God’s warning about sin and His severe mercy
Amos 8:4-14
The Christian youth hostel in Israel where I worked as a volunteer in my gap year had a dog. Around 11pm every evening, we would lock the office for the night and, occasionally, we failed to notice the dog sleeping peacefully in a corner. She was a clean animal and never soiled the place but by 7am next morning when we opened everything up, she was usually dancing behind the door desperate to get out and answer nature’s call. It is an image that comes to mind as I read Amos’ description of Israelites who could hardly wait for the Sabbath or the new moon festival to be over to get back to the business of making a profit (Amos 8:5). Their desire was seemingly as compulsive as our biological urges.
Enslaved to sin
God’s people in Amos’ time have become obsessively exploitative using smaller than standard containers to measure the grain they sold and larger than standard counterweights for weighing the buyer’s money (Amos 8:5), thus making a dishonest profit.[1] Impoverished buyers ended up in debt slavery and were bought by their exploiters for next to nothing (‘a pair of sandals’, Amos 8:6). Neither did the poor have recourse to justice against sellers mixing the sweepings from the threshing floor into the wheat they sold (v.6). The exploiters’ lack in loving neighbour was a telltale sign of their lack in loving God. They formally kept the Sabbath rest but forgot its true meaning, namely that Israel was no longer enslaved to do hard labour as they were in Egypt (Deut 5:15). Yet Amos’ contemporaries could hardly wait to get back to work and make more money. In the process, they demonstrated that they were still enslaved – by their own desires.
God’s warning signs
God swears an oath ‘by the pride of Jacob’ to respond to injustice starting with an earthquake (Amos 8:7-8). The same Hebrew word for pride (ga’on) refers earlier to Israel’s arrogance in trusting their fortifications (Amos 6:8) and elsewhere to their pride (NASB ‘glory’) in their land given by God (Ps 47:4 [Heb. v.5]). Thus, it is the very things Israel takes pride in that the Lord will shake so that the people might awaken to their dependence on God. The devastation will compare to losing an only son (Amos 8:10), a bitter tragedy in the ancient world where sons carried on the family name and provided for aging parents. Although disasters are not automatically a sign of God’s wrath, the prophet affirms that the earthquake and eclipse here will be (Amos 8:8-9 cf. Amos 1:1). They warn of a two-fold judgment: the earthquake will foreshadow the shaking up of Israel’s world with the loss of their land (exile) and the eclipse points to the spiritual darkness to come when God’s Word will not be available anymore (Amos 8:12). The last verse clarifies that Israelites will still be swearing by their idols (Amos 8:14), i.e. appeal to their various gods,[2] so their desperation to hear from God and get guidance and help will not be coming from a place of repentance. Rather, they will be like Saul, who never turned to God with genuine remorse but was frantic to get some reassurance and instruction in the end as he was confronted with the consequences of his sin (1 Sam 28:6, 15-16).
The severity and kindness of God
Although Amos’ prediction sounds like a foregone conclusion, prophecy is never mere information but a call – explicitly or implicitly – for transformation and action. It sets out the consequences of sin in the hope that Israel may repent and teaches us how the Lord tries to bring His people to their senses. In our lives too, God may need to shake our confidence in the things we take for granted (health, strength, financial or emotional security, etc.), so that we realise how fragile our own resources are.[3] Israel’s story also warns us that we cannot have our cake and eat it too. The Lord so often helps us out of trouble, guides and teaches us, even when we are sinful, in the hope that His kindness will bring us to repentance, but this cannot go on forever if we continue to reject His ways. Thus, this passage is a stern admonition, but in it is also a sign of God’s grace because it reveals His character, His desire to warn, to bring to repentance and save. May we respond to Him with trust.
[1] It may not be immediately obvious to us why money needed to be weighed, since the value of our coins or paper/plastic money is an assigned value (the number on the coin/paper), which does not correspond to the actual value of the material it is made of. In the ancient world, on the other hand, the value of money reflected the weight of the precious metal used for it, such as silver or gold. Coins were not minted with absolute precision and also wore off in use, hence the need for weighing.
[2] The ‘guilt of Samaria’ is probably a reference to other gods like Asherah and Baal worshipped there. The god of Dan would have been the golden calf that Jeroboam I. set up when the kingdom split from Judah (1 Kings 12:28-29). The ‘way of Beersheba’ may be an appeal to the pilgrimage route to that sanctuary, similar to how Muslims may swear by the road to Mecca.
[3] It is important that we do not try to reverse engineer from disasters and suffering or the seeming absence of God that we must be guilty of some unforgivable sin because the Bible makes no automatic equation between sin and suffering. Job and Jesus suffered innocently though they were righteous. Jesus and the psalmists felt abandoned by God (Mk 15:34; Ps 22:1; 42:3; 88:14), and faithful servants of the Lord today know periods of spiritual dryness, too. If we are unsure and worried that we may have committed some sin, we can ask God to reveal it to us (Ps 139:23-24). He wants us to understand, so He will not play games or set us riddles. Most of the time though, suffering is something that happens to all of us in this fallen world and the best we can do is to draw closer to the Lord and lean on Him knowing that He is with us.
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