The Coming Economic Collapse

You may turn in your Bibles to the book of Amos in chapter 4. We will be in the book of Amos today, friends, as I feel there are several parallel aspects to it that apply to our day. Amos was a fiery prophet of God, and he was a country boy. Amos was called into the ministry by God, as seen in Amos chapter 7 and verse 15.

And the Lord took me as I followed the flock, and the Lord said unto me, Go, prophesy unto my people Israel. I believe, friends, some of the best preachers I have heard have been country boys. Much of Amos's references and images are drawn from country life.

Amos was a contemporary of Hosea, Micah, Isaiah, and Jonah, and he preached a double-fisted message of a call to repentance and a prediction of the destruction of Israel. Amos was rigorously opposed by false prophets like Amaziah, and his message was both unheeded and unpopular because the people were enjoying a season of great peace and prosperity. For under Jeroboam II, Israel was at the peak of material and political success, and it was this material prosperity which made the people forget God.

Very much like our situation in America today, where a self-reliant church sits in material comforts and self-indulgence. Amos warned the people of God to turn back to God in repentance, but they refused to listen and to heed those warnings. Soon the remedial judgments of God began to fall upon them, and as each remedial judgment went unheeded, another came on the heels of it with increased severity.

We find this pattern in Amos chapter 4, beginning in verse 6, which is our passage today. And I have also given you a cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and want of bread in all your places. Yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the Lord? Judgment number one was that God sent a famine in the land.

In his mercy, he sent them a famine, with the purpose that this affliction would turn the people back to God. But how did they respond? Yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the Lord? We see judgment number two in verse 7. And also I have withholden the rain from you, when there were yet three months to the harvest, and I caused it to rain upon one city, and caused it not to rain upon another city. One peace was rained upon, and the peace whereupon it rained not withered.

This remedial judgment from God is more severe than the last one. A person can go without food for a week, but man cannot live long without water. God sent a drought to his disobedient people.

Did they repent and turn back to him? No, yet have ye not returned unto me. The next judgment from God becomes more severe than the preceding ones that went unheeded. God sends them a financial collapse.

We see this in verse 9. I have smitten you with blasting and mildew. When your gardens, and your vineyards, and your fig trees, and your olive trees increased, the palmer worm devoured them. Yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the Lord? Our economy today is a house of cards.

The dollar has nothing back in it but our tarnished reputation. A global depression can occur at any moment, as the economies of the world can fall like dominoes, one crashing into the other. If China collapsed, America would be right behind it.

We live at a time when the nations of the world have rejected the God of the Bible. Sin is legalized and evil promoted country by country. No one is without guilt.

All have dirty hands. God has sent one natural disaster after another to this nation of ours in the forms of fires, and floods, and tornadoes, and earthquakes, and we still refuse to turn back to God in repentance. So he allows the devil to wreak havoc among us by mass shootings, killing us in our own offices and shopping centers in several states, people being gunned down in places like Walmart, and even this doesn't faze us to the point of getting us to repentance, as judgments unheeded increase in severity.

The next judgment that will hit this nation is where God knows that will hurt us the most, and that's our wallets. An economic collapse is impending because of our disobedience to God. We have disobeyed him on several levels.

As a church, we are a nation of hoarders who want to grow more prosperous for our own selfish benefit. We only give 10% of our money to God because we think it's our money, when it never was our money to begin with. Everything we have belongs to God, including all our finances.

By being hoarders, we hinder the spread of the gospel in a day where people need it the most, as time is fast running out before Antichrist will soon appear on the horizon. Because we hoard our money and trust in our net worth and our investment portfolios, we fail to give God the way God wants us to give for the spread of the gospel. God wants us to give sacrificially out of our want, not out of our abundance.

A few understand this principle and give sacrificially to the work of God for his glory, but most church folk today hoard their wealth for their families. Therefore, the spread of the gospel does not sound forth as it could, and there are still 1,200 languages without even a Gospel of John in their native tongue. Bible translation suffers, but there's enough money in Christian hands right now to meet this need.

But the need goes unmet because we hoard our money for ourselves while others perish. Another reason for the coming economic collapse is how we grow our wealth through the stock market by participating in corporate profits from corporations that reject God, hate God, and promote evil. Many Christians who are invested in the stock market own mutual funds.

These mutual funds own shares of companies that are known as sin stocks like gaming and alcohol and tobacco companies like Budweiser and Philip Morris and casino stocks. Most Christians don't even realize this or overlook it, and they enjoy profits from companies they normally would not go out and buy their products from because of their Christian convictions. What people don't realize is that most companies now are conglomerates that own other companies, and as you own shares in a mutual fund, you also own shares in cable television that is a purveyor of pornography.

Most mutual funds have a large holding in Disney Company. Disney promotes sexual perversion by broadcasting it to our children in the form of entertainment. The bottom line is, God does not condone sin of any kind, and if we are participating in it by profiting from it, then he will simply pull the rug out from under the stock market.

After all, most of us aren't using that wealth for the spread of the gospel anyhow. Why should he allow us to grow fatter by things that are against his word? The stock market is highly overvalued, and historically at levels it has never been at before. Many stocks are trading at historical highs, and the party doesn't last forever.

When it comes crashing down, you could face ruin. In the stock market crash of 1929, people jumped out of windows to their deaths because their fortunes evaporated overnight. God will not be mocked, and America has mocked God long enough.

The sad thing is, the churches are too fast asleep in their spiritual declension to even sense their danger. If the Christians continue to ignore the warnings and judgments from God, then he has no choice but to increase the severity of those judgments to get our attention. If this nation and the churches of the land which comprise this nation, if we continue to fail to heed the warnings and refuse to repent and turn back to the God of the Bible, then you will not want to live in this nation, friends, that sits on the verge of utter destruction.

God have mercy upon us all.