We all want revival. When I was a boy we knew exactly when it would come. Every third week of July. It was on the church calendar. July was the season for revival. But a less pragmatic view of history and of Scripture shows that in order for something to be revived, it must be dead.
If ever there was a dead church, it was the Church in the Northern Kingdom of Amos’ day. In the final chapter of Amos, things look bleak. The prophet has pronounced death to the nation, yet he says. “In that day, I will raise up the fallen tabernacle of David.”
The condition of the church in our day is dismal, yet let us pray that in our day, God will raise up the fallen tabernacle of David. In preparing to preach this passage, I enjoyed a few timely exhortations to modern preachers from Ebenezer Erskine’s Sermon, The Tabernacle of David Ruined By Man, and Reared up by the Mighty God, upon the text, Amos 9:8-11. The following excerpts are long, but well worth reading and considering.
The Lord commands his ministers to “cry aloud, and to spare not, to lift up their voice like a trumpet, and show his people their transgressions, and the house of Jacob their sins.” It is a sign that the watchman is in a confederacy with the enemy, who is silent when the enemy is breaking down the carved work of God’s temple : can that man be counted faithful to his trust?
The sacred mysteries, typified in the tabernacle, are now opened in the promulgation of the gospel: hence, in Rev. xi. 19, it is said, ” The temple of God was opened, and the ark of his testament was seen.” It is the great business of ministers of the gospel, now under the New Testament, to disclose or open the ark of the covenant of grace, to preach Christ, and the manifold wisdom of God through him, in the salvation of lost sinners; which things the cherubim, or angels, desire to look into.”
The tabernacle of David is fallen and ruinous, when the oracles of God, the law and the testimony, are not carefully kept, and purely dispensed. Blessed be God, we have the written word in purity, we have excellent standards of doctrine in our Confession of Faith and Catechisms. But how is the law and testimony dispensed and given out through many corners in Scotland, when an empty jingle of human oratory, and dry harangues of heathenish morality, or virtue, as they call it, are substituted in the room of the gospel of Christ? a natural kind of religion preached up, and the supernatural mysteries of the gospel, such as the incarnation and satisfaction of the Son of God, justification by his imputed righteousness; regeneration, sanctification, or gospel-holiness, generally exploded as unfashionable among many of our young ministers?
The weapons that are “mighty through God for pulling down the strong-holds” of Satan, are cast away, and weapons that are merely carnal taken up in their room. We have ministers now-a-days, who, instead of teaching men to deny themselves, do teach from press and pulpit, that self-love is the foundation and original of moral virtue, or of all the duties required in the moral law; and carnal reason is asserted to be the first principle of religion. And although Arian, Socinian, Arminian, and other detestable and abominable errors be rampant; yet where is there a suitable banner of a testimony emitted against them, that it might be given unto them that fear him? Higher censures have been inflicted upon men for preaching the truths of God, than upon others for denying the supreme and independent Deity of the Son of God.
The good news is that despite this sorrowful state of preaching in the Church of Erskine’s day as well as ours, he declares that “God many times ushers in a glorious works of reformation, by very cloudy, dark, and dismal dispensations of providence.” In that day I will raise up the fallen tabernacle of David! May it be so in our day!
