "Gilgal galoh yigleh" in Hebrew which is a Paronomasia, a figure of speech, even a play on words, where similar sounding words are repeated. In English we would say, "The Roller, rolling, shall roll away."

However, this verse is really quite simple because Father is telling us that there is no salvation in any of those places, not in a church, not in setting up altars, and not in making covenants.

You must seek Him!        That is the ONLY way!

You can go to church (Bethel) regularly for years and years and more years and still be slaughtered with the majority in the spiritual warfare. You can set up altars all day and all night, such as at Gilgal, and you can make covenants all the way to Beer-sheba, but unless in these latter days you seek the LORD thy God through His Word, not man's, with all your heart and all your soul, your little old church isn't going to do you a bit of good on that Day! The sad part is that the life giving instructions to Seek Him and obey His Voice, not man's, was given to our people and recorded in His Word long, long ago! Here it is in the Book of Deuteronomy:

Deut. 4:29
But if from thence thou shalt seek the LORD thy God, thou shalt find him, if thou seek him with all thy heart and with all thy soul.
Perhaps you are a faithful church goer, so again the question to you is: "Will Bethel, your church, and all the wonderful works done there in the name of Christ, help you during the great tribulation?

How wise a virgin are you?
Do you "Seek Him" or do you "Seek Bethel"?
 Are you a Christ-man or are you a Church-man?
You see, it doesn't matter what some preacher may tell you or a movie or book some man produced and left behind may say, you are going to go through the tribulation of Satan, the false-christ, either as a protected witness for Jesus Christ, with your feet firmly planted in the field, or as a "witless" for the spurious messiah with your head somewhere in the clouds! You see, both the wise virgins and the foolish virgins go through the night, the hour of darkness. Haven't you read about them (Mat. 25:1-13)?

However, even though we all, the good, the bad, and the ugly, go through the tribulation of Satan, those who seek the Lord in these latter days and are obedient to His Voice, which is His Word, have nothing to fear. For as it is written in Rev. 9 that only those who have NOT the seal of God in their foreheads shall be harmed (spiritually slaughtered by the king of Babylon, Satan, when he comes to earth as  the false-christ). 

And yet the truth of the matter is, for the benefit of those who desire to escape physical harm in some rapture, that true Christian soldiers do not even fear he who can kill the flesh body. We are all going to shed the flesh and graduate from this animal life earth school sooner or later anyway, are we not? Matthew 10:28 "And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell."

Amos 8:11
Behold, the days come, saith the Lord GOD, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD:

Amos 8:12
And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the LORD, and shall not find it.
They shall wander from Sea to shining Sea, from border to border, back and forth, here and there, from one Bethel to another, and shall not find the truth from the Word of God taught.

What a waste of time and energy!

Haven't you read what Amos wrote: "Seek not Bethel (Amos 5:5)". There are way too many Amaziah's out there. Hey, you have the Word of God, the very Bread of Life, right before you!

Seek ye Him, and ye shall live!

Here is His PROMISE!

John 6:35
And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.
FEAST or FAMINE!

His Word or some Bethel!

It is your choice dear one!

Amos 8:13
In that day shall the fair virgins and young men faint for thirst.
You can thank all those good reverends Amaziahs and fancifully dressed evangelists and priests and all those highly polished brazen preachers for the famine! It is precisely because of the drought of His truth, the "Living Water" having been dried up by the scorching "fire" (remember Amos' second vision in chapter 7), that our nation (America) has become a valley of dry bones as described in Ezekiel 37! Remember what happened when Ezekiel was told to go teach the truth to them? Bone joined to bone and they came to life (spiritually)!

Live Link to- Can these bones live?
[14] They that swear by the sin of Samaria, and say, Thy god, O Dan, liveth; and, The manner of Beer-sheba liveth; even they shall fall, and never rise up again.
If you do some homework as you are instructed in 2 Tim 2:15, you will learn that Dan and Beer-sheba were where the golden calves were set up for people to go and worship instead of having to go to Jerusalem according to the Word of God. So the people quickly began to suffer from that Mad Cow disease of IDOLATRY, which is the "Sin of Samaria"! Who are they who swear, i.e. those who make oaths to the false god? The Amaziah types and their harlots! Again, the sin of Samaria, the sin of America, is IDOLATRY. Though they do it mostly because of ignorance, because they lack the knowledge of His Word, our people worship the wrong god, the false god, the instead of Jesus, the god of the golden calves which were set up at the borders in Dan and Beer-sheba. Again, the "sin" of Samaria, the capital of the 10 tribes of Israel and therefore representative of the whole, is IDOLATRY, the worship of another god instead of the "I AM the Lord thy God" of the first commandment.

Because it is so critical that one fully understands the "famine" of the end time caused by the lack of wisdom and knowledge from His Word, and in so far as all prophets are all in one accord concerning the events of these last days, let's let one of them give us some further explanation of the famine. We will conclude today's study with the words from Hosea, whose name means "salvation", as in the salvation of His people Israel:

Live Link to- The famine is coming, in fact it is already here.

Hosea 4:1
Hear the word of the LORD, ye children of Israel: for the LORD hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land.
He is not happy about the famine and the following pestilences:
[2] By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery, they break out, and blood toucheth blood.
This describes the Amaziah's/Pastors of many of our churches today.

They make false oaths (promises to our people) and lie (teaching traditions of men) and kill (souls, i.e. spiritually) and steal (steal the precious harvest) and commit adultery (idolatry). "They break out" means they "breach" the law, the Word of God and "blood touches blood" is a figure of speech meaning they commit "one sin after another".

One of the great lessons we learn in Hosea is that adultery is symbolic of idolatry, the greater sin, so while these sins of swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery certainly are prevalent in our land, one must understand that in reality they are but "symptoms" of our spiritual sickness caused by the lack of the knowledge of the Word of God.

We've got big problems in our land right now.

And now you know why!

To study the Bible is the noblest of all pursuits; to understand it, the highest of all goals.
We pray that with the guidance of the Holy Spirit, you accomplish both.
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