Fidelity To God's Call

INTRODUCTION

When we hear the word “prophet”, we often think of someone whose primary job is to tell the future. We might equate the term with “soothsayer”, “seer,” or even in a non-Christian context, “fortune teller”. We most often judge a prophet by whether or not their words come true. There is a precedent for this in scripture, for instance when Isaiah buried his oracles until they came true, to demonstrate that God was really speaking through him; or in a case that decidedly worked against the prophet, when King Ahab imprisoned the prophet Micaiah until the king “returned safely” suggesting that the prophet would rot in prison if his prophecies came true and the king didn’t.

But the prophets of the Old Testament had a much more important job than simply telling the future. First and foremost, they were called to bring the hard truth to God’s chosen people, so that they would be forced to take an honest look at themselves and realize their need for reconciliation with God. And, as we see from our brief glimpse of him in this passage, Amos was all about hard truths. He was a man who lived during the most prosperous and powerful reigns Israel and Judah experienced during their monarchies, second only to the golden age experienced during King Solomon’s reign.(1)(2) The land prospered so much that recent archaeological finds have found ivory horns inlaid with gold and all sorts of luxuries dating from the period. But there have also been a surprising number of cultic sites found from the period.(3)

AMOS' VISIONS

In fact, as Amos’ oracles note in the previous chapters, the more Israel prospered, the more they abandoned the two basic components of their covenant with God: Exclusive worship of the Lord, and care for their fellows. Ch. 2:6-8 is a perfect example of God’s indictment against Israel through the prophet Amos, where he says,

“For three transgressions of Israel,

and for four, I will not revoke the punishment,

because they sell the righteous for silver,

and the needy for a pair of sandals—

those who trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth

and turn aside the way of the afflicted;

a man and his father go in to the same girl,

so that my holy name is profaned;

they lay themselves down beside every altar

on garments taken in pledge,

and in the house of their God they drink

the wine of those who have been fined.”

And again in 4:1, when he says that they have “oppressed the poor, and crushed the needy.” Their prosperity has led them to believe they can do whatever they want and get away with it and their riches have led them into a false sense of security that nothing can go wrong. Indeed, when Amos was prophesying around 760 BCE, the idea that a foreign power would come in, completely destroy them, and cart them off into exile was the furthest thing from their collective mind.(4) They were at peace with their neighbors, following Assyria’s defeat of their main rival, Damascus and they had little inkling that that same superpower would roll over their own kingdom just 40 years later. I can’t help but find parallels with the U.S. today. Since the end of WWII, we have enjoyed unprecedented prosperity, power, and prestige and with the fall of the Soviet Union we are the sole remaining superpower. No other nation comes remotely close when it comes to either economic or military clout. But I wonder if this prosperity gives us a false sense of security as well. If we take a hard look at our own culture through the prophet’s eyes, what do we see? Do his harsh words apply to us as well? Israel may have been oblivious, but they could not say they hadn’t been warned.

We get a sense of this warning over the course of Amos’ ministry in the preceding two visions of chapter 7. First, Amos sees that God is about to destroy Israel with locusts, but his judgment is held in check by Amos’ pleas for mercy. Again the same thing happens with fire, and again God relents.(5) But in the third vision, though v. 7 in English says that God was “standing by” a great wall with a plumb line in his hand, the Hebrew word, “nishav” is a firm, reflexive verb meaning he “stationed himself”.(6) Basically, he planted his feet and made clear that he wouldn’t be moved this time. Where during the previous two visions, natural disasters were mitigated; this time by using the imagery of the wall and plumb line, God is showing that Israel is like a wall that is crooked and about to crumble under its own weight. The plumb line used to measure the extent to which the wall had become warped represented the terms of the covenant by which Israel was to remain faithful to God. But unlike with the previous two visions, there can be no mitigation this time, because Israel’s judgment is the natural, unavoidable result of its sin and its judgment will be felt explicitly by Israel’s leaders when the high places where its priests offered sacrifices to other gods were torn down and Jeroboam’s dynasty would be cut off by the sword.(7) This time God would not “pass by” them as he had passed over them when He killed the firstborn of Egypt; and it appears from the passage that Amos, perceiving God’s resolve, did not intercede this time in order to avert the impending disaster of invasion and exile.