Albert Barnes Commentary Amos 4:6

"And I also have given you cleanness of teeth in all your cities, and want of bread in all your places; yet have ye not returned unto me, saith Jehovah." — Amos 4:6 (ASV)

And I, I too have given you - Such had been their gifts to God, worthless, because lacking that which alone God requires of His creatures: a loving, simple, single-hearted, loyal obedience. So then God had only one gift which He could bestow, one only out of the rich storehouse of His mercies, since everything else was abused—chastisement. Yet this too is a great gift of God, a pledge of His love, who did not want them to perish; a guarantee of greater favors, had they used it. It is a great gift of God, that He should care for us, so as to chasten us.

The chastisements too were no ordinary chastisements, but those which God forewarned in the law that He would send; and if they repented, He would, amid the chastisements, forgive. This famine God had sent everywhere, “in all their cities,” and “in all their places,” great and small. Israel thought that its calves, that is, nature, gave them these things. “She did not know,” God says, “that I gave her corn and wine and oil” (Hosea 2:8); but she said, “These are my rewards that my lovers have given me” (Hosea 2:12). In the powers and operations of “nature,” they forgot the God and Author of nature.

It was then the direct corrective of this delusion that God withheld those powers and functions of nature. So Israel might learn, if it were willing, the vanity of its worship from its fruitlessness. Scripture records some such great famines in the time of Elijah and Elisha (1 Kings 17; 1 Kings 18; 2 Kings 8:1–6); but it relates them only when God visibly intervened to bring, remove, or mitigate them. Amos here speaks of other famines, which God sent, as He foretold in the law, but which produced no genuine fruits of repentance.

And you returned not to Me - He says not that they “returned not at all,” but that they “returned not wholly, quite back to God.” In fact, the emphatic saying, “you did not return quite to Me,” so as to reach Me, implies that they did, in a way, return. Israel’s worship was a half, halting worship (1 Kings 18:21). But a half-worship is no worship; a half-repentance is no repentance; repentance for one sin or one set of sins is no repentance, unless the soul repents of all it can recall in which it displeased its God. God does not half-forgive; so neither must man half-repent.

Yet of its one fundamental sin, the worship of nature instead of God, Israel would not repent. And so, whatever they did was not that entire repentance on which God, in the law, had promised forgiveness—repentance which stopped short of nothing but God.