18 "Woe to you who desire the day of Yahweh! Why do you long for the day of Yahweh? It is darkness, and not light.
*Minor differences ignored. Grouped by changes, with first version listed as example.
The Prophet expresses here more fully what he briefly and obscurely touched upon as to the passing of God through the land; for he shows that the Israelites acted strangely in setting up the name of God as their shield, as though they were under his protection, and in still entertaining a hope, though oppressed with many evils, because God had promised that they should be the objects of his care: he says that this was an extremely vain pretense. He yet more sharply reproves their presumption by saying, "Woe to those who desire the day of Jehovah!" This appears, even at the firstview, to be very severe; but we need not wonder that the Prophet burns with too much indignation towards hypocrites, from whom that security, through which they became ferocious against God, could hardly be shaken off. And we see that the holy Spirit treats hypocrites everywhere with much more severity than those who are openly impious and wicked: for the despisers of God, how stupid soever they may be, do not yet excuse their vices; but hypocrites seek ever to draw in God into the quarrel, and they have their veils to cover their turpitude: it was therefore necessary to treat them, as the Prophet does here, with sharpness and severity. Woe, he says, to those who desire the day of Jehovah! Some expound this day of Jehovah of the day of death, and pervert the meaning of the Prophet; for they think that the Prophet speaks here of desperate men, who seek self-destruction, or lay violent hands on themselves. Woe, then, to those who desire the day of Jehovah, that is, who have recourse to hanging or to poison, as no other remedy appears to them. But the Prophet, as I have already reminded you, does here on the contrary rouse hypocrites. Others think that the contempt which Amos has before noticed, is here reproved; and this in part is true; but they do not sufficiently follow up the Prophet's design; for they do not observe what is special in this place, -- that hypocrites flattered themselves, falsely assuming this as a truth, that they were the people of God, and that God was bound to them. Though, then, the Israelites had been a hundred times perfidious, they yet continued arrogantly to boast of their circumcision; and then the law and the sacrifices, and all their ceremonies, were to them as banners, -- "O! we are a holy nation, and God's heritage; we are the children of Abraham, and the redeemed of the Lord; we are a priestly kingdom." As then these things were ready in the mouth of all, the Prophet says, "Woe to those who desire the day of Jehovah!" And, indeed, when the Lord had begun to punish them for their sins, they still said, "The Lord, it may be, intends to try our constancy: but how can he destroy us? for he would then be false; his covenant cannot be made void: it is then certain that we shall be saved, and that he will be shortly reconciled to us." They did not indeed expect that God would be propitious to them; but as they were overwhelmed with many evils, they sought to allay their sorrows by such a drug. When therefore the Prophet saw, that the Israelites so waywardly flattered themselves, and so foolishly and wickedly laid claim to the name of God, he says, Woe to those who desire the day of Jehovah! What will this be, he says, to you? The day of Jehovah will be darkness and not light; as though he said, "God is an enemy to you, and the nearer he comes to you, the more grievously you must be afflicted: he will bring nothing to you but devastation, for he will come armed to destroy you. There is therefore no reason for you to boast that you are a chosen people, that you are a priestly kingdom, for ye are fallen away from the favor of God; and this is to be imputed to your own misconduct. God then is armed for your destruction; and whenever he will appear, he will at the same time pursue you with cruelty and violence; and it will be for your destruction that God will come thus armed to you. Whenever then the Lord will come, your evils must necessarily be increased. The day then of Jehovah will be darkness and not light." He afterwards confirms this truth --
Woe unto you that desire - for yourselves.
The Day of the Lord - There were "mockers in those days" 2-Peter 3:3-4; Jde 1:18, as there are now, and as there shall be in the last. And as the "scoffers in the last days" 2-Peter 3:3-4; Jde 1:18 shall say, "Where is the promise of His coming?" so these said, "let Him make speed and hasten His work, that we way see it, and let the council of the Holy One of Israel draw nigh and come, that we may know it" Isaiah 5:19. Jeremiah complained; "they say unto me, where is the word of the Lord? let it come now!" Jeremiah 17:15. And God says to Ezekiel, "Son of man, what is that proverb that ye have in the land of Israel, saying, the days are prolonged, and every vision faileth? The vision that he seeth is for many days, and he prophesieth of the times far off" Ezekiel 12:22, Ezekiel 12:27. "They would shew their courage and strength of mind, by longing for the Day of the Lord, which the prophets foretold, in which God was to shew forth His power on the disobedient."
