Amos 3-4
Dear RTB’ers,
I hope you all read John’s comment yesterday pointing to a post from last year. He provides good background for our reading of the prophets, even clarifying some of what I wrote yesterday. Also, in reading his post I was reminded that Amos was the first of the prophets that we read in The Chronological Bible. Amos was sent to prophecy to the Northern Kingdom and it was the first to fall, in 722 BC. So in our chronological study we read Amos in the context of our historical readings of II Chronicles and II Kings.
After blasting neighboring nations in chapter 1 and the first part of chapter 2, God (through Amos) now continues His judgment on Judah and Israel. We see that Judah is included in His judgments today as we see Him speaking to the whole family that I brought up out of the land of Egypt… (v. 3:1) Much of what Amos writes includes God’s concerns for inequality, for greed, for the rich subjugating the poor: …the oppressed in her midst… (v. 3:9); …those who store up violence and robbery in their strongholds… (v. 3:10); …you cows …on the mountain of Samaria, who oppress the poor, who crush the needy… (v. 4:1)
But God also has judgment against their “religion”. Here He is speaking sarcastically: Come to Bethel, and transgress… (continued in Amos 4:4-5). My Study Bible speaks well of the Northern Kingdom’s mix of religious ritual and human inequality: “They loved the forms and rituals of religion but did not love what God loves – goodness, mercy, kindness, justice.” We’ll see more of this mix as we continue in Amos.
Finally in Amos 4:6-13 God speaks of His “smaller” judgments against Israel – His goodness to them alongside difficulties that He has brought upon them. And His clear message to them is from His heart, His longing for them: “Yet you did not return to Me…”, spoken four times (Amos 4:6, 9, 10, 11). I think there’s a message there for us today – return to Him!
Blessings!
I’m taking Fred’s and John’s entreaties to comment to heart…
Here’s what has struck me in Amos:
After a list of sins and judgments against other nations (brutality, greed, etc.), God takes His people to task in Amos 2-4 for false worship, greed, injustice, and so on. (We would do well to examine our own lives here.)
In Amos 3 there is a list of causes and their logical effects. Then in Amos 4 God gives a list of His acts against His people, expecting their logical effect: humility and repentance. That hasn’t happened.
The verse that caught my attention was Amos 4:12: “Therefore … prepare to meet your God, O Israel!”
Whew! Look out! The God Who “forms the mountains, and creates the wind, and declares to man what is his thought; Who makes the morning darkness, and treads on the heights of the earth” (Amos 4:13) is about to show up! I’m sure I do not live in awe of our God nearly enough…
Thanks for chiming in, Carol. I hope we all might likewise attend to the text, not just as some ancient words delivered to “those” people long ago in a land far away, but as words that are very much applicable to us today — to our nation, to the Church writ large, to our local congregations, and to ourselves as individuals. We would all do well to look within and see whether God might be trying to get our attention.