It was there at Gilgal that Joshua piled up the twelve stones taken from the Jordan River. Then Joshua said to the Israelites, “In the future your children will ask, ‘What do these stones mean? Then you can tell them, ‘This is where the Israelites crossed the Jordan on dry ground.’ Joshua 4:20-22 NLT
The prophet Amos spoke to the people of the northern kingdom of Israel in the last years of that kingdom’s existence, years when it seemed everything was going well, and they were experiencing the blessings of God. He tells them sarcastically to go to Gilgal and sin (4:4). What is that about?
First of all, we must ask why they would go to Gilgal at all. What was that place and what was its attraction? If you look at the book of Joshua, you will see that Gilgal, in the Jordan Valley just north of Jericho, was the “base camp” for the Israelites during their occupation of the land west of the Jordan. So it was a place with fond memories of “the good old days.” But there was an additional reason for the place’s interest to later generations. That is seen in the passage printed above. The pile of stones commemorating the dry-shod crossing of the Jordan was there. Just to go there and look at those stones was a reminder that this land is ours, given to us by God. “Goose bumps!”
So what is Amos’s problem? Moses told the people very clearly in the book of Deuteronomy that they should never forget what God had done for them in the past. So these people are remembering, right? Yes, but why remember? It is to remind us to live today in the light of what the past taught us. So you were converted at a certain altar in a certain church? So what? Have you grown in faith at all since that blessed day? Are you more today the person for whom Christ died than you were then? So your family has owned a cottage at a certain camp meeting for 50 years. So what? Do you now attend that camp meeting to become challenged, in C. S. Lewis’s words, to go “higher up and deeper in”? Or do you go there for fond memories? Yes, remember. But why?
Called To Be Transformed 