Albert Barnes Commentary Amos 2:4

"Thus saith Jehovah: For three transgressions of Judah, yea, for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because they have rejected the law of Jehovah, and have not kept his statutes, and their lies have caused them to err, after which their fathers did walk:" — Amos 2:4 (ASV)

For three transgressions of Judah etc. - Rup.: "Here too there is no difference between Jew and Gentile. The word of God, a just judge, shows no partiality. Those whom sin joins together, the sentence of the Judge does not separate in punishment" (Romans 2:12).

"For as many as have sinned without law will also perish without law, and as many as have sinned in the law will be judged by the law."

Jerome: "Those other nations, Damascus and the rest, He does not rebuke for having cast away the law of God and despised His commandments, for they did not have the written law, but only that of nature."

So then, concerning them He says that "they corrupted all their compassions"—and similar things. But Judah, who, at that time, had the worship of God and the temple and its rites, and had received the law and commandments and judgments and precepts and testimonies, is rebuked and convicted by the Lord, because it had "cast aside His law and not kept His commandments;" therefore it should be punished as it deserved.

And since they rejected and despised these, then, consequently, "their lies deceived them," that is, their idols; lies on their part who made them and worshiped them for the true God, and lies and lying to them, as deceiving their hopes. For an idol is nothing in the world (1 Corinthians 8:4), just as all the vanities in the world of which people make idols are nothing, but they deceive by a vain show, as if they were something.

Jerome: "They would not have been deceived by their idols, unless they had first rejected the law of the Lord and not kept His commandments."

They had sinned with a high hand: despising and so rejecting the law of God; and so He despised and rejected them, leaving them to be deceived by the lies which they themselves had chosen.

So it always is with man. Man must either love God’s law and hate and abhor lies (Psalms 119:163), or he will despise God’s law and cling to lies.

He first in act despises God’s law (and whoever does not keep it, despises it), and then he must inevitably be deceived by some idol of his own, which becomes his God. He first willfully chooses his own lie, that is, whatever he chooses apart from God, and then his own lie deceives him.

So, morally, liars in the end believe themselves. So, whatever false maxim anyone has adopted against his conscience, whether in belief or practice, to justify what he wills against the will of God, or to explain away what God reveals and he dislikes—stifling and lying to his conscience—in the end deceives his conscience. And finally, a man believes that to be true which, before he had lied to his conscience, he knew to be false.

The prophet uses a bold word in speaking of man’s dealings with his God: despises. Man carries on the serpent’s first fraud, Hath God indeed said? Man would not willingly admit that he is directly opposed to the Mind of God. Man, in his powerlessness, at war with Omnipotence, and, in his limited knowledge, with Omniscience! It would be too silly, as well as too terrible.

So he smooths it over for himself, lying to himself. "God’s word must not be taken so precisely;" "God cannot have meant;" "the Author of nature would not have created us so, if He had meant;" and all the other excuses by which he would evade admitting to himself that he is directly rejecting the Mind of God and trampling it underfoot.

Scripture draws back the veil. Judah had the law of God and did not keep it; then, he despised it. On the one side was God’s will, His Eternal Wisdom, His counsel for man's good; on the other, what debasements! On the one side were God’s awful threats, on the other, His extraordinary promises.

Yet man chose whatever he willed, lying to himself, and acting as if God had never threatened or promised or spoken. This ignoring of God’s known Will and law and revelation is to despise them, as effectually as to curse God to His face (Job 2:5). This rejection of God was hereditary.

Their lies were those after which their fathers walked, in Egypt and from Egypt onward, in the wilderness (see the note at Amos 5:25-26), "making the image of the calf of Egypt and worshiping Baalpeor and Ashtoreth and Baalim." Evil acquires a sort of authority by time. People become accustomed to evils to which they have become accustomed.

False maxims, undisputed, are thought indisputable. They are in possession; and possession is held a good title. The popular error of one generation becomes the axiom of the next. The descent of the image of the great goddess Diana from Jupiter or of the Koran, becomes a thing which cannot be spoken against (Acts 19:35–36).

The lies after which the fathers walked deceive the children. "The children canonize the errors of their fathers." Human opinion is as dogmatic as revelation. The second generation of error demands as implicit submission as God’s truth.

The transmission of error against Himself, God says, aggravates its evil, does not excuse it (Nehemiah 5:5). "Judah is the Church. In her the prophet reproves whoever, worshiping his own vices and sins, comes to have that as a god by which he is overcome; as Peter says, Whereby a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage (2 Peter 2:19).

The covetous worships mammon; the glutton, his belly (Philippians 3:19); the impure, Baalpeor; she who, living in pleasure, is dead while she lives (1 Timothy 5:6), the pleasure in which she lives."

Of such idols the world is full. Every fair form, every idle imagination, everything which gratifies self-love, passion, pride, vanity, intellect, sense, each the most refined or the most debased, is such a lie, as soon as man loves and regards it more than his God.