Lap.: "Let it come, what these prophets threaten until they are hoarse, let it come, let it come. It is ever held out to us, and never comes. We do not believe that it will come at all, or if it do come, it will not be so dreadful after all; it will go as it came." It may be, however, that they who scoffed at Amos, cloked their unbelief under the form of desiring the good days, which God had promised by Joel afterward. Jerome: "There is not," they would say, "so much of evil in the captivity, as there is of good in what the Lord has promised afterward." Amos meets the hypocrisy or the scoff, by the appeal to their consciences, "to what end is it to you?" They had nothing in common with it or with God. Whatever it had of good, was not for such as them. "The Day of the Lord is darkness, and not light." Like the pillar of the cloud between Israel and the Egyptians, which betokened God's presence, every day in which He shows forth His presence, is a day of light and darkness to those of different characters.
The prophets foretold both, but not to all. These scoffers either denied the Coming of that day altogether, or denied its terrors. Either way, they disbelieved God, and, disbelieving Him, would have no share in His promises. To them, the Day of the Lord would be unmixed darkness, distress, desolation, destruction, without one ray of gladness. The tempers of people, their belief or disbelief, are the same, as to the Great Day of the Lord, the Day of Judgment. It is all one, whether people deny it altogether or deny its terrors. In either case, they deny it, such as God has ordained it. The words of Amos condemn them too. "The Day of the Lord" had already become the name for every day of judgment, leading on to the Last Day. The principle of all God's judgments is one and the same. One and the same are the characters of those who are to be judged. In one and the same way, is each judgment looked forward to, neglected, prepared for, believed, disbelieved. In one and the same way, our Lord has taught us, will the Great Day come, as the judgments of the flood or upon Sodom, and will find people prepared or unprepared, as they were then. Words then, which describe the character of any day of Judgment, do, according to the Mind of God the Holy Spirit, describe all, and the last also. Of this too, and that chiefly, because it is the greatest, are the words spoken, "Woe unto you, who desire," amiss or rashly or scornfully or in misbelief, "the Day of the Lord, to what end is it for you? The Day of the Lord is darkness and not light."
Rup.: "This sounds a strange woe. It had not seemed strange, had he said, 'Woe to you, who fear not the Day of the Lord.' For, 'not to fear,' belongs to bad, ungodly people. But the good may desire it, so that the Apostle says, 'I desire to depart and to be with Christ' Philippians 1:23. Yet even their desire is not without a sort of fear. For 'who can say, I have made my heart clean?' Proverbs 20:9. Yet that is the fear, not of slaves, but of sons; 'nor hath it torment,' 1-John 4:18, for it hath 'strong consolation through hope' Hebrews 6:18; Romans 5:2. When then he says, 'Woe unto you that desire the Day of the Lord,' he rebuketh their boldness, 'who trust in themselves, that they are righteous' Luke 18:9." "At one and the same time," says Jerome, "the confidence of the proud is shaken off, who, in order to appear righteous before people, are accustomed to long for the Day of Judgment and to say, 'Would that the Lord would come, would that we might be dissolved and be with Christ,' imitating the Pharisee, who spake in the Gospel, "God, I thank Thee, that I am not as other men are" Luke 18:11-12.
For the very fact, that they "desire," and do not fear, "the Day of the Lord," shows, that they are worthy of punishment, since no man is without sin 2-Chronicles 6:36, and the "stars are not pure in His sight" Job 25:5. And He "concluded all under sin, that he might have mercy upon all" Galatians 3:22; Romans 11:32. Since, then, no one can judge concerning the Judgment of God, and we are to "give account of every idle word" Matthew 12:36, and Job "offered sacrifices" Job 1:5 daily for his sons, lest they should have thought something perversely against the Lord, what rashness it is, to long to reign alone! 1-Corinthians 4:8. In troubles and distresses we are accustomed to say, 'would that we might depart out of the body and be freed from the miseries of this world,' not knowing that, while we are in this flesh, we have place for repentance; but if we depart, we shall hear that of the prophet, "in hell who will give Thee thanks?" Psalm 6:5. That is "the sorrow of this world" 2-Corinthians 7:10, which worketh "death," wherewith the Apostle would not have him sorrow who had sinned with his father's wife; the sorrow whereby the wretched Judas too perished, who, "swallowed up with overmuch sorrow" 2-Corinthians 2:7, joined murder Matthew 27:3-5 to his betrayal, a murder the worst of murders, so that where he thought to find a remedy, and that death by hanging was the end of ills, there he found the lion and the bear, and the serpent, under which names I think that different punishments are intended, or else the devil himself, who is rightly called a lion or bear or serpent."
Wo unto you that desire the day of the Lord - The prophet had often denounced the coming of God's day, that is, of a time of judgment; and the unbelievers had said, "Let his day come, that we may see it." Now the prophet tells them that that day would be to them darkness - calamity, and not light - not prosperity.
Woe unto you that (k) desire the day of the LORD! to what end [is] it for you? the day of the LORD [is] darkness, and not light.
(k) He speaks in this way because the wicked and hypocrites said they were content to endure God's judgments, whereas the godly tremble and fear; (Jeremiah 30:7; Joel 2:2, Joel 2:11), (Zephaniah 1:15).
