The Endless Pursuit of MORE Will One Day End

From Amos 8:

“The end [1] has come upon my people Israel;
I will never again pass by them.
3 The songs of the temple [2] shall become wailings [3] in that day,”
declares the Lord God.
“So many dead bodies!”
“They are thrown everywhere!”
“Silence!”

4 Hear this, you who trample on the needy
and bring the poor of the land to an end,
5 saying, “When will the new moon be over,
that we may sell grain?
And the Sabbath,
that we may offer wheat for sale,
that we may make the ephah small and the shekel [4] great
and deal deceitfully with false balances,
6 that we may buy the poor for silver
and the needy for a pair of sandals
and sell the chaff of the wheat?”

The end came for Israel in part because of their obsession with accumulating wealth. We were created by God to STEWARD his creation. This doesn't eliminate the possibility of ACCUMULATING his creation, but we should be warned that accumulation is NOT OUR PRIMARY DIRECTIVE. As with Israel, I think we have all experienced that the pursuit of wealth can alter our sensibilities and lead us to abuse what God has given to us as a blessing. Notice they abused:

1. Other people -- trampling others in order to gather their own wealth

2. Their faith -- religious gatherings had become a mildly inconvenient interruption to the their week of wealth creation.

3. Justice -- the desire for MORE drove them outside God's law AND man's law as they engaged in nefarious business practices.

Greed can be a nasty monster. The more often you feed it, the more likely it will eventually consume you.