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Daily Devotionals
Our Daily Homily - Volume 3
Amos 5:8—Seek Him that maketh the Pleiades and Orion. (R.V.)
This chapter resounds with invitations to seek God. He makes the Pleiades, which usher in the spring: seek Him when life is full of radiant hope and promise, in days of love and joy. But He also makes Orion, the precursor of tempests; be sure, therefore, to seek Him when the sky is overcast and lowering, and when He presses you to enter the boat and face the storm.
He turns the shadow of death into the morning. Thank God for this. There is a turning of death-shadow into morning, when despair gives place to hope; when the dear one begins to revive from sore sickness; when circumstances begin to brighten; and when the perplexity and darkness of this mortal life, with its separations and misunderstandings, shall brighten with the eternal day. Weave thoughts of God into all these glad experiences; but not less so, when He makes the day dark with night. It may be that you will come closest to Him then; as the little child will sit on the far side of the railway carriage from her mother till they enter a tunnel, and then there will be a little startled cry and a rush to the mother’s knee.
Sometimes the waters of the sea pour in on the land, engulfing the works of men, and devastating their toils. But amid all such scenes of desolation, the righteous have a secure hiding-place, suggested by the reference to the name Jehovah, with which this verse closes. "The name of the Lord is a strong tower; the righteous runneth unto it, and is safe."
"Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure;
What entered into thee,
That was, is, and shall be;
Time’s wheel runs back or stops—
Potter and clay endure."
