| Though written
on the other side of a long expanse of time, the words of the Old
Testament prophets echo, even loudly, today. Though these prophets
spoke to their own era and their own people, their messages aren't just
interesting historical asides, tidbits on the lives and toils and loves
of another people in another place and in another epoch. They have been
preserved for us today because they have messages for us today. And
however different the style, the context, and the specifics, the
messages almost all come down to one thing: God is calling us to die to
self and surrender our sinful, wicked ways to Him; a God who forgives,
heals, restores; a God who will ultimately bring us into an existence
so wonderful that our imagination can't even begin to dare envision it.
Yet, as always, people have a hard time listening,
accepting, believing. Maybe the news, that of a God willing to forgive,
to heal, to pardon our sins, is simply too good for people to easily
believe? More than likely, however, people simply enjoy too much "the
pleasure of sin for a season" (even though the season always changes),
and thus these people don't want to heed God's merciful, loving voice.
Nevertheless, He calls anyway. And we hear His pleas,
His shouts, His begging, all through sacred Scripture, including the
book of Amos, the subject of this quarter's lesson study. In the Old
Testament, as in Amos, these calls often come in the form of the
prophetic messages, which usually begin with diatribes against the
continuing sin and apostasy of God's people, and often are followed by
vivid descriptions of where the continuing sin and apostasy will lead.
To the uninitiated, the Old Testament can sound like a fearful book
expressing the thoughts of a fearsome God. Those, however, who know
this God personally know, in fact, that the opposite is true. The
strong words and warnings of the prophets are nothing but the pleadings
and admonitions of a loving and caring God. Out of infinite love and
care, He is trying to save a people who, due to the nature of a fallen
world, are utterly incapable of saving themselves.
Even amid all the gloom and doom and warnings of
judgment and locusts, plagues and armies, captivity and fire, the
fibers of hope, of promise, of salvation, of redemption, and of
restoration are always woven through these messages. And that's
because, in the end, when all is said and done, one universal,
irrefutable, and eternal truth provides the foundation of all truth and
reality, and that is: Our God is a loving, saving, healing God who
calls out to us these simple words: "Seek Me and live."
Higher View of Things"
I n 1884, British clergyman and amateur mathematician
Edwin Abbott wrote Flatland, a book about the incredible adventures of
A. Square, a rather flat character who lived in two dimensions only.
For A. Square, the universe consisted of a single plane; reality (and
that's all reality) went either north and south, or east and west. The
notions of up and down, height and depth, were inconceivable.
A. Square once visited Lineland, whose inhabitants
lived in a single straight line alone; this meant that, for them,
reality existed as forward or backward only. Linelanders could not even
begin to conceive of anything such as width, and when A. Square tried
to explain that there was a greater dimension to reality than a mere
line, the notion was rebuffed by Linelanders as absurd.
A. Square then visited Pointland, where all reality
consisted only of a single point: There was no forward or backward (as
in Lineland) or no width (as in Flatland), and trying to convince
anyone in Pointland otherwise was as futile as trying to convince those
in Lineland that sideways existed.
Then one day A. Square was visited by someone from
Spaceland, a person who lived in three dimensions. A. Square thought it
ludicrous, this notion of a reality beyond the two dimensions that made
up the universe as it appeared to him. However, only after a visit to
Spaceland, did he eventually accept what he called "a higher view of
things." In fact, he tried to convince his Spaceland guide that there
could be dimensions of existence beyond even Spaceland, a notion that
his Spaceland guide rejected as "utterly inconceivable," just as
Pointlanders did with the idea of forward and backward, as Linelanders
did with the notion of sideways, and as A. Square first did with the
concept of height.
This quarter's study deals with the Old Testament
book of Amos, which reads almost like Abbott's Flatland, in the sense
that it tells about Someone, in this case the Lord, trying to help a
people understand a reality that goes beyond what's immediately
accessible to their senses. The Israelites were living only for the
moment, within the narrow confines of their little world, where things
seemed (and we stress that word seemed) so good. The reality, of
course- which was greater than the narrow view of reality that they
knew- turned out to be radically different from how it appeared. And,
like those in Pointland, Lineland, Flatland, and even in Spaceland,
they wouldn't easily listen to the One who tried to give them a
broader, wider, and more encompassing perspective.
no doubt, Leo Van Dolson, the author of this quarter's Bible Study
Guide, would like us, as we study these lessons, to ask ourselves the
crucial question: Are we limiting our view of reality to only what we
see, or will we open our hearts to the One who has, through the
revelation of His Son, given us "a higher view of things"?
(all lessons may not be posted)
School Study Helps
Jerry Giardina of Pecos, Texas, assisted by his wife,
Cheryl, prepares a series of helps to accompany the Sabbath School
lesson. He includes all related scripture and most EGW quotations.
Jerry has chosen the "New King James Version" of the scriptures this
quarter. It is used with permission. The study helps are
provided in three wordprocessing versions Wordperfect;
RTF for our
MAC friends; and HTML (Web
Last updated on September 22,
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Principal Contributors: Leo R. Van Dolson
Editor: Clifford Goldstein
Associate Editor: Lyndelle Brower Chiomenti.
Editorial Production Manager: Soraya Homayouni Parish.
Art and Design: Lars Justinen.
Pacific Press Coordinator: Paul A. Hey.
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