Israel had grown complacent...totally in their comfort zone, knowing what to expect and pampering themselves. Israel is prideful and God especially hates this sin. Israel is not taking care of the poor and God really hates this.....God gives Amos 3 visions of locusts, fire and a plumb line....Amos interceeds in prayer and God relents on the first two visions. The plumb line is a tool that measures whether something (usually a wall) is straight in building...a crooked wall will eventually cause the house to fall....the people were getting "crooked" in their approach to God and their house was about to fall in.......
Amaziah the priest of Bethel (where the temple was) told the king that Amos was conspiring against him....Amaziah was getting worried about his position....Amos replies that he has no background of a prophet and the Lord came to him when he was working to deliver a message, and it was true, regardless of what Amaziah thought, and God executes judgment on Amaziah (see 7: 17)
Amos has another vision of a basket of ripe fruit.....a ripe fruit doesn't have much longer...it gets rotten and is thrown away, and that is what God is going to do to Israel.....Israel is to be destroyed...the last vision is God seeing Amos standing at the temple and shaking the columns that support the foundation.....a remnant will be saved so that God can honor the covenant to David, and Israel will be restored...
Look what comes up from the depths of the sea.
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So I guess this book is simply Amos delivering God's message.......Simply Amos telling God's message to the people.......looks like another hard book.....
ReplyDeleteIn 3:7 "Surely the Lord God does nothing, unless He reveals his secret to his servants the prophets." Is this saying that God will not send punishment to the people unless he has told a prophet to warn the people?
I like 5:14...."See good and not evil, That you may live; So the Lord God of hosts will be with you as you have spoken>"
Yep, you've got it.....God will always warn first so you get a chance to make a choice....think of Amos as a contemporary of Isaiah...Amos was prophet in the North, Isaiah in the South....the Lord was warning the whole land so they'd have a chance to repent AGAIN...
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