Woe unto you that desire the day of the Lord,.... Either the day of Christ's coming in the flesh, as Cocceius interprets it; and which was desired by the people of Israel, not on account of spiritual and eternal salvation, but that they might be delivered by him from outward troubles and enemies, and enjoy temporal felicity; they had a notion of him as a temporal Saviour and Redeemer, in whose days they should possess much outward happiness, and therefore desired his coming; see Malachi 3:1; or else the day of the Lord's judgments upon them, spoken of by the prophet, and which they were threatened with, but did not believe it would ever come; and therefore in a scoffing jeering manner, expressed their desire of it, to show their disbelief of it, and that they were in no pain or fear about it, like those in Isaiah 5:19;
to what end is it for you? why do you desire it? what benefit do you expect to get by it?
the day of the Lord is darkness, and not light; it will bring on affliction, calamities, miseries, and distress, which are often in Scripture expressed by "darkness", and not prosperity and happiness, which are sometimes signified by "light"; see Isaiah 5:30; and even the day of the coming of Christ were to the unbelieving Jews darkness, and not light; they were blinded in it, and given up to judicial blindness and darkness; they hating and rejecting the light of Christ, and his Gospel, and which issued in great calamities, in the utter ruin and destruction of that people, John 3:19.
Woe unto those that desire the day of the Lord's judgments, that wish for times of war and confusion; as some who long for changes, hoping to rise upon the ruins of their country! but this should be so great a desolation, that nobody could gain by it. The day of the Lord will be a dark, dismal, gloomy day to all impenitent sinners. When God makes a day dark, all the world cannot make it light. Those who are not reformed by the judgments of God, will be pursued by them; if they escape one, another stands ready to seize them. A pretence of piety is double iniquity, and so it will be found. The people of Israel copied the crimes of their forefathers. The law of worshipping the Lord our God, is, Him only we must serve. Professors thrive so little, because they have little or no communion with God in their duties. They were led captive by Satan into idolatry, therefore God caused them to go into captivity among idolaters.
Woe unto you who do not scruple to say in irony, "We desire that the day of the Lord would come," that is, "Woe to you who treat it as if it were a mere dream of the prophets" (Isaiah 5:19; Jeremiah 17:15; Ezekiel 12:22).
to what end is it for you!--Amos taking their ironical words in earnest: for God often takes the blasphemer at his own word, in righteous retribution making the scoffer's jest a terrible reality against himself. Ye have but little reason to desire the day of the Lord; for it will be to you calamity, and not joy.
The first turn. - Amos 5:18. "Woe to those who desire the day of Jehovah! What good is the day of Jehovah to you? It is darkness, and not light. Amos 5:19. As if a man fleeth before the lion, and the bear meets him; and he comes into the house, and rests his hand upon the wall, and the snake bites him. Amos 5:20. Alas! is not the day of Jehovah darkness, and not light; and gloom, and no brightness in it?" As the Israelites rested their hope of deliverance from every kind of hostile oppression upon their outward connection with the covenant nation (Amos 5:14); many wished the day to come, on which Jehovah would judge all the heathen, and redeem Israel out of all distress, and exalt it to might and dominion above all nations, and bless it with honour and glory, applying the prophecy of Joel in ch. 3 without the least reserve to Israel as the nation of Jehovah, and without considering that, according to Joel 2:32, those only would be saved on the day of Jehovah who called upon the name of the Lord, and were called by the Lord, i.e., were acknowledged by the Lord as His own. These infatuated hopes, which confirmed the nation in the security of its life of sin, are met by Amos with an exclamation of woe upon those who long for the day of Jehovah to come, and with the declaration explanatory of the woe, that that day is darkness and not light, and will bring them nothing but harm and destruction, and not prosperity and salvation. He explains this in Amos 5:19 by a figure taken from life. To those who wish the day of Jehovah to come, the same thing will happen as to a man who, when fleeing from a lion, meets a bear, etc. The meaning is perfectly clear: whoever would escape one danger, falls into a second; and whoever escapes this, falls into a third, and perishes therein. The serpent's bite in the hand is fatal. "In that day every place is full of danger and death; neither in-doors nor out-of-doors is any one safe: for out-of-doors lions and bears prowl about, and in-doors snakes lie hidden, even in the holes of the walls" (C. a. Lap.). After this figurative indication of the sufferings and calamities which the day of the Lord will bring, Amos once more repeats in v. 20, in a still more emphatic manner (הלא, nonne = assuredly), that it will be no day of salvation, sc. to those who seek evil and not good, and trample justice and righteousness under foot (Amos 5:14, Amos 5:15).
That desire - Scoffingly, not believing any such day would come. To what end - What do you think to get by it? Is darkness - All adversity, black and doleful. Not light - No joy, or comfort an it.
*More commentary available at chapter level.