Albert Barnes Commentary Amos 4:12

"Therefore thus will I do unto thee, O Israel; [and] because I will do this unto thee, prepare to meet thy God, O Israel." — Amos 4:12 (ASV)

Therefore thus will I do to you – God says more by His silence. He had enumerated successive scourges. Now, with His hand uplifted to strike, He mentions none, but says, thus. Ribera states: “So people too, reluctant to name evils which they fear and detest, say, ‘God do so to me, and more also.’ God using the language of people.” Jerome comments: “Having said, ‘thus will I do to you,’ He is silent as to what He will do, so that Israel, hanging in suspense, having before it each sort of punishment (which are the more terrible because it imagines them one by one), may indeed repent, so that God does not inflict what He threatens.”

Prepare to meet your God – In judgment, face to face, final to them. All the judgments which had been sent until now were but heralds, forerunners of the judgment to come. He Himself was not in them. In them, He passed no sentence upon Israel. They were medicinal, corrective; they were not His final sentence.

Now, having tried all ways of recovering them in vain, God summons them before His tribunal. But although the judgment of the ten tribes, as a whole, was final, to individuals there was place for repentance. God never, in this life, bids people or individuals “prepare to meet Him” without a purpose of good to those who do prepare to receive His sentence aright.

He then does not say, “Come and hear your doom,” but prepare to meet your God. It has hope in it, to be commanded to prepare; yet more, that He whom they were to prepare to meet was their God. It must have recurred very often to the mind of the ten tribes during their unrestored captivity of over seven centuries before the coming of our Lord—a period as long as the whole existence of Rome from its foundation to its decay, as long as our history from our King Stephen until now.

Very often they must have thought, “We have not met Him yet,” and the thought must have dawned upon them: “It is because He willed to do thus with us that He commanded us to prepare to meet Him. He did not meet us when He did it. It was then something further on; it is in the Messiah that we are to meet and to see Him.”

Jerome states: “Prepare to meet your God, receiving with all eagerness the Lord coming to you.” So then, a further sense that lay in the words is this: “he (as Hosea did at the end) exhorts the ten tribes, after they had been led captive by the Assyrians, not to despond, but to prepare to meet their God, that is, to acknowledge and receive Christ their God, when the Gospel would be preached to them by the Apostles.”

Ribera states: “God punishes, not in cruelty, but in love. He then warns those whom He strikes to understand what He means by these punishments, not thinking themselves abandoned by God, but, even when they seem most cast away and reprobate, rousing themselves in the hope of God’s mercy through Christ, to call upon God and prepare to meet their God. For no one’s salvation is so desperate, no one is so stained with every kind of sin, that God does not still come to him by holy inspirations, to bring back the wanderer to Himself. You therefore, O Israel, whoever you are, who once served God and now serve the vilest pleasures, when you feel God coming to you, Prepare to meet Him. Open the door of your heart to that most kind and benevolent Guest, and, when you hear His Voice, do not deafen yourself; do not flee, like Adam. For He seeks you, not to judge, but to save you.”