"YHWH is His Name" (Amos 5:8,9)

Amos now begins an extended proclamation of woes against Israel that will go through chapter six. And he starts it out with a poetic, descriptive introduction of God.

“He who made the Pleiades and Orion,
and turns deep darkness into the morning
and darkens the day into night,
who calls for the waters of the sea
and pours them out on the surface of the earth,
the Lord is his name;
who makes destruction flash forth against the strong,
so that destruction comes upon the fortress.”

I love scripture like this. The way the Creator talks about creation, as something that would make sense to the prescientific mind without contradicting things we know today. Truth is truth. Pleiades and Orion are powerful images for the work God did in creating the universe. Both star clusters that are relatively close to earth and very visible to the naked eye, they are natural reference points.

Orion encompasses the Orion Nebula, which is an area where a lot of star formation is visible. We have learned more things about star formation observing it than any other area of space. That fact makes this verse even more powerfully descriptive to us today. The laws that God set up in the universe are on full display there. Pleiades as observed by us today (and in Biblical times) is a star cluster passing through another nebula, and its formation appears to have been similar to what we see in the Orion Nebula, just further along in the process.

Other natural processes that God reminds us of here are the passage of day and night, and the water cycle. These are processes we can count upon and trust, as they have been set up by a Creator who established the way the universe works and maintains the laws and processes of the universe.

This is the Creator God, YHWH is His name. But He is more than just the Creator who set things in motion. He is active in the universe in a personal way. We see this in the next verse.

God flashes destruction on the strong evil in the world. He judges against sin and injustice. He will not sit idly by as men disobey the moral laws He established in the universe. Just as natural laws must be followed, so to must moral, supernatural ones. The woes about to be delivered to Israel are just, and they are assured.