The stink of death is sickening, horrifying. Each living creature suffers due to the acute insufficiency of food. It is one of the most traditional of all plagues—and famines are still with us to this day. We hear and read of them sweeping across massive territories leaving people and animals in their wakes. The hunger brings a mix of such starvation and starvation, life grinds to a virtual dead stop.
Not even the otherwise hearty and once-powerful four-footed beasts of the field can survive if the famine remains.
We who live in “the land of plenty” can only imagine such scenes. With fast-food places at nearly every corner in our busy towns, corner shop shelves stacked high with lots of food and typically a selection of different types of the same food to pick from—all of it in abundance—and, additionally, many eateries to suit our food fancy, we do not think about what life would be like where none of that is right.
The Bible speaks rather regularly of famines but nowhere more eloquently than in the scribblings of a rather obscure soothsayer named Amos. God used Amos’s pen to explain a crisis that would one day arrive, leaving humanity in the grip of a famine. However incredibly, it wouldn’t be a hunger for literal food or seared tongues hankering for clean water. It’d be a famine for hearing God’s truth announced. Here’s the way that the prophecy appears in Amos 8:11-12. “Behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord GOD,. Not a famine for bread or a thirst for water,. But rather for hearing the words of the LORD.
They’ll go to and fro to find the word of the LORD,. Without meaning to be overdramatic, that prophecy has come to pass. We now live in the middle of such a famine. The sound, unswerving, balanced, consistent, and healthy teaching and evangelizing of the Word of the Lord is barely heard here in these US or, for what it’s worth, around the planet.
There are churches and chapels, churches and churchs where spiritual activities abound. And there are folks of each convincing who talk and teach, who appear in the media, who write books, who talk about God and debate subjects the Bible addresses related to our times. But the absence of solid biblical food based mostly on sound doctrine, served continually and in healthy portions, is noticeable by its absence. Let’s recommit ourselves to breaking that famine.
