I have begun my study of the book of Amos. Briefly - God is not real happy with His people, and sends Amos to tell them about it. As I talked about in the last blog, prophets don't tend to be tolerated well by the people in power. In Israel, the nation was a theocracy, so God's word has implications in the direction of the nation, not just the church, as we see it today. Let me set the stage:
Israel was, by this time, divided into the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah. In Amos' time, they had been relieved of occupation by Damascus (Syria). They had become wealthy. Therein, apparently, lay the problem. The nation was rich and had need of nothing, not even God. They had rid themselves of the Baals, but there was another god in its place – wealth and good fortune. This they kept at all costs. They oppressed their own people, looked on the poor as something to be trod upon, cast away or sold off. Elijah had begun the process of cleaning up the worship of the people, culminated by Elisha (and Jehu), slaughtering the priests of Baal, but they had not cleaned the hearts of the people. Worship became a focus; the people followed the rules of worship, but there hearts were far from God, and He was about to address that. God is about to, through Amos, warn the people about coming to His house with their hands full of offerings while their daily life was one of social injustice. Seems we are in a very similar place in today’s American church.
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